Democrats are Working with Trump. Here is why.

Democrats are working with Trump.  Remember: except on matters of race and ethnicity Democrats did not say Trump was wrong.   Only that Trump was too crazy to be president.

Readers of this blog and listeners to the podcasts will not be surprised to read that Democrats are playing ball with Trump.   Trump is a big spending, big deficit, big government New Yorker.   He is not a conservative.   

He only pretended to be one.    He dressed himself in a few parts of the Republican costume as a Halloween disguise and Republicans bought it:

       ***Support guns big time.  (That cements things with rural people.)

       ***Oppose abortion. (That cements things with values voters.)

       ***Embrace the white Christian team by opposing Muslims and non-white crime.  (That cements the large white identity vote.)

       ***Oppose Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama vigorously.  (This all by itself would almost have done it.   No policy promises here, just be anti-Hillary and you are a bone fide Republican.)

Notice that except for gun legislation (which was going nowhere anyway) and opposing abortion (which the Supreme Court protects for the foreseeable future) this really isn't policy.        Trump took over the Republican party with a bare-bones policy disguise and lots of team solidarity cheerleading. Trump guessed right that there were more motivated white people who wanted a retreat from politically correct and globalist embrace of outsiders than there were minorities.  Besides, as it worked out, he got plenty of votes from white women, Hispanics, and even some blacks.

Make no mistake.  Democrats are still dismayed by Trump.  They have spent a year telling the world and themselves that Trump is unfit to be president, and a majority of voters agree.  But a lot of them voted for him anyway.  They didn't like Trump.  They liked his message.  So it makes all the sense in the world for Democrats to adopt big parts of it.

Satirical Joke Headline, but funny because it is true

There was a lot of overlap between Trump and Sanders, and the Sanders insurgency forced Hillary to adopt some of those policies.   Democrats will reject the white identity cheerleading part of the Trump message but embrace Trump on the policies that were the core of Trump's message.  They are a bipartisan message, being voiced by Sanders as well as Trump.  Hillary picked them up and they have become mainstream Democratic ideas on trade, infrastructure, immigration, and opposition to elites.

Trade and protection:   Trump and Sanders raised the issue and used it to win the upper midwest rustbelt states.   Democrats learned you cannot just trade a Wisconsin machinist job for a Silicon Valley programmer job, and if you do you rack up votes in California but lose Wisconsin.   Democrats are now against the TPP and want to revise NAFTA, as does Trump.

Trump message throughout the campaign

Infrastructure:   Republicans are the ones uncomfortable with deficits and infrastructure spending.  Democrats love it.  Democrats may be the team that creates the infrastructure bill over Republican objection.  

Immigration:   Democrats reject Trump's harsh descriptions of their minority coalition members but the actual policy on immigration will move in Trump's way--just without the white resentment dog whistles.    Obama is already the Deporter in Chief.   Democrats will work with Trump to heighten border security and remove dangerous scofflaws and will position it as protection for their people.   Hispanic neighborhoods are the ones most hurt by gang activity and drugs.  Trump conflated immigration and crime which leaves room for Democrats to support legal immigration and oppose crime and still connect with their minority base.  

Reform Government to reduce power of the elites:   This is an issue that is better for Democrats than any other.   Democrats have more to fear of Trump failing to follow through on his "drain the swamp" message than by his doing so.  It will be easier for Democrats to shed the connection to the special interest billionaires than it will be Republicans.   As the parties re-align Democrats will want to ally closely with Trump.   Here is where Trump will get the most resistance--and primarily from Republicans.

But what about all the nasty, nasty things Democrats said about Trump.   Isn't he the devil?  Doesn't this empower evil?

Notice they don't say "wrong".  They say "unfit"

Democrats should chill a little.   Democrats would have demonized any Republican candidate.   They would have demonized Ted Cruz for being over-the-top conservative, a rigid self-righteous odious government destroying ultra conservative.  There would have been good evidence for this and Republican senators would have somewhat agreed even as they backed Cruz--just as they did with Trump.   Rubio would have been attacked as a mindless robot with canned memorized lines, utterly unready for office.   We would have seen the tape of him repeating "Let's dispel the notion that Barrack Obama doesn't know what he is doing. . . ." a million times.

Mike Pence is a conservative ideologue.   So is Cruz, only more so.  Ryan is a libertarian who wants to un-do the New Deal and the Great Society.  There are Republican ideologues. Trump is no ideologue.   

Democrats' big problem with Trump is not policy, it is temperament and if he blows up the world because he gets into a snit-fit with North Korea or China then this is out of the Democrats' control.   America took its chances with Trump and we will see what happens.  

Trump may well go farther in pushing a progressive agenda on jobs and the economy than would Hillary Clinton have been able to manage.  He can muscle and cajole the Republican House and Senate while Clinton would have caused them to seize up in righteous opposition.  Democrats can work with a progressive big government builder.   That is perhaps who they should have nominated themselves.   Trump, but without the white resentment piece.   Republicans would have opposed that person.  Instead they got Trump and they are duty bound and habituated to support their leader.   This is not a disaster for the Democrats.

Thad Guyer and I had predicted this in our podcasts.   We are beginning to see it played out here.  Guyer lays out his point of view in writing:

Guest Comment by Thad Guyer:

The Building of a Popular Bi-Partisan President Begins

As the UpClose post yesterday explained, the Steve Bannon controversy is classic media manipulation by the President-Elect, laying the ground work for normalizing his coming nominations and Congressional agenda. This post-Bannon period has already begun. Today’s New York Times headline is “Senate Democrats’ Surprising Strategy: Trying to Align With Trump”, NY Times (Nov 16, 2016, ).   Click Here

The article states: “On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.” The article says NY Senator Chuck Schumer will lead Democrats out of the desert.

While this may be “surprising” for the Times, anyone who didn’t live in an anti-Trump media bubble would easily have seen this coming. All of the following is excerpted from the Two Left Eyes podcast on November 6, 2016:

We’re headed to an era of a popular President with bipartisan appeal in the electorate, like Ronald Reagan was, especially in his first term. It’s usually ideology that divides us, but Trump is non-ideological like most of the country left and right. True, Americans get angry and combative over certain things like economic malaise, tax increases, cuts to entitlements like Social Security. But regular people don’t protest tax cuts, everybody likes entitlements, and we’re all used to our great national credit card—the deficit—to pay for everything from wars to bailouts. There’s actually very little people won’t like with Trump on these bread and butter issues.

Trump's infrastructure projects, his love of bricks and mortar, they’ll be popular. Even New Yorkers and Hollywood will love him if he renovates La Guardia and LAX. He has no economic or ideological interest in war. If the left was right about one big thing regarding Trump, its that he's a wall building isolationist. Trump and Sanders exposed Americans for the popular isolationists that we are.

From the election, we learned that “globalism” is a bad word, its politically toxic and its now solidly linked to the political toxicity of open borders, exactly as it was with the Brexit vote in UK voters rejecting EU globalism and open borders. It’s not just the Trans Pacific Partnership under Trump that is dead, its NAFTA as well without major and symbolic modifications. We likely won’t see either party in the future doing anything other than telling voters they are against any global trade agreements that are perceived—rightly or wrongly-- as costing industrial job loss in the rust belt and mid-west. And we learned that our body politic is far less ideological and far more populist that we had known. Most of our history for the past 100 years has been electing ideological Republicans or ideological Democrats. Bush and the neo-conservatives on the right, Obama and neo-liberals on the left. Trump is literally an ideological agnostic, he doesn’t care about social or political ideology. Americans now want populism, and they want non-ideological progressivism

Bottom line, there is a strong chance that Trump is going to be a very popular president for everyone other than 2/3rds of Hispanics, 100% of our 3 million Muslims, the left establishment, and die-hard nerd Democrats like us. It’d be foolish to underestimate Donald Trump yet again. We should have learned that lesson after he won the primary when everyone said he couldn’t, and won the general election we were told that was inconceivable at 10 to 1 odds. Never, ever underestimate the Donald’s drive and effectiveness in winning, or his need to be loved as part of that.