The media is misrepresenting the Democrats and their opposition to Donald Trump

| 1:50 pm EDT September 4, 2017
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Every day, you hear yet another political journalist or pundit say it: the Democrats must decide what they stand for, and they can’t simply be anti-Donald Trump, if they want to get back into power. To those who haven’t been paying attention, it sounds reasonable. But the reality is that this is not how things have been playing out at all, and the media knows it.

President Obama and the Democrats used their time in power to focus on a number of core issues. They worked to reform health care, reform immigration, and reform the financial sector. As is typically the case even with smart and well intentioned politicians in our oppositional system of government, their legacy on these issues is a mixed bag. They simply made incremental progress. But they clearly defined which issues they cared about. Then came Donald Trump.

Thus far Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have decided that they don’t stand for anything, beyond being firmly against anything that President Obama accomplished. They tried (and mercifully failed) to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with something far worse. They’ve rolled back every meaningful financial regulation that the Democrats put in place to try to prevent another Bush-era economic crash. Now Trump is trying to end immigration as we know it. Of course the Democrats are standing in opposition to Trump on all of these issues; these are their issues.

The media is correct in the sense that the Democrats can’t afford to come across as taking positions in opposition to Donald Trump simply because they don’t like him. Then again, come to think of it, the Republicans have managed to seize power by doing precisely that to Obama. But the upshot is this: the Democrats have spent the past decade clearly defining which issues they consider important and where they stand on those issues. It’s Trump and the Republicans who haven’t stood for anything at all, beyond giving the finger to the progress made by the Democrats. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.