It might seem like ancient history, but in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s first election victory in 2016, congressional Democratic leaders wasted little time in extending an olive branch, voicing support for, among other things, the Republican’s rhetoric about investing in domestic infrastructure.
Trump ultimately lost interest in the idea, of course, but given the Democratic outreach, it was tough for him to argue that the opposition party was necessarily refusing to work with him in a constructive way.
Eight years later, we’re seeing even more steps down the same path. On Friday, for example, Politico reported, “A group of eleven moderate Senate Democrats say they want to work with Republicans on addressing the GOP’s expiring tax cuts and raising the debt ceiling.” The effort was led by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada — a state Trump narrowly won in 2024, after coming up short in both of his previous campaigns.
The same day, on the other side of Capitol Hill, Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said he’s interested in trying to “find common ground” with Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and their so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
A couple of days after that, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania became the first Democrat to actually make the trip to Mar-a-Lago for a meeting with the president-elect.
And did I mention that there are apparently some Senate Democrats who are even open to supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s prospective nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services? Because there are.
I’m reminded of a point The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made in a recent column.
In some ways, it’s the mirror image of what happened after the 2008 election, in which the outsider tea party movement, and ultimately Trump, emerged as a backlash against President Barack Obama. At first, Republicans were reeling from their losses, which were far heavier than Democrats’ were this year. But congressional GOP leaders, particularly House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Virginia) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), met secretly even before Obama was sworn in to hatch plans for a comeback — based entirely on opposing everything the new president did. “If he was for it, we had to be against it,” then-Sen. George Voinovich, an Ohio Republican, explained in Michael Grunwald’s 2012 book on the era.
Obama, it’s worth noting for context, won an actual mandate, earning 365 electoral votes and nearly 53% of the popular vote. GOP lawmakers nevertheless decided, almost immediately after learning of the will of the voters, that they had one priority above all others: Republicans had to deny Obama bipartisan victories. It’s the polar opposite of how many Democrats on the Hill are responding to Trump’s return to the White House. The larger point isn’t “Democrats are good; Republicans are bad.” Rather, the broader takeaway is that the parties are playing the same game by very different rules, guided by wildly divergent values, principles and priorities.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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