For more than a decade, Democrats have watched Donald Trump succeed with a brand of politics that is crude, often coarse, and always volatile. They have agonized, mostly unproductively, about how to defeat it. They tried various strategies, and all ultimately failed. Now they are trying another that is doomed.
First, before it was clear how powerful Trump’s methods and appeal had become, members of the blue party pooh-poohed him and airily dismissed the possibility that such a man could ever become president. But then he did.
As lofty disdain failed, they had to try something else, so they turned to angry vituperation and name-calling, trying to alienate decent people from Trump by saying he was a racist, fascist, rapist, and other damnable things. When that didn’t work either, they sought to eject him from politics by pursuing him with federal and state prosecutions and impeaching him twice.
It all came to naught. Trump is still there in the White House 11 years after he descended the Trump Tower escalator and erupted into the national psyche.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP; Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images; Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty ; Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Now Democrats have arrived faute de mieux, and perhaps without even realizing it, at a new strategy. Instead of mocking or maligning Trump, they are trying to win by mimicking him. If he can throw F-bombs, they can throw F-bombs. If he can sneer and be nasty, brutish, and short, so can they. If he can be outlandish in his analyses, Democrats can overmatch him and become utterly ridiculous, not convincingly sane.
But with Democrats, vulgarity, extremism, and hyperaggression are not limited to their rhetoric. Such qualities, if one can think of them that way, are inextricable from their policies. Marxists who are taking over the Democratic Party advocate abolishing the police, prisons, immigration controls, the Constitution, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College and turning in hatred against our most important ally, Israel. Essentially, if there is any institution or tradition that works, they’re against it.
The Democrats leading the charge are socialists; the party “leadership” is following meekly behind. The militants carry conviction because they actually believe their own absurdities rather than merely mouthing them as some of their party colleagues do. The Coca-Cola principle applies in politics: Voters prefer the real thing. They want authenticity. If they are attracted by radicalism, they prefer genuine revolutionaries such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) over more performative firebrands such as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT).
The latest extremist to rocket to public attention is Abdul el Sayed, who won the Democratic primary in Michigan to run for the Senate. The 41-year-old son of Egyptian immigrants, endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, has no natural affinity with America and associates himself with Hasan Piker, a demagogue who says our nation deserved the terrorist outrages perpetrated against it on Sept. 11, 2001. At a more local level, el Sayed was recently exposed as detesting what Michiganders love: In a video clip, he scorned a beloved state vacation destination, saying, “I hate Mackinac so much.”
On substantial policy, el Sayed wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and socialize medicine by extending Medicare, which is already fiscally unsustainable, to everyone.
If he becomes the first Muslim to enter the Senate, he wants to cut off all weapons sales to Israel. This would not mean merely ending military aid, which is a reasonable medium-term goal, but would involve a 180-degree betrayal, turning against our staunchest ally by refusing to let the Jews have the weapons they need to defend themselves from terrorism perpetrated by el Sayed’s co-religionists.
Throughout his campaign, el Sayed lied about Israel, accusing it of being an “evil,” “rogue state” that “committed genocide and apartheid.” He uses dog-whistle rhetoric attuned to the antisemitic voters he hopes to woo by accusing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being “bloodthirsty,” an allusion to the ancient libel that Jews consume gentile blood.
El Sayed adopts a demotic argot, much like Trump, to give himself a populist everyman appeal. In a speech attacking his Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, he quibbled with Rogers’s pronunciation of his name, and snapped, “If you can’t say the name … keep the name out your damn mouth.”
In short, he is a candidate who would not have stood a chance a few years ago, but now his vulgar extremism tickles the itch of middle- and upper-middle-class adults who resent a world that does not deliver them the comfort and ease to which they think themselves entitled. They are prone to ideological fads, and socialism is edgy and in vogue. White, college-educated voters went for el Sayed by big margins, but traditional working-class areas of Michigan, and racial minority groups across the state, were repelled, preferring his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI).
Stevens, who knows exactly what el Sayed is and made that plain during her campaign, now describes the Democrats’ chosen candidate as “awesome” and has agreed to campaign for him. So has Pete Buttigieg, a member of former President Joe Biden’s Cabinet and a likely 2028 presidential candidate. So will Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who intends to help el Sayed shore up support among black and other racial minorities with whom his extremism falls flat.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) endorsed Stevens at the outset of the campaign because he knew el Sayed was a dangerous extremist and a prominent element of the socialist takeover of the blue party. Now, however, the Senate’s top Democrat has dropped his objections and humiliatingly endorsed the socialist victor, embracing him just as he embraced the egregious Graham Platner after Maine Democrats picked him. Schumer does this even though he knows the socialists he endorses are enemies intent on deposing him and replacing him with more radical leadership.
What we are seeing here is top Democrats capitulating and spinelessly pretending that members of the socialist fifth column in their midst are acceptable. These ersatz leaders are willing to sing kumbaya with their enemies in the forlorn hope that they can persuade the crocodile to eat them last. They think a facade of party unity is best, for it might convince voters to put Democrats back into office. Schumer and his ilk are so desperate for power that they kick principle and even sober calculation to the curb.
What’s fascinating is that Democrats don’t need to do this. They are allowing the party to be dragged deeper into vulgarity and extremism just at a time when the yearning of ordinary Americans for politics to be refreshed with decency and moderation is palpable. America voted Trump back into office, not because the public liked the way he conducted himself, but because a majority of people could not abide the prospect of another four years of the lurching left-wingery and incompetence under Biden. There is no need for Democrats at this juncture to entice voters with radicalism and belligerence.
The end of the Trump era is in sight. Peak Trump was surely last year. Now he is increasingly unpopular. After the midterm elections, which it would take a miracle for Democrats to lose, the Trump agenda will fizzle out, perhaps slowly, perhaps quickly, but surely. Then, 2028 presidential contenders will emerge. Whether the Republican nominee is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance, or someone else, the GOP standard-bearer is bound to be more statesmanlike than the current incumbent of the White House. The red party will inevitably move at least a little, and perhaps a long way, away from the volatility and vulgarity of its current champion.
But just as that process is beginning, the Democrats are moving in the opposite direction. Extremism and volatility are on their way out among Republicans, but on their way in among Democrats.
When the Trump era closes, legions of voters will be unsure about which party they prefer. It is not just MAGA loyalists who will be in a state of confusion once Trump quits the political stage. There will also be more natural independent voters, and they will be key in swinging the nation one way or the other. All across the country, there will be a desire, just as there was in 2020, for a return to calm and normality. Are voters likely to see that in a Democratic Party infiltrated by militant socialists bent on wrenching America to leftist regions where it has never been before? Hardly.
Some political candidates clearly recognize this. When el Sayed won the Michigan Democratic primary, Rogers adopted a strategy to win over independent or unsure voters in the political center. He is not focusing on the base, whether it be the Make America Great Again base or otherwise, and he is not trying principally to energize more of the red party’s existing supporters. He has calculated that his best way of beating el Sayed and socialism in Michigan is to win independents and those who, alarmed by the direction of the Democratic Party, might switch.
Like a straw in a political wind that could strengthen into gale force, Rogers’s campaign is seeking to appeal to the legions of ordinary voters — he’s focused on Michigan, but they’re all over the country — who loathe political excess from whomever, and whichever party, it comes. He is calculating that more people want a sober, reasonable, and indeed recognizably sane alternative.
In a new campaign ad, the former congressman tells alienated Democrats they need not despair, even though their own party has ignored the issues ordinary people care about. If those voters don’t want to support el Sayed, he reassures them, they have an acceptable alternative.
“If you’re among the majority of Democratic voters that woke up [the morning after el Sayed’s victory] feeling hopeless because the person who won does not represent your values, just know there is still hope,” Rogers says. He tells voters of all stripes that he can represent them because he shares their concerns about education, young adults leaving Michigan, unaffordable housing, high taxes, and low paychecks.
Finally, Rogers hits the nail and his opponent on the head, saying, “To the vast majority of people across Michigan who do not want to throw their support behind a campaign filled with anger, divisiveness, calls for violence, and views that are out of touch with your values, well, you have a home with us. The fight is far greater than just Left versus Right. The fight is for the very soul of our nation.”
It’s not new for a politician to warn that the next election is for the soul of the nation — Biden did it in 2022. But the Rogers campaign is like a divining rod dipping toward a wellspring of support that can be tapped by Republicans or Democrats if they are willing to appeal across party lines and to independents who feel they no longer have a home in the party they once thought of as theirs.
Hugo Gurdon (@hgurdon) is editorial director of the Washington Examiner.