One of the underappreciated gifts of President Donald Trump is his ability to goad his opponents into taking politically unpopular positions and then sticking to them.
Case in point was the recent dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. As the Trump administration hit the ground running, the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, went to work right away, exposing the corrupt rot that had infiltrated America’s foreign aid program.
The project culminated in the suspension of practically all of the agency’s operations, and the vast majority of its workforce was placed on indefinite paid administrative leave.
Now, the brilliance of this move, aside from the fact that it stopped the work of an agency that is an out-of-control bureaucratic behemoth, was it goaded the president’s political adversaries into defending an unpopular program.
Right on cue, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other prominent leaders of the Democratic Party condemned Trump for shutting off the foreign aid slush fund.
But, as Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said recently, “My message to my Democratic friends and to the tofu-eating wokerati at USAID is, ‘I hear your question, but you need to call somebody who cares.’”
The truth is that people are generally skeptical when they hear their tax dollars are going to pet projects on the other side of the world. Even more than that, people have little in the way of positive feelings toward government bureaucracy, so by defending an agency whose mission is already generally unpopular with the public, the Democratic Party is doing little to change the perception that it is out of touch with the average American.
In a recent interview with Politico, David Axelrod, a veteran political strategist from the Obama campaigns, noted that the Democratic Party has trapped itself into becoming the party of unpopular institutions.
“Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions,” he said. “And they become — in the minds of a lot of voters — an elite party, and to a lot of folks who are trying to scuffle out there and get along, this will seem like an elite passion.”
It caught him a lot of heat from the very politicians who have been performatively rallying in front of soulless-looking federal buildings, including Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who said Axelrod’s way of thinking was “the kind of pundit-brain, poll-tested bulls*** that got us into this mess.”
But, of course, the real picture is far more complicated than that. When Axelrod was guiding Barack Obama to two relatively easy election victories in 2008 and 2012, the Democratic Party showed strength in working-class and rural regions where it is now uncompetitive. At the same time, Republicans were the preferred party of the affluent and educated suburbs, which, in the years since, have increasingly favored Democrats.
By 2016, the Democratic Party was exclusively reliant on urban centers and upscale suburbs to maintain any competitiveness, while Republicans dominated the industrial and rural areas that had once been the core pillar of the Democratic Party’s electoral strength.
The realignment of the working class with the Right while the suburbs moved to the Left is key to understanding why the Democratic Party is obliged to defend institutions such as USAID.
It’s not hard to see why the party rushed to defend the agency when you learn that 97% of political donations from USAID employees went to Democratic candidates. Any functioning political party worth its salt defends its base when its interests come under attack.
But today, defending the interests of the base is causing the party serious problems, and it is a story best told in two headlines 11 years apart.
In 2014, Democracy Now, a leftist organization, asked, “Is USAID the new CIA?” and questioned if USAID was a front for efforts to subvert the Castro regime in Cuba. Fast forward to 2025, and the group had gone from discussing how USAID was a front for the CIA to declaring that the end of foreign aid “threatens millions.”
Anti-establishmentarianism, whether skepticism of the CIA, the government, Big Pharma, or the military-industrial complex, was once the calling card of the grassroots Left. But today, that project has vanished, replaced by a full-throated defense of the status quo and the institutions that underpin it.
Unlike 20 years ago, the Democratic Party’s voter base is now composed primarily of the highly credentialed and economically affluent class that staff the very institutions the majority of the country loathes. The party simply cannot afford to adopt a hostile attitude toward institutions because the very people who ensure the viability of their political party are the ones who are negatively affected by hostility toward these institutions. In other words, the Democratic Party has become a prisoner of the elite establishment that has so thoroughly lost favor with the nation at large.
Now, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that the highly credentialed college graduates that comprise the party’s base do not even come close to a majority of voters. Thus, not only is the party defending unpopular institutions, but it is doing so in direct opposition to the feelings of voters the party desperately needs to win elections.
Which brings us back to Trump. Currently, the president is enjoying the highest approval rating he has ever enjoyed, including through the entirety of his first term in office. His party controls both chambers of Congress, and his political opposition, the Democratic Party, is reeling from the flurry of activity from the administration and is struggling to find a coherent and consistent message with which to mount a viable response that would help the party chart a path back to power.
So, what do you do when your opponent is digging a hole for himself? You hand him a shovel. And that is exactly what Trump, Musk, and the rest of the administration have done. The president has few fans across the federal bureaucracy, and he knows it. Thus, the risk to his political capital is entirely nonexistent. The residents of Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs in Maryland and Virginia are the core of the Democratic Party’s base and represent the pinnacle of the class divide that has gripped the nation’s political landscape.
At the same time, by goading the Democratic Party into defending its wealthy urban-suburban base, Trump is paving the road for Democrats to alienate further the voters they desperately need to maintain some semblance of viability as a political party at the national level.
A recent headline in Politico quoted a D.C. area resident who asked, “Are we Detroit now?” in reference to the industrial decline and ensuing economic depression that has gripped the Motor City for a generation. If Trump is successful in his bid to remake the federal government, there may be some truth to that sentiment. With fewer government jobs and fewer government contracts, the nation’s capital and its surrounding area may actually experience the sort of economic downturn that the industrial heartland has faced for decades.
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It is a cruel irony that the Democratic Party’s abandonment of Detroit and embrace of the Beltway class may have condemned the party and its base to the same fate that Detroit has suffered since the end of the 20th century. The party that had made its opposition to the establishment its electoral calling card is now the party whose leaders are willing to sacrifice their public dignity to defend the establishment.
And of all the people who could have goaded them into it, it was a billionaire reality TV host from New York whose anti-establishment agenda carried him to the Oval Office with the support of the richest man in the world.