Copyright The New York Times
At roughly the same time that Senate Democrats were readying themselves to cave to their Republican colleagues on Sunday — effectively ending the weekslong government shutdown without any real concessions on health care policy — President Trump was getting booed by the crowd at an N.F.L. game between the Washington Commanders and the Detroit Lions. Trump, the first sitting president to attend a regular-season N.F.L. game since Jimmy Carter in 1978, wants the Washington Commanders to name their planned new stadium in his honor, as a tribute to his time in office. He probably arrived at the game thinking the fans would cheer him. Instead, he faced the jeers of thousands of angry people. You could imagine, if this were a film, an editor cutting between the two moments; the surrender of Senate Democrats back to back with the weakness of an unpopular president. You might even say, in fact, that it was a little too on the nose — a contrast too apt to be believed. Less than a week after winning landslide victories in bellwether races in Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats ceded their political advantage to a man who is as unpopular as a president can be in the current era. To extend a little fairness to Senate Democrats — and I do mean the 47-member caucus and not just the eight defectors — you can see some of the logic of their position. They are in the minority, which in the modern Congress means they have little, if any, power, influence or authority. Yes, they have made great use of the shutdown as a political tactic, but as far as policy goes, they’re still as far away from Republican concessions on the central issue of the confrontation — health care, here taking the form of Obamacare subsidies — as they were at the start of this drama. In fact, the Republican Party has shown that it won’t budge on anything that it actually cares about — and it cares about its program of austerity and retrenchment. So much so that both the White House and congressional Republicans were willing to starve families or leave them bankrupt with unaffordable health care costs rather than open the government on terms the Democratic Party as a whole might accept. In the face of a Republican Party that would not yield, Senate Democrats had a choice. They could continue the shutdown — threatening the livelihoods of federal workers and those families that rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — or they could hold the line long enough to force Republicans to follow Trump’s lead and nuke the filibuster to end the showdown. I think Democrats should have welcomed this outcome, as the filibuster is a fatal obstacle to even the most moderate Democratic legislative agenda. But since it does not seem that Senate Democrats agree, they took the option that made the most sense to them: a short-term deal that restores SNAP benefits, reinstates federal workers and brings the Affordable Care Act’s insurance subsidies to a promised vote later this year (it has essentially no chance of passing). And when the money runs dry for most of the government at the end of January, Democrats will take another bite at the apple. Again, I can see the logic. I can even see the larger perspective. In this understanding of the overall political environment, Trump is no different than any president who overreaches in pursuit of his agenda. Last week’s elections were one predictable backlash, and another is on the horizon. Chastened by voter discontent, Republicans will retreat and try to salvage what’s left of their political position. It is, in other words, an ordinary moment that calls for ordinary politics. But this view is wrong. This isn’t an ordinary moment. The president is openly lawless. After firing thousands of civil servants and slashing entire agencies, he has turned much of what’s left of the federal government into a tool of authoritarian consolidation. He’s transformed the nation’s immigration enforcement agencies into a de facto secret police force, terrorizing communities across the country. He wants the National Guard to occupy American cities and he has publicly mused about sending the military against protesters. He’s turned the Department of Justice into his personal law firm as well as the enforcement arm for his efforts to suppress dissent and force the institutions of civil society into compliance with his will. And his supplicants in Congress, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, are willing and eager to sacrifice their independence as constitutional actors on the altar of his personal rule. This extraordinary reality calls for something different than the usual approach. Senate Democrats may think they are fighting to position themselves for crossover votes in the midterm elections, but they are actually in a battle for self-government itself — for democratic freedom and the rule of law. In that fight, the goal of any legislative strategy should be to inflict as much pain on the ruling party as is feasible. Democrats were, up until this week, meeting the task at hand. The polling was clear: Republicans were losing the shutdown. Americans were souring on Trump even more than they already had. And nearly half of them were willing to keep the government on hiatus if it meant Congress would retain enhanced tax credits for health insurance. But if it appears that a feckless set of Senate Democrats have looked a gift horse in the mouth, it is also important not to over-read the electoral implications of this week’s maneuver. Next year’s midterm elections won’t be shaped by the Democratic Party’s congressional posture as much as they will be by the public’s view of Trump. And there is no reason to think that its view will improve. The president does not know how to save face or change course. His go-to move is to escalate, whether or not it is effective. He doesn’t swerve away from his most unpopular positions; he drives full speed in their direction. You can imagine a world in which these tendencies were mitigated by strong advisers willing to give good counsel. But this is the exact opposite of the actual case. Two of Trump’s most influential counselors, Russell Vought and Stephen Miller, are uncompromising ideologues more interested in pushing their extreme agendas than they are in Trump’s political standing. If a large part of the job of president is to receive and manage information, then Trump has constructed an environment in which he rarely if ever hears anything contrary to his own perception of the world and is rarely if ever challenged on his decisions. This means he cannot respond to political conditions on the ground. His decision to go to an N.F.L. game — in the Washington area, of all places — is instructive. It is the choice of a president who does not understand that he is unpopular and will not listen to anyone who tries to tell him to think about the optics of a potentially hostile crowd. The president is flying blind and headed straight for a mountain. All of this is to say that Democrats will probably do well next year, especially if there is a crisis or disaster between now and next November. The problems come afterward, if and when they hold power in Washington. The task of a new Democratic Congress will be to hold the president accountable, to curb his lawlessness, to investigate his administration and to lay the groundwork for the reconstruction of the federal government in the wake of the implementation of Project 2025 and the president’s reactionary terror. If they win, Democrats will have to use their newfound authority to rethink, even dismantle, agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. They may need to walk back the Bush-era decision to consolidate those agencies, and others, under a single department, given the wild abuses perpetrated under this administration and its predecessors. It will need to give serious thought to major political and social reform, including D.C. statehood, a federal ban on partisan gerrymandering, a new voting rights act, and federal protection for reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, including the rights of gender and sexual minorities. Democrats will also need to embrace the legislature’s constitutional authority to structure the executive branch and the judiciary, up to and including Supreme Court reform. If they win next year, Democrats will need to treat the next Congress not as a return to the status quo ante but as the beginning of a new era in which the principal task is to roll back the president’s effort to create and consolidate a personalist dictatorship. They’ll need to fortify the American political system against future attempts to play dictator and lay out a project of genuine democratic renewal. None of this is possible without a willingness to use power rather than just hold it. What we’ve seen this week is that there are still too many Democrats whose instinct is to retreat to normalcy rather than face the conflict at hand. Democratic voters have shown, over the last 10 years, a remarkable amount of pragmatism when it comes to confronting Trump. But it is clear, from the mass protests of the past few months, that their patience is running thin. They want lawmakers who understand the stakes of the moment. They want leaders more inclined to fight on every front than retreat in the face of pressure. They want Grants, not McClellans. It is not too late for Democrats in Congress to show the fighting spirit that their voters want to see. At the very least, they should consider the consequences for their own careers if, and very likely when, rank-and-file Democrats decide that their patience has run out.
