Weekend Jolt: What’s Next for Democrats?

WITH AUDREY FAHLBERG

May 31 2025

Dear Weekend Jolter,

Audrey Fahlberg here, filling in for Judd this week. With Congress out, much of the chatter in Washington this week revolved around President Donald Trump's evolving stance toward Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk's departure from DOGE, and the latest judicial blow to the White House's trade agenda.

But even as the courts continue to present significant legal challenges to Trump's second-term agenda and congressional Republicans remain divided over many aspects in this year's "big, beautiful" reconciliation bill, our writers believe that Democrats seem astonishingly incapable of capitalizing on their adversaries' political pitfalls.

Well beyond Democrats’ closed-door conversations about Biden's cognitive decline, revealed in excruciating detail by the new book Original Sin book tour and by the recently released Robert Hur interview audio, endemic problems remain in Democratic circles about recovering from their bruising 2024 presidential election loss. In Jeffrey Blehar's view, things are looking rough for the out-of-power party:

As strange and objectionable, in many ways, as Donald Trump's second term has been, as middlingly unpopular as it now stands — with Trump's approval ratings currently sitting within his historical average, neither positive nor overwhelmingly negative — the Democratic Party is in far worse shape. The numbers don't lie. Democrats are held in contempt by the nation at large: a recent CNN poll has their approval rating at a historic low of 29 percent. No easy fix beckons, and things may in fact get worse for them before they get better.

For the Democratic Party is being pulled apart by horses: On one hand, the party is increasingly held in contempt by once reliable voter demographics (Hispanics, African Americans, working-class men) as out-of-touch elitists taking orders from the Ivy League and the progressive ultra-left. On the other hand — and just as relevantly — the party is crippled from within by that same hard-left faction, which has held the ideological whip-hand over Democrats' social agenda for a decade now.

As I reported for the site this week, Democrats have spent recent weeks panning the GOP's House-passed reconciliation bill as a nasty effort to slash and burn Medicaid to offset tax cuts for Republicans' billionaire friends. This may end up serving as a helpful short-term strategy to project a unified front in the face of their inability to settle on a coherent message about what their party is for heading into the 2026 midterm cycle.

Rich Lowry thinks the left's problem is Donald Trump-centric. He believes that the woke liberals will "never recover" from Trump because they "won't again be able to replicate the frenzy we saw in the wake of George Floyd's death, or again get the same kind of buy-in from people and institutions across America for radical cultural change." He writes:

The populist Republican wasn't the only factor in turning the page, but he was a decisive one, both as a symbol of relative cultural normality and as an instrument to wield federal power to blunt the left's advances and prevent them from recurring.

This doesn't mean that Democrats won't win again — they will, and perhaps as soon as next year's midterms.

Things might not feel so great for the right when it is defending Trump during his third impeachment in 2027, yet there will be no taking us back to the years of peak woke.

Democrats may make inroads against Trump's economic policy, his executive overreach, or his crypto schemes. They aren't, however, going to recover by fighting it out on the issues of gender fluidity or systemic racism…

… Trump's executive orders and funding decisions can eventually be reversed, but re-radicalizing every institution in America will be difficult for any future Democratic president.

Michael Brendan Dougherty dissents from this view. He's convinced Senate Republicans will help Democrats find their footing:

I'm watching the way the Senate is approaching the big beautiful bill — they are taking Republicans back to 2012. Ron Johnson wants even bigger tax cuts (deficit spending). Rand Paul wants to cut out the populist agenda items, like funding for the wall, maybe more cuts to Medicaid. And Lindsey Graham seems to want to increase the House's bid on funding for Ukraine. This big beautiful bill is about to become a repudiation of Trump.

Turning the GOP back into a party that is easily caricatured as being primarily concerned about lowering taxes on the highest earners while piling up debt for future generations, and doubling down on conflicts that have no strategy, is a great way to divide and destroy the large conservative-populist anti-woke coalition. It invites back into power a party that has only regretted, not repudiated or repented of, its obnoxious social agenda.

Jeff is also unsure about Rich's thesis, arguing that "history is far more contingent than that, and to believe that the left's power has been broken by the zeitgeist of Trump is perhaps to mistake a dormant ideology for a defeated one." But, he concedes, "there is no doubt that the Democrats are at a historic low point in terms of cohesion and future viability, even as Trump's wild (and often inexcusable) behavior in office leaves them such a vast opening. I close with a traditional toast, and wish confusion upon my enemies."

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

On the Trump administration's Middle East foreign policy: On Iran and Gaza, Trump Should Avoid the Mistakes of Obama and Biden

Tim Cook Gets a Trump threat: Trump's Ominous Threat to Apple

On Memorial Day: The Loved, and Lost

ARTICLES

Noah Rothman: The United Nations Is on Hamas's Side

Rich Lowry: Golden Dome and Its Enemies

Michael Brendan Dougherty: Charlotte and the Ghost of Pope Francis

Andrew McCarthy: Mr. President, Putin Is Not Your Friend. He Is America's Enemy

Jim Geraghty: New York City Is About to Make a Terrible Mistake

Jim Geraghty: The New 'Make America Healthy Again' Report Is Filled with Artificial Ingredients

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Don't Let Planned Parenthood's Lies Hit You on Their Way Out

Dan McLaughlin: Big and Beautiful: The House Defunds Planned Parenthood

Dan McLaughlin: There's No First Amendment Right to Government Money for NPR

Jack Butler: The Upside of Gerontocracy

Haley Strack: San Francisco Backtracks on 'Equity' Grading Program after Backlash

Jimmy Quinn: U.S. to 'Aggressively' Revoke Chinese Student Visas, in Bid to Rebalance China Relationship

James Lynch: New Paper Debunks Popular Claim That Abortion Drugs Are Safer Than Tylenol

CAPITAL MATTERS

Dominic Pino on the law firms that are challenging Trump on executive overreach and winning: Thank Goodness for Libertarian Law Firms

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Check out Armond White's Review of The Phoenician Scheme: Wes Anderson Shows How the World Works

Brian T. Allen argues that when it comes to colleges and universities, the government "ought to be using carrots as well as cudgels and cleavers to put them right." : Elite and Effete Universities Get Their Comeuppance

EXCERPTS YOU SHOULDN'T MISS

The Court of International Trade presents a major legal barrier to Trump's second-term trade agenda. Andrew McCarthy read the court's opinion so you don't have to. And the Editors give us a fresh reminder that tariff power belongs with Congress:

The Founders rebelled against taxation without representation; they did not mean for the executive to control the duties on all imports by daily whim.

It is Congress that was granted power by the Constitution to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations," and for good reason. It is Congress that can set policies that are stable and predictable for business, our allies, and our adversaries. The representative branch's policymaking may not be pretty, but it includes the greatest number of people in the most deliberative fashion in balancing competing policy concerns and getting buy-in from people likely to face the voters again soon. That's how we have always set tax policy, and tariffs are nothing if not taxes.

Earlier this week, Trump finally came to the conclusion that Putin "has gone absolutely crazy." Read Noah's take:

It does now seem like the president is slowly backing away from his efforts to coax and flatter Putin into giving up on his territorial ambitions in Europe. Earlier this month, the Trump White House lifted a hold on the sale of weapons to Ukraine. This week, the U.S. and its European partners lifted the "range restrictions" on Western-provided missiles fired on Russian targets inside the Federation. If the president moves forward with new sanctions on Russia, we may soon recapitulate something resembling a coherent policy of opposition to Moscow's expansionist war.

And yet the losses America's partners in Europe sustained as a result of this ill-conceived diplomatic offensive are real. They detract from the leverage Ukraine and its allies might have brought to the negotiating table. If Trump's goal was to force Ukraine into a disadvantageous cease-fire, that strategy has been a failure. If his objective was to appease Moscow into submission, that failed, too. The strategy Trump and his brain trust pursued in the first few months of the president's second term has come up short. Trump needs either a new strategy or a new brain trust. Perhaps both.

And here's Jim's:

It's good of Trump to notice this; the war is only in its fourth year. How can Trump possibly be very surprised that Putin's forces are bombing civilians?

You figure one of the great benefits of being president is having the world's most extensive intelligence network at your fingertips — never mind the resources of our allies, the "Five Eyes," etc. Just about anything in the world you want to know, they can either find out or try to figure out. The U.S. intelligence community isn't perfect and makes its share of misjudgments. What it gets wrong (Iraqi WMDs, not foreseeing the 9/11 or 10/7 attacks) usually turns into front-page news; what it gets right (hopefully) stays secret. But the U.S. government spends about $100 billion per year on intelligence-gathering. Getting our lawmakers the best possible information to make the best possible decisions is an enormous priority of our government, and there are signs that Trump just isn't that interested in using that resource.

CODA

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend. Judd will be back in your inboxes in June.