What Are Democrats Supposed to Do?

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February 3, 2025 10:02 a.m.

I wrote a series of posts over the weekend about how to make sense, politically, strategically and even emotionally of the unfolding crisis of governance in DC. Here’s a piece about messaging and morale and another on Trump and Musk’s “shock and awe” strategies. After reading those posts, a number of TPM Readers have asked, okay, what are we supposed to do? Or what are our electeds supposed to do? I want to dig into this more later, but in this post I want to give as best a quick answer to that as I can.

We start with a piece in this morning’s Punchbowl which is simultaneously encouraging and gobsmackingly disheartening. The headline reads: Democrats ask: Why would we help Trump and the Republicans?. Most of you are probably thinking, you’re just getting to this question, guys? Well, they are. As they should, though it’s far more tentative than it should be. I suspect that’s about to change.

Let’s repeat the core fact. Republicans are in charge. As I explained here, the levers Democrats have over any of this are very limited. This is fundamentally a battle over public opinion, one in which the opposition needs to be making the case about the disastrousness of Trump’s policies. But there are levers. And they need to use them. Because even those tiny levers are key to that larger battle. Talk in itself is meaningless. Begging especially is meaningless. In fact, on its own it can be demoralizing — same old, same old, just performatively illustrating either the inability or unwillingness to act.

Right now in Washington, DC, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are dominating literally everything. That will start changing quickly, at least in a limited way, in the courts. But the overriding need is for Democrats to get a seat at the table. And they can do that in several ways. The biggest way is that Republicans will need help to pass a budget and raise the debt ceiling. The rubber starts meeting the road on that front next month. Real soon. You can talk as much as you want. But the White House and congressional Republicans absolutely need that help. And Democrats need to be crystal clear that the answer is absolutely no help — without meeting their conditions. That’s where you get the seat at the table.

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