The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 5
Feb. 3, 2023
This Week:
- Trump’s “flood-the-zone” strategy has Democrats gasping
- Elon Musk’s superpower is the bureaucracy’s weakness
- Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) explains his actions on Hegseth nomination
Outlook
Last week, we called the Democrats “helpless.” As long as everyone is talking about Greenland, let’s add some of the other adjectives from the famous line delivered by Wallace Shawn in “The Princess Bride.” Probably “brainless” would go too far, but “hopeless” seems fair at the moment.
As rapidly as political fortunes can change, Democrats are now at multi-decadal lows when it comes to their party’s favorability rating. A recent poll from the Wall Street Journal had the party with a 36 percent favorable versus 60 percent favorable rating. This 24-point deficit is their worst showing since the Journal started asking the question in 1990. Republicans, meanwhile, break have a minus-5 net favorable, according to the Journal’s poll, better than at any time since at least November 2021.
Quinnipiac confirms a similar result showing Democrats at an all-time low of minus-26 and Republicans at just minus-2. So it isn’t just one fluke poll.
Trump 2.0: For now, Trump also enjoys robust and sustained positive approval ratings, something that had never happened before in his political career. He is certainly in a honeymoon period, though, and it must be noted that this could change.
Democrats’ best hope at this point is probably that Trump overdoes it on the deportations or in some other way upsets the sensibilities of normal, non-hyper-political people. But this is naive. After four years of Biden, a Democracy Institute poll finds that the public is very much in favor of Trump’s immigration agenda.
For example, in 2017, most people treated Trump’s wall as some kind of a joke. This time, the public favors building it by a margin of 30 points. By almost the same margin (27 points) voters want to see deportations. And a smaller majority (7 points) wants to end birthright citizenship.
Perhaps this will not last, but Trump is doing something successfully right now that he tried and failed at in his first administration. Two weeks in, he is “flooding the zone” with success, moving on so many fronts so quickly that despondent Democrats have no way of keeping up. And unlike in his first-term administration, there are no leaks in this ship disrupting or delaying his efforts.
As ICE ramps up its deportations of thousands of criminals (and wisely publicizes their names and crimes), Trump is attacking birthright citizenship, abolishing USAID (or at least trying), firing dozens of senior officials at the Justice Department and the FBI, firing inspectors general supposedly loyal to Biden, dismantling nodes of resistance within the bureaucracy and the intelligence community, pardoning the rioters, rescinding deep-staters’ security clearances, shutting down DEI contracts, putting DEI administrators on leave, and — this one is truly innovative — offering an aggressive, generous buy-out for government employees, who will have the option of collecting their pay through September 30 if they resign by this Thursday. Either that, or they can start coming in to the office for work.
This last item is clearly an attrition strategy, which the administration hopes will induce up to 5 or 6 percent of federal workers to leave. It remains unclear whether Trump intends to reduce the size of the workforce, replace the bureaucrats with loyalists, or (most likely) some of both. He is trying to fix the bureaucracy for the long term, so that he and (he hopes) his Republican successor will face less resistance from within in enacting lawful policies. If he were to succeed, this would be an accomplishment far above and beyond anything Ronald Reagan did in office.
Flood the zone: This is the very opposite of a risk-averse approach. Trump has fully dived in this time, and for this we can probably thank the influence of Elon Musk. This is no minor effort, but a full-court press to defeat the bureaucracy in a way conservatives have always wanted to but never figured out how. Musk and his tireless team at DOGE, rooting through government grants and spending, may have identified the bureaucracy’s key weakness. To paraphrase him, they are willing to work no more than 40 hours a week, whereas his team works 120. The bureaucrats can’t obstruct you if they are at home drinking a glass of red wine and watching Netflix.
Meanwhile, Trump has a very capable and intelligent vice president in JD Vance, whom he has deployed to one network after another to sit for interviews and push back against Democrats’ criticisms. Among other things, this insulates Trump somewhat from situations where he will start a new controversy by going off the cuff. He has not hesitated to interact with reporters, but he is wise to use Vance as a public advocate because he is much harder to mischaracterize.
All of this administration’s furious multi-tasking has so far kept not only bureaucrats but also Democrats in a state of total disarray. They can engage only one battle at a time, but there are ten others they cannot even follow, let alone fight. They are fighting multiple far-flung battles, and the time they reach the castle walls — if they ever do — they will be exhausted.
In an environment less dense with activity, Trump’s clumsy DEI comments after last week’s tragic plane crash over the Potomac might have caused him a lot more grief. His January 6 pardons — by far his least popular act in office so far — would have caused much more blowback. His nominees would be facing more opposition. His tariffs (supposedly taking effect tomorrow) would be causing much more outrage. His public sparring with foreign presidents would be more controversial, and he would probably also be taking more criticism from the Right for failing to end the conflict in Ukraine more quickly.
Democratic Meeting: But Trump’s “Blitzkrieg,” as one Democratic critic called it, is simply overwhelming a party and a far-left ideological movement in full retreat.
Anxious and still licking their wounds, Democrats chose a party chairman and vice chairman at their meeting over the weekend. How did it go? Well, as the Wall Street Journal’s Molly Ball put it, not great:
“[A]s the would-be leaders bickered over party mechanics, the very pathologies that many critics argue have alienated Democrats from the American heartland were on display: a party captive to leftist activists, obsessed with divisive litmus tests, out of touch with regular people’s concerns and in thrall to a patronizing identity politics that alienates many of the very minorities it is meant to attract.”
The whole thing began with a land acknowledgment, then proceeded to a lengthy explanation of how many gender-nonbinary officeholders have to be elected to party offices in order to comply with party rules.
At no point did the leadership candidates acknowledge that they lost the 2024 election by a lot more than anyone expected (we were among the very few to predict a popular-vote victory for Trump) because, above and beyond any messaging problems, they had a poor candidate and a poor track-record of governing. For today’s Democrats, it is always about sexism and racism and the media failing to amplify their message sufficiently about how great Joe Biden was doing, and how Trump is a fascist, et cetera. It can never be their fault, or the fault of their ideas.
But when it comes down to it, this was never a messaging problem. No one looks to the media to see how their personal life is going. As one conservative writer put it before the election:
“There’s no lie that can make your neighborhood safer. There’s no rhetorical trick that can make that bag of groceries bigger or that tank of gas cheaper. There is therefore no magic trick that can make four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris seem like an argument in her favor.”
At no point did the consensus in the Democratic meeting come to grips with this problem — with just how much their party and its modern version of hyper-political-correctness has radicalized the public against them.
Ironically, for all of the focus in this meeting on DEI and identity politics, they still elected two white men to the top party positions. The choice of Ken Martin over the establishment choice backed by Nancy Pelosi and most other Democratic office-holders, was probably one of the less bad choices they could have made. The choice of anti-gun activist David Hogg as vice-chairman, however, really solidifies the impression of a party that is not trying to expand its base. As he himself put it a couple of years ago, “I’m one of the most politically toxic people in the country and I’m too radical for American politics… We have enough straight white men in power.” That last bit, especially, says it all.
Senate 2026
Michigan: With Sen. Gary Peters’ (D) surprise announcement that he will retire at the end of his term, it now appears that former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) will not be running for governor of his newly adopted state but for Senate — or at least he is considering it. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) is not considering it, perhaps having an eye toward 2028 instead.
On the Republican side, former House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R), who only narrowly lost the 2024 Senate race, seems eager to try again. There are at least a dozen other possible candidates, though, some of whom might favor entering the race for governor instead.
North Carolina: In what is easily the Republicans’ toughest seat to defend, the predicament of Sen. Thom Tillis (R) deepens. Some criticized what they called an underhanded effort by Tillis to prevent Pete Hegseth’s confirmation as defense secretary.
Tillis, for his part, offered an explanation of his actions in an interview with Fox Digital, stating that the reporting has been inaccurate. He says that he always believed and said behind closed doors that the hearsay testimony of abuse by Hegseth’s liberal Democratic ex-sister-in-law was not enough on its own and would have to be corroborated before other Republican senators would believe it.
Hegseth’s ex-wife, the alleged victim, had denied that the allegations were true, and Hegseth’s nomination squeaked through with Vice President Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
There is a chance Tillis will face a formidable primary challenge for re-election next year. It will not come from failed 2024 gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson, who has sworn off politics for good after his humiliating defeat.
House 2026
New York-21: New York Democrats, those great defenders of democracy, are plotting a law change that would leave Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R) House seat vacant after her confirmation as UN ambassador — possibly until November. Under current law, the election would occur in May at the latest. House Republicans’ narrow majority heightens the urgency of filling this seat, which is precisely why Democrats want it to sit empty.
