As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office for a second time, the mood is distinctly different than in 2017.
Democrats are moving out of Resistance mode ahead of Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration despite, or perhaps because, fascism and Hitler were such a big part of their closing argument in last year’s presidential campaign.
The hair-on-fire approach to opposing Trump has plainly failed, so some Democrats want to try something different.
For the first time since 1989, no Democrats protested the Electoral College certification of a victorious Republican presidential candidate. Yes, those protests were largely confined to the fringe of the party. (Fun fact: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was the leading proponent of the conspiracy theory that George W. Bush lost Ohio, and therefore the presidency, to John Kerry in 2004.) Against Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, however, they were nonexistent.
WHAT TRUMP HAS PROMISED TO DO ON DAY 1 IN THE OVAL OFFICE
Trump’s 2020 election protests and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot could have formed the basis for additional Democratic election protests. Lawmakers could have argued, as many Democrats did during the presidential ballot-access process last year, that Trump was an insurrectionist who should not be allowed to serve under the 14th Amendment. Some activists wanted this, but they found no takers among Democrats in Congress.
Trump was largely chummily received by the presidents club at former President Jimmy Carter’s funeral, most notably yukking it up with former President Barack Obama. Former Vice President Al Gore, who began the trend of contesting presidential races beyond Election Day a quarter-century ago, rose to shake Trump’s hand at the same time former Vice President Mike Pence did.
Nearly 50 House Democrats defected and voted for a conservative immigration bill named after Laken Riley, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant and became a flashpoint in President Joe Biden’s last State of the Union address. Only nine Democratic senators voted against cloture in a procedural vote on the bill, while dozens voted in favor. Two of them, Sens. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), both hailing from battleground states Trump won in November, co-sponsored it.
In 2019, by contrast, most Democratic presidential candidates said they supported decriminalizing border crossings — a position Vice President Kamala Harris had to walk back during last year’s general election campaign. Biden never took this position, but the mindset undergirding it fueled the border crisis that dominated his term.
Fetterman became the first Democratic senator to make a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump. It was the closest thing to a Sister Souljah moment the party has seen since Bill Clinton in 1992.
None of this is to say things will be easy for Trump, starting with the confirmation of his Cabinet picks. The Laken Riley Act was a political loser for Democrats outside deep-blue, uncompetitive areas, but not all legislation Republicans will want to advance through their narrow majorities will be.
A few Democrats made conciliatory gestures eight years ago as well. But Trump led with the legislative agenda he had in common with Republican congressional leaders, with whom he had sparred during the primaries. There wasn’t much appetite among Democrats for corporate tax cuts or Obamacare repeal.
Trump’s sentencing in New York, making the “convicted felon” label official, and the eventual release of former special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 report will tempt Democrats to give into old habits.
But this time around, election conspiracy theories involving Russia, now updated to include Elon Musk, circulating among left-wing social media influencers have found virtually no support among Democratic elected officials or mainstream liberal pundits. The business community has warmed to Trump, if not his tariffs.
Part of this is because Trump won the popular vote. He did so by making significant inroads with parts of the Democratic electoral coalition. After positioning themselves as defenders of democracy, they had to accept the voters’ verdict.
Democrats may realize that their anti-Trump lawfare, including the successful New York hush money prosecution, backfired politically. They could not rail against Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2020 election or on Jan. 6 and have even a handful of progressive lawmakers protest the certification of the 2024 Electoral College results. Some Democrats even believe accepting the results more or less gracefully is an effective way to rebuke and draw contrasts with Trump.
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It remains to be seen whether Democrats are underserving the angry Left, along with other voters who are angry or apprehensive about a second Trump presidency. The columnist Jennifer Rubin, for example, quit the Washington Post to launch a new publication for this audience. Polls have found a nontrivial level of support for the alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin. Four more years of Trump could harden these attitudes.
The other possibility is that Trump’s second term forces a reckoning among Democrats, just as losing three straight presidential elections did in the 1980s. That’s what it took for Clinton to finally end the party’s White House drought in 1993.
