Whether or not they vote to shut down the government today, Democrats have proven one thing: They are really bad at messaging.
Laying out their political narrative on funding the government should have begun on Jan. 3, when this session of Congress began. Instead, as of lunch time on Wednesday, the party was still trying to puzzle out what it’s going to say.
That’s just not the way to do it. Democrats need to have a consistent, effective message that everyone can understand. This shouldn’t be that hard. In the Trump administration, they’ve been given the fattest, juiciest target in American political history.
As a general rule, I’m not a big fan of populism. But it is certainly one way to build a message, and it seems to be the way Democrats will be heading. Populism, however, has to be popular. Old-school leftist populism tends not to be, especially if the idea is to peel away President Trump’s voters.
So let’s try something different: centrist populism.
The message should start with the fact that Trump is taking us for a ride. He ran on a promise to make prices go down quickly. He ran on a promise to stand up for regular people. He’s not doing any of that.
Trump talks a lot about tariffs and slashing government. But the only thing he has to say about rising prices is that they’re going to go up because of tariffs — and he’s “OK with that.”
Trump claims he’s going to make America richer, but he’s not talking about our America. He’s talking about his America — the America of billionaires and the 0.1 percent.
Unfortunately, Trump is now all about billionaires. He’s even willing to let Russian oligarchs, some of the most corrupt people on earth, into our country while he throws out hard-working Ukrainians who came to America because Vladimir Putin bombed their homes. He has appointed 13 genuine billionaires to the government so far, plus who knows how many people who are worth “only” a few hundred million.
That’s not a government for the little guy.
We need to make sure the citizenry knows the people Trump has appointed aren’t interested in our problems. These are people who own private islands. They aren’t worried about the price of eggs. Just Trump’s Cabinet is worth $11 billion — and that obviously doesn’t include mega-billionaire and Trump sidekick Elon Musk.
It’s easy to tell people that the American dream isn’t about “cheap goods,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week, when you’re worth $500 million and don’t have to care about the price of groceries.
Trump and his Cabinet want to turn the clock back to the 1890s — the Gilded Age — when America was rich and had high tariffs. But don’t forget, America also had child labor, a 60-hour work week, robber barons and monopolies.
Tariffs don’t help ordinary people. They help people who are already rich. How does a 25 percent tariff on aluminum help the Average Joe? Is he going to be building an aluminum smelter? Probably not. But those tariffs on aluminum cans are making beer more expensive and putting local craft brewers out of business.
Trump is not being straight with us when he claims he’s firing federal workers to cut the deficit. If Trump fired every single federal employee — every air-traffic controller, every park ranger, every FBI agent — he would save about $110 billion a year. That would cut the annual federal budget deficit by just 6 percent.
So firing government employees isn’t really about saving money. There’s another reason: It’s because the American government looks out for people like us, not for billionaires. People who work at federal agencies like the EPA and OSHA make sure the president’s billionaire backers play by the rules. And they hate that.
Clean air isn’t communism. Workplace safety isn’t “woke.”
The president’s billionaires want to be the new robber barons who have the power to run the country. They want an America where Elon Musk will decide what you can say, Mark Zuckerberg will decide what you can read, and Jeff Bezos will decide what you can buy.
That’s not what any of us voted for.
It’s important that this message does not point the finger at Trump voters, nagging about why they were wrong. It’s about alerting them to Trump’s bait-and-switch. Even the most ardent MAGA voter isn’t in favor of having billionaires run everything. They thought that’s what they were voting against.
Everything in this message is as mainstream American as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” There’s no mention of culture war issues or raising taxes. It’s about pocketbook issues that affect every voter. Moreover, it’s a message that can’t be spun. If inflation is rising, not even FOX can convince people that prices are going down instead of up.
Finally, in order to make this work, every Democrat needs to repeat this message, over and over and over again. The power of repetition is real. Trump himself is a master at it. He’s able to convince even his enemies of things that aren’t true. Everybody in the country knows about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Everybody in the country should know that Trump lets Musk ignore conflict of interest rules.
Assuming the laws of economics have not been repealed, the wheels are going to come off Trump’s economy sooner rather than later. Assuming the laws of politics have not been repealed, Trump will try to find a way to blame Democrats when they do.
And if Democrats don’t have better messaging than they do today, he’ll probably succeed.
Chris Truax is an appellate attorney who served as Southern California chair for John McCain’s primary campaign in 2008.
