Dems in Disarray: ‘It feels like we’re battling the L.A. fires’

Democrats in Washington are definitely on the back foot this week and they know it. It’s obvious to anyone who is paying attention that Democrats are barely showing up.

As President Trump pushes aggressively to reshape the federal government, Democrats have retreated into a political crouch that reflects their powerlessness in Washington.

Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach as Mr. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship, halt diversity programs in the federal government, undo foreign policy alliances and seek retribution against his perceived political enemies….

“We’re no longer trying to win a news cycle,” said Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat who has become an outspoken messenger for his party on social media. “We’re trying to win an argument, and that’s going to take time and patience and discipline.”

Honestly, the defensive crouch is probably the smartest move Dems have made in a while. If there was one thing that certainly didn’t work in the 2024 election it was endless alarms about the end of democracy. People just did not buy it and keeping that same panicky train-of-thought going for another six months isn’t going to change the outcome of the last election or the next one.

But this leaves Democrats in a quandary. If the message they spent the last year delivering doesn’t work, what will? They are trying to figure that out this week.

A group of 70 progressive House Democrats and six Senate Democrats gathered at the Capitol on Thursday to try to settle on a single message of opposition to Mr. Trump as he takes aim at myriad liberal constituencies and priorities. The assembled Democrats concluded that their best course of action was to focus on economic concerns, which they believe led to the party’s November defeats.

Representative Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat who is the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, convened the meeting. He said Mr. Trump’s control of the federal government, combined with his allies’ ownership of major social media networks, meant that Democrats must be in lock step, with a focused message of opposition for voters.

I’m reading between the lines a bit but it sounds to me like the same people who spent months telling us about how amazing Bidenomics was are now going to start bad-mouthing the same economy because now it can be blamed on Trump.

To be fair, they may have an argument if Turmp pulls the trigger on tariffs with Mexico and Canada, the number two and three source of goods imported to the US.

The US imported $87 billion worth of motor vehicles and $64 billion worth of vehicle parts from Mexico last year, not accounting for December, the top two goods imported from there that year, according to Commerce Department data. (December trade data is not yet available.)

Motor vehicles were also the second-largest good the US imported from Canada last year through November, for a total of $34 billion…

The US imported $97 billion worth of oil and gas from Canada last year, that country’s top export to the US…

Last year, the US imported $46 billion of agricultural products from Mexico, according to US Department of Agriculture data. That includes $8.3 billion worth of fresh vegetables, $5.9 billion of beer and $5 billion of distilled spirits.

You can certainly make a case that, in the long term, tariffs are going to bring more production home from overseas and that will ultimately make us more self-reliant and put more people to work. However, there’s really no version of that plan that doesn’t make prices go up sharply. The whole reason companies offshore in the first place is that it’s cheaper to produce the products overseas with lower-paid workers. So, again, it’s probably good for the US over time but in the near term (in Trump’s term) it’s going to mean rising prices.

Then again, Trump is a pretty crafty negotiator and it’s possible he’s using tariffs as a threat to get other things he wants, i.e. more cooperation on border control. So Democrats may not want to count their tariff chickens before they hatch.

Whatever they decide is their best message, there’s some agreement that they are going to have to wait for the right moment.

“It feels like we’re battling the L.A. fires, and the wind is 100 miles per hour, and it’s zero percent contained,” said Matt Bennett, a founder of Third Way, a center-left think tank. “We’re just going to have to wait for the wind to die down a little. It’s going to be a minute before Democrats can mount an effective response.”

As of now, the deadline for tariffs is set for Feb. 1. Maybe that will be the moment Dems are waiting for or maybe Trump will push that deadline back before we get there. In any case, for the moment it’s awfully nice to hear fewer talking points from elected Democrats and their media friends than we usually do.