The Memo: Democrats brace for a new Trump presidency

Democrats are bracing for a new — and, for them, bleak — political era as President-elect Trump prepares to take office for a second term.

Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 will be a massive rebuke to Democrats — and not only because it renews the focus on Vice President Harris’s decisive defeat in November.

Trump is viewed by many Democrats as an actual threat to the American Republic. And the voters have put him back into power handily. That is both a dispiriting and worrying reality for many in the opposition party.

For at least the past four years — since the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021 — Democrats have asserted that Trump is unfit for office.

They have repeatedly banged the drum on that argument, from President Biden’s attacks on “extreme MAGA Republicans” to Harris’s closing speech in the final days of the election campaign, which was given from the Ellipse, the same location where Trump addressed his supporters on Jan. 6

Self-evidently, none of it worked. Biden, who ran in 2020 to save "the soul of America” from Trump will instead watch his predecessor be sworn in again.

The reversal is stark. Trump has sought to go after his tormentors and has support within his party for doing so.

In mid-December, Republicans on the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight alleged that one of Trump’s leading critics, former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) may have engaged in witness tampering during her time serving on the House select committee investigating Jan. 6.

“Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee,” Trump gloated on social media.

Cheney fired back on social media that the panel’s report “intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee’s tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did.”

Democrats are grappling with two other major factors.

First, Republicans have retaken control of the Senate and preserved a narrow majority in the House, giving Trump unified government. That means Democrats need to figure out how to resist Trump’s agenda.

Second, Trump won in November partly by eroding Democrats’ support among some of the demographic groups on which the party mostly relies.

The mere fact the GOP holds congressional majorities deprives Democrats of any obvious chance to put the brakes on Trump’s agenda on Capitol Hill. Instead, the pushback against the president-elect is set to come at the state level.

Blue-state governors — such as Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois and Maura Healey of Massachusetts — have expressed a particular willingness to fight Trump.

Newsom has been seeking as much as $25 million to bolster his state’s legal stockpile of money to take on Trump in the courts. Pritzker has said he will be a “happy warrior” against the president-elect. Healey has asserted that she will refuse to allow state police to assist in Trump’s plans for mass deportations.

Newsom is widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential nominee. Pritzker, Healey and another prominent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, are also in the mix.

But Democrats must also figure out some broader problems. Trump did significantly better than expected among young voters, Black voters and Latino voters in November.

To be clear, Harris won all of those groups overall. But her margins were too narrow to offset the traditional Republican advantages with other groups.

For example, Harris prevailed among voters younger than 30 by just 4 points, according to a voter analysis from The Associated Press and Fox News. Among men younger than 45, Trump won by 8 points.

Harris carried Latino voters by 12 points. But Trump’s achievement in securing the backing of 43 percent of Latinos was a reminder of just how far the landscape has shifted since 2016, when his fiery language on immigration was predicted to doom him with this group.

The share of Black voters backing Trump remains modest — 16 percent. But that was also a doubling of his share of support from four years before.

Taken together, those statistics suggest there is some degree of realignment going on in American politics, with Trump’s appeal resonating both with young voters dissatisfied with the state of the nation and with working-class voters of all races.

That gives Democrats much to think about — and to fight about.

Some of the postelection squabbling has centered on social issues, especially transgender rights.

Moderates like Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) have suggested placing less emphasis on that issue, though his argument earned some immediate blowback from progressive activists.

On the left, figures including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) contend that Democrats have become too disconnected from working-class concerns, like increasing the minimum wage and boosting health care. The left asserts that Harris’s campaign failed to channel popular anger on these kinds of topics.

Those battles will be fought out in the months to come.

But right now, Democrats are mostly bracing for Trump’s impact — for a second time.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

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