Democrats will never win by being the second-best Trump

There's already a party of using immigrants to divide and conquer. We need to offer an actual solution.

I have to say that since Election Day, I’ve become a lot less frightened of Donald Trump.

Yes, the past-and-future failed president making the exact play for dictatorship I imagined he would. His most authoritarian appointments—nominating a Secretary of Defense who has written in favor of turning the military on Americans and an FBI Director whose sole qualification is undermining democracy by going after Trump’s perceived opponents—have not been quashed. This suggests that our immune system as a democracy is still failing. Yet Trump is floundering legislatively, as he always has. And he’s consistently overshadowed by his corporate sponsor Elon Musk, who may be the most fearsome force against democracy that has emerged since the Cold War.

That said, we will defeat them eventually because we have to—because it’s our only choice. It’s their job to be terrible, so we are forced to rise to defeat them faster.

What worries me more these days is the direction in which leading Democratic voices seem to want the party to take after the defeat of Harris/Walz. These people are not supposed to be terrible.

The worrisome behavior includes Ezra Klein going on Pod Save America to scold Democrats for not taking “crime” more seriously, even though the only honest debate to have about crime is how much of a historic drop in crime we’ve seen under Biden/Harris.

It includes Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry saying “that immigration has become a losing issue for Democrats over the past decade because elected leaders have followed progressive advocates to the left.” They say this even though the only clear message on immigration Democrats have offered during the Biden years is, “We would like to pass Mr. Trump’s wonderful border bill but mean Mr. Trump won’t let us!”

Muñoz and Sharry sidestep that to argue Democrats have completely abandoned the focus on “enforcement” that made the failed immigration reform bill so popular in 2013, suggesting “It’s easy to blame Trump, and the lure of his xenophobic rhetoric” but that doesn’t make sense because “the public saw him as someone who took the problem seriously and was trying to address it.”

If your argument requires us to accept that Trump is presenting solutions instead of creating the problems, it’s not an argument. It’s surrender.

This is the exact kind of normalization of Trump that led to our defeat, that led us to run on Trump’s policies. The idea that we’re ever going to be the second-best Trump failed before there was ever a Trump when Obama’s massive investment in deportations resulted in a bill that had no hope of ever passing a Republican House.

I would call this quisling defeatism. But to be fair, this failed analysis makes the same error Democrats have been making since Republicans first adopted “the Southern Strategy” in 1968.

They believe they can defeat the right’s strategic racism with better policy proposals.

Clearly, “crime” and “the border” are not actual issues. They are dog whistles. No policy is going to make a right-wing demagogue stop being a right-wing demagogue. Deportations rose steadily in 2024. That never entered the discourse because this isn’t a debate about anything real other than how some of the wealthiest people ever to live are using the fear of the other to divide Americans and loot the public treasury.

Rarely is it noted that when Donald Trump began his political career in earnest, border crossings were about as low as they had been this century.

What was high—at a fever pitch—was race and class anxiety brought on by the election and re-election of our first non-white president.

The public sentiment on “crime” or “the border” is not and has never been rooted in reality. And it’s the panic about “the border” that has led us to steadily destroy our immigration system over the last two generations, turning it into a a series of mental and physical prisons that help no one except the politicians who want to cut Elon Musk’s taxes. That broken system can only create the kind of “crisis” that Trump has no interest in solving but every interest in weaponizing.

The good news—the very good news—is that despite this, despite decades of fear mongering that has only made our system more brutal, costly, and cancerous to our values, voters still want an immigration system that works. And that’s a system that gives productive immigrants a chance to aspire to what we all take for granted—citizenship.

That’s what I learned by producing this week’s episode of Next Comes What:

I hope you’ll notice the fantastic title of Somebody to Hate—because that’s all immigration is about for guys like Trump who claim to be fighting for American workers even as they’re hiring foreign workers to drive down our wages.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at American Immigration Council, explained to Andrea Pitzer how the polling reveals that more than deportations or anything Trump is promising they want the fair immigration they imagine exists in place now:

Democrats need to reexamine what we’ve been doing wrong. But that must start with what we’ve actually been doing.

We need to be the party that wants to create a fair immigration process that respects all families. That has to be our message. We are for real solutions and ending the devilish division of guys like Trump and Musk who divide us over sick nonsense and then hire foreign workers just so they don’t have to pay us fair wages.

I told you in March that if this election was about “the border,” Trump will win. You cannot out “enforce” someone who is spreading racism for his own particular advantage. But you can fight for a system that vast majority of us want and most of us already believes exists.