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Over the past two weeks, Democrats have relentlessly wrung their hands in public while trying to avoid accountability for Kamala Harris’ preventable loss to Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, journalists continue to play into the ruse of partisan warfare, conveniently ignoring how Democrats repeatedly enabled Trump and effectively put him in the White House—twice.
What was all that about, anyway?
Election observers often attempt to read tea leaves in order to discern whatever mandate might emerge from any given election. That effort is particularly difficult this year, because relentless disinformation supporting the GOP, and theatrical rhetoric from Democrats lacking any substance, left voters choosing between choices differentiated more by style than policy.
What did voters want? The question is vitally important to answer in order to enable course correction, but has invited an array of seemingly incompatible responses ranging from economic fairness, and accountability for military industrial corruption, to racism and misogyny.
While each of these factors likely played a role for some voters, examining the ascent of Trump over time reveals a series of moments when Democrats crucially enabled him. Could Trump have ever become President if Democrats had not repeatedly cut off their noses to spite their proverbial faces?
Voters have wanted to throw the bums out for 30 years
Setting aside the increasingly compelling case for supporting candidates from minor parties, and presuming elections to be contests between only the nominees from the corporate political parties, voters can offer only binary signals: they can embrace continuity, or they can instead force change.
Plenty of voices have observed the failure of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign to differentiate her candidacy from the Biden administration. Running on what amounted to a continuity platform, in the midst of mounting social crises including an ongoing genocide and economic collapse driving low-wage workers into preventable poverty, more or less determined the election’s results. After all, in every presidential election since 1992, voters have sent perceived outsiders to the White House—probably because the 32 years since then have witnessed an unabated upward transfer of wealth leaving working families struggling to survive.
In 1992, Bill Clinton beat former CIA Director and President George H. W. Bush. He won re-election in 1996 over career Senator Bob Dole (R-KS) largely because Clinton was presented by the press as an iconoclastic Governor of a conservative southern state willing to sacrifice critical defining goals of the Democratic Party. Clinton was a quintessential outsider, reversing the Democratic Party’s previous commitments to labor while emphasizing his small town origins from Hope, AR.
In 2000, George W. Bush defeated career Senator Al Gore (D-TN) while running on a campaign of “compassionate conservatism” informed by his history as the Governor of Texas, well outside the Beltway. He won re-election in 2004 over another career Senator, John Kerry (D-MA). Bush’s working class and southern affect was cultivated specifically in order to depict him as an outsider to Washington despite having grown up in the White House as the son of a president and former CIA Director.
In 2008, Barack Obama won the White House after serving a single term in the Senate, beating career Senator John McCain (R-AZ) on a platform emphasizing his opposition to the Iraq War that had united both corporate political parties in Washington. He won re-election in 2012 over Mitt Romney, an investment banker who served at the time as the Republican Governor of liberal Massachusetts. While Obama’s antiwar stance propelled him to the White House in 2008, by 2012 he had revealed himself to be a creature of Washington but continued to command cultural appeal based largely on political theater and the support he enjoyed from Hollywood celebrities well outside the Beltway.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the White House as a reality television star and real estate mogul promising to drain the proverbial swamp, while running against a figure who had spent decades in Washington as a Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and First Lady. Democrats apparently learned nothing from their loss.
While Joe Biden triumphed in 2020 as a career Senator promising a commitment to bipartisanship (suggesting continuity more than change), he did so while challenging the chaos and radicalism of the first Trump administration. Even as a career Senator forced out of multiple previous presidential primaries, he was ultimately greeted as an agent of change.
Trump’s forthcoming return to the White House was driven by several factors. Ultimately, voters rejecting the stasis, continuity, and vacuousness of a campaign promoting a Vice President and former U.S. Senator with a long history of siding with the establishment. In the same way that Biden was able to cast himself as an agent of change in 2020 despite a long career of complicity in Washington’s corruption, Trump was able to do the same despite his history as a divisive former president. But how?
Let us count the ways….
The complicity that Democrats can’t admit
In over half a dozen ways stretching back decades, Democrats played key roles in putting Trump back in the White House next January.
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Democrats abandoned working class voters since the 1990s: The long-standing complicity of Democrats in corporate corruption laid the foundation for the contemporary populist movement. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visionary Letter from a Birmingham Jail offered what amounts to a political prophecy noting the complicity of White moderates and their contemporary successors in impeding change for the sake of preserving their social positions. The dynamic that King decried in 1963 repeated itself ad nauseum over the following decades, and especially in the 30 years since Bill Clinton shifted the Democratic Party’s priority from supporting labor to supporting Wall Street, but was never more obvious than in 2016 and in 2024.
Clinton promoted Trump to the press: In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign promoted Trump to news outlets because strategists foolishly thought he would be easier to beat in the general election than Jeb Bush, who was widely seen as the frontrunner heading into the GOP primaries. Politico publicly reported on Clinton’s tragic complicity in her own electoral defeat, yet few Democrats care to remember or admit it today. Without Clinton’s self-defeating support, Trump may never have emerged from the 2016 Republican primary.
Kneecapping Bernie in 2016 and again in 2020: Bernie Sanders inspired a mass movement and gained unprecedented support from across the country, and the entire political spectrum. Despite having served in the Senate for decades, he ran as an outsider even more committed to tearing down the Washington establishment than any previous nominee over the past generation. He offered solutions to problem #1 above, but corporate Democrats, threatened by his promise to refashion the party in the image of FDR, schemed to deny the 2020 nomination to their populist frontrunner. Democrats prompted various centrist candidates to drop out and consolidate their support behind Biden, who had been forced out of multiple presidential primaries in the past based on his unfortunate history of public lies and misrepresentations. These machinations to preserve corporate rule in the face of a historic challenge by a Democratic Socialist willing to meet the needs of struggling families paved the path for Donald Trump in both 2016 and again in 2024. As many of us said at the time, Democrats preferred to lose with a moderate dedicated to Wall Street than win with a Socialist dedicated to Main Street.
Congressional Democrats funded Trump’s programs and enabled his first term agenda: After Trump gained the White House in 2016, a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives repeatedly funded his various programs, including his proposed border wall and devastating decision to send federal shock troops into liberal cities in order to suppress protests demanding basic human rights. This particular pattern is especially frustrating to me, and prompted me to run for Congress starting in 2018, only to watch journalists ignore the public complicity of the Speaker of the House while instead emphasizing her acts of political theater and disinformation orchestrated by party loyalists to insulate her corruption.
Slow walking impeachment: Many observers forget that Democrats refused to impeach Trump for most of his first administration. Nancy Pelosi argued that the Clinton impeachment offered a dysfunctional precedent and spent years ignoring calls for impeachment, allowing Trump’s mendacity to continue largely unopposed in Washington while she led Congress and ensured funding for his programs.
Limiting impeachment to exclude Emoluments violations: When Pelosi finally did show up for impeachment, she did so like a boxer throwing a fight. Both of the impeachment processes targeting Trump left the most compelling charges aside, reducing the grounds for impeachment to partisan offenses that never held any promise of swaying Republican votes in the Senate—unlike the consistent public graft that could have mobilized conservative voters to press their Senators. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who helped lead the impeachment effort, has publicly said that he “regrets not pushing harder on impeachment over the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause,” which was blocked at the time by Pelosi, probably because Democrats are no less guilty than Republicans of monetizing their offices to fill their filthy pockets.
Running Kamala on a continuity platform: After Biden finally dropped out and Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party nominee, her campaign consciously and consistently chose to present her to the public as an agent not of change, but rather continuity. She embraced Biden’s record, including his support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. That doomed her efforts from the start, and left her underperforming downballot candidates, as well as progressive ballot measures that passed in even conservative states like Missouri, where I grew up. The theme of change that has driven every election cycle since 1992 has been largely inexorable, but Democrats couldn’t be bothered to observe it or act accordingly.
Will clowns continue commanding the Democratic Party?
Voters have resoundingly rejected the Democratic Party in Washington, handing control of not only the White House, but also the House and Senate, to the GOP.
In a sane world, this might prompt accountability among the officials who have aligned the Party with Wall Street and the Pentagon since the 1990s. But neither today’s Democrats nor the journalists who enable them wield the independence or insight to acknowledge the reality staring them in the face.
Given their recurring complicity with a figure they ironically decry, Democrats deserve neither credibility, nor public support to maintain their positions as the supposed opposition. Defecting from the trash fire of the corporate Democratic Party, and supporting alternative voices dedicated to working Americans and the future we all share, has never been more important than it is today.
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