There Can Be No Compromise With MAGA

Donald Trump isn't interested in negotiating with Democrats, so why do they keep trying?

by Julie Roginsky

Compromise is not typically a dirty word. On his way out the door in January, President Joe Biden urged newly elected Democratic lawmakers to reach across the aisle. “We don’t do that anymore,” Biden told them. “The single greatest loss we have is that we don’t know each other anymore.”

With all due respect, Mr. President, we do know each other — which is why we need to clean house of the politicians who still think that they can cut deals with Donald Trump. We must replace them with a new generation of leaders who understand that there is no compromising with a president and a movement whose entire reason for being is to stick it to the other side.

I spent a decade as one of the few on-air Democrats at Fox News. When I first arrived in 2004, debates with my conservative counterparts centered on policy issues. Was the Iraq War really a righteous cause? Did we really need another round of tax cuts? By the time I left six months into Trump’s first term, something had shifted. The debates were no longer about policy. They were entirely about owning the libs. If Hillary Clinton said A, the answer was clearly B. It did not matter what the issue was. If Democrats supported it, it had to be defeated.

Over the last eight years, things have only grown worse. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has proven with each passing day that his carelessness endangers the lives of every American. Under any other president, Hegseth’s use of a commercial messaging app to transmit military plans, his installation of a private electronic device to circumvent security protocols, and his dissemination of secret information to his family members would have gotten him thrown out of the Pentagon and likely prosecuted. But that would require a president who cares more about the nation than he does about owning the libs.

The more Democrats and the media call for Hegseth’s head, the safer his job. Trolling your enemies is what matters to MAGA — not the commonwealth. And Hegseth is nothing if not well-studied from years as a Fox anchor about how to troll the media and “the libs.” The more he mouths off to his opponents, the more he thrills the man in the Oval Office.

That’s because Trump and his movement are uniquely fixated on sticking it to the other side. They are in the business of revenge, not governance.

“For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution,” Trump vowed to his acolytes at a campaign rally two years ago. It is the promise he has kept more than any other. Democrats and Never Trumpets, the president believes, have wronged and betrayed him. In his world view, you cannot work with people like that. You can only avenge yourself on them.

This is a president who reveled in a video of prisoners having their heads shaved at the hellhole gulag in El Salvador to which he has consigned them without due process. Watching this horror, the crowd at his Michigan rally roared, “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Are these the kinds of people with whom you can find common ground?

Scott Jennings, my occasional CNN sparring partner, gave up the game at Trump’s rally yesterday when he told the crowd, “I gotta get a farm in Michigan because when you own as many libs as I do, you gotta put a place to put them all.”

Yes, joking about buying a farm where you can “put” “the libs” is hilarious in MAGA world, but remember — Trumpists aren’t really joking. They are sending up trial balloons. (Had someone said this at a Harris rally about MAGA voters, by the way, Jennings would have been the first to sputter in outrage across every platform that CNN grants him.)

So, forgive me if I’m skeptical about efforts to reach across the aisle. After a decade of Trump, it is clear that he is wholly disinterested in finding partners with whom to govern. All he is interested in is payback.

Yet some Democratic leaders want to convince their own voters that if they only extend a hand, the days of bipartisanship and comity will return. They should stop wasting our time.

Gavin Newsom has spent the first months of Trump’s term making nice with the most extremist elements of Trump’s movement — the same people who platform white supremacists, denigrate women and people of color and espouse political violence. Gretchen Whitmer went to Washington to deliver .a speech touting bipartisanship. Their defenders argue that they are governors whose states will benefit from outreach to Trump and the MAGAverse. Nonsense.

There are already ample examples of what befalls Democrats who extend a hand to Trump. No one in the Democratic Party has sucked up to the president more than Governor Phil Murphy of New Jersey. He was the only Democratic governor who sent the national guard to Washington at Trump’s request in the wake of George Floyd’s death. He and his wife Tammy have repeatedly hightailed it to Bedminster to hobnob with the Trumps. In the wake of the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Murphy did not simply just wish Trump well. As he told a local outlet, “at one point, Tammy and I said to each other, ‘The right thing to do, is to go see the guy and give him a hug,’”

Conscious of the fact that he still has a D after his name, Murphy tried to have it both ways. “The following two things can be true at the same time: There are going to be areas where we’re going to fight like hell and we’ll defend people to the nth degree, till death do us part, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find common ground,” he said.

What did all this sycophancy get the governor? Trump’s handpicked U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, recently announced that she has launched an investigation into Murphy. That’s what giving Trump “a hug” gets you. He is not interested in partnerships. He is interested in abasement — and even then, it may not be enough.

Whitmer probably assumed that by going to the Oval Office and humoring Trump, she delivered for her state. Yesterday, Trump hugged her as she greeted him on the tarmac in Michigan. On his way to his rally, they hosted an event announcing that the Selfridge Air National Guard Base will house a new fighter jet fleet, a boon for the local economy. None of this, Whitmer argues, would have been possible if she had not cajoled Trump at the White House several weeks ago.

This is naive thinking. What Trump gives with one hand, he takes away with another. And to humiliate Whitmer for daring to criticize him on anything, he will repeatedly punish both her and Michigan. The whole exercise is to set her up for abasement. For Trump, there are no permanent allies. If you are a Democrat, however, you are a permanent enemy.

It’s time to realize that the days of policy disagreements are over. You are either on Team Democracy or Team Autocracy. Autocrats have no interest in working with the opposition because, in their worldview, there is no opposition. It is defeated or subsumed but, in any event, it is eradicated.

The MAGA movement is fighting democracy with everything it has. It’s time that anyone who cares about preserving it fights just as hard. On this, there can be no compromise.

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