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The United States needs a serious opposition

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The 100 -minute record discourse of Donald Trump on Tuesday to a noisy joint session of the Congress made a curious and shit show, and I do not even refer to the (in large part predictable) Ragadocio and Balons Coming from the man standing in the speaker’s gallery.

No, it was the behavior of many of the Democrats in the camera that really made me win. Many appeared wielding banners reading things like “That is a lie”, “Musks steals” and “This is not normal”, which they maintained as strict student protesters at several points during Trump’s direction.

Many congressmen and democratic women had also coordinated their outfits in a series of different colors: blacks “to fulfill the gloomy of the political moment,” apparently. Rose was used as a “protest, power and persistence” color, according to the representative of New Mexico, Teresa Leger Fernández. “It’s time to accelerate the opposition and come to Trump strong and clear,” he told Time magazine, without a sense of irony.

It was far from being the only punched attempt that the Democrats did to attract attention during the past week. In what seemed to be a kind of preventive refutation of the president’s speech before Congress, more than 20 Democratic senators launched an attack of social networks concerted against Trump. “Sh*t that is not true, that is what you just saw”, every senator, with varying degrees of discomfort, told the camera after a Trump clip that he states that he would reduce prices on the first day of his presidency.

And then, on Thursday, a video in Tiktok was published by several female members of the Democratic Chamber, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which is made through video game characters, along with the title “Choose Your Fighter”. “Our side will be in power forever if this is our opposition”, aware The right -wokeness “final account”.

It is difficult to disagree. Democrats urgently need to present a convincing opposition to the Trump administration. But, if I can adopt the tone of the videos of the senators, This is not, boss. How many Trump voters do you think they will win with these Maladroit acrobatics? The fact that Democrats could have thought that a good idea suggests that November lessons choice It has not yet been learned.

And let’s be clear: things are not going well for the party. A minimum record of 21 percent Voters are satisfied with the way in which the representatives of the Democrats in Congress are handling the work, according to a survey by the University of Quinnipiac. A record of 40 percent of voters approves the performance of Republicans in Congress.

Yougov favorability tracker It shows that Democrats are more unpopular than at any other time since at least January 2017.

Part of his problem is that there is no obvious leader of the opposition, official or of another. In the first two months of Joe Biden in the position in 2021, approximately half of the news reports about the president also mentioned Trump, According to Pew. Democrats currently do not have a comparable figure.

So what can they do? There have been suggestions, even the former congressman Nickel Wiley and historian Timothy Snyder – What the United States needs is some type of shadow cabinet, like the one we have in Britain. This seems to me a very good idea, since it would mean that an alternative point of view was always available.

Democrats can also show more courage in the way they communicate: instead of carefully rehearsing television interviews, they could afford more freely in podcasts in a long way as Joe Rogan’s. There are tentative signs of change: the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, considered a probable candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2028, this week he released his own podcast, promising to invite the guests who “disagrees deeply.” But avoiding such discussions, the Democrats seem not to know what they represent and are afraid to be trapped.

And this leads us to the quid of the matter: Democrats urgently need to present a positive vision of their values ​​and ideas. Instead of a constant flow of tedious triumph, they must say what they would do differently, particularly when they face a man who knows how communicate your message so powerfully.

“Orange Man Bad” doesn’t work. Democrats must present a serious alternative to Maga. The use of matching colors and pronunciation expletives awkwardly to the Chamber does not meet the seriousness of the political moment.

jemima.kelly@ft.com