The US under Donald Trump continues to fracture and untether itself from its democratic norms at a pace that is almost impossible to keep up with.
This weekend alone, Trump gutted government-funded news, ramped up deportations in apparent defiance of the courts, and launched military attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Such times call for a decisive opposition, propelled by a mix of strategic organisation and moral clarity. The Democrats’ response? Waving Republican legislation through, a bold strategy that’s been rewarded with the party’s lowest popularity rating in history.
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Trump’s eerie mirrors
A few hours ago at time of writing, Trump proudly shared footage on his social network Truth Social showing shackled figures being led from a plane by heavily armed security. Military figures can be seen swarming over the tarmac, and police cars, their lights ablaze, clog the surrounding roads. At one point in the video, a prisoner’s clothes are lifted to display his tattoos for the camera.
In his post sharing the footage, Trump called the prisoners, whose faces are in no way obscured, “monsters”:
These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation, which was allowed to happen to the United States because of incompetent Democrat leadership. We will not forget!
This gleefully furious pageant, centred on the arrival in El Salvador of alleged Venezuelan members of the MS-13 gang, comes after a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s stated plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The act has only been used three times in US history — during the war against the British in 1812, as well as during World War I and World War II — and allows the US president to detain or deport immigrants based solely on their country of birth. It was notoriously used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
Over the weekend, Judge James Boasberg argued that the act “does not provide a basis for the president’s proclamation given that the terms invasion, predatory incursion really relate to hostile acts perpetrated by any nation and commensurate to war”. It appears that this order has been ignored. El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele shared the same footage as Trump of the alleged criminals arriving in his country.
It is an eerie mirror of the footage of the arrival of 20 Afghans — described by the then chair of the joint chiefs of staff as “people that would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down” — at Guantanamo Bay in January 2002, during the opening stages of the disastrous War on Terror.
Meanwhile, another judge has ordered the administration to respond to the allegation it had “willfully disobeyed” an order to halt the deportation of Dr Rasha Alawieh, who was placed on a flight to Paris and detained there over the weekend. The administration won’t say why she was deported, or why she was detained.
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The ‘resistance’
So what are the Democrats doing? Certainly, earlier this month, in the aftermath of Trump’s state of the union address, the opposition went hard. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear”, New Mexico Representative Teresa Leger Fernández, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, told Time.
And it doesn’t get much louder, or clearer, than coordinated outfits — whether it was pink to “support” women’s rights, or yellow and blue to “stand up” for Ukraine. Above the protests of leadership, some even waved signs.
Another thing in the Dems’ armoury was their official response to Trump’s address, giving them an opportunity to launch a blistering attack on his unweaving of political and diplomatic norms. But they handed this honour to Senator Elissa Slotkin, the first Democrat to be endorsed by confirmed war hawk Liz Cheney (though not the last).
Slotkin had previously helped Trump notch an early legislative win when she voted for the Laken Riley Act, which allowed for the detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants without due process, and used her response to sing the praises of that noted progressive champion Ronald Reagan. Her speech was, shall we say, rather lacklustre.
Still, the Democrats did get really serious in response to the “inappropriate” behaviour of… their own representative Al Green, who heckled the president over cuts to Medicaid. A few days later came whatever this is:
Okay, but now they’ve really learnt from all that, and basically everything that’s happened in the past 10 years, right? After all, on March 13, Senate Minority Leader and senior Democrat Chuck Schumer promised to reject a government funding bill that Republicans wrote and passed through the House. Schumer’s pledge raised the possibility of a government shutdown — a bit like the one Republican lawmakers brought about in 2013.
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Oh yep, turns out not. Schumer pulled off an impressive backflip for a man with a jelly-like backbone, breaking with the majority of his party to provide Republicans with the votes they needed to pass the bill.
This has prompted widespread fury from many of his colleagues. Representative Pete Aguilar said: “When Donald Trump wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You’re doing the right things, Senate Democrats’ — we don’t feel that is the right place to be.”
The weekend also brought an NBC poll that awarded the Democrats their lowest popularity rating in history, with only 27% of registered voters viewing the Democrats positively, and only 7% being “very positive”.
“With these numbers, the Democratic Party is not in need of a rebrand. It needs to be rebooted,” Democratic pollster Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates told NBC.
Meanwhile…
All full-time employees with the government-funded Voice of America (VoA), the nation’s largest international broadcaster, were informed Saturday that they have been placed on administrative leave. This follows an executive order from Trump seeking to gut the agency (as well as those concerned with trifles like homelessness and museums).
The last time VoA was so directly targeted by a US politician was during the era of rabid anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led an investigation into the broadcaster which in turn led to 11 hearings into whether it employed communists or communist sympathisers. He found none, at VoA or indeed any government agency.
Incidentally, McCarthy’s chief counsel at the time was Roy Cohn, who would later mentor a young Donald Trump.
And, again, the Democrats’ response? Eerily absent, and indicative of the fracturing effect Trump’s administration is having on the party.
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