As Trump brings fascism to America, Democrats must model the convictions—and emotions—they expect from the public. So far, they're failing

In the first week of what has already become the most corrupt administration in United States history—featuring everything from a new Trump "meme coin" for laundering foreign bribes to the summary firing of agency watchdogs to the blanket release of even the most violent of Trump's allied Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Democrats have been mostly absent.

It doesn't seem that they've been caught flat-footed, either; each of Trump's crooked acts was something he either flirted with during the campaign or an obvious expansion of one of his previous crooked acts. There haven't been any surprises. Nonetheless, the message from Democratic leaders—with a few notable and brilliant exceptions—has mostly fallen into two responses.

1. Pleas for "bipartisan" solutions to Trump's own priorities, such as deportations.
2. Bemused quips about the price of eggs or public statements noting that the latest fascist dismantling of some longstanding part of government isn't the economic agenda Americans voted for.

The first message stinks of both impotence and cowardice; Democrats futilely prostrating themselves to Republicans in the hopes that they could perhaps assist in passing Trump's malevolent priorities to whatever extent they might be allowed to. The second brushes off illegal acts, such as the firing of inspector generals, as merely misplaced priorities rather than five-alarm acts of corruption.

When one of the lead plotters of the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt goes from a prison cell to a VIP position propped up alongside the "president" who was meant to benefit from his violence, I'm not sure what to even say. If any Republican lawmaker was not an anti-American, pro-coup seditionist the sight ought to have turned their stomachs and they would have immediately started drafting impeachment articles; it is transparently obvious that a man who elevates violence directed at Congress and calls its participants heroes has betrayed his oath of office in that very moment.

But there are no Republicans who are more loyal to the nation than to their blustering reality show leader. Zero. The task of expressing outrage over Trump's disgusting show of support for insurrection falls to the media, which brushed off the affront and which has scrambled to compete for Dear Leader's crooked affections, and to a Democratic Party that can only be described as mummified.

Democratic lawmakers, aides, and strategists have been repeating the same strategies and focused on the same invisible voters since Bill Clinton's time, and each office pushes out the same genteel smoking-club prods that they imagine might win Cleverness Points on television panels rather than showing any of the emotions that voters are so hungry for that they would agree to elevate a thuggish barbarian if that was the only way they could get it.

What should the emotional response be, when government watchdogs are fired in over a dozen federal departments and agencies? What should the emotional response be, when the supposed president releases cop-beating thugs and stations their leader in a position of honor, at an appearance, so that the nation can see that Trump is literally standing with those who attempted a coup on his behalf?

Voters look for guidance on these things, which is the whole point of propaganda in the first place; they look to leaders to establish the boundaries of what leaders should do, and if some leaders say that overthrowing the whole damn government based on a crooked man's hoax is within the boundaries, and receives only harrumphs in response, then the public shrugs and presumes that yes, it turns out beating police officers with poles and bats and barricades is within the boundaries now.

Should voters be outraged by Trump's actions?

Should voters accept those actions, and meekly hope that perhaps the obvious corruption will not touch them, personally?

Model one behavior or the other, but don't expect the public to intrinsically know whether using the presidency to solicit "business" cash is good or bad, or that the inspectors general are the watchdogs Congress put in place to make sure presidents were not doing criminal things—meaning that summarily firing a large number of them is an obvious signal criminal things are about to unfold.
Don't expect them to know that putting a pause on wide swaths of government spending and illegally impounding designated foreign spending will kill a considerable number of children with AIDS, sabotage countless medical trials, and quite possibly supercharge a new national pandemic.

If the public is expected to be alarmed by these things, then perhaps Showing Some Damn Alarm would be in order. If the public is expected to reject rampant illegality and vicious, vicious cruelty from their government, perhaps somebody should say so.

I can understand tactical decisions to, for example, approve some Trump nominations without much fuss while blocking the most egregious. Republicanism is a fascist movement; the response to attempted blockades of their power will, in the House and Senate, be announcements from crooked Republican leaders that from now on the rules will change and the opposition party will get no votes at all; if approving the now-castrated Marco Rubio for a position will demonstrate that Democrats still intend to keep government running when the options presented to them are not patently insane, there may be merit.

But this is not that. The Democratic message has been more of appeasement than opposition. Please let us work with you to establish the rules of your threatened new internment programs only validates the fascist's agenda, in the public eye. Being unable to muster no organized outrage over the "president" allying himself with violent seditionist militias has no tactical purpose other than to convey cowardice.

Tell me, is the threat of military action against NATO so that a new president can acquire Greenland a rational reworking of the international order, or evidence of megalomaniacal insanity?

No real outrage can be mustered there? No plainly worded revulsion?

It may be difficult, I admit, to turn a ship as lumbering as the Democratic Senate caucus to any direction other than its preferred one. But Democrats have, for decades now, expected the public to share their positions and priorities through some version of intellectual osmosis. That is not how leadership works. The public cannot know what is corrupt unless someone tells them. They cannot know whether to be outraged over a new scandal or inured to it when their leaders demand the first but model the second.

A new president has entered office and immediately allied himself with seditionists, with corrupt megawealth, with Nazi salutes, with virulent racism, and with a broad dismissal of the laws meant to constrain him, all while exhibiting public behaviors—imagining a "valve" that can be turned to make arid California green, insisting that Canada will become a 51st state even if he has to wreak havoc to bring it about—that amounts to plain delusion.

What happens next is going to churn the stomachs of most of the U.S. population. But they still may not muster the will to vote for Democrats, if they see Democrats shaking the hands and pleading for the favor of the kleptocrats spearheading the destruction. If Democrats cannot exhibit the plain human emotions that any decent person would show, in those situations, then why should the public trust that they would truly reverse any of it?