“Standing Up To Donald Trump Didn’t Work”

An urgent message to Democrats: This is not how you negotiate.

Image: KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

by Julie Roginsky

We once had Democratic leaders who proactively stood up against fear.

“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” said Franklin Roosevelt at his first inaugural address, at the height of the Great Depression.

In his final address to Democrats at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama explicitly contrasted his vision of America with a politics of fear. “We don’t fear the future — we shape it,” he said.

Those days are over now. We are led — if that word even applies — by gutless cowards who are afraid of Donald Trump. Read that again: the people we sent to Washington to stand up to the authoritarian in the White House are so terrified of him that they have given up even the pretense of fighting.

If Democratic leaders in Washington have a unifying principle these days, it isn’t progressivism or pragmatism — it’s fear. Fear of bad headlines. Fear of Wall Street. Fear of Fox News. Fear of Donald Trump. Fear, most of all, of their own shadows. And nowhere is that timidity more calcified than in the United States Senate, where Democrats have made governing from fear into an art form.

Their latest capitulation in the government shutdown fight on Sunday night was just the freshest proof. After weeks of stalemate, Senate Democrats finally folded — accepting a short-term funding deal that reopens the government without securing the very Affordable Care Act subsidy extension they swore was nonnegotiable. The party that spent all autumn promising to “fight for working families” couldn’t even hold the line through November. Eight Democrats crossed over to back a stopgap that punted their own priorities into next year. Within moments of announcing his capitulation, Senator Angus King (I-ME) announced that, “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work.”

That sentence could be the Democratic Party’s epitaph.

You can trace this pattern across the last decade: Democrats are most decisive when they’re terrified — not of the problems they are elected to solve but of how those problems will look if they go unsolved. They move only when their fear of blame outweighs their fear of the right. That dynamic explains almost every major Senate negotiation of the Trump era and beyond.

Why? Because they fear being called hysterical, or partisan, or — God forbid — “too political.” The irony of being a political party afraid of being called political never seems to occur to them.

The Senate breeds this pathology. The upper chamber is where big ideas go to be tranquilized — a place where Democrats, in particular, treat institutional caution as proof of statesmanship. They revere “process” like a civic religion. The filibuster becomes a sacred relic, comity a sacrament.

But this fear runs deeper than procedure. It’s existential. Senate Democrats fear conflict itself — the visible exercise of power. They equate governing with refereeing, and compromise with courage. The result is a caucus that doesn’t lead public opinion – it tries to anticipate it, triangulate it, and get out of its way before it bites.

When Mitch McConnell was Senate majority leader, he wielded power like a hammer. When Chuck Schumer became majority leader, he wielded it like a wet napkin. Schumer’s instinct in every crisis has been to negotiate downward from his own position before the first meeting starts in an effort to appear “reasonable.” His members, conditioned by years of conservative rage cycles, do not object. The Democratic Senate caucus behaves as if political force is something only Republicans are allowed to use.

The gravitational pull of Trump’s intimidation politics still defines the Senate Democrats’ posture. The president’s brand of performative dominance has colonized their imaginations. He tweets; they tremble. He lies; they issue sternly worded letters. He breaks precedent; they discuss norms that have long been extinct. The result is that Trump sets the tempo of American politics even when he’s not in the room. And the Senate Democrats’ compliance — their obsession with not seeming as “angry” or “radical” as he says they are — keeps his cultural authority alive.

The fear isn’t limited to Republicans. Senate Democrats are just as afraid of their own voters — particularly the younger, more progressive bloc that actually wants them to act like the fighters for working people that they claim to be.

The party’s Washington wing has internalized a worldview that equates caution with competence. Boldness, to them, is recklessness. So, they perform “adult in the room” politics — always deescalating, always hedging, always triangulating. They think this makes them look responsible. In fact, it makes them look afraid.

Democrats outside the Beltway sense that fear and despise it. That’s why so much of the party’s grassroots energy now flows outside Capitol Hill — into state movements, local ballot measures, and organizing campaigns that bypass Washington altogether. Washington Democrats’ fear of taking risks has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: they fear their base’s disillusionment, but their timidity is what drives it.

Too many Democratic leaders in Washington treat power like a radioactive substance: something to be handled with tongs and promptly buried. When they had a trifecta in 2021, they shrank from reforming the filibuster, terrified that doing so would “set a precedent” Republicans could exploit. Now, Trump threatened to nuke the filibuster if Democrats did not fall in line on reopening government — so they did, in order to preserve the very mechanism used as a cudgel against them.

Washington Democrats refused to expand the Supreme Court after a Republican president filled three seats in four years — one stolen outright — because they didn’t want to “politicize” the Court. The Court, politicized to the point of radicalization, has since done more to dismantle their legislative legacy than any Republican majority could dream of. Their restraint wasn’t principle — it was cowardice dressed as civility.

Power is a game of territory. When one side plays to win and the other plays not to lose, the outcome is preordained. Republicans understand that politics is a contact sport. Too often, Washington Democrats act like it’s yoga.

Why this perpetual flinch? Partly, it’s the legacy of decades of GOP narrative dominance. Republicans spent forty years branding Democrats as “tax-and-spend liberals,” “soft on crime,” “weak on defense.” Senate Democrats, desperate to prove their toughness, overcorrected into timidity. They preemptively disarm, terrified of confirming the caricature.

But fear also flatters the ego. The Senate’s self-image — serious, deliberative, institutional — depends on pretending that excessive caution is moral virtue. To be afraid is to be wise. To hesitate is to be thoughtful. To avoid confrontation is to rise above it. That self-mythology lets Senate Democratic leaders mistake paralysis for prudence.

The shutdown deal captures it perfectly: Eight members of the Senate Democratic caucus framed their retreat as putting the country first. What they really did was put their comfort first — relieving the pressure of conflict at the expense of policy substance. They weren’t acting out of civic duty —they were soothing their own anxiety.

The cost of this fear-based governance is measurable. It demoralizes voters who want conviction. It emboldens opponents who sense weakness. It drains moral clarity from every debate. And it cedes the initiative — over and over — to those willing to wield power without apology.

Look at the scoreboard: on voting rights, climate, judicial reform, immigration, labor, gun safety — every major structural reform Democrats promised was either watered down or abandoned in the Senate when Democrats were in the majority. Each time, the same rationale: the votes weren’t there, the optics weren’t good, the backlash would be worse. Fear of acting becomes a prophecy that fulfilled itself.

Meanwhile, the Republicans govern in the majority as though they hold a mandate from God. When they can’t pass laws, they shape the courts. When they can’t win elections, they gerrymander. When they can’t persuade, they suppress. When they don’t have the votes, they threaten to eradicate the filibuster to get them. Their moral confidence — however unfounded — makes Democrats’ caution look like complicity.

At heart, too many Washington Democrats fear exposure. They fear revealing what they really believe because they suspect it might be unpopular — something Republicans never worry about when ramming through legislation — and they fear pretending to believe what they don’t because it might anger the base. So they try to blur the distinction. They speak in slogans calibrated to offend no one and inspire no one. “We believe in fairness.” “We’re fighting for working families.” “We support everyday Americans.” It’s language as anesthesia — designed not to awaken but to numb.

The problem is that fear, once internalized, becomes habit. The Senators who surrendered on the shutdown this week are the same senators who will flinch at the next fight over reproductive rights or climate targets or executive overreach. Their instinct will be to manage the optics, not to change the outcome. They’ve forgotten that politics isn’t therapy. It’s war by other means.

To govern from courage instead of fear, Democrats need to start by redefining what risk looks like. Right now, they treat risk as the chance of losing the next election. But the real risk — the existential one — is losing the country’s faith that government can deliver anything at all. Each retreat teaches voters that politics is performance, not purpose.

Breaking that cycle means making peace with temporary backlash. The Affordable Care Act was toxic for two years after passage. By 2020, it was one of the most popular federal programs in America. Democrats forgot that lesson the moment it became inconvenient. The courage to endure unpopularity in the short term is what separates leaders from caretakers.

There is a possibility that Trump’s overreach will put both houses in Congress in play next year, which means that Democrats might be back in the majority. If that happens, the first thing they must do is reclaim their moral imagination. The Senate once produced giants — Lyndon Johnson, Robert and Ted Kennedy, Paul Wellstone — who believed politics could change the structure of society. Today’s Democrats treat it like a customer service desk. They can start reversing that by actually using the power they have.

Because if they don’t, fear will continue to write the Democratic script — one surrender at a time.

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I’m With Kamala

Why I’ve changed my mind about Joe Biden—and Kamala Harris.

by Ben Cohen

How fast a year goes by. Which is odd given that a week in Trumpworld feels like an eternity. But as the parent of any toddler will tell you, the days are long but the years are fast.

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I didn’t think it was useful to tear Joe Biden and Kamala Harris down for losing to Trump. The US had been subjected to one of the most far reaching, truly evil propaganda campaigns by Elon Musk, the Trump 2024 team, and the right wing media I’d ever seen.

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This is an excerpt from today’s Members Only article. To continue reading, get 50% off a Banter Membership and go here:

I'm With Kamala