During last week’s debate between Ed Markey and Seth Moulton, alert viewers might have taken a moment to check their ears. In the course of a monologue defending his skeptical 2024 comments about the impact of trans athletes on youth sports, the congressman cast himself as empathetic with beleaguered transgender people.
“To the trans community feeling the weight and the pain of the Trump administration policies, I deeply recognize your trauma,” said Moulton.
He might as well have said “I deeply recognize your Trump.”
There’s nothing hidden about Moulton’s contempt for the president. He called him “a monster” in his Democratic Convention speech last spring. Markey has been equally blunt, describing Trump as “unstable” and a “war criminal.” And none of these adjectives is even in the hall of fame of Trump slurs. That pantheon is reserved for the likes of Spy Magazine’s prescient 1980s moniker “short-fingered vulgarian,” Jimmy Kimmel’s “Teddy Dozevelt,” writer Tim Berry’s “Mango Mussolini,” and perhaps the most succinct, definitive adjective, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s description of his boss as a “moron.”
But while all this is fun and fair game considering Trump’s affinity for gratuitously derogatory nicknames, there is a singular Democratic strategy this campaign season — making it a referendum on Trump’s once-dominant turned grotesquely toxic political brand.
The feces smeared on the walls and floors of the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s beloved January 6 rioters is an apt metaphor for the damage he’s done or tried to do to an array of important institutions, including the courts, the legal system, the press, NATO, the U.S. military, foreign aid, etc. ad nauseum. But here in Massachusetts we don’t even need to look far to feel the pain of Trumpism.
Federal cuts have cost the state billions in badly needed funding for medical and scientific research. Major regional wind-energy projects have been stalled thanks to Trump’s suspension of leases and stop-work orders. State officials estimate the widely ridiculed Trump tariff obsession has cost us close to $5 billion in higher expenses and prices, a tax of more than $1,700 per household. And God help you if your loved one is in a nursing home reliant on the labor of the immigrants Trump is so eager to send packing.
We’ll find out on November 3 how easy all this has made re-election for local Democrats. Every poll suggests that unlike 2024, when even some Massachusetts voters were nostalgic for the pre-pandemic economic prosperity of the first Trump term, the spectacular failure of round two has made dumping Trump and his Republican enablers job one for voters. Even the most dense local Democrats understand that when problems on their watch come up, simply deploy the magic word.
It will be especially telling to see if GOP Senate nominee John Deaton can sidestep the backlash once the general election begins. Deaton says he never voted for Trump, can’t stand his divisiveness and grifting, and rejects the MAGA brand. He even insists Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Markey or Moulton will nonetheless do their best to dress Deaton in a Trump wig, just as John Kerry tied Bill Weld to the locally loathed Newt Gingrich in their 1996 showdown. (It didn’t help that Weld, at his 1994 re-election victory party, rattled on about his eagerness to work with Gingrich.) And if October polls show Deaton isn’t getting any slack for his Trump resistance, it’s look out below for every Republican in sight.
So call the approach a sign of Trump Derangement Syndrome if you like. Trump acolytes who favor that particular psychological projection are usually the quickest to blame their hero’s failures on Biden, a.k.a. BDS. And the purists among us prefer that we be focused on “issues,” as if there were any more pressing than our hellbent descent into authoritarian kleptocracy.
But brace yourself for the voters’ verdict that the only TDS is what’s infecting the man and his supporters. Democrats of varying worthiness will gladly reap the harvest.
After all, they feel your Trump.
