Op-Ed: Brad Todd: Meet the Democrats' new boss

Donald Trump is running the Republican Party and America – that much is clear. So liberal activists and journalists are asking: who’s running the Democratic Party? The answer lies in the the words of the 1971 hit by The Who, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Since November 8, 2016, Democrats have learned nothing. They persist in being owned by an unwillingness to add even a whiff of legitimacy to the public’s elevation of Donald Trump.

We must use rock-and-roll lyrics from the Woodstock Era to describe today’s Democratic Party because the hippie ethos of protest and identity politics is the time-warp they understand.

Admitting that identity politics has led them astray on a wide range of issues from crime to immigration to eligibility rules in girls’ sports is anathema. They are totally incapable of booking strategic losses to get problematic issues off the table if doing so validates Trump, however narrowly.

We saw this aversion last week during Trump’s joint address to Congress. Rep. Al Green (D., Texas), stood waving his old man cane at the leader of the free world and refusing to abide the Speaker’s calls for him to follow House rules on decorum. Green knew his tirade would get him kicked out of the House chamber, but civil disobedience is nirvana for a Woodstock-era lefty.

Green was not alone in acting the fool. Democratic congresswomen mindlessly wore bubble-gum pink pantsuits in protest. Other Democrats held up silly auction-house paddles with jeers at Trump printed on them. That all helped Trump use the Democrats as stage props, steering them into objecting to a litany of popular positions and accomplishments, like record-low border crossings, eliminating waste in government, and even cheering on a brave kid who’s battling brain cancer. He predicted up front that the Democrats would not clap for him no matter what he said, then proved it.

Democrats simply could not give Trump a win on anything because they hate his legitimacy too much.

And it’s not just theater. In Congress, Democrats just walked the plank on whether or not we should roll back the excesses of the Biden administration on the transgender agenda. The idea that middle school girls’ locker rooms should be off limits to anyone with a Y chromosome is as mainstream as it gets — but congressional Democrats won’t agree.

Cutting waste in government has long been popular with Americans and a generation ago, it was a Democratic priority in Washington. When President Bill Clinton proposed a plan that eventually eliminated 400,000 federal government workers, 55 Senate Democrats voted for it.

Today, not even one Democratic Senator will work with Trump and Elon Musk to cut waste.

Joe Biden’s lax border enforcement posture was the main driver of the Republican takeover of Congress. Trump’s unilateral resetting of that posture — and objective proof it is working — offers Democrats an easy chance to get healthy and take the topic off the table. But they cannot stomach it.

When a political movement cannot bring itself to advance its own political interests, the underlying reason must be diagnosed. In this case it’s a toxic aversion to legitimizing Trumps’ victories.

Since Trump won in 2016, Democrats high and low have been on an unending quest to undo his victory. They blamed it on Russia. They tried impeachment. They changed the rules of elections in hopes it maximized their likelihood of beating him. They deployed state and federal prosecutions of him. They sent federal agents to rifle through his wife’s underwear drawer. They ran an entire 2024 campaign warning he’d be the end of the entire American experiment.

After a decade of this delegitimization campaign, his voters — a bigger group now than ever — are left to reconcile themselves to the adjacent reality. It’s not the old lion’s legitimacy Democrats cannot abide; it’s the legitimacy of his voters.

Two party systems crave equilibrium. The president’s party, when it rules Congress, almost always loses in midterms because the two-party dynamic incentivizes corrections. Over the intermediate term, a defeated party takes lessons from losses and jettisons the platform planks that caused them. The GOP did this after drubbings in 2006 and 2008 by giving up on entitlement program reform — to the detriment of the national debt — and by recalibrating its Bush-ian national security policy, to the chagrin of hawks like me.

Modulation in defeat is the engine grease of humility that keeps the American political system humming. Democrats were quick remind Trump of that when he protested his 2020 loss. Being unwilling to accept it now, themselves, is a malignant threat to the Democratic Party’s present and its future.

Brad Todd is a partner at OnMessage Public Strategies, a CNN Commentator, and co-author of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.