By: Audrey Fahlberg – nationalreview.com – March 5, 2025

Lawmakers’ antics during Tuesday’s speech and strident culture-war stances suggest the postmortem is a long way off.

A little more than a month into Donald Trump’s second term, there is a growing divide between Democrats over how to resist the president’s governing agenda.

In one camp are Democrats such as former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville who believe that the out-of-power party should engage in strategic retreat from the congressional political discourse and wait for inevitable Republican dysfunction, at which point Democrats can steer persuadable voters back into their fold. In the other camp are Democrats who, facing immense pressure from resistance grassroots groups still shocked by Trump’s victory, feel the need to engage in reflexive opposition to the president’s every move.

This fracture was on display inside the House chamber Tuesday evening, where dozens of progressives bucked party leadership in various acts of protest, from heckling Trump during his speech to holding up signs, brandishing “resist” T-shirts, and walking out of the chamber during his remarks. The disruptions by 77-year-old Representative Al Green (D., Texas), right at the beginning of Trump’s speech, were so persistent that he earned himself a one-way ticket out of the chamber (escorted by the sergeant at arms), along with a GOP-authored House censure resolution.

Broadly speaking, it’s hard for the minority party to cut through the noise in joint addresses before Congress. For such events, presidents poll-test their message and present their agenda in ways that appeal to broad swaths of the American public. But in general, the out-of-power party should try to abide by the do-no-harm principle.

Put more simply, “the minority party should not have negative stories coming out at the State of the Union,” said former Representative Tim Ryan (D., Ohio).

It’s safe to say that Democrats failed to clear that low bar Tuesday evening. What’s more, Ryan told National Review that his former colleagues came off as cruel and unfeeling when the vast majority of them declined to clap or stand when Trump singled out several special guests during his remarks. Those mid-speech shoutouts included the mother and sister of Laken Riley, a University of Georgia nursing student who was murdered by an illegal immigrant last year; DJ Daniel, a 13-year-old cancer patient whom Secret Service director Sean Curran swore in last night as honorary agent; Jason Hartley, a high school senior who Trump announced had just been accepted by West Point, the school of his dreams; and Marc Fogel, a teacher imprisoned in Russia for almost four years, recently returned home through Trump’s efforts and accompanied at last night’s speech by his joyful 96-year-old mother.

“You should clap because you’re a human being,” Ryan said. “If you’re trying to convince people Trump is callous, and he does something like that, and you don’t clap? That makes your job all the more difficult.”

Representative Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) rejects this characterization. Democrats’ decision to remain seated during special-guest shoutouts “was directed at the president of the United States, who told one lie after another, lie after another lie,” he told National Review immediately following Trump’s address. “State of the Union addresses are supposed to be about unifying the nation. This guy went out of his way to divide the nation even more. I thought it was an offensive speech, one of the longest speeches in history.”

One problem for Democrats? The vast majority of Americans disagree with that assessment, according to a CBS/YouGov snap poll suggesting that most speech watchers liked what they heard from the president Tuesday evening and found his remarks “unifying” and “presidential.”

Congressional Democrats’ post-2024 election problems extend well beyond progressives’ performative antics Tuesday night. In recent weeks, Democrats have drawn headlines across the country for falling out of step with Americans on a range of social and cultural issues.

In Wisconsin, Democratic Governor Tony Evers has proposed swapping out the words “woman,” “wife,” and “mother” with variations of the phrase “inseminated person” in his state budget proposal on legislation relating to in vitro fertilization. And in Maine, the two-term Democratic governor got in a spat with President Trump over transgender athletes: As a guest at a governors’ luncheon at the White House, she warned Trump, “I’ll see you in court” over her state’s refusal to comply with his administration’s executive order banning transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

These attention-grabbing moves from high-profile Democrats have done little to dispel the notion that this powerless and leaderless party has yet to engage in much serious introspection about why Trump carried every single battleground state in November. A smattering of consultants believe that the party needs to avoid buzz words and identity politics to better relate to the working class, but their advice is falling on deaf ears.

“There’s no universally agreed upon diagnosis of what went wrong, and therefore there’s no universally agreed upon prescription of how to move on,” New York Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres told NR. “Having said that, I do feel there is a widely shared recognition that we went too far to the left on the issue of border security. And so, I suspect you’re going to see a return to the center on the issue of border security. But on other issues, it varies.”

Given these disagreements, many Democrats have apparently concluded that they ought to focus less on an intra-party postmortem about their own electoral missteps and more on tearing down the opposition. On that front, Democrats have developed an obsessive fixation with the role that tech billionaire Elon Musk plays in overseeing the administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE).

The White House is convinced that Democrats are miscalculating by focusing so much of their resistance on the administration’s efforts to shrink and reshape the federal bureaucracy. No surprise, given how much time Trump devoted during his speech to various examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that his administration has identified in recent weeks.

“Big picture, people are thinking, ‘Okay, President Trump’s reining in waste in government.’ And there will be isolated issues that crop up, for sure,” James Blair, a deputy White House chief of staff and assistant to the president, said in a recent interview with NR. (A prime example of an “isolated issue” occurred last month, when DOGE accidentally canceled a USAID Ebola-prevention program, prompting Musk to joke during a cabinet meeting: “I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.”)

But Blair thinks that the American people aren’t buying what the minority party is selling. Most Americans’ regular interactions with the government are negative, he says, whether that’s waiting in line for food stamps or waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. “Think about the position the Democrats have right now: The bureaucracy is perfect, they don’t do anything wrong, and everything is as efficient as it could be.”

Former Representative Tim Ryan agrees with this assessment and thinks his former colleagues’ reflexive opposition to DOGE plays into many voters’ perception that the Democratic Party is too coastal, too elitist, and too out of touch with the everyday priorities of average Americans.

“I voted for foreign aid, I support foreign aid,” Ryan said. “But does it need reform? Yeah! Is there wasted money? Yes! And we should be for reforming it, not against reforming it. And we’re coming off as so clueless and out of touch with what the average American thinks.”

As Democrats dig in against Trump’s every move, it’s in the White House’s interest to “keep them off kilter” from here on out. “Not only does President Trump want to accomplish a lot in a short period of time, but certainly he recognizes that, strategically, it’s very valuable to stay in motion,” Blair told NR. “We just keep moving. There’s a little hiccup? We fix it, we move on, he’s done five things before they can write a segment about it.”

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Source: Democrats Divided on Strategy to Resist Trump Agenda | National Review