Democratic politicians don’t seem to believe Trump is a threat to democracy

Democratic politicians don’t seem to believe Trump is a threat to democracy
Peter Meijer (Image: YouTube screen grab)

If your actions belie your words, people won’t believe you. Sometimes, Democratic politicians claim Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, but they never act like it, and don’t seem to believe it. As the Washington Examiner pointed out,

On a recent episode of the Bulwark Podcast, hosted by never-Trump commentator Tim Miller, New York Times opinion writer Ezra Klein admitted that he has heard from Democrats who admit that they don’t actually believe their hysterical talking point.

“I’ve had top Democrats say to me basically something like, ‘I don’t know why all these Democrats who think Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy are acting the way they are,” Klein said. “But the reason I’m acting the way I am is because I don’t think that.’”

Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME), who represents a House district that overwhelmingly voted for Trump four years ago, likewise said in a column published earlier this month that democracy would be just fine if Trump were to win in November.

“Unlike Biden and many others, I refuse to participate in a campaign to scare voters with the idea that Trump will end our democratic system,” he wrote.

The truth is that most party-line Democratic Party politicians have never believed that Trump is the threat to democracy they claim he is. Instead, they have parroted this talking point for years to rile up their base and bolster fundraising.

Congressional Democrats have tended to view Trump as a political opportunity to gain seats in Congress, not a threat to Democracy. With Trump in the White House, Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 2018, and took control of Congress and the White House in 2020. They don’t like Trump, but they’d rather have him in the White House than Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who has devastated the Democratic Party in Florida, turning what was once a swing state into a solidly Republican state with conservative policies.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton badly wanted Trump as the GOP nominee, reports Politico in the article, “They Always Wanted Trump.” Behind the scenes, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did things to make Trump more likely to win the Republican Primary, in hopes of facing him in November. The inept Clinton managed to lose the November 2016 election, by antagonizing centrist voters in a handful of swing states she paid little attention to, such as Wisconsin. But she never expected to lose the general election, because polls showed her doing better against Trump than against more popular Republicans, like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.

If Clinton had actually viewed Trump as a threat to democracy, she would have welcomed Trump critics with open arms, even if they were conservative, libertarian, or Evangelical Christian. But she didn’t. When one of the billionaire Koch Brothers publicly floated the idea of supporting her, saying some “kind words” about her, she denounced the Koch Brothers for being fiscally conservative. As a result, they stayed neutral in the presidential campaign, and spent millions of dollars to elect Congressional Republicans, even though that money indirectly benefited Trump as well. (When a Koch-backed entity drives an elderly Republican voter to the polls to elect a Republican Senator like Pat Toomey (R-PA), that voter usually votes for the Republican presidential candidate as well, although in some Philadelphia suburbs, upscale voters split ballots, casting votes for Republican congressional candidates but not Trump).

Clinton thought there was no danger to democracy, so she felt no need to build a political coalition with former foes. She showed nothing but contempt for free-market conservatives and religious conservatives who mulled voting for her, welcoming only a handful of neoconservatives (she didn’t even have an outreach coordinator to Evangelical Christians, the way President Obama did, because she didn’t think she needed Evangelical Christian votes, and didn’t really want their votes as a result, viewing them as backward and bigoted). The only kind of conservatism Clinton was willing to tolerate in her supporters was on foreign policy.

By contrast, political candidates who view their opponent as a threat to democracy don’t act that way. They don’t act the way Clinton, Biden, and Harris did, in refusing to build political coalitions with people of different ideologies. They welcome even former enemies.

When French center-right candidate Jacques Chirac went into a presidential run-off election against right-wing nationalist Jean-Marie LePen in 2002, Chirac welcomed all his former political foes on the left, and ran a unity campaign that dropped many of Chirac’s own pet issues. As a result, he won the Presidential run-off election in 2002 with 82% of the vote. Voters believed Chirac when he said his opponent was a threat to democracy, because Chirac acted like it, and did everything he could to mend fences with his left-of-center competitors to build a coalition to defeat Jean-Marie LePen. Chirac acted like there was an emergency, and acted like he believed democracy was in danger. This convinced voters — even some voters who voted for the right-wing nationalist in the first round of the election, to express their frustration with the political establishment, voted for Chirac in the second round (run-off) election.

Neither Clinton nor Biden nor Harris made any meaningful effort to build a cross-ideological coalition in their campaigns against Donald Trump, because none of them actually viewed Trump as a threat to democracy. Since they didn’t view him as a threat to democracy, they weren’t willing to compromise on any of their positions to attract support from across the ideological spectrum.

Instead, Democrats viewed Trump — a relatively unpopular president — as an opportunity to win elections and implement a more left-wing agenda than prior Democratic presidents had pursued. Believing that Trump was no threat to democracy, they felt free to not compromise their positions, and pursue a more left-wing agenda than prior Democratic presidential nominees.

They pursued ever-more-leftist policies. In 2020, Biden proposed $11 trillion in new spending, and $3 trillion in new taxes. That’s much more spending — and deficit spending — than past Democratic nominees had ever proposed. As the progressive Peter Beinart exulted in The Atlantic, Biden embraced “an agenda that is further to the left than that of any Democratic nominee in decades.”

Because the Democrats don’t believe Trump is a threat to democracy, but rather a political opportunity to win general elections, they have routinely funded ad campaigns designed to get Republican primary voters to choose Trumpier Republicans over less Trumpy Republicans in swing districts where it is somewhat more difficult for a more Trumpy Republican to win a general election than a less Trumpy Republican.

For example, Reason Magazine reported that Michigan Republican “Rep. Peter Meijer’s Trump-Backed Primary Challenger Got a $435,000 Gift From Democrats.” As a result, Meijer lost the Republican Primary election, and John Gibbs, the more Trumpy candidate who won the Republican primary, went on to lose the general election to a progressive Democrat. If a very Trumpy Republican has a 60% chance of losing a general election, and a less Trumpy Republican has a 60% chance of winning a general election, the Democrats will help the Trumpy Republican win the primary. If Democrats cared about democracy, and Trumpists were truly a threat to democracy, Democrats wouldn’t do this, and wouldn’t take the risk of electing more Democrats. But the Democrats do it, over and over again, showing they don’t actually view Trump and his followers as threats to democracy.

In 2024, the Democrats spent $2 million to help a pro-Trump Republican try to unseat a Republican Congressman who had voted to impeach Donald Trump over the January 6 riot. The Democrats spent that $2 million in the Republican Congressional primary, in a swing district that has been carried by Clinton, Biden, and Harris. Democrats had a chance of beating the incumbent in the general election, but wanted to increase their chances of winning the general election by getting Republican primary voters to nominate Donald Trump, who was more unpopular in the district than the Republican Congressman (who had a mostly conservative voting record). They were willing risk making Congress Trumpier as part of their electoral strategy. If they really cared about “democracy,” they would not have intervened in the primary to get rid of a Republican incumbent who actually believed what they said about January 6 being awful, and replace him with a candidate who wasn’t bothered by Trump’s behavior on January 6.  But the anti-Trump Republican Congressman won that 2024 primary, and went on to win the general election against a progressive, big-government Democrat.

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