The only thing the parties can agree on is that Donald Trump is the central issue of our time.
Let's start with a recent headline: “It's 2025 and Democrats are still running against Trump.”
“After a year of soul-searching and introspection by Democrats about what they should stand for after losing the White House and Senate in 2024,” Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times writes, “the party is largely uniting behind the same message that has united it for the last decade: stop Donald J. Trump.”
Now, I confess I missed a lot of the soul-searching and introspection among Democrats, but I remember a very different search that occurred two decades ago: the search for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.
While you might think I'm looking for some weird metaphor comparing President Trump to a weapon of mass destruction, that's not my point.
For those too young to remember, George W. Bush's administration focused on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program as the main – some would say the only – justification for overthrowing the Iraqi dictator.
This became more controversial after US forces failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration and others said were there. For war opponents, this became the refrain that Bush had “lied to the United States in the war.”
This was always unfair. Then-Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz, in a now-forgotten but once highly controversial speech interview with Vanity Fair, explained why the administration focused on weapons of mass destruction. “[W]We decided on one issue, weapons of mass destruction,” Wolfowitz said, “because it was the only reason everyone could agree on.”
It may seem far-fetched, probably because it is, but the parallel came to mind because Trump plays a similar dynamic within the Democratic Party.
Some segments of the party, epitomized by Senator Bernie Sanders and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, are flirting with socialism or social democracy. Others They are trying to forge a more centrist lane, Bill Clinton style. Some hate Israel. Others defend him. Some want to open the government. Others want to maintain closure. Some support the so-called “abundance agenda,” which seeks to curb government bureaucracy and activist-driven NIMBYism, while others oppose it as a rollback of hard-won environmental and labor protections.
But there's one thing everyone can agree on: They don't like Trump.
There are other reasons to focus on the president. “I worry that Donald Trump is like crack cocaine for our party,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told The Times. “Trump is very seductive because when you run an ad that is anti-Trump, you get a lot of contributions of small amounts and a lot of activists say, 'Good job!'”
Lake and other Democrats worry that focusing so much on Trump is distracting the party from crafting a more positive agenda. They are right. Democrats are almost as unpopular how they have done it ever state. This is partly because hardliners are angry at their own party for not being tougher in their “resistance” to Trump (hence the shutdown). Other Democrats believe the party is too leftist and are simply abandoning it.
For example, in the last five yearsNearly twice as many Pennsylvania Democrats changed their registration to the Republican Party as the other way around. It should come as no surprise that opposition to Trump unifies Democrats who have not defected to the Republican Party.
Democrats hope that in the short term opposition to Trump will be enough to win the upcoming gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and, perhaps, the upcoming midterm elections.
After all, Trump is also unpopular. His overall approval rating is only 37%, according to the latest AP-NORC survey. He Economist He has it with 40% approval of his second term, with 55% disapproval. Americans give him low marks on the economy and, now, on immigration as well.
Still, there is little reason to expect a “blue wave” in next year's midterm elections. During the same period of his first term, Democrats had a 9-point lead on the generic congressional ballot. Now it is 1.6 points.. A lot depends on where the economy will be a year from now.
However, Trump is not just a unifying issue for Democrats. It's also a unifying issue for Republicans, which is one reason why more people than ever identify as independent. Increasingly, calling yourself a Republican means being a Trump supporter for the same reason that calling yourself a Democrat means being a Trump opponent: It's the only thing the Republican Party can agree on.
What this means for the future is unclear, except for one thing: Once Trump is no longer president, or even once he is an outgoing duck, both parties are going to have a big fight trying to figure out what they stand for.
UNKNOWN: @JonahDispatch
