Will the Democrats let Democracy Die?
- Will Allen
- Mar 30
- 6 min read
Donald Trump is not a normal president. His first few weeks in office have made that abundantly clear. Never has a president sought to cross so many red lines so often. In a matter of weeks, he has purged individuals who are supposed to check his powers, attempted to erase constitutional amendments using executive orders, and usurped Congress’s power to spend money. More recently, he has proudly defied a court order and begun calling for the removal of judges who stand in his way by reading the law into his unconstitutional acts. When you take stock of Trump’s actions and executive orders, they paint a clear picture of a president willing to bend and break the office (and the entire federal government) to his desires. None of these acts are normal, but neither are they surprising. Donald Trump campaigned on this very platform. For the last four years, he shouted about exactly the kind of president he would be in office and the lengths he would go to get there. What is surprising, in this moment of constitutional crisis, with the president attempting to unshackle the office he inhabits from the limits of the law, is the failure of the Democratic party.
For weeks, even months, now the Democratic party has been gripped by inertia as Trump and his allies refashion the presidency into an office that needs not be concerned by the law or the co-equal branches of government. The party’s leaders on Capitol Hill, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, have led this charge to nowhere, telling colleagues to sit tight and be quiet. They have instructed Democratic members to lay down their outrage and look the other way as Trump and Musk tear the federal government to pieces. When they have sprung into action, these two men have used their platform to chastise their own colleagues and voters, telling them (wrongly) that the democratic party is powerless at this moment. Elsewhere, and more embarrassingly, they have put up acts of so-called resistance, standing around and shouting ‘We will win’ as Trump and Musk shuttered USAID and prepared to gut other agencies. These actions, if they can even be called that, are emblematic of the approach Schumer and Jeffries have taken as this new administration seeks to expand its power beyond the bounds of what is legal.
Elsewhere, the party has only furthered its listlessness by filling its ranks with individuals who are hopelessly unprepared for this moment. In the House, Democrats shot themselves in the foot when they rejected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bid to take control of one of the most influential positions in Congress as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee. Instead of AOC, the party opted for a 74-year-old man who had just announced he was being treated for cancer. Since assuming the role, Gerry Connelly - with his nearly 4,700 followers on Instagram - has yet to go viral and take on the Trump administration as it steamrolls American democracy and the freedom it provides. Shying away from individuals like AOC, individuals who were forged in opposition to Trump and have millions of followers on social media, has only condemned the party to further stasis in a moment of profound crisis. As democracy is bent and broken out of shape, the party appears like it is barely able to make sense of itself and its strongest players, let alone put up any kind of fight to a president unshackling himself from the oversight of Congress.
This inertia at the top has slowly led the party below to rip itself apart. As Schumer and Jeffries stand around and dither, and other leaders are unable to meet the moment, democratic voters and caucus members have grown increasingly restless, begging (to no avail) for direction and a clear course of action. This disconnect between the two most powerful democrats and the wider party has slowly grown into a deeper and deeper discontent. Voters and representatives alike are desperate for direction and have been suffering since the catastrophic electoral loss last November. Being told to shut up by their leaders and politicians and wait for Trump to fail has only incensed already frustrated voters, and rightly so.
For the past four years, Democrats have shouted again and again at voters that they would be a party that defended democracy. They centred their campaigns on the promise of democracy and told Americans to lend the party their votes to secure the freedoms it delivers. Yet, in this completely predictable moment, as Trump and his acolytes reshape the government in his image, destroying independent agencies and hobbling those who push back, the party has shown it is indifferent to it all. Jeffries and Schumer - who back in November were using the defence of democracy to secure votes for democratic candidates - have done nothing but tell voters to calm down, admonish those who protest an increasingly lawless president, and even - in Schumer’s case - voted for a spending bill that gives Trump carte blanche to continue shredding the government services Americans rely on for safety and security.
This kind of behaviour is nothing new for the party, in fact, it mirrors what it has done before so many times. Back in 2023, when the Supreme Court signed away the rights of millions of women to state politicians, democratic leaders told voters they shouldn’t be surprised Roe was no longer settled law. Democrats on Capitol Hill read out poems and pushed for a cautious response. They failed to mobilise and turn the moment into a durable message. Once again, party leaders begged for votes as they stood around and did nothing. More gallingly, this current response did not have to happen. Because Democrats knew it was coming. Just as was the case with the leaked Dobbs opinion, the Democratic Party and its leaders had access to a document that detailed how Trump would pull apart democracy. Everything happening today was laid before the Democratic Party long before Trump returned to power, and still, they chose to stand around and look the other way. The party could have been ready for this profound constitutional crisis, its leaders could have gone all in, but instead, they repeated past failures. Democrats have done this over and over, with healthcare, Abortion, and the Supreme Court - and now the party is repeating history with democracy.
The failure of the Democratic party at this moment has far bigger consequences than its future electoral fortunes. All too often, democracies are won and lost on how the opposition party reacts as democracy is wiped away. In Hungary, the opposition parties - now cast aside by Victor Orban - watched and waited as an autocrat bent governmental institutions towards him. They were too late to the moment and, by the time they woke up, could do nothing but watch as Orban and his party demolished democracy. On Capitol Hill, Democrats, under this current malaise, could very well end up succumbing to the same fate. Chuck Schumer currently believes America and its democracy is yet to enter a constitutional crisis. He is willing to wait for Trump to defy the courts once more, to cross another redline, to dissolve one more agency, to usurp Congress one more time, only giving him more power. Like him, those who have the ear of the party and its leaders, like Rahm Emanuel, think, “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch”, they believe there are better hills to “die on” than the dismantling of USAID. If the party continues to operate under those assumptions (that there is a future fight worth waiting for, one which will be more popular) there will soon be nothing left for the party to defend.
Fighting every fight is essential, even if it is exhausting - it will be how democracy is won or lost in America. Despite Jeffries’s protests that Democrats have no power, the party and its leaders have all the tools needed to defend democracy and block Trump and his lackeys. They only need to look at the actions that the Republicans took when Democrats were in power to understand what is possible. At every turn, Republicans in Congress and their leaders put up a fight, ensuring every attempt to pass legislation in the House and Senate was hell for the Democrats. These tactics stopped everything from the confirmation of democratic appointees to the Supreme Court to democratic government spending bills. They even went to the mat and shut down the government using the filibuster. Those tools of disruption now belong to the Democratic party (even if Schumer and Jeffries are unwilling to use them). Democrats have the chance to throw every procedural hurdle at Republicans in Congress while they still have the chance and make life equally as unpleasant for them. Their voters demand this, and democracy requires it. If they don’t break free from the inertia they have created themselves, they will soon be consumed by it and the anger it instills in voters across America.
The Democratic party is far from over, but what comes next will define the course it, and the rest of America, takes. In just a matter of weeks, Trump has fired 17 inspector generals, frozen funds to universities, defied both branches of government and has dissolved entire federal agencies, and brought others under his direct control. For the next four years, Trump will continue trying to amass powers no other president has ever attempted to seize control of. Democracy doesn’t die by one hand, it takes many, and as it currently stands, the Democratic party, in its absence, is lending its hands to the death of the constitution, freedom, and democracy itself.
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