A decade into the Trump era, Democrats are, to nearly everyone’s great amusement, still searching for their own version of the cultural icon-turned-two-term president.
Well, not all Democrats. Some believe they have at long last found her.
The Atlantic headlined its recent profile of Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) “A Democrat for the Trump Era.” It is, to author Elaine Godfrey’s credit, no puff piece.
Crockett’s “colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper fiercer communicators,” Godfrey observes after conveying the second-term legislator’s irritation at falling short in her bid to serve as the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee.
“It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told her interlocutor, seemingly incredulous that anybody could be using any other metric.
“Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there,” Godfrey continued. For a few examples: Crockett roasted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body,” has repeatedly mocked Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) for being confined to a wheelchair with a paralyzed lower half of his body, and suggested during a podcast appearance that Trump supporters are “sick.”
“We’ve got a mental health crisis in this country because everyone, no matter how you affiliate yourself, should be against Trump, period,” she insisted. Apropos of nothing at all: Godfrey noticed, and documented, that Crockett’s cellphone lock screen was a headshot of herself.
In another notable aside, Godfrey relayed that Crockett responded to the reporter’s attempts to reach her colleagues for comment by mistakenly assuming that she could prevent the Atlantic from moving forward with the piece. The congresswoman announced she was “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions” four days before it was, in fact, published.
Such coarse bravado, to put it kindly, has its admirers among the Democratic faithful. Trump’s victory in every single swing state last year, followed by his steamrolling of them at the outset of his second administration, has many on Team Blue clamoring for not just victory, but blood.
Literally, in some cases. House Democrats recently complained to one Capitol Hill reporter that they’re facing increasingly hysterical demands from supporters at local town hall events.
“This idea that we’re going to save every norm and that we’re not going to play [Republicans’] game … I don’t think that’s resonating with voters anymore,” one lawmaker said.
“Some of them have suggested … what we really need to do is be willing to get shot,” recalled another. “Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough … [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.”
A third was told that “civility wasn’t working,” and that they ought to prepare for “violence.”
The sentiment is more than anecdotal. According to the most recent Wall Street Journal poll, the party is more unpopular than it’s been in at least 35 years, and that’s in no small part because of the erosion of support from within its own ranks, largely over its perceived failure to push back against Trump. Another recent survey from the Associated Press found that the term Democrats associated most with their own party was “weak.”
It is in this environment that Crockett has become a national figure, a Democratic “fighter” willing to go toe-to-toe with Trump by biting as hard and scratching as deeply as he does in the ring. She’s not only the favorite to win the Democratic nomination for Senate in her home state should she seek it next year, but she has fans all over the country who would have her set her sights even higher. Democratic strategist Max Burns has argued that she should play a “lead role in reshaping the party’s 2026 message.” And at a church outside of Atlanta, Godfrey listened as a crowd rose to its feet as the pastor shouted, “Jasmine Crockett for president,” and “2028 is coming, y’all.”
They should be careful what they wish for.
In the years since Trump pulled off his shocking upset victory over Hillary Clinton, the Democrats have been laboring under a series of myths about themselves and Trump that have compelled them to continue digging their own graves.
The first is that they are too noble, too genteel, and indeed too good for their own good. The record belies this misdiagnosis. Trump’s abrasive rhetoric and often forthrightly self-centered approach to governance are more jarring to Team Blue than Team Red, not only because Trump is wearing the latter’s jersey, but because they recognize that the former has been playing the same game for years. Trump just abandoned the pretense.
To call Mitt Romney, the last Republican presidential nominee prior to Trump, a Boy Scout would be to make him sound infinitely more menacing than he actually was. A former Massachusetts governor who placed an obvious emphasis on his fiscal conservatism, Romney picked the arguably even less threatening Paul Ryan as his running mate. Both have been exceedingly critical of Trump for the better part of the last decade.
What did their good behavior earn them? A staggering number of smears invented by Democrats and dutifully parroted by their thinly veiled media allies. The Democratic leader in the Senate accused Romney of not having paid taxes for four years. Joe Biden told a predominantly black crowd that the GOP ticket was “going to put you all back in chains.” Ads went up depicting Ryan pushing an elderly woman off a cliff. And when Romney referred to having “binders full of” female applicants that he used to fill jobs during his time in Boston, the entire tangled mess of Democrats in office and the Fourth Estate alike cried foul for reasons that his critics still can’t attempt to articulate without embarrassing themselves.
Romney’s plight paled in comparison to those of Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, whose nominations to the Supreme Court were imperiled by unsubstantiated accusations of sexual misconduct. Before them, Ted Kennedy, the full-time nepobaby and threat to women everywhere, marched to the Senate floor to assassinate Robert Bork’s character. In a lesser-known episode of cruelty, Senate Democrats dragged Miguel Estrada, a well-qualified George W. Bush nominee to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals, through a grueling, yearslong nomination process that he eventually abandoned because they deemed him “especially dangerous” as a result of his Hispanic heritage.
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were madmen marching the United States toward nuclear war. Bush was a theocrat. John McCain was compared to George Wallace. Only the historically illiterate could be awed by, and apparently convinced of the efficacy of, Crockett declaring that “Donald Trump is a piece of s***, OK? We know that. Yes, yes! He is, he is, he is!”
Trump’s electoral success isn’t explained, in part, by his willingness to play a game Democrats haven’t been, but by his eagerness to play the game they have been for over a half-century.
In part. The Democratic political class misunderstands Trump’s appeal as readily as it misunderstands its own lack thereof. Back in 2018, Adam Serwer hypothesized that “the cruelty is the point” or, in other words, that “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.”
That’s probably true of some small proportion of any coalition, but it’s an incontrovertible mistake to attribute such cartoonish evil to the plurality of the country that voted for Trump. It may be comforting to conceive of oneself as standing athwart a sadistic voting bloc of bigots seeking to make their neighbors’ lives worse, but that comfort continues to prove self-destructive. Nine years and two lost presidential elections after Clinton uttered her infamous “basket of deplorables” crack, many progressives continue to labor under the misimpression that Serwer had their opponents pegged. And, having lost two presidential elections, they themselves are eager to nominate their own gangster president to punish their enemies.
This simplistic understanding of Trump’s success is childlike in its folly. His detractors loathe him so fully that they are completely unable to see past his flaws. The incumbent president is unique for his sharp, loose tongue and shameless pursuit of his self-interest, yes. But he also has his strengths, the first and most obvious one being his preexisting status as a figure of cultural significance prior to his political career. For decades leading up to 2015, Trump cultivated an image as the very picture of American success: A distinctive-looking New York City man in a suit and trench coat with a big ego, big ambitions, big mouth, who built big buildings. His failures, most notably in Atlantic City, only served to reinforce the fact that he’s a daring entrepreneur, a new kind of American pioneer.
Second is his singular way of speaking. To this day, Trump has never delivered a commanding, signature podium-and-teleprompter style speech, but he has nevertheless entered hundreds of memorable turns of phrase into the American lexicon at press conferences, gaggles, as well as on social media and The Apprentice. His verbal tics, over-the-top gestures, and knack for creating indelible moments are endearing to the public in a way that professional Democrats who devote their work lives to covering and fighting him could never understand.
Last, but not least, is the fact that to many, he presents as eminently reasonable rather than the imposing, right-wing maniac he’s so often treated as. Trump is a relative centrist on abortion who wants to leave the issue to the states. He talks about entitlements like they’re his own children. And it was on his watch that the party removed language about traditional marriage from the Republican platform last year.
Trump may have run far to the right of any other candidate on immigration back in 2016, but that’s only because the entirety of the Democratic Party, and much of the GOP, was so far out of step with the public. For the Left, “Mass deportations” sounds like one of the first steps in a fascist’s playbook. For the median voter, it sounds like the logical step in a country with millions of people residing in it illegally.
Whatever any perceptive political observer makes of his character and performance in office, they must acknowledge these sources of Trump’s popularity. Democrats’ systemic failure to do so led to their defeat in 2016 and 2024, and their continued failure to do so now might condemn them to further losses down the line. Their own Donald Trump, Jasmine Crockett is not.
Can a party so plagued by projection and a misconstrual of the defining political figure of the age come up with its own adaptation of him? If it looks at Crockett and thinks, “Maybe,” the answer is a resounding “No.”
Isaac Schorr is an editor at Mediaite.