Democrat resistance to Donald Trump is collapsing. They’ve finally realised they’ve lost

A celebratory rally for Donald Trump in Florida
A celebratory rally for Donald Trump in Florida. The president’s success has begun to sink in for Democrats - AP Photo/Alex Brandon

It’s difficult to give up on one’s dreams, no matter how destructive they turn out to be. But after Donald Trump’s triumph in the 2024 election, some Democrats are finally coming to terms with the fact that they will never win some sort of final, dramatic victory over him that sees the former and future president permanently vanquished.

Every incoming president must contend with an intransigent opposition party unwilling to grant him even the smallest of successes. Vast ideological differences, as well as the concentration of power in the executive branch, have raised the stakes too high for collegiality, much less bipartisanship.

Yet the headwinds Trump faced from the moment he took the oath of office back in 2017 were of a different character. The progressive blob that makes up much of Washington, DC didn’t just push back on his agenda, it declared total war on the man himself.

Activists christened themselves “The Resistance”, as though they were an occupied people under the thumb of a foreign conqueror. Progressives sounded the alarm about Russian collusion and kompromat that they never had any evidence of. The media flooded the zone with negative – and often misleading – coverage of Trump.

The effort to destroy Trump extended past his first term in office, when several rounds of criminal charges were brought against him, unwittingly reuniting the Republican Party around the now president-elect at his most vulnerable hour.

Trump’s return to the White House, though, has shattered the illusions of the less delusional wing of the Democratic Party.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, for example, has expressed not only his willingness, but his excitement to confirm Elise Stefanik as the next US ambassador to the United Nations. After having denounced the international body’s “rank, pervasive anti-Semitism,” Fetterman said that he was looking forward to voting for her.

John Fetterman
John Fetterman is among Democrats who have signalled they rare willing to have a constructive relationship with Donald Trump - Reuters/Quinn Glabicki

Similarly, Fetterman has called Senator Marco Rubio a “strong choice” and a “serious, qualified” individual. He’s even expressed a willingness to confirm his former opponent, Dr Mehmet Oz, to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

More dramatically, perhaps, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough – two of Trump’s harshest critics for the better part of a decade – kicked off Monday’s edition of Morning Joe by announcing that they had met with the president-elect over the weekend and agreed to “restart communications”.

“Joe and I realised it’s time to do something different and that starts with, not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him,” said Brzezinski.

“Somebody close to Donald Trump told me this past weekend, this is a president who is not seeking re-election, so maybe, just maybe now could be time for both parties to get to work,” added Scarborough. “I will tell you a lot of Democratic leaders we have talked to this past week since the election have told Mika and me, it’s time for a new approach.”

Of course, not all of Trump’s opponents agree with this assessment. Scarborough and Brzezinski’s colleague Katie Phang reacted to the Morning Joe segment by declaring that “Normalising Trump is a bad idea. Period.” Democratic governors JB Pritzker and Jared Polis have already formed a resistance coalition under the haughty banner of “Governors Safeguarding Democracy”. And opportunistic operatives like The Lincoln Project’s co-founder Rick Wilson are already hard at work constructing the track for their new anti-Trump gravy trains.

Collectively, Democrats now face a choice between the path of virtue-signalling, capital-R resistance championed by the hysterics and the more thoughtful, strategic form of opposition touted by the pragmatists.

Four more years of strife on the scale that the country saw between 2017 and 2020 would take a potentially irreversible toll on American political culture. Moreover, there’s little proof that histrionics redound to Democrats’ benefit. After all, Kamala Harris and her allies spent the final month of the campaign denouncing Trump as a fascist only to suffer the most embarrassing defeat for a Democratic standard bearer since 1984.

Indeed, if they had any sense at all, they would pursue the course modelled by Fetterman.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean they should feel obliged to acquiesce to the president-elect’s every whim or offer him undue praise. But it does mean acknowledging when he’s right and avoiding alarmism.

The American Left was just rejected by the electorate because of its excesses. If its leaders have any hope of regaining the trust of the public, they’ll have to finally accept that most voters chose to empower Trump.