Dem Senator to Party: Chill Out… Just a Bit

OVER THE PAST EIGHT YEARS, Donald Trump has sparked fierce and unrelenting opposition over both his chaotic governance and the threats he posed to governing institutions.

But what if Democrats were a bit too feverish in their response?

That’s the concern of one of the party’s leading members as he and others contend with Trump’s return to office.

“I do think it matters whether or not we are at an 11 every morning. And I don’t think we should be,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in an interview with The Bulwark. “We cannot be the party of ‘Can you believe he did that?’ Which is different from saying that we won’t oppose and fight and mobilize and do everything we can to protect people and institutions. But I think we’re going to have to demonstrate to the public—which is paying less attention than the resistance—that we are not immediately wishing for his failure.”

In a wide-ranging interview, Schatz did not downplay the threats that he believes Trump poses. But he argued that, as a tactical matter, Democrats over the past several years have erred in treating each of those threats with equally immense gravity. Doing so, he said, led voters to view the party as a bunch of hysterics—and even as something like “Soviet”-style defenders of government bureaucracies.

Schatz offered COVID as an example. “We told people, ‘Hey, listen, you’re going to die.’ Then, definitionally, the people who didn’t die are still around, right? And then we say, ‘Democracy is going to die,’ right? And then democracy doesn’t die. And then we say four years later, by the way, this time is the time to be worried about American-style democracy collapsing. And I just think people just stopped believing this idea that we’re always at the precipice of a catastrophe. They don’t like living like that.”

As one of many Democrats offering postmortems and prescriptions for the party in the wake of its November defeat, Schatz’s perspectives appear influenced by his relative youth. At 52, he is both firmly middle-aged and a relative youngster by Senate standards. He’s one of the more outwardly engaging officials in the chamber, routinely responding to readers on X—often to the chagrin of his comms team.

Schatz said that Democrats needed to engage in media ecosystems well beyond the outlets they find most comfortable and comfortable—not just to show voters that they are, in fact, normal, but to better understand how voters feel. He noted how off-key the party’s messaging about inflation was.

“You know, if you get, whatever, these fancy-pants, progressive economists on TV, they’ll say we have performed better than other industrialized countries,” he recalled. “And if I’m trying to buy eggs, I’m like, ‘Fuck off. What does that even mean?’”

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Despite his invocations to fellow Democrats not to freak out over every Trump action, Schatz did spotlight ones that would necessitate that type of hair-on-fire response. Declaring martial law “for no damn reason,” or jailing “members of the media,” fit into that category. So too would pulling back on widely accepted vaccine requirements.

“The biggest vulnerability for the Trump administration are the ones [the cabinet nominees] most likely to cause immediate harm in a way that is understandable and causes people to go like, ‘Hey, I wanted a disruptor, but like not in my kids’ elementary school,’” he said evoking the possibility of rubella or measles or mumps epidemics.

Ultimately, the balance Schatz said Democrats need to strike is a simple one: Discerning the signal from the noise. That means not exhausting the public with freakout theater. But it doesn’t mean laying down in defeat.

“Is it alarming? For sure. Is it the end? Absolutely not,” he said of Trump’s reemergence. “And I just worry very much that people who are very critical about ‘obeying in advance’ are also catastrophizing to the point where people start to feel powerless. We’re not fucking powerless here. . . . I think that is a chickenshit way to operate.”

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