Midterm Issues Watch: “Our Democracy” & the Ogre Trump
This manufactured issue hasn’t worked out too well for Democrats
Former president Donald J. Trump isn’t on the ballot in 2022—but that’s not for lack of Democratic Party efforts to get him listed.
Realizing that a midterm election is always a referendum on the incumbent party and especially on the incumbent president, Democrats had good reason for worry in early 2022. President Biden had not, shall we say, impressed the American people. His lackluster approval rating was rightly judged to be a political liability, and the obvious remedy was to change the subject. On that score, the Dems thought they had an ace in the hole: MAGA and the serial psychodrama of the Trump post-presidency.
The work of the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot was well underway by then, and a fat file of derogatory information on Trump’s role in that outrage had already been compiled. His refusal to concede the 2020 election, his false claims of electoral fraud, his increasingly farcical efforts to keep hold of the presidency on this or that pretext, undoubtedly played a role in the events of January 6. In sum, the Committee’s investigation clearly showed that Trump bears a major share of the blame for what happened that day.
Here were the raw materials of a potent 2022 election issue—or so Democrats thought. That it failed to work out was their own fault. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blundered badly when she decided to stage the committee hearings as a partisan show, with no meaningful Republican participation. But Democrats also misread the room: They made the mistake of projecting their own deep loathing of Trump onto the electorate at large.
If Pelosi and her colleagues in the House leadership were hoping to split the GOP over committee participation, they fumbled the ball. The Speaker’s refusal to accept the House GOP’s proposed committee members had the opposite effect: It let Republicans off the hook. It became easy for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to wash his hands of the whole thing and denounce it as a partisan witch hunt. This was a charge whose credibility was bolstered by the token Republicans whom the Speaker allowed onto the committee, both never-Trumpers bitterly opposed to the former president
Despite the considerable good work that the January 6 committee did, it thus bore the appearance of a partisan hit job. Then the Democrats fumbled again by giving the impression that the committee was conducting a criminal investigation, not a fact-finding inquiry. But criminal investigation is not the proper role of any congressional committee, much less one organized on such an openly partisan basis, with all members united in their desire to stick it to Trump. This gave many Republicans, MAGA and non-MAGA alike, all the reason they needed to reject or at least disregard the committee’s findings.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s team came up with what they thought was a sure-fire communications strategy: the President would trumpet the threat to “our democracy” posed by “MAGA Republicans.” The idea was to tie the GOP to Trump—but it fell flat on its face. Who is and is not a “MAGA Republican” has never been made clear; that and Biden’s mush-mouthed delivery of the message soon reduced it to a running joke. Very likely the MAGA Republican smear antagonized more voters than it mobilized. After all, in 2020 some 74 million Americans did vote for Trump.
But there’s another, deeper problem with the Democrats’ scheme to make Trump and MAGA and January 6 a midterm election issue: A considerable number of people just don’t care.
Those of us who pay close attention to politics sometimes forget that many of our fellow Americans pay scant attention to politics except in the immediate runup to an election. Nor do the issues we prioritize necessarily resonate with our friends and neighbors. What matters to them are the things that most directly affect their lives. They’re unlikely to spend much time wringing their hands over the threat to “our democracy” when the price of a gallon of gas is over four bucks and their supermarket bills are soaring into the stratosphere. Compared to that, all things Trump—the FBI raid on his Florida compound, the January 6 Committee’s multimedia extravaganzas, the endless media blather about classified documents and boxes, the walls always closing in—is just background noise, irrelevant compared to people’s daily concerns.
But Democrats and progressives resolutely refuse to accept this home truth. In their view, the failure to prioritize “our democracy” over inflation and crime is evidence of the American people’s wickedness. Recently on MSNBC, Matthew Dowd, a former Republican driven crazy by Trump, opined that worrying about inflation is fascist. He reminded his handful of viewers that Hitler and the National Socialist Party rode into power on a promise to fight inflation. It was a laughable sally, especially since Dowd didn’t even manage to get the history right. The hyperinflation that wiped out the German middle class in the aftermath of the Great War occurred in the period 1921-23, when Hitler was still an obscure figure on the radical right. He and his party assumed power in January 1933 against a background of political and economic collapse far worse than anything America has ever experienced.
So Democrats’ attempt to assemble a set of unsavory facts and some fake history into a midterm election issue has come to nothing much. The small minority of voters for whom the Ogre Trump, MAGA and the threat to “our democracy” constitute the top issue are those who’d have voted Democratic anyway. Perhaps being reminded how much they hate Trump has gingered them up a bit—but that’s not much of a return on such a big, big investment.
Trump is an ogre, a clinical-level narcissist to be sure. His behavior on 1/6/21 demonstrated that, in case you needed proof. Many who voted for him recognize his deep personality flaws but voted for him anyway, for political reasons, not because of his personal character.
Meanwhile, since 2015, Trump has been the lightning rod for wide discontent in American democracy with neoliberal technocracy and "experts" and all their attendant ills -- two wars we can't figure out, a devastating financial crisis that parts of the country still haven't recovered from (a result of elite's monetary and globalization policies), massive erosion in the lower socioeconomic orders and regions (a result of the elite's monetary and globalization policies), with the COVID pandemic (its origin and spread results of the elite's globalization policies) and attendant devastating response (a result of the technocracy's absurd claims of omniscience and "higher truth"). Got that?
Trump will off the stage soon enough. That politics will be with us for the rest of our lifetimes, and it's only gotten stronger among younger Americans. One of our parties is no longer a real party and doesn't represent middle and working class voters as it once did -- instead, it's stalking horse for wealthy donors and legacy media, with some legacy special interest groups (like public employee unions) attached.