Democrats may have finally learned Steve Bannon’s favorite strategy: “Flood the zone”.
With Donald Trump’s presidency reaching its 100th day and the US president plummeting in approval polling on issues that have historically been his strongest areas with voters, the broader left and a wide coalition of groups are coming together to capitalize on a groundswell of discontent caused by the administration’s slash-and-burn tactics.
And there’s little sign that anyone is heeding the grumbling complaint-warnings held by centrist Democrats and spoken either directly or laundered through friendly media outlets to avoid the “distraction” of so-called “woke” issues (immigration, transgender rights, mass incarceration, etc.) in favor of “kitchen table talk” and reclaiming the narrative on the economy.
Instead, the party’s backbenchers and even some members of leadership are embracing a strategy laid out (but hardly invented) by Illinois Governor JB Pritzker over the weekend. Pritzker, widely considered to be a potential 2028 presidential contender, made an appearance at a local Democratic Party event in New Hampshire on Saturday and laid out his vision for Resistance 2.0.
“It’s time to fight, everywhere, all at once,” he told Democrats in Manchester. “Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.”
Over Tuesday and Wednesday, Democratic activists and some of their allies on Capitol Hill lived up to that aspiration.
Morning rush hour traffic was even more chaotic than usual in the nation’s capital on Wednesday, thanks to crowds of demonstrators who began marching in the streets (with police protection) around 7:45 a.m. A large banner representing the Constitution was unfurled as protesters marched down Massachusetts Ave. describing the administration as a “fascist occupation” and calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil and other detained student activists on green cards (legal residency).
Though police escorts directed traffic and kept disruptions to a minimum, The Independent witnessed one unlucky driver rear-ending an officer’s squad car just as the group was heading out, presumably distracted by the displays. The driver, a man appearing to be in his 30s, did not seem injured.
Organizers who spoke to The Independent said that the groups held more than a dozen intersections across the city during rush hour, and persisted for several hours. A handful were arrested at the intersection of 14th and Constitution after locking down the intersection for around a half hour and refusing police commands to move on.
At the State Department early Tuesday evening, a crowd of Democratic lawmakers shouted through loudspeakers to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a former senator. Denouncing their former colleague as a hypocrite, they urged him to step down or acknowledge the constitutional due process rights of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Vermont green card holder and legal resident of the US for a decade who was arrested and jailed after being lured to what he thought was an interview as part of the legal process to obtain full citizenship. He has not been charged with or accused of a crime.
“Does it matter to come out on the streets? Does it matter to protest? Absolutely, this administration needs to know that we are watching very carefully what they are doing, that we care about our rights,” Rep. Becca Balint, a Vermont congresswoman and the organizer of Tuesday’s rally, told attendees. Other speakers included Senator Chris Van Hollen, who flew to El Salvador to meet with a Maryland man deported against a judge’s order earlier in April, as well as other progressives — Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Rep. Maxwell Frost, Rep. Nydia Velazquez and Rep. Maxine Dexter.
Balint told The Independent after the rally that she expects the administration to proceed further with retaliation against judges and other members of the legal system who oppose or otherwise hold up the president’s deportation orders if Americans are not vocal about such actions being unacceptable. She added that her party had work to do as well to reach voters and meet the urgency of the moment.
“[W]hat I want to see from my colleagues, and I'm already seeing a lot of that – I want to see more of people being unafraid to speak directly to the American people about what's happening,” Balint added. “We need to get better both at listening deeply to what the concerns are of of our [voters], you know, regardless of what district you're in. But also, we need to be better at about articulating why something is important. And it sometimes takes throwing some elbows, throwing some punches.”
Even Hakeem Jeffries, the party’s minority leader in the House of Representatives, joined Senator Cory Booker in a sit-down chat with passerby on the steps of the Capitol on Sunday, as he and others reforge ties with their base. Their talk, billed as a sit-in, attracted a crowd of at least a hundred people.
Booker, who recently set a record in the Senate with a 25-hour speech denouncing the Trump administration, was celebrating his birthday Sunday as he arrived for the sit-in around 6am.
“We can’t keep doing things like business as usual,” he said.
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