Democrats are ditching dignity for strategy, mirroring Trump’s chaos to dismantle his power from within, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.
ON THE EVE of the 2016 U.S. Election, Michelle Obama famously said of the Trump campaign: “When they go low, we go high.” Going high did not win Hillary Clinton the presidency, nor did it help Kamala Harris in 2024. This is because the MAGA movement celebrates Trump going low, because it’s an expression of his and, in turn, their power.
Now months into Trump’s much-worse-than-the-first-term second presidency, some Democrats are finally accepting that the old rules of moral-high-ground politics are dead and are fighting Trump’s fire with fire.
The political strategies Democrats are using to undermine Trump include a mixture of mockery, pointing to hypocrisy and revenge.
To be fair to the Harris-Walz ticket, Democrats made an attempt at using mockery during the 2024 campaign. This took the form of calling Trump and the MAGA movement “weird”. This type of mockery is politically potent because it shifts from framing Trump as strong and powerful to someone weak and silly.
As described in this BBC analysis, when former President Joe Biden tried to warn voters that Trump would wreck American democracy, this characterisation made Trump look strong and powerful. This portrayal is something Trump’s supporters want to hear — that Trump will be powerful on their behalf.
Harris’s label of “weird” was a mocking insult designed to not only show how inappropriate for the presidency Trump is, but also how weak he is, using a light-hearted “we’re laughing behind your back” rhetorical approach.
It could, however, be assumed that this label, like when Clinton called MAGAs “deplorable” in 2016 (which they are), just reinforced MAGA voters’ perception that Democrats are “elites” who look down on MAGA, when Trump is “their man”.
This backfiring problem of mocking has been overcome in an ingenious way by one of the strongest Democrat voices to oppose Trump throughout his second term — the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom.
Newsom has innovated a mode of mockery, or some would say “trolling”, which avoids the problem of name-calling. He has done this by imitating Trump and, in doing so, showing just how ridiculous, incompetent, unhinged and weak Trump is.
Newsom’s strategy includes writing posts in Trump’s puerile upper-case ranting, incoherent style and using AI to create images of Trump supporters worshipping Newsom.
One of the most amusing parts of this mockery is that Trump’s allies and presumably Trump too, seem to think Newsom is imitating Trump’s social media style to emulate him because Newsom wants to be like Trump.
For example, Steve Bannon accused Newsom of trying to “mimic” Trump to “imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting”.
Vice President JD Vance said on Fox News:
“This idea that Gavin Newsom is somehow going to mimic Donald Trump's style — that ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump's political success, that he is authentic. Don't be a crazy person. Be authentic.”
Newsom shared this Vance clip and responded mockingly:
‘He almost got it.’
Obviously, those in on the joke – which is everyone except, apparently, the Republicans – can see what Newsom is doing. He is holding up a mirror to Trump to demonstrate how ridiculous Trump’s social media posts are and how they are unbecoming of a president.
As Newsom said:
“If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s [Trump’s] putting out as President.”
It’s not just the Republicans who are struggling to know how to deal with Newsom’s Trump-mirror. Trump’s propaganda arm, Fox News are where we get to the hypocrisy part of the equation.
As explained by radio host Lenard Larry McKelvey, aka Charlamagne tha God, Fox News has been criticising Newsom’s mimicry of Trump, calling it immature and unbecoming of a Governor.
Charlamagne pointed to Fox’s out-of-this-world levels of hypocrisy, saying:
“To act like it’s cool when Trump does it, but it’s not okay when Gavin Newsom does it. Knock it off. The hypocrisy is disgusting.”
Indeed, Newsom, in an interview on MeidasTouch, said one of the reasons he is employing the mimicry-mockery strategy is to highlight the way the media collectively has, over the past decade, normalised Trump’s unhinged communication without giving it the scrutiny they’re now giving Newsom when he does exactly the same thing.
This highlighting of hypocrisy is also evident in Newsom and Texas Democrats’ response to Trump’s attempts to cheat in the 2026 midterms through gerrymandering Texas electoral borders to manufacture five new Republican seats.
While Texas Democrats bravely bought Newsom time by leaving the state and refusing to let the gerrymandered redistricting vote go ahead, Newsom took political revenge through California’s Election Rigging Response Act. This act redraws Californian maps to gain Democrats five new seats, nullifying the five new Texas seats.
When Texas Governor Greg Abbott called Newsom’s plan “disgraceful” and “potentially illegal”, Newsom pointed to his hypocrisy, pointing out he’s just doing the exact same thing Texas is. Indeed, Newsom wouldn’t have to take tit-for-tat revenge if Abbott hadn’t done something disgraceful to begin with.
A key difference between Texas and California’s plan, however, is that Newsom is democratically taking his redistricting changes to the people through a special election, something Texas has not done in its gerrymandering efforts.
President Barack Obama has endorsed Newsom’s actions as responsible and ‘designed to address a very particular problem at a very particular moment in time’, showing that the Democrats can fight fire with fire, while still taking the high moral ground.
With all this mockery, hypocrisy highlighting and revenge, it is fair to question where the Democrats’ strategies of fighting fire with fire might end up. In criticising the Democrats for Newsom’s map-redrawing, Californian Republican minority leader James Gallagher said that fighting fire with fire means you ‘burn it all down’.
There is, however, another way of characterising the Democrats’ strategies beyond the “fire with fire” analogy. Trump has been given far too much power to burn down American democracy and up until recently, the Democrats seemed incapable of adequately responding. I like to think the Democrats have not brought fire to a firefight. They have finally found a firefighting truck to pour water on Trump’s flames in an attempt to salvage American democracy on behalf of the people.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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