OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, Donald Trump has sparked fierce and unrelenting opposition over both his chaotic governance and the threats he posed to governing institutions.
But what if Democrats were a bit too feverish in their response?
That’s the concern of one of the party’s leading members as he and others contend with Trump’s return to office.
“I do think it matters whether or not we are at an 11 every morning. And I don’t think we should be,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview with The Bulwark. “We cannot be the party of ‘Can you believe he did that?’ Which is different from saying that we won’t oppose and fight and mobilize and do everything we can to protect people and institutions. But I think we’re going to have to demonstrate to the public—which is paying less attention than the resistance—that we are not immediately wishing for his failure.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Schatz did not downplay the threats that he believes Trump poses. But he argued that, as a tactical matter, Democrats over the past several years have erred in treating each of those threats with equally immense gravity. Doing so, he said, led voters to view the party as a bunch of hysterics—and even as something like “Soviet”-style defenders of government bureaucracies.
Schatz offered COVID as an example. “We told people, ‘Hey, listen, you’re going to die.’ Then, definitionally, the people who didn’t die are still around, right? And then we say, ‘Democracy is going to die,’ right? And then democracy doesn’t die. And then we say four years later, by the way, this time is the time to be worried about American-style democracy collapsing. And I just think people just stopped believing this idea that we’re always at the precipice of a catastrophe. They don’t like living like that.”
As one of many Democrats offering postmortems and prescriptions for the party in the wake of its November defeat, Schatz’s perspectives appear influenced by his relative youth. At 52, he is both firmly middle-aged and a relative youngster by Senate standards. He’s one of the more outwardly engaging officials in the chamber, routinely responding to readers on X—often to the chagrin of his comms team.
Schatz said that Democrats needed to engage in media ecosystems well beyond the outlets they find most comfortable and comfortable—not just to show voters that they are, in fact, normal, but to better understand how voters feel. He noted how off-key the party’s messaging about inflation was.
“You know, if you get, whatever, these fancy-pants, progressive economists on TV, they’ll say we have performed better than other industrialized countries,” he recalled. “And if I’m trying to buy eggs, I’m like, ‘Fuck off. What does that even mean?’”
Despite his invocations to fellow Democrats not to freak out over every Trump action, Schatz did spotlight ones that would necessitate that type of hair-on-fire response. Declaring martial law “for no damn reason,” or jailing “members of the media,” fit into that category. So too would pulling back on widely accepted vaccine requirements.
“The biggest vulnerability for the Trump administration are the ones [the cabinet nominees] most likely to cause immediate harm in a way that is understandable and causes people to go like, ‘Hey, I wanted a disruptor, but like not in my kids’ elementary school,’” he said evoking the possibility of rubella or measles or mumps epidemics.
Ultimately, the balance Schatz said Democrats need to strike is a simple one: Discerning the signal from the noise. That means not exhausting the public with freakout theater. But it doesn’t mean laying down in defeat.
“Is it alarming? For sure. Is it the end? Absolutely not,” he said of Trump’s reemergence. “And I just worry very much that people who are very critical about ‘obeying in advance’ are also catastrophizing to the point where people start to feel powerless. We’re not fucking powerless here. . . . I think that is a chickenshit way to operate.”
Ro Khanna Wants Musk to Disclose His Finances
NO CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRAT has been as willing to accept and oblige Elon Musk in his MAGA turn as Rep. Ro Khanna.
The Case For Biden to Give Preemptive Pardons to Trump Targets
Rep. Brendan Boyle thinks the president should act in radical ways to match these unprecedented times.
Terrifically good conversation. Thanks so much for having him on. I didn't know much about him before but I'm very impressed.
The new Democratic fascination with profanity is kind of distracting. There has to be a political consultant behind it. I get why they're doing it but I think it's off target. Almost makes them seem less authentic. Not necessary.
Sam's questions reflect the tone that's bugged me about the Bulwark since the election. It's that hair-on-fire, speculative, always keeping things at an "11" approach. And here we have Senator Schatz acting as the ideal cooler head, and I loved it. It's really encouraging to know that people as smart (and as willing to say "f*ck") as him are in the senate.
Of course, credit Sam and team for having Senator Schatz on in the first place. Love the Bulwark.
Sam your interview style is awesome. I find you push and pull out the logical fallacies with people’s statements. You did this on the immigration and this pod. Well done.
This was great. Makes me hopeful that Democrats can re group in a meaningful way and come back stronger.
Thanks for this introduction to Senator Schatz! Somehow, I'd missed him! Plain spoken and to the point! My eye will be on him!
Well, that was a refreshing and insightful conversation. Thanks Senator!
Great interview. Senator Schatz was not on my radar before, but now he will be. Would love to hear from him again as time and events unfold
Excellent conversation. Thank you for introducing Senator Schatz; I'd never heard of him before now. He's exactly the kind of level-headed, reasonable person I want to see in politics.
More of this kind of interview, please!
Way to go Sam. Great interview. Great to hear from Sen Schatz. Yep, the messaging and being in the right rooms is the key. Talk to people where they are (at).
Sen Schatz was terrific - very thoughtful and level-headed. Reassuring. We are NOT cooked!
Agreed, I liked this interview a lot! My favorite takeaways overall were that realism and optimism are not mutually exclusive, and when everything is urgent, nothing is.
Second one is probably a pretty common experience for anyone with kids or a job lol
It was encouraging to hear from Brian Schatz, I feel bit of hope about moving forward.
Dems are horrible at messaging and Shatz is the perfect example. Always playing defense, bringing a spoon to a knife fight, and not being able to sell a $20 for $5. Dems have had 30 years to manage poor messaging and they still fail! The US has the best economy in the world, and they can't sell it! Dems always play defense and never play offense. They are currently embarrassing and need to have some real messengers than ramblers...
But that is the point…it isn’t messaging. The message is just an excuse because then they don’t have to make the real hard choices that lie in front of them. And they are really really hard.
I don’t know what the answer is but the problem is definitely not messaging. It’s (1) the people that need to hear the message never ever hear it…how do you change that?!?! (2) you probably have to make real hard/difficult choices on the actual platform that really alienate portions of your base. They might be even antithetical to your and my values. (3) they have to find enemies that they attack and vilify constantly. And (4) they cannot support or defend the institution
Good points, but if dems cannot sell democracy, women's rights, civil rights, voting rights, the best economy in the world and the rule of law, then it may not be the dem problem, but a problem of American stupidity of a large segment of the population. maga and trump are selfish fools while dems are compassionate realists, probably to a fault. The loudest voice often carries the day, no mater how foolish, idiotic, or unreal. No simple way to address a lack of education, ignorance of history, or fear of the deep state. A cult believes its leader at all costs. Jim Jones knew that and so does the monstrosity trump... Maybe the fever just has to break on its own before maga and the apathetic begin to recover.
Honestly I don’t know. This election results surprised me on 2 fronts: (1) Trump winning the popular vote. I thought Trump was a 50/50 chance of winning the ec but never thought he could win the popular vote. (2) losing Congress. The republicans ran Congress like a complete and utter shitshow. They were not only disastrous from a legislative perspective but also from a media perspective. They were a complete clown show…and yet they won again.
No one cares about democracy. That has been clear for a while. However, I did think people would care that our economy is the gem of the world and yet we said “fuck it. Give me the idiot.”
I think women’s rights actively hurts dems. I want to be clear I don’t believe this. I don’t want to believe that other people believe this but they do. Men are pissed (I’m a man and I could give a shit) but they are pissed. Women…I got to be honest with you I’m mad a women for what happened to Hillary and Harris. I don’t get it. If Dems/republicans ran a Hispanic, Hispanic’s would come out in droves to vote for the candidate. Somehow women voted more for Biden than they did for Harris/clinton. WTF.
Rule of law. I think people don’t believe this. They think the rich get off and the poor go to jail. They aren’t wrong.
So I think people are stupid. I do t know what to do
No argument there. I was more stunned and disappointed than surprised trump won. A majority of white women voted for the sexual assaulter and thief in waiting. That's mind numbing.. Many people have the attention span of a tic yok video and the historical references of the of no more than 2 months. It has become a society that craves celebrity over substance and clownishness over competence. I am not a sociologist or rocket scientist but facts are no longer facts, and the truth is whatever the cult leader mumbles at the time. How about that Hannibal Lecter guy...
Yes, the sideshow has already started and repubs backed out of a budget deal because musk screams nonsense while eating hallucinogens. I can't do a damn thing about stupid. But I am ready for it since I do not have any maga cult illusions that trump is my savior. Those who do suffer most will be maga, and frank;y, Scarlet, they deserve it. A little metaphorical slap in the face might be the only answer. I am done trying to make sense of it.
Yep. Let them touch that hot stove.
I got to be jones though: I’m not sure what is worse (1) Trump does incompetent and evil shit and the people like it or (2) Trump does incompetent and evil shit and they don’t notice. I kind of think number (2). (1) we could respond too but (2) wtf do you do then?
One thing you mentioned is a certainty, he will do incompetent and evil shit. The reaction is the unknown. But if the cost of eggs spike, he is in for a world of hurt from his nut job base...
HoI’m e so but betting on (1) egg prices seems idiotic but that’s where we are and (2) hope it does because if it doesn’t then I have no idea what to say/do.
All I can do is take a deep breath and hope the crazies fight each other and don't have time to do much harm. I will keep the passport nearby though... I can take only so much crazy.
Yes, totally agree. I love President Biden, but he should have stepped down as he promised. RBG should have stepped down. Gerry Connolly should step down. Even Nancy Pelosi. We need the AOCs, and other younger folks or we will continue to lose. It is like thank you for your service now go home! Please our country needs these old folks to step aside. It is past time.
Nancy Pelosi, along with her colleague Steny Hoyer, did step down. They passed the baton of House leadership to a younger generation without waiting for visible decline to set in. I was never a fan of Pelosi before, but my opinion of her has risen a lot in the past four years. It's too bad other aging leaders have not followed her example.
The problem is he never promised this. I don’t know why people keep saying this.
Sure in retrospect he shouldn’t have ran but we don’t need to skirt the truth that he would only run for one term
We keep saying it because Biden did promise it, if only obliquely. Insiders from the Biden camp who defend Biden do not say he always planned to run for a second term. They say he changed his mind. When a politician leads voters to believe he has given them an assurance and then "changes his mind", voters will never forgive him for it. The most obvious case is Bush's "no new taxes" pledge. And Bush's change of mind was much better reasoned than Biden's.
“Obliquely” is doing a lot of work here. Can you show me where he said he would only run for one term please? Can you provide evidence of this claim please? Otherwise why don’t we report what he said not what you thought.
I disagree with your whole approach to your article. I don’t think you understand the seriousness of what’s going on and what’s going to happen once pumpkin head takes control of our country. They have already shown how dangerous this next administration can be with Trump‘s recommendations for his cabinet
the the fact that you are supposed be a representative of the people shows why you’re in the minority in all three branches of government - there needs to be somewhere that people can go to see fact checks on all of the lies that Trump is going to promote through his propaganda machine on faux news- I still believe the reason the Democrats lost this past election was not because of the ideas or campaign that Kamala Harris ran - she ran a fantastic campaign in a very difficult situation - but the reason she lost was because she was a black woman - as a final thought, using the language that you did as a elected official just shows a disrespect for maintaining a professionalism in expressing your opinions - we are in more trouble than I thought if there are more people like you
What's missing in most of analyses of the defeat (such as this one) is the magnitude of the negative campaigning mode used by Republicans against Democrats. Faced with such a barrage, Democrats have tried two strategies that did not work.
The first is to go high when they go low. That only works when Republicans are not willing to go all out against you. They were afraid to do that against a man, however black he was, but felt no compunction doing this all out against a woman (whether white or black).
The second is to respond quickly and forcefully against all attacks. This certainly worked in the states where the Democrats invested heavily (the so-called swing states) but even there it proved insufficient to turn the tsunami of negative campaigning.
A third strategy would be to go as low as the Republicans, but I wonder how low most people are willing to go without being such a pathological person (a person with no sense of shame or guilt) as Donald Trump is.
The big danger, here, if Democrats don't find a different way to do things, is to discourage anybody from becoming a public official.
The ridiculous aspect of the argument that Biden resigning earlier would have opened up the way to a more viable Dem candidate is precisely the hubris that makes one think than an earlier resignation (and selection) would not also have given more time to the Republicans to wage an efficient shit show against the new figure.
Going for Harris at the last minute sort of minimized the degree to which the efficiency of the Republican way of doing politics since at least Willie Horton. Trump way of campaigning is no different from that of Lee Atwater, it is just Lee Atwater on steroids. The problem is at this game of only throwing shit in the fan, you have to be quite a pig to want to be in politics.
I think this is a weakness inherent to female candidates - voters don't like it when they "go low". Traditionally, going low is the VP candidate's job, but Tim Walz is just not a go-low kind of guy, as shown clearly in the VP debate. Maybe that is a lesson for the future: When you put a woman at the top of the ticket, you need a running mate who is not afraid to be as nasty as it takes to destroy the opponent, even if he destroys his own political future in the process.
"That only works when Republicans are not willing to go all out against you. They were afraid to do that against a man, however black he was"
You remembered things very differently than I did. Remember when Obama was a Muslim Marxist from Kenya? He won in 2008 because any Dem would have won in that environment, and won in 2012 because Romney sounded like an out-of-touch plutocrat at a time when the economy still wasn't the best. The attacks just fell flat because the working-class voters that decide every election thought that Obama was more relatable. The fact of the matter is, Trump is just better at relating. Despite his wealth, he learned how to talk like his working-class voters. Candidate quality and environment both matter. And this might sound preposterous, but Trump's candidate quality isn't bad at all, and he was running in a favorable environment for him.
I have no idea what the right strategy should or could be going forward.
This election was about (1) inflation, (2) incumbency, and (3) immigration. I’m pretty sure there was no one that we could have run (who were “real” candidates) could have won this election.
What I’m most concerned about though is I’m not clear how the Dems win power going forward (not 2028 or in presidential) but actual power by getting the senate. In 2030 we will do another census where ny and California will loose 7 electoral college votes to Florida and Texas. The “blue wall” is expected to lose a single electoral vote for each state. It looks in 10 years to be pretty ugly for Dems and I have no idea how they actually break through with these voters.
Schatz talks like a neophyte who never had to experience such amount of negative campaigning (and therefore thinks he could be immune to that).
Ok as a 62 year old native Washingtonian whose dad worked for Meet the Press and who went to Penn (by the way not a Jew but always assumed to be one proudly) I am in despair about the fate of The Washington Post (now a tax deduction for Bezos) and other traditional forms of media. Are these dead or can they be revived with enlightened leadership? There are lots of us out here, old but not dead yet, who still like to read a “newspaper” or watch “traditional” media and who don’t like being tied to a smart phone for snippets of “news” in between runs and errands?
He's got a point - I hear it often from more heterodox types, even those that still vote Democrat, that the Democrats have become the party of the boy who cried wolf. Remember when some called Bush a fascist because of the Patriot Act? Or Biden saying Romney would "put you back in chains" to black voters? This is a big reason why people don't believe the Democrats now when they say Trump is a fascist authoritarian threat to our democracy. It's the Democrat equivalent of Republicans calling everything socialist - voters have begun to tune that out and there's widespread support for a number of economic policies that are considered "socialist". Sure, as always, there's asymmetry - Trump's authoritarianism is real while the non-Squad Dems aren't actually socialist (though the Squad got elected to begin with partially because of this "boy who cried wolf" effect) - but it's gotten to the point where voters basically tune out these sorts of things even when the threat is real. The median voter thinks all the "[Republican nominee] is a fascist" rhetoric is just typical campaign mudslinging that's been used for decades just as they think "[Democrat nominee] is a socialist/communist" rhetoric is also.
By the way, judging from the way a lot of elected Democrats reacted to the Biden debate back in June or frankly for the entirety of the past 4 years, it's clear they themselves don't believe what they say about Trump. They certainly don't act like it. They're all a bunch of wealthy elites who think that they'll be safe from whatever Trump does. They have no skin in the game. We plebeians do.
Don’t disagree but I don’t think this makes a lick of difference. Republicans have been yelling about Dems being communist, socialists, pedophiles for like 35 years. I think this is just an excuse made so that dems don’t have to make really hard choices (to be clear I don’t know what those are).
One of the hard choices is to deny Trans civil rights or rights to medical treatment. Totally inhumane.
My MAGA friend lectures me...they are hot under the collar about trans being the most fiery cultural issue (I told him, you should be after they spent millions on brainwashing you by advertising) and the competing in sports issue...all I can say is they are making a mountain out of a mole hill so you can't see the sun going down.....
Oh I think that is the ante. That’s just the thing you have to put on the table. The other shit will be far more impactful and meaningful. They aren’t dumb they know that is a tiny tiny community. They want something much bigger: gay marriage, whites are discriminated against, affirmative action for white males, etc.