It’s All About Owning The Libs Now

How can Democrats fight back against MAGA Trump nihilism?

The last Congress, led by a dysfunctional Republican House majority, was among the least productive in history. Which is by design.

The Republican Party has learned over the years that blocking the progress of a Democratic administration (and in this case, a Senate majority), and the policy priorities of the left more broadly, are the keys to electoral success with their MAGA base. And certainly, that was proven true once again in 2024 when voters returned them to the majority, albeit barely. The incentives for Republicans are clear.

But this is not your usual Republican obstructionism. This is Trump’s Republican Party, one fueled by opposition to whatever the left supports, just for the sake of it, and the embrace of all that the left detests.

This politics of spite has been an undercurrent of the Republican Party for decades but has taken on new life under Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who see power as a retaliatory tool to exact vengeance against the left, driven as they are by long-held grievances.

The Republican Party is no longer a means for passing conservative policy. It is a permanent opposition party, persistently opposing progress by Democrats and tearing down the institutions the left has built.

It’s why even when they win—in this case, literally every lever of power in Washington—they are still so angry and act as though they control nothing.

It’s why even a month in, they continue to blame everything on Joe Biden. And even as they dismantle the federal workforce, they will continue to blame the “deep state”, their convenient scapegoat to justify failure even as they hold all of government.

In the face of such nihilistic governance, where tearing down the left’s norms and institutions is an end justified by any and all means, no matter who is harmed, how do Democrats fight back?

In today’s piece, I’ll look at all the ways Donald Trump is exerting his toxic and chaotic politics of spite, and explore different ways Democrats in Congress can push back.

“Own The Libs!”

One of Donald Trump’s—and the right’s more broadly—favorite tactics is to “own the libs,” which takes many forms.

For one, Trump loves to embrace turncoat Democrats. The pro-democracy coalition that worked so hard last year to try to elect Kamala Harris is full of former Republicans, from former GOP operatives such as Nicolle Wallace, Tim Miller, and Stuart Stevens to former representatives such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Joe Walsh. The list is long. So when the right sees the occasional conservative Democrat turn and embrace Trump, they embrace them as a sign the culture is shifting toward them, reveling in the knowledge that it will piss off the left.

Trump expended significant political capital confirming Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard to his cabinet. They are two former Democrats who famously defected to the MAGA fold. For Trump, their nominations and confirmations were power plays completely detached from their qualifications for the posts. But they had one important qualification in Trump’s eyes: they are great for spiting Democrats.

This helps explain Trump’s recent play for New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams. In some ways, Adams is an even bigger avatar of this “own the libs” politics than Kennedy or Gabbard.

For one thing, the right loves supporting Black conservatives, whom they perceive as a slap in the face to the left. After all, if Democrats view MAGA as an irredeemably racist movement, having Adams in Trump’s camp is the political equivalent of saying “I have Black friends.”

For another, New York City is ground zero for the shift of minority male voters away from the Democratic Party and toward Trump, for which Adams is the ideal model.

And finally, Adams was indicted by a grand jury following a federal investigation. For Trump, Adams serves as an example of MAGA’s ongoing (*accusation is a confession*) claim that Biden’s Justice Department somehow was weaponized against its political enemies. And while Adams is a Democrat, for Trump he still qualifies as an enemy of the left because he’s pro-cop and anti-immigrant and, let us not forget…corrupt.

Trump and MAGA understand that it’s the left that is deeply offended by such political corruption. By embracing blatantly corrupt politicians and equally corrupt political tactics, it’s a perfect way to “own the libs.” And, of course, the Trump administration sees Adams as a useful pawn who would accept its devil’s bargain, which of course he did.

Shattering the Norms of Western Liberal Order

A key rallying cry against Trump in 2024 was that he is anti-democratic and has clear authoritarian tendencies. But this warning was more than a fear that 2024 may have been the last free and fair election in the United States. It’s also based on the fear that Trump would shatter the Western liberal world order.

Since taking office, Trump has deliberately picked fights with our allies: bizarrely trolling Canada as the 51st state and renaming the Gulf of Mexico; threatening to take Greenland from Denmark by force; and more ominously, upending our decades-long relationship with NATO. Trump recently escalated this last threat by suggesting the resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war would necessarily include ceding some of Ukraine’s sovereign nation’s territory to Russia.

Meanwhile, Trump has openly embraced our enemies Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Viktor Orbán of Hungary, and Kim Jong Un of North Korea. But it’s not just Democrats who are uncomfortable with his pro-dictator deference, and it wasn’t just Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats who wanted to fund Ukraine against Russian aggression. The Republican Party once championed advancing democracy around the world and stood up to authoritarians. Our financial support for Ukraine is what remains of what once was a bipartisan consensus reflecting our values and national security interests.

It says a lot about Trump, and the Republican Party at large, that his policy decisions are now driven largely by who they will piss off the most rather than what’s best for the country. There used to be strong bipartisan consensus over USAID, for example, and the importance of American soft power. But in a matter of weeks, Trump has decimated that agency while sowing deep frustration and anger among our partners around the world, all in the name of “America First.” The more liberal tears shed over these destroyed programs, the better.

If the left supports it, Trump and Republicans oppose it. If the left built it, the right must tear it down, even if it hurts millions of Americans. It’s politics as nihilism, seemingly for the sake of it.

And it’s hardly new to the Republican Party. It’s just that Donald Trump took that to a whole new level.

So What Are Republicans Actually For Anymore?

Trump’s first-term crusade to repeal Obamacare was version 1.0 of this destroy-everything-the-left-loves strategy, when you think about it.

Despite Democrats’ coalescing around a conservative health care plan, which was market-driven, flooded private insurance companies with new business, and was based on Republican Governor Mitt Romney’s successful plan in Massachusetts, the GOP monolithically opposed it.

This nihilistic approach by Republicans was a thumb in the eye to a bygone bipartisan consensus about legislating, but turned out to be good politics. The subsequent rise of the Republican Tea Party movement, which sought to obstruct everything the Obama administration set out to do, led to huge defeats for Democrats in the 2010 midterms. And it laid the foundation for the rise of Trump and MAGA years later.

It made sense that “Obamacare”— a product of solely Democratic votes, under a Democratic president whom Trump resented, and which represented a decades-long goal of the left—would be prime pickings for Trump to repeal. Indeed, Trump ran on repealing it in 2016, and after winning the election, he tried and famously failed to do so. But he failed precisely because there was still at least one Republican with an innate aversion to such nihilism. Sen. John McCain understood that Trump had no plan, no replacement for Obamacare. People would simply be thrown off plans they relied on with nothing to catch their fall, and Trump just didn’t care. Luckily for us, McCain did. With one thumbs-down gesture, he saved Obamacare from Trumpian destruction.

The Republican Party got to test this kind of nihilism over climate change, too. When Al Gore made climate change his signature issue, even winning an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace prize for his work on the issue, both in 2007, that helped seal the right’s opposition to climate mitigation efforts, no matter how “market-based” Democrats tried to make some of the policy solutions. That nihilism now has reached its most base form, as chants of “Drill, baby drill!” signal to Democrats that the Republicans are willing to destroy the whole planet if it means it will make liberals cry harder.

Sometimes this nihilism takes the form of denying Democrats a win no matter what. In 2014, Speaker John Boehner refused to bring a bipartisan immigration bill to the floor that had already passed the U.S. Senate. It had the votes in the House, but Boehner hit a permanent pause button on the bill, all so as not to give Barack Obama a win.

Trump demanded the same of the more recent bipartisan border security bill, hashed out for months by Senate negotiators. Trump single-handedly scuttled that legislation at the eleventh hour to deprive Democrats of an immigration win in an election year, just so he could continue to campaign on the issue of a “migrant invasion.” And it worked.

By the time Donald Trump took the oath of office in 2025, the Republican Party had been completely remade in his image: a party with no actual policy proposals other than to tear things down, oppose anything the Democrats support, and embrace anything they despise. The blast zone now includes the very foundations of our country, including the social safety net, the administrative state, and a progressive tax system.

So How Do Democrats Fight Back?

The nihilism that Trump and the MAGA GOP have supercharged raises the stakes of all future elections, even assuming they proceed as expected. The Republican Party has become so cowed by Trump—and by Elon Musk’s threats of funding primary challengers—that it is not even pretending to be a productive force of its own anymore. Its senators have recently shown themselves willing to confirm objectively unqualified people to top cabinet posts, putting the entire country at risk. They have also looked away as government systems were seized by unaccountable, unelected members of the so-called DOGE, with complete indifference to whether their own constituents were harmed.

So how do Democrats fight back? If the GOP doesn’t care about the negative impact Trump’s and Musk’s policies and decisions have on ordinary Americans, aren’t Democrats essentially negotiating with political terrorists?

So far we have seen three models of Democratic pushback.

One camp of Democrats appears to think that doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the way to go, clinging to norms that have been shattered by the opposition in hopes that a bygone notion of bipartisan consensus about the importance of public service can be preserved. We saw how this worked out for Merrick Garland the last four years. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also appears to be mounting a wait-and-see approach in the face of unprecedented, anti-democratic onslaught.

A second camp, represented by a younger cohort of Democrats, wants to counter the GOP blow for blow, trolling back hard in the hopes it will bring press attention to the unfolding national crisis. For example, Rep. David Garcia recently presented a photo of Elon Musk on the House floor as a “dick pic.” And Rep. Jasmine Crockett famously fired back at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a hearing, calling her a “bleach blond butch bad built body.” These are admittedly headline-grabbing moves, which in this attention economy has some real value. They also demonstrate to Democratic voters that someone is fighting back, an important reassurance at this time. But while these counterpunches may feel good in the moment, there is little evidence they actually do anything to make MAGA stop behaving so terribly. If anything, they encourage more bad behavior in an endless cycle. If the other side is behaving like spoiled children, and our side does it, too, the fear is we will be locked forever in a schoolyard fight.

Perhaps there’s a third way, best represented by Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s style of discourse. He combines a willingness to engage and actually listen to the other side with a sturdy defense of Democratic values. Buttigieg is not afraid to go on Fox News and other outlets where Republicans are tuned in. He looks past the bad behavior and taunts of the MAGA right and tries instead to get at the heart of why they feel aggrieved, even when that grievance is tainted with racism and misogyny. He then seeks to find common ground, at least on some level. He always presents a path forward, even if it is an aspirational one, where the two sides can treat each other as people caught in the same dysfunctional system, yet all with a shared need for security, health, and community.

It may be too lofty for these rough and tumble times. And there are few in the Democratic Party who can actually step into this role with the skill of Buttigieg and consistently resist the urge to condemn the other side as irredeemable monsters. Few leaders will bother to try and unpack whatever it is that drives the dangerous nihilism at the core of the MAGA right.

But considering the incredibly high stakes, more Buttigieges may be sorely needed if we are ever to escape the downward pull of Trumpian nihilism.