President Trump doesn’t dominate just one party in America — he dominates them both. And it’s becoming clear Trump may dominate the Democratic Party longer than he will the Republican Party.
Today, Democrats have no policies except anti-Trump policies, and they have no leaders except strident, knee-jerk Trump-opponents.
The nadir of Democrats’ reflexive opposition, thus far, came with their response to the deportation of alleged MS-13 gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Garcia entered the U.S. illegally in 2011. In addition to his purported gang membership (a police informant said Garcia was an “active member” of MS-13, held a low rank in the gang, and went by the name “Chele”), Garcia is accused of human trafficking and assaulting his wife, Vasquez Sura while in the U.S.
Such warning signs didn’t stop Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) from traveling to El Salvador last month to visit with Garcia. Nor did it stop four other Democrat House Members from going a few days later.
As more details have surfaced about Garcia, Democrats have backed off their public histrionics. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) has said “This is not the right person to be saying that we need to bring him back to the United States.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) would go on to refuse comment altogether.
Garcia’s case is a lesson for looking before you leap — or before you jerk your knee. Yet knee-jerk opposition is precisely what Democrats’ agenda has become. They blindly follow their first instinct to resist Trump whenever possible and blame him for everything.
This came to a boil last Friday, when a group of Democratic officials tried to force their way into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark.
Habitual, blind opposition gives Democrats an automatic response to play through a willing establishment media megaphone. Trump functions as Democrats’ safety net. His history of low approval and favorability ratings undergirds their strategy. Anti-Trump sentiment helps inflate Democrats’ level of support. It also gives them political positions to adopt if they cannot come up with or generate them themselves.
Democrats’ problem on both fronts, however, is that they only have support, positions, and unity by default; they are not doing either positively on their own. This raises the question: What will Democrats even do when Trump leaves the political scene a few years from now?
Democrats have been unable to generate positive support for their own positions. Nor do they have any particularly new issues. Instead, since Trump’s November election, Democrats have been taking stridently anti-Trump positions, which only serve to resurrect Biden administration stances that cost Democrats last November — even after Kamala Harris replaced Biden.
Democrats have opposed Trump’s stopping illegal immigration and deporting illegal immigrants (as in the case of Abrego Garcia and their attempted ICE incursion). However, Biden’s rating on immigration was abysmal, because his border policy was nothing short of sabotage. According to Real Clear Politics’ average of national polls, Biden’s approval rating on the issue was 33.5 percent.
Following Trump’s victory, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), now a potential 2028 presidential candidate, immediately proclaimed that Illinois would do more transgender surgeries. Yet even Democrats believe that transgender issues — especially Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for prison inmates — hurt Democrats in 2024. Polls show that Americans strongly opposing allowing biological men and boys to compete in girls’ and women’s sports.
Democrats are not generating positive policies that Americans favor, but rather just reacting with knee-jerk negativity to anything Trump supports. Their reactive attitude caters only to the 23 percent of voters who self-identified as liberals in 2024 exit polling, who make up more than half of the Democrat Party.
This means that Democrats’ message is only resonating in places where they already win, America’s deep-blue enclaves. But this gets Democrats no closer to cutting into Trump’s 312-226 electoral vote victory.
What’s more, such anti-Trump positioning could well mean that Democrats are primed to fall below their current artificial levels of support once Trump leaves the stage.
Consider again that only 23 percent of the country identified as liberal in 2024, and that Biden’s final job approval rating average — the rating for an administration pursuing a strong set of liberal policies — was just 39 percent overall. What happens when this reactively anti-Trump party, lacking any positive vision, no longer has Trump to run against?
Democrats need positive policies — not simply opposition — that generate support. It is not now and will not be enough just to galvanize the opposition to Trump. Once Trump is gone, Republicans will be running someone else. Democrats look like they will still be running against Trump.
There is an adage in American politics that you can’t beat something with nothing; right now, Democrats’ only “something” is Trump. It’s hard to see how they will go on without him.
J.T. Young is the author of Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left. He has over three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Management, and Budget, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
