It might have been when several dozen Democrats walked into Donald Trump’s Tuesday congressional address wearing coordinated shades of bubblegum, but it was definitely by the time that several dozen Democrats started waving ping-pong-sized paddles in the House chamber that I started to really worry about the resistance.
Do something! approximately half of America had been begging these representatives.
Do anything! we have cried. Democratic legislators had six weeks, after all, to strategize a strong, coherent rebuttal to the early days of Trump’s chaotic second term.
You have a plan to save our republic, do you not?
As it happens, they did. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-New Mexico), had
told Time magazine earlier Tuesday. That opposition plan was: wear pink.
The color signaled “our protest of Trump’s policies which are negatively impacting women and families,” Leger Fernandez, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, had said. Great idea. I, too, would like to protest those policies. But if this is the revved-up version of the opposition, was the previous version just … the hooptie sitting on blocks on your neighbor’s front lawn? A Schwinn?
Shortly after Trump began speaking, Democratic lawmakers began producing paddles emblazoned with tidy phrases such as “Save Medicaid,” or “Musk steals,” or, simply, “False.”
One presumes that the paddles, which members held up discreetly at sporadic intervals through the address, were intended to be pointed but also somber. But the overall effect of the whole scene was, “On our way
to Barbenheimer, we were kidnapped by Sotheby’s and forced to bid on our dignity.”
These props — along with the shirts reading “RESIST” worn by some members — were simultaneously too perfunctory and too earnest. Earnest doesn’t register with this White House, where Elon Musk showed up to a Cabinet meeting in a “Tech Support” T-shirt and Dark Maga ball cap, as if he’d pwned USAID for the lulz.
All of this illustrates a bigger conundrum than exists in the House chamber. What
is the best way to be an effective voice of protest in this era? In recent years, liberals have tried Minnesota nice, coconut trees, going high, going low, going “weird,” being heartfelt, being snarky, marching, pleading, mocking, understanding, using facts, using pathos, and here we are again, like it’s 2016 and some hardworking activists are wondering if we can turn this thing around via pussyhats.
By now, we’re not really talking about fashion. We’re talking about the real issue, which, of course, is that the spectacle of the address actually did deliver a coherent message. The Democratic message, whether accurate or not, was:
We do not know what to do.
The president of the United States is up there
repeating falsehoods about Social Security fraud, and nobody can make him stop. There is a dude in the back of the room whom nobody elected but who is dismantling the federal workforce with the help of a 19-year-old once allegedly known online as “Big Balls,” and it’s just going to continue apace. We are somehow on the precipice of becoming enemies with
Canada, and maybe someone can wear maple leaves at Trump’s next public address.
The guardrails of our democracy were not built to handle a president like Trump, convicted in court, elected in polling stations. The protocols of human decency are similarly ill-equipped. The protest tools commonly available to lawmakers in a State of the Union setting have typically been limited to refusing to smile, or choosing not to applaud. Remember back in 2020 when Nancy Pelosi
primly ripped her copy of Trump’s State of the Union address in half, and
that was seen as shocking? In that era, a color-coordinated pink campaign might have seemed meaningful. I don’t think we’re in that era anymore.
As Trump’s speech continued, Democratic protests escalated, and it felt to me as though we were watching the resistance try to sort itself out in real time. Is an effective strategy one that stays within boundaries of civility, but then gets shouted down by a president who knows nothing of these boundaries? One that gets angry, but then risks of losing the upper hand of looking like the adults in the room? One that taunts (as Rep.
Jasmine Crockett of Texas did when she left the chamber and let loose with some truly artful expletives)? One that reasons (as Sen.
Elissa Slotkin did, when she used her rebuttal to paint herself as a solid Michigander)?
At one point Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), rose to his feet and, calling out a defense of Medicaid, refused to be seated. He was eventually escorted from the floor at the direction of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) His protest was polarizing — I had one friend texting that it was a terrible move while another simultaneously texted that every Democrat in the building should follow suit — but whatever you thought of it, it met Trump’s vitriolic speech with forceful behavior of its own.
Later in the speech, a cohort of Democratic lawmakers walked out of the chamber of their own accord. And again, you or I might have wondered whether this was the right move. But we might also recognize that this might not have been done for anyone watching television in real time. It was an act for the history books, meant to signal extraordinary dissent in extraordinary times.
These are extraordinary times, and we need an extraordinary, lawful resistance.
The impression that you want of your elected officials in times like this is that they know better than you. They have a serious plan for all of this. They are on the phone with one another at all hours of the night trying to figure out how to preserve this country’s rights, freedoms and rule of law. The impression you do not want is that they are on the phone with one another trying to figure out who can loan them a magenta blazer.
Nearly every person I talked to about the address — mostly liberals, I’d wager, at drop-off lines and in text chains — told me they’d cringed through Tuesday night’s address. Because Trump was up there bloviating, and because Democrats seemed to have to so little recourse. Because it wasn’t clear whether the issue was that Democrats were trying the wrong things, or, scarier, that there was actually nothing left to try.
