In Theory, The Democrats Can Beat MAGA With The Politics Of Substance— Populism Without The Fascism

The Real Resistance Is Economic

In his column yesterday, Trump Is Immensely Vulnerable, Nicholas Kristof lists 3 of Trump’s top weaknesses. I think we’ve covered his corruption— from the crypto-cartel to the Qatari flying palace to Musk and the transactional nature of everything he comes into contact with— enough here so that we can skip right over that. 

Let’s remember that there are some Democrats who see the path back to power not through identity politics and an agenda and caricature that Fox News and the GOP have successfully ascribed to Democrats too stupid to resist the temptation, but through the economic equality the Democratic Party has traditionally been all about. The Associated Press covered that yesterday, emphasizing the way the party has given up on rural Americans and is started to realize… oops. “It’s not that Democrats must carry most white rural precincts outright to win more elections,” wrote Bill Barrow. “More realistically, it’s a matter of consistently chipping away at Republican margins in the way Trump narrowed Democrats’ usual advantages among Black and Latino men in 2024 and not unlike what Kentucky’s Democratic governor Andy Beshear, did in two statewide victories.” [three statewide races; he was also elected Attorney General.]

Meanwhile, Kristof wants his readers to never lose sight of the fact that Trump is hurting us in the pocketbook. “One reason Trump won the presidency was voter resentment at inflation and economic weakness under Joe Biden. Now it’s Trump who is badly damaging the economy and hitting voters in the wallet. Trump’s tariffs amount to the largest tax increase for Americans since 1993, with one study suggesting that a typical household may pay an extra $1,400 per year. Trump may already have sent the economy spinning into a recession, and plans for huge increases in American debt are pushing interest rates upward— which for many Americans means putting off any hope of buying a home. In addition, the Republican House approved a plan that would slash Medicaid, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that more than seven million Americans would become uninsured— this in a country where life expectancy in Mississippi already appears shorter than in Bangladesh.”

Kristof’s third Trump vulnerability is that Trump actually is the elitist he’s always whining about and that he looks down on us and thinks he can manipulate us. “Several studies have found that warning teenagers that smoking may kill them is often not effective. What does work is showing them how tobacco companies are trying to deceive and manipulate them. That outrages them— and in the same way, MAGA voters may shrug at Trump’s defiance of the courts but be offended by evidence that he thinks they are dummies. ‘Look at those losers,’ Trump once said of the people spending money at his Trump Plaza casino, according to Maggie Haberman’s biography of Trump, Confidence Man. Haberman also quoted Trump telling White House aides that his supporters were ‘fucking crazy.’”

[T]here is a tendency in liberal circles to denounce anyone sympathetic to Trump as a racist, bigot or fascist. It’s always distasteful when educated elites employ invidious stereotypes to dismiss millions of working-class people— plus it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re castigating.

The last task for Democrats is to fix our own blue communities; the blight in West Coast cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland helps Trump hold the Senate by winning votes for Republican candidates in purple states. And how can Democrats ask voters to trust them when the blue state of California accounts for nearly half of the entire nation’s unsheltered homelessness, or when one study finds blue Oregon ranking around the bottom of the country in education after adjusting for demographics?

However appalling Trump’s own behavior may be, his critics have to show that they can not only mock him— but can also govern. If we are to hold Trump accountable, we must also hold ourselves accountable.

Trump won’t ever be running for office again. The DCCC and DSCC will sink right into their comfortable “lesser of two evils” approach to elections— their only forever strategy besides praying for anti-red wave elections, like the one building now for 2026 and has exactly nothing whatsoever to do with Democrats or whatever policy agenda they claim to have (besides being anti-Trump).

It couldn’t be clearer that the only antidote to Trump’s hollow strongman populism is the real thing: a politics of solidarity, material improvement and universal dignity that can't be spun as elite condescension. Will Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries ever understand the concept? We’re talking about the policies Bernie and AOC have been prioritizing like housing guarantees, labor rights, student debt cancellation and taxing the ultra-wealthy— not as technocratic tweaks, but as moral imperatives. Democrats lose when they act like managers of the existing order. They win when they channel the urgency of people’s everyday struggles into clear, redistributive policy— and when they’re unafraid to say who’s hoarding the wealth and power. But… too many of them are afraid and we wind up with triangulating garbage like Josh Gottheimer, Cory Booker, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Elissa Slotkin, Henry Cuellar, Gavin Newsom, Mikie Sherrill, Ruben Gallego, Kamala Harris, Jared Moskowitz, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Alex Padilla, Jim Costa, Laura Gillen, Scott Peters, Ami Bera, Brad Schneider, Jeanne Shaheen, (not to mention Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin) destroying the New Deal brand and becoming our sorry standard bearers.

I’m not advocating that the Democratic Party abandon identity; I’m saying the party should refuse to let the right weaponize it into a caricature. The GOP wants the conversation to revolve around campus controversies and DEI memos because it distracts from the actual looting they’re facilitating at every level of government and what the party wants to accomplish for working families. When Democrats reduce themselves to defending symbolic diversity at the expense of structural justice, they’re playing the GOP’s game. But when they connect racial and gender justice to economic justice— when they make clear that the billionaire class uses division as a tool to keep everyone else scrambling— they can realign the debate on their own terms. And by “they,” we get to a different problem… Schumer, Maggie Hassan and Elissa Slotkin instead of Bernie, Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren; Jared Golden, Josh Gottheimer and Susie Lee instead of AOC, Pramila Jayapal and Greg Casar.

Again, in theory, we’re not stuck with Trump’s reality-TV version of strength. There’s a very different kind of power on offer— the power of collective bargaining, of mutual care, of democratic control over the forces shaping our lives. That’s the space Democrats need to reclaim. Not with slick slogans, triangulation or influencer energy but with policies that say: we see you, we’re fighting for you and we’re not backing down. If they can make that case clearly and consistently, Trump’s and the GOP’s supposed invincibility will start to look like what it has been in almost all the special elections since 2024: a brittle fantasy propped up by grievance and greed.