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Donald Trump’s record-breaking 100-minute speech on Tuesday to a rowdy joint session of Congress made for a curious and cringeworthy spectacle — and I am not even referring to the (largely predictable) braggadocio and baloney coming from the man standing on the speaker’s rostrum.
No, it was the comportment of many of the Democrats in the chamber that really made me wince. Many turned up wielding placards reading things like “THAT’S A LIE”, “MUSK STEALS” and “THIS IS NOT NORMAL”, which they held up like stroppy student protesters at various points during Trump’s address.
Many Democratic congressmen and women had also co-ordinated their outfits in a series of different colours — black “to meet the sombreness of the political moment”, apparently. Pink was worn as a colour of “protest, power and persistence”, according to New Mexico representative Teresa Leger Fernández. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear,” she told Time magazine, with no sense of irony.
It was far from the only ham-fisted attempt the Democrats made at getting attention over the past week. In what seemed to be a kind of pre-emptive rebuttal of the president’s address to Congress, more than 20 Democratic senators launched a concerted social media attack on Trump. “Sh*t that ain’t true, that’s what you just saw,” each senator, with varying degrees of awkwardness, said to camera following a clip of Trump making the claim that he would bring prices down on the first day of his presidency.
And then on Thursday, a video was posted on TikTok of several female Democratic House members, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, posing as video game characters, along with the caption “Choose your fighter”. “Our side will be in power forever if this is our opposition,” posted the right-wing account “End Wokeness”.
It’s hard to disagree. The Democrats urgently need to present a compelling opposition to the Trump administration. But, if I may adopt the tone of the senators’ videos, this ain’t it, chief. How many Trump voters do they think they are going to win over with these maladroit stunts? The fact that Democrats might have thought them a good idea suggests that the lessons from November’s election have still not been learnt.
And let’s be clear: things are not going at all well for the party. A record low of 21 per cent of voters are satisfied with the way that the Democrats’ representatives in Congress are handling the job, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. A record high 40 per cent of voters approve of Republicans’ performance in Congress.
YouGov’s favourability tracker shows the Democrats are more unpopular than at any other point since at least January 2017.
Part of their problem is that there is no obvious leader of the opposition — official or otherwise. In Joe Biden’s first two months in office back in 2021, about half of news reports about the president also mentioned Trump, according to Pew. The Democrats currently have no comparable figure.
So what can they do? There have been suggestions — including from former congressman Wiley Nickel and historian Timothy Snyder — that what the US needs is some kind of shadow cabinet, such as the one we have in Britain. This strikes me as a very good idea, as it would mean that an alternative point of view was always available.
Democrats might also show more courage in the way they communicate: rather than carefully rehearsed TV interviews, they could allow themselves to speak more freely on long-form podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s. There are tentative signs of change: California governor Gavin Newsom, considered a likely candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2028, this week launched his own podcast, promising to invite guests he “deeply disagrees with”. But by largely avoiding such discussions, Democrats look as if they don’t know what it is that they stand for and are scared of being caught out.
And this takes us to the crux of the matter: the Democrats urgently need to present a positive vision of their values and ideas. Rather than a constant stream of tedious Trump-bashing, they must say what it is that they would do differently — particularly when they are up against a man who knows how to communicate his message so powerfully.
“Orange man bad” isn’t working. The Democrats need to present a serious alternative to Maga. Wearing matching colours and awkwardly uttering expletives to camera doesn’t, in fact, meet the seriousness of the political moment.
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