The Establishment is Lying Down Before Trump

Democrats and the media once called Trump an existential threat. Now they’re normalizing his second presidency.

by Julie Roginsky

Is Donald Trump an existential threat to this nation or is he not? Establishment Democrats and legacy media can’t answer that question definitively, even if they say all the right words.

Trump is president again. And this time, there is only surrender coming from the establishment — quiet, polished surrender.

It came even before the inauguration, in the form of a Mar-a-Lago sit-down, where Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, formerly the morning voices of democracy panic, smiled across at the man they once called a fascist. The symbolism of that summit was perfect — a pair of former moralists sitting beneath chandeliers, pretending the republic wasn’t bleeding out around them.

It came when Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said there was an “imminent threat posed by MAGA extremism and the radical far-right manifesto” in 2024, only to respond to that threat in 2025 by writing letters to the White House, asking to partner with a man who poses existential threat to Schumer’s professed life’s work.

Let there be no doubt about what the choice before us is right now:

Either Trump is just another president with whom we have policy disagreements or he is an existential threat to the nearly 250 year American experiment. If he is just another George W. Bush, then let’s dispense with the overheated rhetoric and fight him on the legislative battlefield.

But if Trump is truly the danger these media figures and politicians spent all of 2024 warning us about, then let’s dispense with the normalization and fight this slide into fascism with every single tool at our disposal.

Yet neither our leaders nor our legacy media are meeting the moment, because their prefer normalization over confrontation. Most Democratic leaders in Washington have been around for so long that they cannot imagine — literally, their brains cannot process — the world in which Trump has now forced us all to live. As for legacy media, they prefer access above all else and possess a sense of self-righteousness that requires them to “both-sides” the hell out of debates — even when the debates are about whether the sun really rises in the East.

All this started long before Trump’s restoration, in studios and green rooms where people who knew better kept saying, “It can’t happen here.” By 2025, it took a small breeze for the entire house of cards to collapse.

It started with Democrats who convinced themselves that voters wanted calm, not confrontation — and spent the Trump interregnum “moving on.” It started with editors who confused “balance” with cowardice.

Now we live in the aftermath of their wishful thinking.

Trump has reshaped the Justice Department to serve his whims. The Office of Personnel Management has been gutted under Project 2025. The retribution squads are quietly moving through agencies, purging career officials and anyone who refuses to abase himself in service of an aspiring autocrat. Innocent people are being snatched off the streets and disappeared.

And still, much of the media covers it all as if it were just another partisan cycle.

Cable news shows run split screens of deportation convoys and consumer-confidence charts.

The Washington Post has purged its editorial page of any Trump dissenters.

And Morning Joe has gone full Versailles — gossipy, glittering, servile.

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All of this is fealty — the kind that happens when the powerful finally stop resisting someone with even more power in order to keep the perception that they have any of their own left.

These were the same people who, for years, warned that Trump was an existential threat, who had called him dangerous, delusional, deranged, who said flatly that democracy was at stake.

But democracy, it turns out, was negotiable, especially when it meant currying favor with the FCC or White House sources.

And where are the Democrats?

With a few prominent exceptions, they issue statements. They write stern letters while the attorney general signs off on seeking indictments for Trump’s perceived enemies.

The party that once claimed to be defending the soul of America has become a ghost of proceduralism. Our leaders speak of norms while the norms are being torched. They chase bipartisan illusions while the Constitution is being hollowed out. It’s as if our Democratic leaders in Washington have decided that if they can’t save democracy, they can at least keep pretending it’s polite. Once in a while, they’ll per formatively drop the F bomb to show that they’re fighters and then go right back to the status quo, because it is all they know how to do.

Legacy media has decided that audiences crave balance, not alarm. And so the content flattens, the adjectives soften, and the truth dissolves into euphemism.

“Hard-line policies.”
“Controversial” rhetoric.
“Unprecedented” measures.

All these phrases are domesticating authoritarianism and underscoring that we are living through a controlled collapse of democracy, narrated in monotone.

Part of what made Trump’s second rise possible was the refusal, by both the press and the Democratic Party, to imagine at first that it could happen again. They convinced themselves that 2020 was the exorcism, that the system had “worked.” That indictments, institutions, and civility would hold.

And when Trump returned — angrier, sharper, more disciplined — they didn’t know what to do except repeat the old playbook. The morning shows booked him for “balance;” the newspapers ran “both-sides” op-eds; Democratic leaders issued the same tired warnings without consequences.

By the time anyone any of them realize the temperature has risen, the water will be boiling. It is quite hot already.

For cable hosts and many Washington Democrats alike, survival means accommodation. The cameras must keep rolling. The donors must keep giving. The invites must keep coming.

They call it “journalism” and “governing pragmatism.” But the truth is simpler: they have always suffered from a serious lack of imagination. By the time they wake up — and at this stage, it is questionable whether they ever really will — we will be living in a full-on authoritarian state.

Why do so many people who know better keep capitulating?

Because accepting the truth — that democracy has already been compromised — is unbearable. It’s easier to tell yourself that this is just another cycle, that institutions are self-healing, that America is “bigger than one man.”

Interwar Germany had its version of this — respectable conservatives who believed they could “manage” the radical. They thought cooperation was stability. They thought normalization was maturity.

Turn-of-the-century Russia had its version too — oligarchs and media bosses who also believed they could manage the rube. The ones who ultimately capitulated fully stayed wealthy. The rest died, along with any hope of a democratic nation.

History doesn’t reward those who adapt to tyranny. It remembers them as the ones who helped it take root.

This is what happens when a nation mistakes fatigue for wisdom. Washington Democrats and legacy journalists alike have convinced themselves that stability requires conversation. Instead, what we are living through now is the quiet hum of consensus as power consolidates.

The scariest part is how easily we’ve adapted to normalization.

ICE raids have become background noise.
Journalist detentions are “under review.”
The words “authoritarian drift” trend for a day, then vanish.

The new normal is sedation.

And unless someone, somewhere, breaks the spell — unless the Democrats rediscover courage and the press remembers its spine — we will continue to slide, politely, into something far darker than chaos: consent.

We urgently need a new generation of voices in both Democratic leadership and in the media — people who did not shout about impending fascism, only to revert to the status quo once it actually got here.

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