Team Trump Prepared To Flood The Zone— Democrats Weren't Prepared For The Onslaught...& Still Aren't

"The 4th Branch" by Nancy Ohanian

Like Thom Tillis, Lindsey Graham is up for reelection next year. South Carolina isn’t North Carolina— and if Thom Tillis needs moderates and independents to win, Graham does not. He needs MAGA, which controls elections in South Carolina. Trump won the state 58.2% to 40.4%, while Trump just garnered 51.0% in North Carolina, a state that saw statewide wins for Democratic candidates running against MAGA Republicans for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state and superintendent of public instruction. In North Carolina only extreme gerrymandering kept the GOP in control of the legislature. 2,719,418 North Carolinians (50.2%) voted for Democratic Senate candidates compared to 2,601,321 who voted for Republicans (48.0%). That yielded 30 seats for Republicans and 20 for Democrats. In the state House, 2,723,032 voted for Democrats (51.2%)  compared to just 2,527,117 for Republicans (47.5%), resulting in 71 gerrymandered seats for Republicans and just 49 for Dems. 

South Carolina was a completely different story. Republicans running for the state Senate took 1,399,659 votes (59.5%) and Democrats took just 924,5535 votes (39.3%). In the state House it was even more lopsided. 1,402,989 voters (62.6%) picked Republicans and just 779,644 (34.8%) picked Democrats. Outside of Black-majority areas (plus a couple of places with well-educated voters), there basically is no Democratic Party and no independents or moderates. South Carolina is a MAGA state and Graham knows it. So… he’ll be backing away from this Meet the Press posturing very quickly:

The Inspectors General question is particularly interesting. Trump breaking the law is not “technical;” it’s blatant. And if most Democrats and most of the media seems asleep at the wheel on this one, at least the 18 fired inspectors general aren’t giving up without a fight. This was encouraging to see yesterday:

Meanwhile, with really bad leadership, House Democrats are utterly useless. “The whiplash,” wrote Marianna Sotomayor, “after less than five days of drastic changes has tested House Democrats’ attempts to stay united against a far-right president who has long irked the party, but also won a significant swath of voters in November that Democrats are eager to win back. House Democrats— the only caucus in government to net seats during the 2024 election— find themselves at a crossroads over how best to do battle with Trump and congressional Republicans.”

Not even listing some of Trump’s worst offenses, she wrote that “Trump’s orders to end birthright citizenship, repeal affirmative action and pardon almost all Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendants have particularly rankled House Democrats, who must rely on lawsuits to halt the actions since they have no levers of power in Washington to stop them. Some lawmakers feel passionate about responding to every rollback Trump has unilaterally enacted, particularly those who have never served in the minority during the previous Trump administration. Others believe they should remain focused and respond more strategically, fearing that voters will again become numb to Democrats’ fire-alarm responses to Trump’s every move.”

Had a petty over-the-hill Nancy Pelosi not intervened, AOC would be the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee and would be leading the Democrats where compromised shitbags like Hakeem Jeffries and Pete Aguilar will never go. Instead Pelosi was able to install somnolent, nearly 75 year old, half-dead New Dem Gerry Connolly, who has nothing to say at all about Trump’s outrages.

Former Republican activist Robert Garcia (D-CA), now a progressive member of Congress told Sotomayor that he thinks “we have to oppose him vigorously. I think the idea that we’re talking about holding hands with Donald Trump and extremist Republicans and like, kumbaya, I think is a huge mistake. We know what he’s going to do. We should oppose that and be very vocal and tough and push back.”

Sotomayor  went  right to the heart of the problem: “Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued during the caucus’ weekly meeting Wednesday that Democrats cannot chase every outrage, especially since the Trump administration will purposely ‘flood the zone’ with maddening changes, according to people in the room. He argued that Democrats must remain united in their messaging and disciplined in holding House Republicans accountable on key issues— particularly cost-of-living issues, border security and community safety— warning that if they don’t, their message will not sink in with the American people. ‘The difficulty in life with Donald Trump as president, as we have seen in the past, is he will throw a lot of things at the wall as a distraction to the real concerns and the real issues that Americans are facing,’ Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) said. ‘Our job is to sift through it and to make sure we have unity of purpose and unity of message.’”

Democrats have found genuine common ground across their ideological factions on needing to strike a more populist tone to resonate with working-class voters who blamed the Biden administration for rising prices. Democrats are beginning to do that by stressing that Trump is in the White House “to help himself or… to help one of his billionaire buddies,” as Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) put it.

“I do think Democrats can turn this thing around if we’re willing to point out what Trump made so obvious at his inauguration: that he’s really just there for the rich guys,” said Casar, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Many Democrats feel that Trump’s and Hill Republicans’ initial focus on culture-war issues is already helping them make that point. House Republicans have, so far, passed bills that would green-light law enforcement to detain undocumented immigrants accused of theft-related crimes, known as the Laken Riley Act, and bar transgender students from participating in women’s sports, among other noneconomic measures.”

46 Democrats— almost all corrupt New Dems and and reactionary Blue Dogs, of course— joined every Republican to pass the xenophobic Laken Riley Act, including disappointing freshmen Janelle Bynum (New Dem-OR), Shomari Figures (Crypto-AL), Laura Gillen (New Dem-NY), Maggie Goodlander (New Dem-NH), Adam Gray (Blue Dog-CA), John Mannion (New Dem-NY), April Delaney (New Dem-MD), Kristen Rivet (New Dem-MI), Dave Min (CA), Suhas Subramanyam (New Dem-VA), Derek Tran (New Dem-CA) and Eugene Vindman (New Dem-VA). Jeffries decided to not whip on that issue, letting cowardly and conservative Dems vote with the GOP, continuing to confuse voters and ruin the Democratic brand.

On their podcast yesterday, the Unpopulist crew explored the risks of an unchecked executive, the breakdown of institutional safeguards, the chilling effect on dissent in both politics and culture— and whether libertarians, who put checking abusive state authority at the heart of their political project, will stand up to Trump in his second term, which is already shaping up to be far worse than his first. They noted that the political landscape has shifted in ways that challenge the very foundations of our liberal democracy. With unprecedented executive power and a growing ecosystem of loyalists surrounding the president, we must ask: What happens when political institutions are no longer able to constrain a populist authoritarian president’s ambitions? And how do institutions, the media, and civil society respond?” Give it a listen: