Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Trump’s shadow is cast on the South Lawn of the White House in May 2019. Every televised debate is a free opportunity to drive his approval ratings further down.
When Democrats gather in the city of Atlanta on Wednesday night for a presidential primary debate, they should learn from their party’s mistake in 2016 and the 2020 campaign to date. They must incorporate President Donald Trump’s biography and policies into their structural analysis of what ails America’s political economy.
Thus far, in the debates and on the campaign trail, the Democratic frontrunners have generally fallen into two camps in terms of how they handle Trump. The moderate conciliator approach of former Vice President Joe Biden, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris is to depict Trump as a particularly unethical and bigoted blot on our country, who must be removed from office. Then, they pivot to their domestic policy agenda.
The left-wing ideological approach of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is little better. Although they recognize that America’s problems, such as economic and social inequality, go deeper than Trump, they still weirdly leave him out of their framework. Sanders and Warren argue that the impediments to a fairer, more just society will outlive Trump and still must be confronted and defeated. Those impediments, they say, are the super-rich and the corporations they control.
The rich businessman in the White House has committed every sin of rapacious capitalism they rail against, so why don’t they bother to say so? Wouldn’t drawing this connection both help persuade the audience of their larger analysis, and undermine Trump’s phony self-depiction as an anti-establishment outsider, who is supposedly incorruptible because he’s already so wealthy?
In the last debate, Warren acknowledged that “costs are going to go up for the wealthy” under her health care plan, and Sanders said “we should demand that the wealthy start paying ... start paying their fair share of taxes.” Why not say, “Costs are going to go up for the rich and pampered, like President Trump,” and “we should demand that the wealthy like Trump start paying their fair share?”
Trump’s biography couldn’t lend itself better to this line of attack if it were imagined by Warren or Sanders themselves. He was a mediocre and ill-behaved student who got into a supposedly meritocratic Ivy League university through family connections—an academic credential he boasts of to this day. In business, he allegedly practiced racial discrimination against employees and prospective tenants, evaded gift and inheritance taxes through setting up a straw company that overbilled his father’s firm, used that tax dodge to also artificially inflate regulated rents, stiffed small business owners contractors, practiced blatant nepotism in hiring, exploited workers and undercut unions with undocumented laborers, made corrupt arrangements with mafia bosses, destroyed architecturally significant structures, operated a nominally charitable foundation as a tax-sheltered addendum to his business, created a fake university that ripped off his own admirers, and systematically sought to reduce his tax burden through under-assessing the value of his properties. The ultimate hypocrisy: While Trump calls himself a nationalist and complains about globalization-driven deindustrialization, his own branded products are mostly manufactured abroad.
And yet the entire Democratic field oddly neglects to mention any of this. Trump illustrates the problems they seek to solve, and yet they don’t bother pairing or integrating Trump’s personal record—and his administration’s deregulation and tax-cutting in the White House—into their calls for enhanced economic equality or higher taxes on the rich. In the October debate, Warren inveighed against “giant multinational corporations that have no loyalty to America,” shipping jobs overseas—and didn’t bother to mention the salient example in the Oval Office.
Nor do the Democrats integrate the Trump family’s intergenerational wealth into their calls for policies, such as free college tuition, that are designed to enhance social mobility. The political payoff to puncturing Trump’s mythology as a self-made maverick could be substantial: Polling shows many Americans don't know Trump was born wealthy, and their estimation of him goes down when they find out.
As The Washington Post’s David Weigel reported Monday from New Hampshire, “how Democrats usually talk about Trump [is] a catch-all attack on how he’s running things, followed as quickly as possible by the issue they want to talk about. Some days, the president isn't targeted by Democrats at all.”
This is odd, since they will need to beat Trump next year, which means they need to hone their anti-Trump message. Moreover, every televised debate is a free opportunity to drive Trump’s approval ratings further down.
Rather than talking about economic policy in one silo and Trump's character defects in another, Democrats should take a page from Karl Rove's playbook and go after their opponent's strength instead of his weakness. Just as Republicans undercut the political strength of John Kerry’s war record, Democrats should target Trump’s supposed “populism,” economic nationalism, and anti-establishment outsiderness, rather than just focusing on his weakness on bigotry and ethics.
So far, though, they’re replicating Hillary Clinton’s failure to depict Trump as part of the very capitalist elite that he supposedly would have combated. No one in the Democratic field is following my advice from after the last election and pointing to the composition of his cabinet and its many conflicts of interest and self-dealing to show Trump himself is the epitome of the corrupt establishment (or “swamp”). As Prospect executive editor David Dayen wrote in July, Democrats’ path to victory “lies in connecting the corruption at the heart of the family occupying the White House to the broader economy, and showing how this rigged system confines the spoils of growth to those wealthy and connected enough to get in line for the payoff.”
Warren and Sanders seem to think that just running on a left-wing economic platform will cut into Trump's margins among the white working class. But Clinton was to Trump's left on economics. To reap the benefits of that requires running Trump's own playbook against him and calling him the enemy of working people, as the Obama campaign successfully did to Mitt Romney in 2012.
As Weigel reported, “Only a handful of the ads Democrats have run in Iowa mention Trump at all; Buttigieg, who has risen quickly in Iowa, mentions him only by way of asking voters to picture America when he's gone. Over the past week, Warren ran just the second TV spot of her campaign, a targeted ad for CNBC to advertise her 2 percent tax on the super-rich.
The CNBC ad called out corporate overlords such as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, but made no mention of Trump. And yet, Trump would—if his unverified, boastful claims of his net worth are to be believed—pay far more under Warren’s tax plan than Blankfein.
Senators Sanders and Warren should be saying things like, “I’m going to raise taxes on the rich so that billionaires like President Trump can’t keep paying less in taxes than their secretaries. I'm going to close tax loopholes so rich children like Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. can't keep evading their gift and inheritance taxes. I’m going to change our trade policies so that President Trump has to stop manufacturing his expensive neckties with foreign cheap labor.”
Democrats seem to not really want to talk about Trump. In October, Andrew Yang said, “The fact is, Donald Trump, when we're talking about him, we are losing. We need to present a new vision.” But this is a false dichotomy. The new vision of a fairer America is one that can and should be drawn in contrast to Trump and his America.
