Post-Trump planning – and why Democrats need to fight for their own side

Dan Froomkin in July came up with ten points that could be used for a post-Trump reconstruction. Or, as he put it in the title of his piece, Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? (1)

I’m going to take off on those suggestions for separate posts on each.

My concern for the Democrats in 2026 and 2028 is that the need to get away from the rut they’ve been in at least since 1996. Obama’s election in 2008 showed that they could do it. Unfortunately, Obama’s far-too-cautious neoliberal approach to policy and politics didn’t take their politics further.

John Ganz gives us this look at the Democrats’ problem:

Supposedly, the way you make a successful political campaign is that you go out and you ask people what they want, and then you make your message based on that. Except that’s bullshit. It doesn’t work. Politely put, the data-based approach to politics is based on a fallacious understanding of the world. Not so politely put, it’s a racket for political consultants so they can scam hapless hacks and wealthy donors. (2)

In theory, polling had advanced far enough at least by the mid-1990s that it was possible to target voters by issues and the priority they put on issues and use that to compile a majority in the election. But that is not the same as having a mandate for any one of those issues. For a mandate, the candidate has to build a broader narrative to generate a wider loyalty to the candidate’s general political program.

This is part of what George Lakoff has been stressing for years with his emphasis on the need for the Democrats to have better framing of their politics and politicians. In an interview in 2014, Lakoff described the concept with this example:

Oil companies – our wealthiest corporations – are destroying the planet for their short-term profit. Corporations govern your life by putting hidden carcinogens and other poisons in your food, cosmetics, furniture, etc. for their profit, not your health. ... These are facts. In isolation, one-by-one, they are just a laundry list. Isolated facts don’t help. Together they tell a truth: Corporations govern your life for their profit not yours, in all those ways. Name it. Repeat it. We need reform at the deepest level. (3)

Democrats often get caught in a defensive mode. The Republicans always come up with a moral-panic issue with which to smear the Democrats. Recently it has been the supposed “transgender” menace and trash the Democrats for supporting The Menace. They also boiled it down to boys-playing-in-girls’-sports. Since the Republicans show again and again in states like Missouri that they are basically hostile to public education in general, no one who is not a Trump cultist will find it hard to believe that that Republicans care about anything to do with public education.

But instead of sticking it back down the Republicans’ throats and attacking them for lying and fear-mongering and general careless as well as the total disregard for schools and the rights of women and girls, Democrats are all-too-tempted to show their “centrist” respectability by mealy-mouthing about how they have doubts about “girls in women’s sports.” Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Elissa Slotkin have been playing that game even in 2025.

Lakoff famously calls this the don’t-think-of-an-elephant-problem. If you tell someone, “Don’t think of an elephant,” it immediately makes them think of an elephant. His point was the Democrats need to avoid reinforcing the Republicans’ partisan framing. This is an important part of Democrats fighting for their own side – which they often seem shockingly unwilling and/or unable to do!

Issues are important. And it’s often remarked that the public tends to agree much more with Democrats on major issues than with Republicans – but that lopsided support is very often not reflected in election results. Because Democrats need to do a far better job of highlighting issues (not just reciting laundry lists of them), frame them within a distinctive Democrats (and preferably progressive!) narrative that defines Democratic identity, and show there are willing to fight for their own side!

John Ganz cites a great example recently provided by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen on immigration, even though he doesn’t mention how Van Hollen framed the Trump kidnap-and-deport program as bad and un-American when he took a potentially risky trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the torture gulag in El Salvador to which the Trump-Vance Administration had illegally sent him:

Look at immigration. The numbers supposedly favored Trump so much that it was a mistake to attack him about the manifestly cruel process of deportations under his regime. Polling and punditry conspire to create one of those situations where “it would play into their hands.” On paper, you can see why: A majority of Americans once said they wanted less immigration and even to deport all illegal aliens.

Now, Trump is underwater on immigration. What happened? Well, people saw what actually existing Trumpism looks like, and it’s ugly. It looks like a police state, because it is.

And this brings us to the problem with issue polling. When you ask someone in a survey, "Should we deport illegal immigrants?" they are going to hear the word “illegal” and reason, “Well, yes, they did something wrong, it’s not fair.” On a very abstract level, it’s almost definitionally correct, tautological in its rational soundness: a person who is not supposed to be here should not be.

Then come the actual images of what it looks like to realize that abstract equation, and people go, “Oh, no, this is awful.” Now the public likes immigrants again and wants them to have a path to citizenship rather than repression. (To make a grumpy point for wokeness or political correctness, this is why people wanted to say “undocumented” rather than “illegal,” because it suggests an administrative problem, not broad-based criminality.) [my emphasis in bold; paragraph breaks added]

There has been massive resistance to Trump’s ICE policies and the masked goons who enforce it. But Van Hollen’s brave action early on was a very important moment in that process. He showed he was willing to do something to support one of his constituents in trouble, even though Abrego Garcia was not yet a naturalized citizen who could vote for him. He took an action that put himself at potential physical risk in El Salvador. He was able to confirm for the first time since Abrego Garcia’s arrest that he was actually still alive. And it dramatically illustrated that Trump’s policies were both cruel and illegal. Van Hollen’s actions and the subsequent protests framed the issue for the public in a pro-democracy, pro-rule-of-law manner. And the process shifted the public perception on the immigration issue more generally because Van Hollen, some other Democratic leaders, and grassroots activists fought politically for their own side.

Compare that to this June speech speech Michigan Sen. Slotkin, who Chuck “oh-no-we-can’t-fight-for-our-own-side!” Schumer selected to give a response in March gave to Trump’s pseudo-State-of-the-Union address: (4)

Brian Taylor Cohen and Mehdi Hasan discussed how the Democrats can learn something from Republican practice about keeping their issues and their framing in the public eye. (5)

Tomorrow I’ll start discussing Froomkin’s “restoration” goals individually.

First goal: Restore the rule of law. This includes rebuilding a devastated and defiled Justice Department, prosecuting the rampant law-breaking of the Trump era, and expanding the Supreme Court.

Notes:

(1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025. <https://www.headsupnews.org/p/is-it-time-to-start-planning-a-post> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(2) Ganz, John (2025): Against Polling. Unpopular Front 08/06/2025. <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/against-polling> (Accessed: 2025-06-08.

(3) Lakoff, George (2025): George Lakoff: In Politics, Progressives Need to Frame Their Values. Georg Lakoff website 11/24/2014. <https://george-lakoff.com/2014/11/29/george-lakoff-in-politics-progressives-need-to-frame-their-values/> (Accessed : 2025-07-08).

(4) Slotkin delivers speech on her Economic War Plan. Sen. Elissa Slotkin YouTube channel 06/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/pbFiKN48UxI?si=SSSPDteVTQYiMs8I> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).

(5) GLOVES OFF: Mehdi Hasan deals MUST-SEE BLOW to Trump. Brian Taylor Cohen YouTube channel 08/07/2025. <https://youtu.be/2K5h2dSDUts?si=rcrf-zUR3LEizk1L> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).