Why are the Democrats so crap?

Stand four feet away from Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat leader in the House of Representatives, and you will appreciate that he is at least trying to be charismatic. He speaks with an attempt at gravitas. He gestures theatrically. But the effect is depressingly dull. He can only speak in his trademark weary, jaded style. Perhaps it was the topic at hand. We were in a darkened corridor in the Capitol for the latest edition of the interminable press conferences he and Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, hold each weekday about the government shutdown. Johnson usually speaks at 10am. Jeffries gets the 11am slot. Their scripts over the past four weeks have been the same: that the other guy refuses to negotiate. The only novelty is the location – will today’s conference be held in the windowless basement room? Or perhaps on the steps outside the Capitol? That they cannot agree on a budget means staffers in the building are going without pay, as are most federal workers. Even the Capitol gym has closed. The House meets pro forma, meaning that representatives register their presence in the chamber, as the rules require. They then impotently return to their offices. Emperor Trump is too busy ruling his subjects to worry about something as procedural and bureaucratic as a shutdown. According to the New York Times, he’s got Timothy Mellon – scion of the Gilded Age robber baron – to donate $130m (£98m) to pay military personnel. Who needs Congress when oligarchs can take care of the wage bill? That allows Trump to jet off around Asia, finesse plans to invade Venezuela, and order demolition crews to destroy the White House’s East Wing to make space for an opulent ballroom. This presidential extension has been pilloried in the liberal press. The anger stinks of justified desperation. Everything liberals have tried so far has failed, and so they are invoking symbolism. It’s common for presidents to rejig the White House, and a big room to host state events is in itself not a bad idea. But reconstruction allows for a metaphor of Trumpian proportions. He is rebuilding the government in his own gaudy image. He did not seek permission from the conservation authorities. The oligarchic class is handling the cheque. Trump also boasts that the taxpayer won’t be charged – a perfect encapsulation of how great wealth insulates government from anything voters might have to say about what is done in their name. The more Trump plays by his own rules, the more liberals pine for a leader. The tussle inside the Democratic Party is between those who are resigned to the Trumpian age and those who imagine an Obama-like figure will swoop in to return the US to the early 2010s. On one side, like a woodpecker who has confused a concrete wall for a tree, we have Kamala Harris musing another presidential run. On the other, there are the left populists, who are much closer to the grain of successful politics as we find it in 2025. Bernie Sanders recently tried to bridge the gap between the Democrats and today’s politics by noting that “what Trump has always understood, unlike many Democrats, is that the system is broken”. He went on to point out that this moment in American history requires more than “establishment-type candidates”. On a podcast, he hit Democrats on an issue on which they have ignored voters when he asserted that “Trump did a better job on the border”. He added that you can’t have nation states with people illegally entering the country. In New York, another lurch towards voters is taking place. Zohran Mamdani, the left-wing Democratic mayoral candidate who calls himself a democratic socialist, is trying to land his upstart campaign. Mamdani, despite his woke past, has chosen to hit the notes of class politics above more familiar cultural gripes. He is polling much higher than his closest rival, the scandal-ridden former governor Andrew Cuomo, who has resorted to spreading fear about what the first Muslim mayor might do in office. (Cuomo has denied accusations that that he is stoking anti-Muslim bigotry.) Mamdani’s victory would pump up the pressure on the party establishment to be more radical. Back in the corridor at the Capitol, I asked Leader Jeffries whether he thought his refusal to endorse Mamdani was splitting the Democratic Party and therefore the main – and at present, only – vehicle to oppose Trump. One Axios poll showed dozens of candidates running for the House in the midterms would not support Jeffries’ leadership. Yet he said this was the most unified he had seen the Democrats this year – a statement that only makes the contrast with reality more stark. Jeffries, who is also from New York, had not then endorsed Mamdani, for reasons he would not state. As he told one reporter: “I have not refused to endorse. I have refused to articulate my position.” It was the Democratic version of Trump saying he had “concepts of a plan”. This sort of enervated rhetoric shows the Democratic establishment is losing control of the narrative even as it seeks to reassert its control over the party. Hours after the press conference, Jeffries reluctantly, and by now pointlessly, endorsed Mamdani. Election day in New York is 4 November. As it approaches, Democrats in Washington have been scuttling in the dark trying to understand the country they hope to govern once again.