The Scene
BEVERLY HILLS, Ca. — The week after Donald Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy went to Bedminster to comfort him. The week after he won the presidency again, Murphy congratulated him — and invited him to the reopening, next year, of a bridge rebuilt during Joe Biden’s presidency.
“He did greenlight it, and it’s going to open, and he’s the president,” Murphy told Semafor, during last weekend’s meeting of the Democratic Governors Association. “To some extent, we’ve got a playbook. You have to fight like heck over here, and defend values and communities and people who are being unfairly attacked over here. And you try to find common ground.”
In the states and in Congress, Democrats are preparing for a second Trump administration with swords sheathed. They are not seeing the sort of grassroots resistance to engagement as eight years ago; the Democrats speaking out about ways they could work with the incoming president, and with Elon Musk’s amorphous government reform agency, are not getting heckled back home.
“There’s a combination of outrage and exhaustion in blue districts across the land,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who’ll lead Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee next year after colleagues fretted that New York Rep. Jerry Nadler wouldn’t square off against Republicans as effectively. “There’s a record number of billionaires who have been named to key positions, and people are expressing great outrage about the situation. But the flood-the-zone strategy has created some exhaustion in people.”
Since the election, Democrats have described a wait-and-see approach to the new administration. It’s not optimistic; it’s not proactive, either. Some were crestfallen by Trump-appointed FBI Director Christopher Wray’s decision to retire before the end of his term rather than fight to ward off a Trump loyalist replacement, but the news did not set off an explosive reaction or derail other conversations about cooperation.
“The fact that we work across the aisle really matters to people,” said Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who defied a Republican trend to win his state’s open US Senate seat last month, after a campaign where he said he could work with anyone to fund more border security. “If we’re always just raising the alarms and fighting, we’re going to be seen as not being even-handed players.”
In this article:
Know More
The Democrats’ first conflict with Trump did not start right after the 2016 election. Befuddled by their defeat, party leaders like Chuck Schumer talked about working with the new president to pass an infrastructure bill. Democrats in red states and districts, most of whom didn’t make it past the 2024 election, were right there with them.
There are fewer obvious points of agreement now, but Democrats have taken two approaches to Trump — both implying that they might work with him. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is not a Democrat but leads “outreach” for the Senate Democratic caucus, has highlighted Trump and Musk statements that he agrees with, daring Republicans to pass them: Caps on credit card fees, defense spending cuts, and more.
The Sanders gamble is that Trump’s control of the Republican Party will either create an opening for policies he wants passed, or give Democrats and progressives a broken Trump promise to run against next year. California Rep. Ro Khanna, a longtime Musk acquaintance, has taken the same approach, and blown off the critics — mostly on social media — who call it naive.
“Aren’t we here to help the lives of the American people?” Khanna told Semafor this week, arguing that the critics who wanted to fully resist Trump had been discredited by the election. “I think that the Democratic Party has to focus less on Trump and more on the American people. This has been our problem. We are obsessed with this man. We should be obsessed about the American people!”
A second approach has been meeting Trump and Republicans where they are, and seeing if they overreach, as Democrats believe they did eight years ago.
“I’m hopeful that the Trump administration will create some opportunities,” said incoming Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer, whose landslide victory gave Democrats their ninth consecutive win in President Biden’s home state. “There’s a bent in the Republican party that’s existed for generations that’s talked about more local control and more resources for states, more discretion at state and local government. And I’m hoping that’s the direction they go in.”
Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, who ended her tenure atop the DGA last weekend, told reporters at its conference that she was “very open to working with the Trump administration.” There were limits. “If there are things that they push us to do that we think are wrong,” she said, “they’re illegal, anything like that, we’ll draw the line.”
Kelly and other governors pinpointed one potential area where collaboration could be either fruitful or impossible depending on Trump’s approach: Deportations.
“Anybody who commits a violent crime must be held accountable fully, and that’s whether they’re in this country as American citizens or they’re here as undocumented people,” incoming North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein told reporters. He would oppose deportation efforts that entangled his state’s resources and went after law-abiding migrants, but he had to wait, and see.
“We don’t know what President Trump’s immigration plan is going to look like at the end of the day,” he said. “He is a master of saying something creating a great deal of noise — and then the reality may be different.”
David’s view
Since the election, there’s been a significant, growing gap between how Democrats discuss the new administration and how the media they consume and appear on discuss the administration.
The “democracy” advocates who found mass audiences eight years ago, the legal experts explaining what might happen to a Trump appointee or policy in court — they’re all still there. But Democrats who have to compete in elections see an incoming administration with a lot of public support, and are trying to set expectations that they can benefit from, if Trump doesn’t meet them.
“I think you’re going to see tremendous energy to fight when the big battles begin,” said Raskin.
There are activists and commentators who think those battles are already happening, and wonder why Democrats aren’t winning them. They’re punting, because they can’t win them — yet. They are waiting for something like the failed push to eliminate Obamacare in 2017, or George W. Bush’s failed campaign to privatize Social Security, something they can rally against and accuse Trump of doing contrary to promises he made to lower prices and protect the welfare state.
“There are plenty of places where we can find common ground here,” New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer said Thursday at a post-election No Labels gathering. “You’re always going to have people on both sides who are more focused on throwing tacks in the road than on getting stuff done.”
It wasn’t surprising that he would say this at an organization dedicated to stopping far-right or progressive goals and advancing centrist ones. It was notable he’s running for governor next year, and will have to defend this approach to a Democratic primary electorate.
Room for Disagreement
Former Trump advisor and War Room host Steve Bannon said that it wouldn’t be enough for Democrats to wait for Republicans to make mistakes.
“Their strategy is a pick six,” he said. “They want Trump to screw up, throw it in the flats and run it back for a touchdown. I mean, that happens in football. Don’t get me wrong. But the key to football is that you must enforce your will onto your opponents.”
Notable
- In Axios, Andrew Solender explains why more Democrats are talking about working with Trump and Republicans on populist ideas. The risk: “Democrats could face blowback within their party even for targeting non-mandatory spending, particularly from colleagues who represent huge swaths of the federal workforce.”
- In Reason, Steven Greenhut asks whether Trump’s antitrust appointments will continue Biden-era populist policies supported by Democrats: “It’s my hope that the Trump administration takes a more market-oriented approach toward antitrust law, but it’s unlikely given the origin of the cases.”