Slipping Democrats should focus on Trump corruption

One of the few people to really see Donald Trump coming was the University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales, who warned way back in 2011 that American politics was going the way of his native Italy, that we could easily produce our own version of Silvio Berlusconi, and that Trump was an obvious candidate to bottle the celebrity-populist-outsider cocktail.

So Zingales’ advice to Democrats after their

2016 defeat carried more weight than the average act of punditry. On the evidence of Berlusconi’s many victories and rare defeats, he argued, the best way to beat Trump was to do exactly what many liberals understandably didn’t want to do — to essentially normalize him, to treat him “as an ordinary opponent” rather than an existential threat, to focus on issues rather than character debates, to deny him both the public carnival and the tone of outraged hysteria in which his brand of politics tends to thrive.

The reasonable Democratic hope has been that grass-roots and online anti-Trump fervor will drive their base’s turnout, even as the official faces of the party reassure swing voters that they’re voting for a check on Trumpism, not a radical impeach-orbust movement.

But lately you can see the limits of the normal-politics strategy. For it to work, you need a political and policy landscape that plays somewhat to your party’s advantage, and there’s always the possibility of becoming a hostage to fortune when the politics of normal start to favor the incumbent instead. Which is exactly what seems to be happening to the Democrats, judging by their steadily shrinking ballot lead.

This decline reflects the fact that in the just-thepolicy debate that Zingales recommended, Trump now has three advantages. First, he’s presiding over the best economy in 10, 15, maybe 20 years. Second, his foreign policy, however blunder-rich, keeps failing to produce the feared descents into war — the main metric by which voters tend to judge success or failure overseas. Third, his party has wisely stopped trying to pass major new legislation, abandoning an unpopular agenda in favor of behind-the-scenes deregulation and judicial confirmations.

How, then, should the Democrats respond? One possibility is that they could lean further into policy debates by not just fighting but deliberately shifting on policy — either by moving somewhat back toward the center on social issues in imitation of the Clintonism of the 1990s, or by going full left-populist.

I know that the current alignment of forces in the party makes a move rightward all but unimaginable. But the second possibility is already being tried out by Bernie Sanders and a clutch of ambitious senators, who are offering single-payer and a job guarantee as the Big Ideas that will crush Trumpism and deliver a new Democratic era.

The smarter path is to focus on Trumpian corruption, the sleazy, sordid, self-dealing side of his administration and the obvious reluctance of congressional Republicans to execute more than a cursory sort of oversight. Between the ineffective poles of “Trump sleeps with porn stars” and “Trump is a Manchurian candidate” lies the most compelling Trump-specific message: That his administration is a grift that’s in desperate need of policing, oversight and constraint.