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Earlier this month, at the height of Democrats’ apparent powerlessness, a visibly
despondent Hakeem Jeffries inadvertently summarized his party’s dilemma. “I’m trying to figure out what leverage we have,” the House minority leader told a reporter. “They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government.” Democrats would do their best to work with their colleagues, he continued, but they also needed to acknowledge “an overwhelming mandate that was given to Republicans by the American people.”

It’s no secret Democrats are feeling demoralized as the party’s leadership continues to extend its requisite postelection soul-searching process. In less than a month, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have neutered the legislative branch, dismantled agencies, defied laws, and threatened judges as they’ve gutted the bureaucracy, choked off congressionally mandated federal funding, and fired thousands of federal employees. And there’s a dawning
fear in Democratic circles that the Republicans have won a cultural victory, too.

Indeed, 14 years after Obama’s brutal riff about Trump played to enormous laughs at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, many Democrats privately fret that the current president is executive producing a massive shift in the zeitgeist. With his first set of executive actions, Trump has gone on a McCarthy-esque witch hunt to root out D.E.I. programs and “woke” personnel. Rainbow flags have
been torn down; posters of civil rights leaders have been hidden away; the word “compassion” has been painted over at the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico. The websites for the C.D.C. and the F.D.A. now include warnings denouncing “gender ideology.” Meanwhile, Trump’s popularity, at least during his first three weeks in office, has never been higher.

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There are signs that the administration is pushing the boundaries in its crusade to
imprint MAGA values on America. Last week, Trump appointed himself to the Kennedy Center board of trustees, citing his intention to purge LGBTQ themes from performances. At the Munich Security Conference, on Friday, Vance bear-hugged Germany’s far-right AfD party. The vice president, who also visited the Dachau concentration camp, said that not permitting extremist politics is an assault on free speech; the following day, Trump channeled Napoleon Bonaparte, writing on X
that “he who saves his country does not violate any law.”

Nevertheless, there’s a pervasive sense among Capitol Hill Democrats that they’ve found themselves on “the wrong side of culture,” as a senior Democratic aide told me this week, which is much more difficult to overcome than an electoral defeat. Trump was repeatedly cheered at the Super Bowl while Taylor Swift was booed. Democrats must have known the
trouble they were in when football players’ touchdown celebrations imitated Trump’s stiff, old-man arm dance. The Democratic aide said the transformation brought to mind Ernest Hemingway’s famous exchange from The Sun Also Rises: “‘How did you go bankrupt?’ ‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’” The cultural shift was barely perceptible, and then it happened all at once.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington is one party member openly criticizing
the Democrats’ lack of direction. Smith belongs to the centrist New Democrat Coalition, a faction that has grown exasperated with the progressive left and activist allies, whose sanctimony on cultural issues has alienated even liberal voters. “I think framing everything as, It’s a human right—you know, healthcare, transportation, asylum, all of that—implies that there’s no responsibility on the other side, and I think that message cost us some support,” he told me on Thursday in his
royal-blue-painted office on Capitol Hill. “I also think we need to get back to the working class and move away from what was sort of the centrist, neoliberal message that was like, Okay, trade is going to cause disruption, but we’re going to send everybody back to college and they’re going to be an engineer, and it’ll be fine.”

Smith has acknowledged that Democrats turned off voters not only with
their immigration policies, but also with how they talked about immigration, adopting academic jargon like the word “Latinx.” But he also pointed to examples of what he called the failure of progressive governance in his own state and district on matters such as homelessness and drug abuse. “We have to acknowledge that across the political spectrum,” he said. “On the left side, we need to develop a better message and better policies to present a reasonable alternative to Trump.”

Smith acknowledged that his opinion is not universally supported within his party, and added, semi-jokingly, that his outspokenness is partly why he doesn’t have many friends—including Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a former chair of the Progressive Caucus, who represents Smith’s neighboring district. “She is not happy with me,” Smith said. (Jayapal told me that Smith’s critique of progressive politics
is far from universal, and is one she disagrees with. More to come on that…)

But he insists that the party needs to reconnect with working-class voters. He’s obsessed with a San Francisco public toilet that cost $1.7 million and took years to build as an example of progressive
failure. A similar incident involving liberal mismanagement occurred in King County, Washington, he says, where the Regional Homelessness Authority repeatedly failed to pay vendors on time. “It’s ironic, actually, because it’s exactly what Trump is doing to USAID right now,” Smith said. “You’ve got service providers all over the world going bankrupt now because contracts are disappearing, and the people they can help are going to be kicked out into the streets.”

So, yes, Democrats are lost—politically, culturally, spiritually. They are debating and contemplating and
struggling internally about how to push back against a president who is pushing the bounds of the law. They’re also under pressure from donors, lefty opinion writers, liberal groups, and some constituents to act more aggressively to thwart Trump’s refashioning of our political system. They want to stop Trump from allowing Elon Musk to access people’s private information; stop Trump from appointing himself chair of the Kennedy Center; stop Trump from firing inspectors general; stop Trump from
eliminating federal agencies.

There’s been one small, if perceptible, change in the past weeks: Democrats have mostly
shed the notion that they should work with Trump and Republicans where they can—one of the strategies that Jeffries referred to in his presser, earlier this month, to win back the voters who have been leaving the Democratic Party. Instead, they’re coordinating with attorneys general, unions, and impacted groups to file lawsuits challenging Trump, which have so far—in the first stages of the long, winding judicial path—mostly been successful.

Smith, a sort of small-c conservative by disposition, if not politics, suggested that an activist-driven freakout would not be helpful—and that fighting Trump’s agenda and culture war would need to be a long and laborious process. “Now is not the time to panic,” he said. “We’re not going to fix this problem in one tweet or one sentence or one message or one action.” On the contrary, he posited, “the only way we get to the place where we can defeat Trump is if
we get more people on our side—if we broaden our appeal, and Republicans in office begin to feel pressure to actually act on their own when they see something [they don’t] like. And we’ve got to be willing to look at what the Democratic Party needs to do to deal with some of the credibility gaps we have.”

In the meantime, the party is without a clear leader. Some have argued that Democrats should return to
the more conservative, populist-inflected politics of the Clinton or Obama eras—both of which appealed to working-class whites and emerged in reaction to long periods of Republican control. But Clinton and Obama were also sui generis political talents, with the sort of charisma that cannot be learned or faked. The young(ish) and charming Jeffries may be one of the more obvious options to lead Democrats through the wilderness, but some worry that he’s too cautious and
indecisive at such a monumental juncture. It doesn’t help that his old boss is still in the building, too, no matter how well intentioned the arrangement.

Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, has no intention of being the next leader, which may be one reason he has no qualms with challenging his own party or making enemies. Anyway, Smith told me, the Dems need more than a single leader to define a
new direction. “No one person is going to be key to this,” Smith said.

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