Donald Trump’s nominees are without an iota of doubt the most appalling collection of choices any president has made to lead federal government departments. Multiple Trump picks have already withdrawn, and more may soon follow. Yet the response from Senate Democrats — who will have votes and a voice in the confirmation process — has been remarkably muted. Ask a Senate Democrat about the nominees, and you’re more likely to hear “I have some serious concerns” than the far more appropriate “My God, is Trump insane? These are the worst nominees in history!”
Many of these Democrats would consider such a response uncivil and undignified; if Trump won’t adhere to norms of propriety, at least they will. Worse, they believe that it is politically clever for them to show voters that they seek bipartisanship, even if that desire turns out to be unrequited. “As I have long said, our preference is to secure bipartisan solutions wherever possible and look for ways to collaborate with our Republican colleagues to help working families,” Chuck Schumer, leader of Senate Democrats, said on social media. “However, our Republican colleagues should make no mistake about it, we will always stand up for our values.”
Republicans are no doubt quivering in the face of such a blistering assault.
Opposition isn’t about how voters judge the opposition party; it’s about how they judge the party in power.
This is a miscalculation born of a misunderstanding. Democrats need to grasp that during Trump’s second term, the electorate won’t be evaluating them either as individuals or as a party, based on whether they acted in good faith and sought areas of agreement with the GOP. The truth is: Voters don’t care about bipartisanship. They might tell pollsters they’d prefer it if everyone in Washington got along, and they may sincerely mean it. But when it comes time to vote, that’s not how they act.
Opposition isn’t about how voters judge the opposition party; it’s about how they judge the party in power. The only evaluation from voters that matters for the next four years (and especially the next two years until the midterm elections) is that of Trump, his government and the Republicans who run Congress. In this situation, Democrats are not the alternative; their role is to oppose, loudly and unceasingly, and call attention to Republicans’ worst excesses. They need to disseminate the most cutting and critical messages and force the news media to address stories of the administration’s worst misdeeds.
Let’s consider some relevant recent history. In the 2008 election, Democrats won 365 electoral votes, 251 House seats and 59 Senate seats — the most sweeping victory for one party in decades. Republicans could have decided that they needed to show the public they were committed to moderation and bipartisanship. They did just the opposite. On the very night of Barack Obama’s inauguration, GOP leaders gathered for dinner and planned to “show united and unyielding opposition” to the new president and his policies. A week later, House Republicans held a retreat where they committed themselves to all-out war against Obama; they cheered their recent unified vote against Obama’s recovery bill, and then-Rep. Mike Pence played a clip from the movie “Patton” of George C. Scott, as Gen. George S. Patton, rallying troops to fight the Nazis.
In the Senate, Republican leader Mitch McConnell believed that bipartisanship had to be avoided at all costs, since it might legitimate Obama’s actions. Any tactic was justified in pursuit of opposition, up to and including refusing to allow a vote on the president’s Supreme Court nominee.
The strategy was an extraordinary success: Republicans flipped 63 seats to take back the House in 2010 — the biggest switch in over 60 years. The Senate went to the GOP in 2014 and the White House in 2016, after which Republicans also secured a majority on the Supreme Court. The voters never punished them for being too partisan.
Ask President Joe Biden how politically effective the search for bipartisanship is. It’s not that Democrats haven’t been capable of united and vigorous resistance. They implemented a similar strategy of opposition after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, and as a result, they took control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterms. Their leaders at the time — Harry Reid in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi in the House — understood that their job was not to look for areas of agreement but to fight with every tool at their disposal. Which they did, and it worked. Yet somehow, today too many Democrats in Congress retain a conviction that it is important to “get caught trying,” to demonstrate over and over that they are making an effort to reach out and seek agreement. Ask President Joe Biden how politically effective the search for bipartisanship is. Few presidents have ever worked as hard, both in private and in public, to win opposition support, especially from his old colleagues in the Senate. On a few occasions he did succeed, winning some Republican votes for the infrastructure law he signed in 2021 and the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022. But Republicans never stopped attacking him in the most intense, personal and ugly ways they could, and voters never rewarded Biden for his efforts at bipartisanship — if they even knew about them. The confirmation hearings for Trump’s picks present a terrific opportunity for Democrats to define the Trump administration as both extremist and reckless, but it might be a mistake to get your hopes up. One example: The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will be hearing the nomination for defense secretary, is Jack Reed of Rhode Island. The 75-year-old Reed is well-respected, conscientious and a former Army Ranger. But watch him talking about the disastrous choice of Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon and you won’t hear a powerful case against Trump, Hegseth or the risk they pose to American security. Other Democrats on the committee have offered similarly weak comments about Hegseth. That could be a harbinger of what the confirmation hearings for Trump’s Cabinet will look like. Democrats should carefully plan their questioning of the nominees to demonstrate how repugnant so many of them are and how dangerous their confirmations would be — not because they might persuade a few Republican senators to vote no, but because it’s a chance to send a strong message to the public about Trump and his cronies. Unfortunately, it may wind up being one more missed opportunity.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
