Queen for a Day: Gretchen Whitmer's Oval Office Surrender

Democrats' Fatal Attraction to Power Drives a Party in Collapse

Elizabeth Warren politely destroying Michael Bloomberg

Massachusetts Senator and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pioneer Elizabeth Warren failed miserably in her 2020 campaign for President, but not before decapitating billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg live on national TV. Warren savaged Bloomberg on his company’s pattern of pressuring women into nondisclosure agreements for sexual harassment and gender discrimination, a rare technical knockout awarded in the midst of a Democratic party primary debate.

Donald Trump said, “hold my beer.”

With COVID-19 surging and a vaccine nearly a year away, four months later Trump was leading superspreader rally after superspreader rally, famously killing Herman Cain and countless other everyday American supporters of the MAGA cult leader. On June 11, 2020 news broke that Trump was requiring event attendees to sign liability waivers for the possibility of contracting the deadly virus from his campaign.

In 2020 the abuse of power was still something the Democratic party had some aversion to; but by then it had become the defining gravitational core of the new Trump Republican party. Ten years into Trump’s warping of Washington, I fear the Democratic establishment has learned the wrong lessons from its arch-nemesis. Instead of embracing a consistent, clear platform that materially improves the lives of regular Americans, leading Democrats are now emulating the nihilistic cult of personality, a celebration of the abuse of power.

Now that Trump is replicating shock doctrine from the Bloomberg playbook, Whitmer and her ilk are lining up to mimic Trump in an uroboros of democratic backsliding. This foolish ploy will neither win elections nor save democracy.

But we know that autocracy—whether within a political party or a governing body—is ultimately self-destructive. President Biden’s power-hungry refusal to give up the reins sent his own coalition into a political death spiral of the highest stakes. And the Trump Administration’s shambolic incompetence is shattering American geopolitical strength faster than anyone could have actually imagined. Fascism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in

Lucid

:

“Authoritarian states abound with examples of engineered incompetence, when leaders appoint individuals to Cabinet positions who lack the skill-set and high-level connections needed to succeed. This makes those individuals more dependent on the leader and creates more space for the leader’s powerful cronies to influence the institution to their own benefit…Appointing someone whose main credential is the ability to smile and repeat propaganda lines convincingly…also accelerates the autocratic process of ‘hollowing out’ institutions by replacing expert and nonpartisan employees with zealots loyal to the leader.”

This sad, sorry style of leadership has been on display in Russia and the USSR before it, to devastating effect. Economic mismanagement slowly destroyed the Soviet Union, but the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster endures as a dramatic synecdoche of cataclysmic state incompetence. Chernobyl is an era-defining example of humanity’s gravest risk to itself compounded by a culture built on loyalty rather than expertise.

While (literally) die-hard Trump loyalists were attending his viral rallies back in 2020, many of us were social distancing, digging deep in the streaming services’ catalogues to entertain ourselves at home. The 2019 Emmy-winning HBO series Chernobyl was so terrifying, I couldn’t bring myself to watch past the first episode. There was something too bone-chilling in its matter-of-fact, slow-rolling depiction of human beings naively navigating a disaster that would come to kill or cripple them all. At the time, we didn’t know if COVID-19 would be any different.

While it was a medical catastrophe first and foremost, our collective response to COVID-19 also triggered global financial devastation. Five years later, recovery may be technically complete but the inflationary impact of “long COVID” is never going away. Now Trump’s tariff madness has created economic turmoil on par with that of the pandemic, and we’ve only just begun.

Austin Woods

calls it American Chernobyl:

“Chernobyl mattered because it proved systems die when they lose the capacity to correct themselves and their contradictions. The Soviet image crumbled not from external pressure, but from their refusal to admit reactor flaws. America now faces its own reckoning. The tariffs imposed by President Trump aren’t the crisis, they’re the flashing warning light. The real emergency is the continued erosion of everything that once restrained capitalism’s worst impulses. This specifically pertains to labor rights, antitrust enforcement, and public investment and has been an ongoing disaster for America for decades.”

For those paying attention, this isn’t even remotely complicated. Tempting though it may be to attribute good faith and progressive aspiration to the leaders of the Democratic party, at a certain point one must inevitably conclude that Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and certainly the Clintons all knowingly and deliberately sold us out while providing mere lip service to our real concerns and rational desires.

Back in the first few days of the current Trump administration, the Democratic minority leaders of the House and Senate pointed repeatedly to a must-pass continuing resolution as their single point of leverage to use against a rampantly fascist President. But when the time came to fight, they just caved and went home. The Senate voted 99-0 to approve as Secretary of State Marco Rubio who is now renditioning political prisoners via gestapo tactics.

With the help of Senators Chris Murphy, Amy Klobuchar, Mazie Hirono, Dick Durbin and Schumer, Cory Booker railed against Trump for 25 hours, then they all immediately joined in providing unanimous consent for another fascist Trump appointee while the party sent out fundraising text messages. This isn’t complicated. They are complicit.

In what demented world view are 10% global tariffs and 125% tariffs on China “actual liberation”?

But at least, on the surface, Democratic leaders still seemed to care about abuses of power. Until recently, that is. On Wednesday Michigan Governor and presidential aspirant Gretchen Whitmer inexplicably visited the White House, standing for a photo op in the Oval Office while President Trump signed directives weaponizing the Justice Department against former administration officials who did not cooperate with his 2021 coup attempt.

Whitmer claimed she was not expecting to participate in the signing ceremony, yet by standing by in silent acquiescence she effectively allowed her presence to validate Trump’s authoritarian move. And the worst part is, if she actually cared about Democratic norms and her own political future, Whitmer would have seized the moment as a rare opportunity to punch Trump in the face.

Literally.

She should have punched him in the face. Or, short of that, Whitmer could have rhetorically assaulted the president, jumped in front of the cameras and eviscerated his plainly anti-American executive orders. Aside from the fact that he’s just plain wrong, the swing-state governor has a good story to justify anger towards Trump: his brownshirts very nearly kidnapped her in 2020. Had Whitmer recognized the situation for what it was, she could have captured the attention of the nation and catapulted to the forefront of a crowded field of potential presidential candidates. But she stood silent, out of deference—indeed, out of loyalty—to Donald Trump.

What the actual fuck?

Democrats aren’t entirely off base when they flirt with the appeal of a strong leader unafraid to use their power. It’s just a shame they can’t—or wont—ever step up to the plate. When you stand for nothing, when your raison d’etre is mere maintenance of the decaying status quo, there’s really no use in even pursuing the spotlight.

Earlier in the day, Whitmer said: “I understand the motivation behind the tariffs, and I can tell you here’s where President Trump and I do agree: We do need to make more stuff in America, more cars and chips, more steel and ships. We do need fair trade.” She called for a bipartisan approach to “usher in, as President Trump says, the Golden Age of American manufacturing.”

Imagine, for a moment, a leading member of the political opposition coming out in the midst of the Chernobyl disaster and calling for more—not less—nuclear power. Is there a practical and political context in which advocating for nuclear makes sense? Is there a time and a place to champion the tactical use of targeted tariffs? Of course there is. But this kind of pathetically ill-timed and tone-deaf adoption of the opposition’s wildly unpopular signature policy can only come about when politicians have become entranced by the sheer power of the dictator.

On this, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was prophetic. Less than a month after the January 6 attack AOC reflected on the assault and MAGA’s post-insurrection strategy:

"They're trying to tell us to forget about what happened. They're trying to tell us it wasn't a big deal," she said. "They're trying to tell us to move on without any accountability, without any truth-telling or without actually confronting the extreme damage, physical harm, loss of life and trauma that was inflicted on not just me as a person, not just other people as individuals, but on all of us as a collective and on many other people. We cannot move on without accountability. We cannot heal without accountability.”

Those are the same tactics, she said, "of that man who touched you inappropriately at work, telling you to move on. Are they going to believe you? Or the adult who, you know, if they hurt you when you were a child and you grow up and you confront them about it, and they try to tell you that what happened never happened."

Trump the man is notorious for profligate sexual abuse. Trump the movement, AOC warned us, runs on those same abusive tactics: "We are not safe with people who hold positions of power who are willing to endanger the lives of others if they think it will score them a political point."

Whitmer wasn’t even successfully kidnapped, yet she still fell head over heels for dear leader. Call it Stockholm Syndrome, call it the craven hunger for power, call it the earnest belief in failed neoliberal economic policies. Whatever’s going on with the leadership of the Democratic party, they have been pulled into the seductive lure of unchecked authority. This is why they won’t ever seriously fight back against Trump—they lust for his levels of power and arrogantly believe they will inherit the omnipotent unitary executive branch for themselves.

But in the real world, nobody gets to be King. Not even Trump—not for long, anyway. Democratic elites may treat voters like non-playable characters in a video game, but in the real world, you can’t win back the White House on the same failed platform of the past. Only common-sense, authentically held, and economically restorative policies will energize enough voters across the spectrum to seriously compete in 2026 and 2028.

Bernie and AOC are on the right track. A few exemplars of passionate, populist progressivism are bubbling up elsewhere across the party. Should state representative and Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani upset the establishment and win the New York City Mayoral race, we’ll have a major victory from which to draw momentum and optimism.

Democratic Socialism? In this economy?!

Although he has run an inspiring campaign, at this point Mamdani is likely to be defeated by former New York Governor and alleged 13-time sexual harassment perpetrator Andrew Cuomo. The love of power is poised to defeat the power of love yet again. But should we really be surprised? After all, New York City allowed then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg to extort an exception to its two-term limit in the crucible of the last financial crisis in 2008.

“In recent weeks and months, as you know, I’ve listened to many different New Yorkers, with lots of different opinions on the issue of term limits,” he said. “But as our economic situation has become increasingly unstable, the question for me has become far less about the theoretical and much more about the practical.”

Now that Trump is seeking to implement shock doctrine right out of the Bloomberg playbook, Whitmer and her ilk are lining up to mimic Trump in an absurd uroboros of democratic backsliding. It is, of course, a foolish ploy that will neither win elections nor save democracy.

It’s time for Democratic leaders to summon their fighting spirit and embrace unwavering opposition to Trump's agenda—not as a matter of partisan strategy, but as a moral imperative to protect what remains of our constitutional republic. Just as Mitch McConnell orchestrated ruthless obstruction against Obama—stealing a Supreme Court nomination and proudly declaring his mission to make Obama a one-term president—Democrats must recognize that principled, uncompromising resistance is both politically effective and necessary to prevent further democratic erosion.

We’re going to need thousands of Kat Abughazalehs

But opposition alone isn't enough; we need a progressive insurgency within the party itself. As the Overton window has shifted dramatically rightward on everything from civil rights to constitutional protections to economic policy, only aggressive primary challenges from the left at every level of government can pull Democrats back toward policies that actually serve working Americans. By forcing establishment Democrats to defend their complicity with oligarchic interests or embrace genuine economic populism, progressive candidates can reclaim the party as a vehicle for meaningful change.

Our only choice is to fight and win within the party apparatus, reinvigorating it in the process. In fact, the Democratic party needs our clarion calls for justice and progress as badly as we need it to endorse and elect our champions. Independent and third-party bids can, in acute instances, provide real strategic benefit to the movement. But make no mistake: the Democratic party isn't going anywhere. The fight for our democracy must happen on two fronts simultaneously—resisting authoritarianism from without while reclaiming the Democratic Party from within. Only then can this corroded vessel once again breathe democracy and middle-class opportunity into our future.

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