The Democratic Party’s most prominent think tank held its annual conference on Tuesday, and the overall message was as unmistakable as it was unspoken: The party is rejecting the restorative mission President Joe Biden’s administration dedicated itself to after President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Democrats, instead, seem determined to respond to Trump’s second term by attempting to echo his tactics and attempts to radically reengineer the government rather than trying to pretend Trump is an unfortunate blip.
The message was delivered, perhaps incongruously, by a corps of Biden loyalists. The head of CAP, Neera Tanden, was a high-level White House appointee. Biden’s secretary of state, ambassador to the United Nations, the chair of his council of economic advisers and another White House senior adviser all spoke. The highest-profile speaker at the event, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, went out of his way to say he “reveres” Biden.
But he did not revere Biden’s tactics.
“We have to be as ruthless as our opposition,” Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, told the crowd of policymakers at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. “I’m sick of just winning arguments, with all due respect to the niceties. It feels good, but we’re going to lose our republic.”
