Democrats are currently in the midst of whether to shut down the government as a response to President Donald Trump’s lawlessness — see this recent Ezra Klein column for an overview of the arguments for and against. What struck me, reading Klein’s assessment, is how centrally the internal Democratic debate revolves around the question of “normalcy.”
Not whether the second Trump presidency is normal. At this point, only the most blinkered deny that Trump is attempting to transform the United States into an authoritarian country. Rather, the debate is over the extent to which the rules of “normal” politics work in these abnormal times.
By “normal” politics, I mean a basic vision of the postwar American democratic system and the role of parties within it. Normal politics begins with an assumption of the rule of law, in the sense that good-faith readings of the Constitution and statute define the rules of the political game. Because those rules say that power is allocated in free and fair elections, normal politics includes a belief that competition for public opinion is paramount — which means that parties must tailor their agendas to the policy views of the public.
Under these conditions, rule of law and responsivity to public preference, normal politics means that legislative actions have two goals: 1) to enact new statutes that accomplish desired policy ends and 2) to enhance the party’s popularity and thus improve its standing among persuadable voters ahead of elections.
At present, the first premise of “normal” politics — the rule of law — is clearly broken. Trump is currently operating with total disregard to statutory and constitutional rules, enabled by Republican majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court. On this, everyone on the broader left agrees.
The question is how to respond. Would Democrats be best served by strategies from the normal politics era, or does Trump’s authoritarianism demand they write a new playbook?
This divide is obvious in the shutdown debate. Under normal politics, a shutdown makes no sense: Previous shutdown fights, like the GOP’s disastrous 2013 bid to defund Obamacare, show that Congress doesn’t have the leverage to coerce presidents into unilaterally abandoning policy priorities. Yet Trump’s agenda is so qualitatively different from a fight over health care policy — it’s not a mere partisan dispute, but an attack on the system itself — that it may no longer make sense to think of a shutdown as a policy fight at all. Rather, it is best seen as an act of sabotage and resistance against a would-be authoritarian trying to consolidate power.
Once you understand this divide, it becomes the obvious subtext of every single Democratic policy debate about responding to Trump. Team Normal thinks Democrats should attack Trump on the “kitchen table” issues where he polls worst, like cost of living, and more broadly condition political strategy around trying to take back the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms. Team Abnormal, by contrast, thinks the democratic emergency requires fighting to stall Trump’s most authoritarian moves as much and as hard as possible: that bold confrontation can both block Trump’s anti-democratic moves and win the midterms.
This is a stylized division: Not everyone is wholly in one camp or the other. But a lot of intra-Democratic fights nowadays really do boil down to whether you agree more with Team Normal or Team Abnormal. The divide transcends the traditional ideological splits in the party, as it focuses less on questions of policy than of strategy and big-picture ways of thinking about politics.
I’m not going to try and prove one of the two camps right on any of the specific tactical debates, like the wisdom of a shutdown. But I do think that Team Abnormal has a better depiction of the situation, in large part because it fits better with how their antagonists on the right approach politics — and the ways in which Trump, in particular, has found success.
Trump’s successful politics of abnormality
After 10 years, we’ve all gotten used to Donald Trump being a key figure in our politics. But during his original conquest of the Republican Party, the constant refrain from figures on the center-left was that “this was not normal.”
And at the time, they were correct. It wasn’t normal for a man who mocked war heroes and disabled people, who had been credibly accused of sexual assault by dozens of women, who openly called on banning people of an entire religion from entering the United States, to be the presidential nominee from one party — let alone to be president!
But with the benefit of hindsight, the problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumed normal was coming back: that Trump represented an aberration in American politics, one who could be put back into a box, rather than a representation of deeper shifts in how the system itself was functioning. The system we used for defining “normalcy” has been quietly transformed — and Trump took advantage.
One transformation was political: The United States had gone from a more consensus-based politics, where informal norms and collegiality led the two major parties to follow a shared set of rules, to a more hard-edged system where two polarized camps were fighting an increasingly bare-knuckles brawl.
This, very obviously, was asymmetric. Starting with the Gingrich Revolution in the 1994 election, and accelerating rapidly through the Obama presidency, Republicans became increasingly unwilling to grant Democrats basic legitimacy as a governing party. Once deviant tactics, like smearing President Barack Obama as foreign-born and blocking his Supreme Court nominee, became widely accepted thanks to the basic depth of shared GOP hatred for its Democratic opponents.
A second transformation was attentional. The decline of traditional media, the rise of social media and influencers, declining public trust in government — all of these things made people less receptive to the traditional, buttoned-down, poll-tested messaging strategies that major parties had come to rely on. Being outrageous, radical, even offensive were career killers in the era of elite gatekeeping. But now they could be weaponized by savvy politicians and operatives to raise their profile and redefine the contours of public conversation.
These were the conditions under which Trump could run and win. They did not grant him, nor figures like him, absolute power: The GOP’s run of electoral defeats in 2018, 2020, and 2022 were all testaments to the public’s distaste for Trump-style authoritarian radicalism.
But the core insight is that the politics of extremism, helmed by someone as charismatic as Trump, could be used to push through political changes that might otherwise be unthinkable.
Sure, the public disapproved of almost all of Trump’s most radical moves, from the Muslim ban to January 6. But the twinned forces of extreme partisanship and a new attentional environment allowed those to become “normal” parts of our politics. The Republican willingness to line up behind Trump, paired with the lack of authoritative and widely trusted social gatekeepers, made it possible for him to mainstream what was once unthinkable.
Now, in his second presidency, he’s running much the same playbook to legitimate his various assaults on democracy. The public might disapprove of things like putting armed troops on the streets of the nation’s capital, but Trump is counting on his party and a fractured media environment to blunt that disapproval — to deflect and distract so much that the public’s baseline disapproval does not translate into a forcible opposition movement.
The lesson of all this, to me, is not that Trump is a political juggernaut giving voice to the silent majority of “real America.” Again, his signature initiatives have almost always been unpopular; recent polling confirms that they continue to be.
Rather, it’s that the basic rules that govern American politics no longer apply in the same way that they did in the pre-Trump era. Trump has succeeded in pushing a radical agenda supported by only a minority of Americans because he understands, at a gut level, how to manipulate the new political and media environment to his advantage — to redefine what “normal” means beyond all recognition.
The implications for the Team Normal vs. Abnormal divide
I think the basic Team Normal position has trouble accounting for the new political reality. It assumes that the political system will constrain Trump because, in old-normal times, it would. But now Trump is using the tactics he used to break the normative consensus in American politics to break the most fundamental legal principles protecting its democracy.
In more concrete terms, Team Normal’s entire argument depends on the 2026 midterms being conducted under free and fair conditions. But elected leaders who want to seize autocratic power know they’re racing against the electoral clock, and Trump is no exception. He’s deeply worried about the implications of a midterm defeat for his power, and is fighting it both through “normal” political tactics and abuses of power to try and stack the deck in his favor.
So far, his success in the latter has been limited to convincing state Republicans to engage in even more extreme gerrymandering. Other moves, like threatening the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, have failed to do much damage yet. But “yet” is perhaps the most important word in that sentence: The more power he accrues, the more tools he has to effectively undermine electoral fairness.
This is why Team Abnormal is right to say that Democrats need to fight even if they have no hope of ultimately winning on that specific issue. Even if all they can do is delay some of Trump’s power grabs by throwing up procedural roadblocks, that could be hugely significant — as it could prevent him from wielding said powers prior to the potentially decisive midterm election. There is real evidence that “losing loudly” can lay the groundwork for more effective resistance in the future.
But it also learns a more fundamental lesson from Trump’s rise: that in our current environment, the very contours of political debate can be exploded.
I don’t think that Democrats have found that formula yet, though the rise of both the Abundance movement and Zohran Mamdani are indications of its possibility. But I do think there is a lack of political imagination among Team Normal, a sense of resignation that public opinion still follows the rules of normal politics — that voters are so focused on simple material politics that they can’t be made to care about what Trump is doing to the freedoms enshrined in the country’s founding documents.
Trump showed that it’s possible to redefine politics against his enemies in ways that few anticipated back in 2015. I think one of the central questions, 10 years later, is how the strategies he invented can be turned against him.
