No One is Coming to Save Us

Our elected officials do not understand the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. So we must rise up to stop him.

by Julie Roginsky

I hosted a Substack subscriber chat on Sunday morning and the number one topic of discussion — more of an angry cry , actually — was about what we could do to stop Donald Trump’s assault on our nation.

The first thing we must all do is to come to terms with the fact that no one is coming to save us. The Democratic leadership in Washington is not going to play hardball, even as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk dismantle every single guardrail that has long been the bedrock of our democracy. Some of our leaders are too old to understand that the rules have changed and that the collegiality and gentility they rose under in the senate is no more, destroyed by the likes of Mitch McConnell even before Trump was elected. Some of them are too gutless, petrified that if they don’t work with Republicans, voters will blame them for a budget shutdown or a debt ceiling default. They are terrified of being blamed because they have no idea how to communicate that any fall-out is squarely on Trump’s shoulders, since he effectively controls all three branches of government. In short, they are not meeting the moment.

This is hard to accept, I know. We have worked, volunteered, donated and voted for people who we thought represented our values, so it is a shock to learn that while our values may be aligned, most of our elected officials do not possess the ability to translate them into action. What’s worse, they can’t even muster up the skill to appear genuinely outraged about what is happening to the country.

It’s up to us now — you and me.

We should still demand that our leaders use every tool at their disposal to shut down or slow down Trump’s march towards autocracy. That means holding every single senator accountable for voting for Marco Rubio because he or she foolishly believed that Rubio would temper Trump. This week, Rubio was in Saudi Arabia, selling out Ukraine, Europe and the Pax Americana to the genocidal tyrant Vladimir Putin. A kindergartener studying basic patterns could have seen this exact outcome coming prior to Rubio’s confirmation but not the people we toiled to elect to the world’s most exclusive club.

Don’t stop the calls and the emails and the letters to your congressperson and your senators. They matter, insofar as they may stiffen their spines a little and remind them who has hired them and who can fire them. But don’t rely on them to save this country. For that, you need to look inward.

One of the most effective tools I learned early in my political consulting days is what we used to call “friend to friend” letters. Back in the nineties, before the internet became the favored means of communication, we would ask volunteers to send handwritten letters to their neighbors, friends and family. These would be short, personalized messages about why they backed a particular candidate or issue. They were enormously effective, for all the obvious reasons. If someone you trust tells you why they support someone, you are more inclined to support that someone too.

Somewhere along the way, this low-tech effort was replaced by modeling, where over a thousand different data points about any given individual could determine whether that person is more inclined to vote for or against someone. Campaigns would segment their communications to persuade and turn out those voters whom the model recommended they target.

Modeling is extremely effective but, too often, it has made Democratic campaigns miss the forrest for the trees. This is, in no small part, how the Democratic Party fell in thrall to identity politics. If a model tells you that a 19-year-old guy who plays FIFA in his spare time is persuadable, you spend your resources talking to him about the very narrow issue that research dictates he cares about. But what we forget too often is to consider whether he also wants to hear the same messaging as the fifty-year-old Latino mother of three who spends her free time reading books, because chances are that whatever you tell him will be overheard by her. None of us lives in a silo.

This segmentation has led to fear that has permeated the top echelons of the Democratic Party. If our leaders are advised to test every message to ensure that it moves persuadable voters, they are paralyzed until someone analyzes the data for them and explains to them how to deploy it and message around it. By the time that happens, Trump will have already dismantled what is left of our constitutional republic.

The truth is that messaging is not complicated, though consultants like me have to justify our keep by making it seem like it is. Smart campaigns became avatars for the hopes and dreams of everyone, not just some segmented cohort.

“It’s the economy, stupid,” said Bill Clinton in 1992. 19-year-old me understood what that meant for her just as much as my forty-eight-year old dad understood what that meant for him. We each had different economic concerns, which we each projected onto a candidate who we believed understood them.

“Hope and change,” said Barack Obama in 2008 and that universal theme also meant something different to every person. “Make America Great Again” said Trump each time he ran and that, too, had a universality for just enough people who had their own individual versions of what American greatness would look like.

Winning campaigns do better when they bring disparate groups together, rather than segmenting them apart. But modeling does work quite effectively when private citizens talk to one another. That is why emailing your friends, family and neighbors with your concerns is so important. I don’t know who they are but I bet they care that the price of eggs has hit a record high since Trump took office. Maybe they are worried about another pandemic? Then should know that Trump has fired hundreds of public health officials whose job it is to prevent another outbreak. Maybe they are short on cash? Then they should know that Republicans are siding with big banks to bring back exorbitant overdraft fees. Maybe they like to fly? Then they should know that Trump just laid off air traffic controllers, even though there have been five commercial airline disasters in the month since he took office.

You know better than I do what they are concerned about but whatever it is, they care about hearing from you because they know you and trust you more than they know and trust someone in Washington. And here is the key: you need to communicate with them on their own terms and not wait for someone to give you talking points. You’ve spent the last month and more panicking about the state of our country. You know exactly what you want to say and how to say it.

We are the message and we need to be the messengers. No one else is stepping up to do what must be done.

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