Tom Williams /CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) stands with fellow Democratic senators after leadership elections at the U.S. Capitol, December 3, 2024.
Democrats have a plan to take on Donald Trump in 2025; just ask them. But you’d have to ask all of them, because they all have a different plan.
John Fetterman thinks Democrats should give Trump a pardon on his “bullshit” hush-money case, and support his executive branch nominees, even the controversial ones. Jim Clyburn also favors a Trump pardon, but to create a “clean slate” for the future.
Many Democrats, from Adam Schiff to Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders, are citing points of possible agreement with Trump and shadow vice president Elon Musk. Some are doing this to look “reasonable,” others perhaps to move some discrete items forward where Trump has made a rhetorical overture, others perhaps to set up an attack later if the common ground fails to emerge.
Sanders and Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado are playing footsie with Trump aides like Health and Human Services secretary-designate Robert Kennedy Jr. Others, however, are highlighting specific conflicts of interest among Trump cabinet nominees. Still others are saying that nobody cares about the cabinet.
Some have joined the initially entirely Republican congressional caucus aimed at partnering with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and its vow to cut trillions in federal spending. Some have resisted joining that caucus. Some, like Khanna, have proposed ways to cut spending while resisting joining that caucus.
Some have decided that the best use of time is to concede to Republican attacks on certain social issues. Some have decided it’s better to elevate arguments on economic populism. (These aren’t mutually exclusive, but differ in framing.) Some think pursuing a seemingly legally doomed effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment is the best current course. Some prefer to say nothing and look toward the more advantageous political ground of the 2026 midterms. Some are in a denial phase, maintaining that the election didn’t really move the needle, and things will swing back.
What of the leadership of the Democratic Party? What are they doing? Well, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opened a press conference last week by saying that Democrats are “ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground with the incoming administration on any issue,” while also being ready to “push back against far-right extremism whenever necessary,” including “any effort to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it.” That’s not totally inconsistent, but it is unlikely to stir a dispirited party faithful, either.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer hasn’t even offered anything that mushy, instead focused on the block and tackle of end-of-the-year bills, in which Democrats have a clear advantage amid a Republican rebellion on funding the government, but in which they seem to be asking for exceedingly little.
And from behind the throne, while convalescing in Luxembourg, Nancy Pelosi thought this was an opportune time, amid bedlam in the Democratic ranks, to engage in a bitter factional fight over who should be the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee.
There’s a lot to say here about Democrats’ adherence to internal institutional power over the fate of the nation, their inability to carry a consistent message, and more. But I think the biggest thing is this: This is what happens when a political party doesn’t have any leaders who command anything approaching respect.
It breeds freelancing among backbenchers, a run for cover where they revert to relying on their political instincts, ensuring that the overall approach is incoherent. It breeds opportunism from party factions seeking to pull things in their direction, ignoring the near-term stakes of the early days of Trump’s second term.
Perhaps most important, even if there were a game plan for winning back a governing majority and responding credibly to November’s election, who exactly would deliver it?
WE APPRECIATED PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN’S essay in the Prospect on his economic vision, but even he would agree that he’s in no position to dictate terms to the party, even if he could. The final days find him walking down blind corners in a bid for legacy items. He commuted 1,500 federal sentences on an ACLU list without reading it, leading to the embarrassing political outcome of giving clemency to a notorious judge who locked up kids in for-profit detention centers in exchange for kickbacks. He may issue an executive order to fast-track energy- and water-hogging data centers, maybe to establish himself as the man who brought forth AI, the damage to his climate agenda and the giveaway to the richest companies on the planet notwithstanding.
Kamala Harris is too busy considering whether to run for governor of California in 2026 or run for the White House in 2028 to fashion an actual message for leading in either of those capacities. Other possible candidates for leadership are similarly absent without leave. Schumer was ready to bargain with Trump as far back as 2017 on infrastructure spending, and hasn’t committed to any grand strategy. Jeffries’s articulated plan is in conflict with itself, but the bigger problem is that the Democratic Party has inexplicably forced him to lead while still wearing training wheels.
Pelosi, Clyburn, and Steny Hoyer, all in their eighties, gave up their leadership positions to a new guard two years ago (Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Pete Aguilar), and then bizarrely remained in the House as looming eminences, even running for re-election this year (Hoyer after a mild stroke). They spend their time giving interviews and projecting power behind the scenes, while overshadowing the actual House leadership and making them look like kids-table leaders without control of their charges.
This is what happens when a political party doesn’t have any leaders who command anything approaching respect.
The House Oversight mess is a perfect example. If you read between the lines, you could see that Jeffries was perfectly fine with a new generation of Democrats taking power on House committees. But Pelosi appointed herself gatekeeper for this effort, endorsing Jamie Raskin to take the leadership role on the Judiciary Committee from 77-year-old Jerry Nadler, but rejecting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s elevation on Oversight in favor of Gerry Connolly, a 74-year-old with esophageal cancer. (Pelosi did lose another fight, as Angie Craig took over the ranking Democratic slot on the House Agriculture Committee over her preferred candidate Jim Costa.)
Both fights sprung from the same personal pettiness that has marked Pelosi’s taskmaster career. She sparred with Nadler repeatedly after he beat her friend in the California delegation, Zoe Lofgren, for the Judiciary chair years ago, while her AOC animosity springs from the Squad founder’s joining a protest in Pelosi’s office in 2018. Focusing on backstage personality conflicts amid a leadership vacuum is bad enough. But when the “Speaker emerita” (an invented title) subtly undermines the actual House Democratic leader’s goals, it only widens the leadership vacuum, and continues to stall the effort to move into the future.
Incidentally, here’s an incredibly telling quote from Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia about Connolly: “Gerry’s a young 74, cancer notwithstanding.” The inability to reckon with Democratic gerontocracy, from Dianne Feinstein clinging to her Senate seat to the angst over Biden running for re-election to today, is fundamentally damaging the party. Schumer, at 74, is practically a spring chicken compared to everyone else. His top deputy Dick Durbin is 80 and hasn’t decided whether to run for re-election. Even on the ideological left, Bernie Sanders is 82 and just ran his final campaign; Elizabeth Warren is 75 and may have also.
The relative young gun here is 63-year-old music and book influencer Barack Obama, who air-drops in to make some speeches every four years and lends his name to a movie studio. Many of Obama’s advisers lost their luster working for Harris; the rest became media commentators engaged in brawls from the outside on the party’s future, unfocused on present threats.
Earlier this month, I attended the Democratic Governors Association conference in Beverly Hills, hearing from a lot of executive officeholders in the states. I got the sense that they were mostly freelancing themselves, understandably trying to offer olive branches to a president who’s vowed to hold federal funding over their heads. “We will always look for ways to work together, but if there are things they’ll push us to do, we will draw the line,” said Gov. Laura Kelly (D-KS), chair of the organization. This potential cooperation extended even to immigration enforcement, as The New York Times has reported.
There was a curious lack of ability or willingness to articulate any sense of what happened in the election, what Democrats believe in or should be doing beyond short-term tactics. Part of the disease of the leadership vacuum is that personal ambition takes precedence over unity of message. There were at least half a dozen presidential hopefuls in Beverly Hills, if not more. The 2028 nominee will not be decided for some time, and those in the midst of that power struggle are less interested in how the Democrats should face their near-term challenges and more focused on how the Democrats should anoint them.
SOME IN THE DEMOCRATIC COALITION at least recognize their purpose. The multiple federal judges reversing their retirements when it became clear that their successors wouldn’t be confirmed has led to hypocritical seething from the likes of Mitch McConnell. Immigration advocates are readying themselves for resistance in the first real crisis of the second Trump term, when the deportations roll out.
But political parties are somewhat hierarchical organizations. In the complete absence of any tone from the top, the hierarchy collapses into anarchy. The party is coming off an election cycle where voters didn’t learn what Democrats got done, and didn’t see a vision for what Democrats would offer in the future. That vacuum of public consciousness has now been magnified, given all the contradictory and self-aggrandizing stances.
Republicans aren’t entirely equipped to capitalize on this, coming to power with a largely unpopular agenda and a thin House majority to push it through. But Republicans once offered a blueprint for unified party resistance that the Democrats might want to heed if they got their act together. In 2009, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had the singular goal of making the Democrats pay for their policy ambitions. “We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of [Democratic] proposals … Because we thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan.”
It would be jarring for Democrats to be that brazenly oppositional. But that’s not the only way to play it. Any strategy at all would be welcome at this point, not to mention anyone with the ability to articulate one.