Deport a college student returning home for Thanksgiving. Pardon a Honduran ex-president convicted of drug trafficking. Kill survivors from an unarmed boat the Navy bombed in the Caribbean. Turn on Canada, our closest ally. Float the idea of taking over Greenland. Undermine Ukrainians fighting off a Russian invasion.
And there’s a strong possibility—an alarming one—that the worst is still ahead.
How did we end up with a president who says and does these things? And what, exactly, are Democrats doing in response?
So far, not much. We’ve seen a record-length speech in the Senate from Cory Booker. Another lengthy floor speech in the House from Hakeem Jeffries. There’s righteous anger over the Jeffrey Epstein files. The only genuinely new substantive theme is “affordability,” pushed hardest by democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. The broader Democratic strategy seems to be: stay quiet, let Trump damage the country, and hope to pick up enough House seats later to box him in during his final two years. Maybe that gamble will work—but we have every reason to be deeply worried, even if recent elections suggest growing frustration with Republicans.
What’s really troubling is the mindset inside the Democratic Party: the belief that the system was basically fine until Trump came along and broke it. That may feel true if you’re part of the party elite. It is absolutely not true for working people.
The Biden decision and the Harris coronation
Start with Biden. Liberals and much of the left hailed him as the most pro-labor president since FDR and praised the Inflation Reduction Act as a historic public works program. Maybe, in a different world where he communicated more forcefully and consistently, those claims might have been borne out. But he didn’t deliver at the needed scale—and he should never have been running for a second term.
The public understood that. By February 2024, 86 percent of Americans thought Biden, then 81, was too old to seek re-election.
How many Democrats had the courage to say that out loud? Almost none. How many progressives demanded he step aside? Again, very few. It was a shameful display of political cowardice. No one wanted to anger the president or his inner circle. No one wanted to be exiled from the inner ring of the party or damage their own chances for a 2028 run by suggesting he should pass the torch. In my view, every would-be 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful shares responsibility for what followed. When the moment called for real courage, they chose silence.
Only after Biden’s clear decline was on painful display during the June 2024 debate with Trump did people finally speak up. By then, it didn’t require courage—just the ability to watch a slow-motion train wreck and admit what everyone could see.
Then came the next disaster: the swift anointing of Kamala Harris. It was as if the party collectively erased the memory of 2020, when she left the Democratic primary with her support stuck at around 3 percent. Let that sink in: you have to be profoundly unpopular to stall that low in a crowded primary. Yet in 2024, she was handed the nomination with no real primary challenge.
Why? Because Harris was beloved by the Democratic establishment. She never said anything that rattled the donor class. She was celebrated by liberals who saw her gender and multiracial background as symbolically powerful. Her message was about an “opportunity society,” not about confrontational economic populism. Her brother, Tony West—a Wall Street insider and her campaign’s behind-the-scenes ace—reassured big money that they had nothing to fear. This was never going to be a campaign designed to win back working-class voters from Trump.
What still enrages me is how easily the Democratic establishment—and many self-styled progressives—shrugged off the danger Trump posed and rolled along with the Biden/Harris debacle. After living through one Trump term already, this is not hindsight. I was sending Biden birthday wishes in November 2023 while pleading with him not to run again.
It’s depressing that I need to point to my own warnings to illustrate just how timid the party was. But this isn’t only about a lack of backbone. It’s about a deeper worldview that sees the system as essentially sound—at least for those at the top.
A party that refuses to see class conflict
For most Democratic electeds, strategists, operatives, and major funders, there is no real clash between capital and labor, between corporate donors and working people, or between their own wealth and rising inequality. In their ideological universe, class struggle simply doesn’t exist. We’re all supposedly on the same team, regardless of wealth, education, or job insecurity. Runaway inequality might be a concern, but it’s not treated as an existential crisis tearing the country apart.
So the party’s leadership gravitates away from economic populism. They show little interest in using government power to:
- Prevent corporations from carrying out mass, unnecessary layoffs
- Raise the minimum wage significantly
- Break up monopolies
- Make unionization far easier
- Guarantee decent jobs for everyone who wants one
Policies like these threaten corporate interests and therefore rarely get serious backing, no matter how popular they may be with the public. You don’t bite the hand that funds your campaigns—and might also offer lucrative post-office positions to you, your staff, and your family.
None of this is viewed internally as corruption or betrayal. Party leaders genuinely believe that centrist, pro-business policies will “grow the pie” for everyone. They cling to the idea of an “opportunity society” where everyone has a fair chance at the American dream. In their view, if we unleash the profit motive and keep regulation light, the market will create the good jobs of tomorrow, and better schooling will prepare workers—or at least their children—to fill them.
It’s feel-good, “we’re all in it together” economics that bears little relationship to recent history or to any plausible path toward a more just future.
We’ve heard some version of this for more than a generation. It was the rationale for:
- Deregulating Wall Street
- Signing free-trade deals that wiped out millions of factory jobs
- Allowing corporations to fire workers to finance leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks while dodging taxes
- Promoting public-private “partnerships” that fattened private investors at public expense
As Bernie Sanders often points out, nearly everyone in the Democratic establishment is wealthy and insulated from working-class realities:
It’s state after state after state. The Democratic Party has abdicated—they’ve given up. They’re not fighting for the working class. What the Democratic Party has been is a billionaire-funded, consultant-driven party—and way out of touch with where the working class of this country is.
What happens if nothing changes?
Unless this corporate-friendly mindset shifts in a serious way, Democrats are likely to fail again in the year ahead—even though I desperately hope Republicans lose in the midterms. I don’t like to dwell on what a lame-duck Trump might do with no more elections to face, especially to those with the least protection and power.
And that’s assuming he doesn’t manage to cling to power beyond that, which is a possibility we’d be foolish to dismiss.
