Currently, Democrats are in the process of shutting down the government as a response to President Donald Trump’s illegal acts – see Ezra Klein Column Overview and objection arguments. What shocked me to read Klein’s assessment is how internal debates in the Democratic Party are surrounding the “normal people” issue.
Is it normal to not be the second President Trump: At this point, there is only the most blinking denial of Trump’s attempt to transform the United States into an authoritarian country. Instead, debate is the extent to which “normal” political rules work during these abnormal times.
Through “normal” politics, I mean the basic vision of the post-war American democracy and the role of political parties in it. Normal politics begins with the assumption that the rule of law is, in a sense, the good-faith reading of the Constitution and the legal provisions define the rules of the political game. Because these rules say that power is distributed in free and fair elections, ordinary politics includes the belief that public opinion is crucial – meaning that parties must tailor their agenda to the public’s policy perspective.
Under these conditions, the rule of law and response to public preferences, normal politics means legislative action has two goals: 1) develop new regulations to achieve the end of the required policy, and 2) increase the popularity of the party, thereby improving its position among the persuasive voters before the election.
At present, the first premise of “normal” politics – the rule of law – is clearly undermined. Trump is currently ignoring statutory and constitutional rules across the board, with Republican majority in Congress and Supreme Court. In this regard, everyone on the left agrees.
The question is how to respond. Is the strategy in the era of ordinary politics the best service, or is it that Trump’s dictatorship requires them to write a new script?
This gap is obvious in the closing debate. Under normal politics, closing doesn’t make any sense: Previous Close Battlelike the disastrous Republican Party 2013 Bid to allocate funds to Obamacareshowing that Congress has no leverage to force the president to unilaterally abandon policy priorities. However, Trump’s agenda is so different from the quality of the struggle on health care policy – not just partisan disputes, but an attack on the system itself – that it may no longer make sense to view the shutdown as a policy struggle. Rather, it is best to see it as a destructive and resisting authoritarians trying to consolidate power.
Once you understand this gap, it becomes an obvious subtext for responding to every democratic policy debate in Trump. The Normal Team believes that Democrats should attack Trump on the “kitchen table” issue, in which his polls are the worst, such as the cost of living, and a broader political strategy to try to retake the House and Senate in mid-2026. By contrast, the team abnormally argues that Democratic emergency needs to fight to put Trump’s most authoritarian moves into trouble as much as possible: bold confrontations can stop Trump’s anti-democratic moves and Win the midterm.
It’s a stylized department: not everyone is entirely in one camp or another. But many civil wars today do come down to whether you agree or not More Team is normal or team abnormal. The gap transcends the traditional ideological division of partisans because it focuses less than policy issues, rather than strategy and large-scale thinking about political thinking.
I will not try to prove one of two camps in any particular tactical debate, such as the wisdom of closing. But I do think that the team anomaly has a better description of the situation, in large part because it matches how their opponents in the right anti-legal politics and how Trump’s opponents, especially in the right approach, find ways to succeed.
Trump’s extraordinary politics of success
Ten years later, we are all used to Donald Trump being a key figure in our politics. But when he initially conquered the Republican Party, he kept avoiding the number on the left was “this Once was no Ordinary. ”
At the time, they were correct. Not normal for a man Mocking the War Hero and DisabledWho is credible Accused of sexual assault Dozens of women who have been publicly appealed Forbid people’s entire religion From entering the United States, becoming a presidential nominee for a political party, let alone becoming president!
But, in hindsight, the problem with this reasoning is that it assumes Come back normally: Trump represents a distortion in American politics, and he can be put back in the box instead of representing a deeper transformation in how the system itself works. The system we use to define “normal” has quietly changed – Trump has taken advantage of.
One shift is political: the United States has shifted from a consensus-based politics to informal norms and cooperation, which has brought the two major parties to a common set of rules to a more stubborn system in which two polarized camps are fighting an increasingly naked struggle.
Obviously, this is asymmetric. Starting with the Gingrich Revolution in the 1994 election and rapidly accelerating through President Obama, Republicans are increasingly reluctant to grant the Democrats the basic legitimacy as a council. Once reversed the strategy, Smear President Barack Obama As a foreign born and The Supreme Court nominee who stopped himdue to the basic depth of shared hatred of its democratic opponents, people are widely accepted.
The second change is to pay attention to. The decline of traditional media, the rise of social media and influencers, the decline in trust in government, all of which have reduced acceptance of the traditions, buttons, and message-passing strategies of major political parties rely on. In the era of elite goalkeepers, the outrageous, radical, and even offensive are professional killers. But now, they may be weaponized by savvy politicians and agents to enhance their image and redefine the outline of public conversation.
These are the conditions for Trump to run and win. They don’t give him, nor do they have a character like him, absolute power: Republican election defeats in 2018, 2020 and 2022 show public dislike for Trump-style authoritarian activism.
But the core insight is that extremist politics led by charismatic people like Trump can be used to drive political change that might otherwise be unimaginable.
Of course, the public Disapprove From the Muslim ban to January 6, Trump has made almost all of his most radical moves. Republicans’ willingness to line up behind Trump, coupled with the lack of authoritative and trusted social gatekeepers, makes it possible for him to mainstream what was once unthinkable.
Now, during his second presidency, he is running the same script that is legitimacy with his various attacks on democracy. The public may disapprove of putting the armed forces on the streets of the nation’s capital, but Trump counts on his party and the broken media environment to slam this disapproval – deflection and distraction – that the public’s benchmark disapproval has not translated into a forced opposition movement.
To me, the lesson of all this is not that Trump is a religion of a political royal family, voices the silent majority of people. Likewise, his signature plan is almost always unpopular. Recent polls confirm they continue to be.
Instead, this is the basic rule for managing American politics No longer applicable Just like they were in the Trump era. Trump successfully pushed a radical agenda supported by only a few Americans as he understood in the gut how to make the new political and media environment manipulate the new political and media environment at his advantage—the meaning of redefining “normal” is beyond all recognition.
Impact on the normal and abnormal gap between the team
I don’t think the normal position of the basic team can solve the new political reality. It assumes that the political system will limit Trump because in ancient times it will limit. But now Trump is using the strategies he uses to break normative consensus in American politics to break the most basic Legal Principles of protecting their democracy.
From a more specific perspective, Team Normal’s entire argument depends on the mid-2026 that is carried out under free and fair conditions. But elected leaders who want to seize authoritarian power know they are playing against the election clock, and Trump is no exception. He is Very worried about the impact of mid-term failure on his powerand is trying to stack the decks to support him through “normal” political strategies and abuse of power.
His success in the latter so far has been limited to persuading state Republicans and even participating More extreme cavalry. Other moves, such as threatening democratic fundraising platform Actblue, Failed to cause too much damage. But “However” is perhaps the most important word in the sentence: the more power he bears, the more tools he has to effectively undermine electoral fairness.
This is why the team abnormally says the Democrats need to fight even though They have no hope of winning on this particular issue eventually. Even if all they can do is delay some of Trump’s power grab by abandoning procedural barriers, that may be very important – because it may prevent him from exerting the above powers ahead of a potential midterm election. have Real evidence of “lost loud” In the future, the foundation can be laid for more effective resistance.
But it also learns a more fundamental lesson from Trump’s rise: the outline of political debate that can explode in our current environment.
I don’t think Democrats have found the formula yet Rich sports and the rise of Zohran Mamdani is a sign of its possibility. But I do think that lacking political imagination in normal teams, this sense of resignation still follows the rules of normal politics – voters are so focused on simple material politics that they cannot care about Trump’s actions of freedoms possessed in the founding documents of the state.
Trump shows that it is possible to redefine politics with enemies in ways rarely expected in 2015. I think one of the core issues in ten years is how to break the strategy he invented against him.
