America is preparing for a midterm election that will almost certainly see the Democrats recapture one, if not both, houses of Congress. In a normal year, the Left would use the power shift to grind the Republican agenda to a halt and negotiate legislative concessions with the president. But this is not a normal election, and the Democrats’ plans and strategies are not normal, either.
They have telegraphed a not-so-subtle message: reprisals are coming.
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In a recent address, Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA agent, indicated that she would use the power of the Congress to investigate White House officials. She hoped that the threat of prosecutions would send a “deterrence message” to any college graduates considering a career in the Trump administration.
Other left-wing figures set their sights on Elon Musk. Vox Media podcast host Kara Swisher suggested that the technologist was destined for prison. “Under Kamala Harris, he might be in jail right now,” she said. “He has a very big sense of fate, and I think it’s coming for him.” Jonathan Last of the Bulwark made the same point in more vulgar language: “We start with the U.S. Congress, and it ends at the fucking Hague for Elon Musk.”
In normal times, this kind of loose talk could be dismissed as bluster, but ten years into the Trump era, the evidence demands that we take it seriously. In President Trump’s first term, the Democrats hatched the Russiagate operation and impeached him twice. During Trump’s time in exile, Democrats orchestrated a series of politically motivated prosecutions, which led to nearly three dozen felony convictions. They even put his mugshot in the newspaper.
What’s driving the desire for reprisals?
First, the Democrats have long sought to invalidate the Trump phenomenon. They simply cannot accept the fact that Donald Trump became the president of the United States and that his ideas—build the wall, restore law and order, Make America Great Again—enjoy popular support. They believe Trump is an embodiment of every “ism” and “phobia” in the book: racism, sexism, nativism, Islamophobia, transphobia. To invalidate his presidency, they believe, is to invalidate these prejudices.
They want to turn Trump into another Richard Nixon. If the president ends his political career in disgrace—or in prison—it will serve as a warning to any future right-wing populist that that is the inevitable fate of his movement and, if he attempts to win the presidency, his life.
The second motivation for reprisals is to create a permanent deterrent against the development of a right-wing counter-elite. In previous decades, the staffer class of Democrats and Republicans had a mutual understanding, in which Republicans in Washington agreed to the boundaries determined by the Left. The Democrats might campaign hard against someone like Mitt Romney or oppose the fiscal policies of someone like Paul Ryan, but everyone understood that both Republicans would respect Democrat-defined boundaries of what was acceptable.
The Trump movement is different. The Republican staffer class has seen generational turnover. Young conservative staffers are notably more impatient and iconoclastic than their elders. Senator Slotkin understands this dynamic and wants to shut it down.
Finally, a reprisal campaign would protect the Left’s institutional hegemony. The Democrats often campaign on the slogan “our democracy,” and they mean it literally. The federal bureaucracy, public universities, and public schools are almost monolithically left-wing. Democrats believe that these institutions are proprietary tools for their political movement, and that any use of them by the Right is illegitimate. They will not only seek to roll back any incursions by the Trump administration but also engage in reprisals to ensure that it never happens again.
This kind of politics poses a real danger. In a competition of reprisals and counter-reprisals, the Left maintains a distinct advantage. Progressives understand the levers of power and stand ready to use them; conservatives wield the rhetoric without understanding the consequences. Trump foolishly boasted about locking up Hillary Clinton and prosecuting Anthony Fauci, but neither event came to pass. It was all bluster—but bluster that Democrats could use as justification for taking real action.
The ultimate risk is the Brazilification of our politics, in which the stakes become thus: if you win, you face reprisals in the future; if you lose, you go straight to prison.