With all the attention deservedly on President Trump and what he intends to do with his defiant return to the White House, there’s a more than good chance we’ll spend the next four years consumed once again by all things Trump.
There’s already been a dizzying amount: a giant raft of executive orders; attacks on a constitutional amendment; his threats to invade sovereign nations; a seeming Nazi salute from one of his biggest surrogates; his sweeping Jan. 6 pardons; his beef with a bishop; his TikTok flip-flop; his billion-dollar meme coin controversy; scathing new allegations against one of his Cabinet picks; unilaterally renaming a body of water; a federal crackdown on DEI; promises of immigration raids across major cities. All this in just the first three days of Trump’s second term.
And this may be his greatest trick — getting not only his own fans and supporters to obsess over him, but his critics and opponents, too.
He does that by flooding the zone — he is never not talking, posting, pointing fingers, ranting, raving, and keeping us all in a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
The problem with that is that so much gets missed. For Republicans, that often inures to their advantage, as they get to slip significant policy changes past an unsuspecting public, or bury bad news under the pile of Trump’s ever-mounting detritus.
But for Democrats, four more years of Trump distractions could mean they miss yet another opportunity to fix their own house, and mount a serious and convincing challenger to end what could be 12 more years of Republican rule in Washington.
They need to find their Ronald Reagan.
Trump’s first term was marked by unprecedented chaos, and Dems admittedly got lured into Trump’s expanding web of distractions. While they busied themselves with investigations and hearings in order to make Trump as weak a president and candidate in 2020 as possible, they weren’t as focused on identifying and cultivating a Democratic candidate, a Democratic message, and Democratic policies that could deliver a fatal blow to the Trump era once and for all.
Over the course of Trump’s first term, his approval rating was never above water, fluctuating between a low of 35% and a high of 49%. After a term marked by civil unrest, incompetence, moral and ethical failures, conspiracy theories, extremism, mismanaging COVID-19, and overseeing Republican losses in the House and the Senate, America was decidedly tired of Trump’s ineptitude and self-destructiveness.
Joe Biden emerged from a crowded 2020 Democratic primary and a general election not with a political mandate but with a collective sigh of relief — he was elected to turn the page on Trump, and then (hopefully) pass on the torch to a younger, fresher, forward-looking Dem.
That, as we know, did not happen. Not only didn’t Biden want to pass the torch, but Democrats didn’t seem to want to architect a winning platform of dynamic messages and successful policies to keep their existing coalition and attract new voters.
Instead, they stuck with old messages that largely centered around Trump: he’s anti-democratic, he’s a convicted felon, and he’s going to end access to abortion.
They also boasted of demonstrably failing policies, insisting the economy was strong as hell, the border wasn’t a crisis, and crime was down.
Without a candidate, messages, or policies that transcended Trump, Democrats were once again playing Trump’s whack-a-mole game.
Instead of finding their own Ronald Reagan, an enormously popular president who not only transformed the conservative movement and the Republican Party, but America and in fact the world, Dems found a Jimmy Carter — a well-intentioned man whose messages and policies nevertheless inspired little confidence in the party.
Instead of setting off 12 years of party control like Reagan did, Dems eked out just four, and now risk finding themselves in the political wilderness.
Democrats must find their Reagan now — a candidate whose utility isn’t just to temporarily sideline Trump but vanquish him and his would-be successors for good.
Who that might be is both an open question and a problem. Democrats’ abject failures in places like California, New York and Chicago shine an ugly spotlight on some of the party’s biggest faces and worst policies. Other boldface names are either too old or too extreme. Identity politics, egos, and intraparty disagreements could easily get in the way.
Democrats must rebuild their party with new faces and new ideas, winning policies and inspiring messages.
For many of us, the next four years under Trump feel like an eternity. But for Democrats, they’ll come and go in the blink of an eye. What they do with that time will change history — possibly forever.
S.E. Cupp: Where is the Democratic Party’s Ronald Reagan? was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency and is shared with permission. S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.