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After three months of soul-searching about how to revive their party, some Democrats this week believe they have finally found a rallying point following Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy piece by piece at Trump’s behest, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development, lit a fire under many Democratic lawmakers — several of whom rallied Monday outside USAID headquarters.

But relaunching the resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation — and some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back.



When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were “walking into a trap” on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence.

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” he said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

Rahm Emanuel — the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat — told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is — while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.

Trump’s orbit, meanwhile, couldn’t be happier seeing Democratic lawmakers lined up on a downtown Washington sidewalk Monday — in their view, wasting political capital defending an agency that they believe the public doesn’t give a rip about. Musk himself spent the following 24 hours posting videos of Democrats protesting the move.

“The federal bureaucracy is very unpopular. … It’s a pretty widely held, majority position — if you poll it, people think the government is wasting money. And, very simply, that’s the battle that we’re fighting,” one senior Trump administration official told me Tuesday. “The Democrats are now taking the opposite position: ‘Everything’s perfect.’ ‘Nothing to look at here.’ ‘No money is wasted.’ ‘All your tax dollars are being spent well.’”

“Not a very politically tenable position,” the person added.

The political considerations in vocally defending foreign aid are of course entirely separate from the humanitarian and national security concerns at play.

Dismantling USAID is already having tragic consequences for health and development programs worldwide, Axelrod pointed out, and America’s withdrawal from the world will give its adversaries new opportunities to win influence abroad.

Republicans had long been proponents of exerting “soft power” — winning global hearts and minds by feeding the hungry, fostering emerging economies and getting vaccines to the most vulnerable populations. China, notably, stands ready to fill the void.

That’s to say nothing of the argument that Democrats’ fight needs to be everywhere all at once given the scale of the threat. That’s what Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz passionately argued to me soon after this column first published.

“People empowered by the president are violating federal law in multiple ways, taking over federal payments, illegally shutting down whole departments, freezing Head Start and Medicaid, and the best these podcasters can muster is that we should wait for a more popular program to defend? Spare me,” said Schatz, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing USAID.

“The emergency is now. We need to act like it,” he added. “This isn’t about any particular program or the theater criticism that substitutes for strategy. This is about making sure these billionaires are not able to loot the federal government and strip it for parts.”

But most Americans have no idea what USAID is, let alone what it does. In fact, much of the country wrongly believes that foreign aid constitutes as much as 25 percent of the federal budget, according to the Brookings Institution. It’s actually closer to 1 percent.

What’s more, Democrats aren’t reading the room: Trump’s team believes his “America First” stance has resonated beyond his own base, and they’re also acutely aware that there’s a large, online conspiratorial contingency surrounding the agency. In short, they’re not sorry about targeting foreign aid, and they’re reveling in the outrage.

“My message to my Democratic friends and to the tofu-eating wokerati at USAID is, ‘I hear your question, but you need to call somebody who cares,’” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters this week.

Democrats’ messaging problem goes beyond USAID, however. They’ve raised alarms about Trump and Musk firing inspectors general, purging FBI officials who probed Trump and offering to buy out thousands more federal workers. Only a fraction of Americans have a personal connection to any of it.

The situation, Axelrod said, reflects the Democratic Party’s broader existential crisis. How, he has been asking himself lately, “did the party of working people become a party of elite institutions?”

“Part of the problem for the Democratic Party is that it has become a stalwart defender of institutions at a time when people are enraged at institutions,” Axelrod said. “And they become — in the minds of a lot of voters — an elite party, and to a lot of folks who are trying to scuffle out there and get along, this will seem like an elite passion.”



Another challenge Democrats face is that Trump is upending so much so quickly that they’re having trouble focusing. If they balk at everything, voters could simply tune them out.

It’s not that Democrats should call off the fight against Musk. Longtime campaign strategist James Carville said it’s a winning message for his party to cry foul on a billionaire coming in and slashing government services for Americans.

“I know this: When the public doesn’t have the bureaucracy, they notice it pretty quickly,” he said. “Here you have some nice people doing a good job, then some billionaire comes in and takes a wrecking ball to everything.”

But Carville, Axelrod and Emanuel agree that Democrats need to save their outrage for issues that will resonate with voters: Cutting benefits. Rising prices. Not slashing foreign aid.

“It’s a question of what you emphasize and how you emphasize it,” Axelrod said. “In the big conversation, where do you want to put your chips?”

The opportunity could come soon enough. With Trump poised to dismantle the Department of Education, special education programs for American kids with disabilities as well as federally subsidized student loans could be on the chopping block.

There, Emanuel said, is a fight Democrats can feel comfortable picking — and winning.

“A third of the eighth graders can’t read ... and now he wants to close the Department of Education?” the former ambassador to Japan asked. “I’m for USAID, but that makes your coastal Democrats really, really comfortable about our moral principles. I care about the kids who can’t read.”

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