The Left Needs to Abandon Hysteria & Scolding if it Wants to Stop Trump

The formula for stopping Trump

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is doing a lot of bad stuff. Some of it is worse than bad: it’s illegal, dangerous, foolish, and a whole lot of additional negative adjectives as well. Democrats need to fight him and do everything they can to stop it (Former Rep Tom Malinowski outlined some of the limited ways they can fight back here) — up to and including brinkmanship over keeping the government open in March.

But stopping more than a fraction of what Trump is doing requires fighting smart. And there are signs that people on the left haven’t grasped this.

What does fighting smart involve? For starters, every single thing Trump does can’t be the coming of the political apocalypse. I saw someone tweet something the other day (this was probably the genesis of this column) about what the next Democratic administration would do with all of the unilateral power Republicans are suddenly okay with presidents having. And someone else chimed in to say that because of what Trump was doing, we had seen the last free and fair election, and there would be no next Democratic administration.

This is far from the only comment I’ve seen on social media that is totally over the top. I AGREE with the people making these critiques on the substance of what Trump is doing. I’m horrified by it.

But issuing hysterical warnings non-stop and fighting indiscriminately won’t stop Trump. If anything, they’ll backfire. I actually think the tendency of people to melt down over everything Trump does was one reason that many voters ignored the warnings about the threat he posed during the campaign. For eight years, huge chunks of the left have been sounding the alarm nonstop. Every single thing Trump does that is bad—and that’s a lot of things—is a five alarm fire.

After a while, people tune out hyperbolic warnings. The people issuing them lose credibility and look like they just hate Trump so much that they have no perspective.

Maybe more importantly: when Trump actually does set five alarm fires, there’s no way for Americans who pay casual attention to politics (or less than casual) to know that it’s different from all of the other bad stuff that people lost their minds over. They can’t decipher the bad from the truly dangerous — the cringey from the constitutional threat. So they just evaluate Trump by this metric: has what he’s done negatively impacted my life? If not, they dismiss the criticisms.

Such hysteria also creates two other problems: First, any Democrat who doesn’t oppose everything that Trump does becomes a Judas who needs to be read out of the party. After all, they’re enabling unacceptable things to happen. This tendency toward infighting distracts from Trump, while also ignoring that a majority of Americans—at least as of the last polling we got—agree with the biggest planks in Trump’s agenda for now.

Second, and relatedly, it enables Trump to suck Democrats into fights that won’t be winners. Politico’s astute Rachael Bade wrote a column on this as it regards Democratic outrage over the illegal and foolish shuttering of USAID.

Now, every Democrat thinks this is wrong. USAID does essential work that bolsters the American brand while saving and improving lives across the globe. The right has hated foreign aid for decades, and Democrats need to make a positive case for it. Furthermore, closing USAID or folding it into the State Department is also illegal. Only Congress can take such actions.

Yet, even before seeing Rachael’s column, I told my students that it was going to be very hard to get average Americans — not academics, liberal or leftist activists, people in the political world — but people who watch 10-20 minutes of news per week, if that, to care about USAID. It has zero impact on their lives. It just doesn’t move the needle. If anything, I could see them thinking, “yeah this is the version of America First that I like; spend our tax dollars here.”

Now, reportedly, Trump’s next target is the Department of Education, which will have a much more tangible impact on millions of Americans, and might give Democrats a stronger issue to fight back on. There are also going to be much more winnable fights over Republicans’ legislative agenda, which will probably involve big cuts to Medicaid, Food Stamps, and scores of other programs that benefit millions of average Americans. That’s before one even takes into consideration the stuff being done by billionaire Elon Musk, who is reportedly demanding (and getting) access to Americans’ personal information and other sensitive information, or the tariffs that Trump keeps threatening, which will dramatically raise prices on Americans.

In short, there are a lot of places where Democrats can fight on favorable terrain. But USAID isn’t one. That doesn’t mean just letting Trump do what he wants. There is ample room to fight back and try to stop the dismantling of the agency. Democrats and their allies can file court challenges, they can try to insert provisions in a government funding bill reversing the changes, etc. Yet, it shouldn’t be an issue where they try to capture headlines and drive news cycles.

They need to strategically pick which battles involve an all out war, and which require staunch opposition — but with less fireworks.

The hysteria over every single thing Trump does dovetails with another problem of the American left: they’ve become incredibly intolerant of anyone who disagrees on innumerable issues. They scold people who disagree, and even worse, label them bigots.