Bulwark Takes - Democrats Are Rebuilding — But With Whom?

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Andrew Egger and Lauren Egan discuss the Democrats' emerging strategy, with Senator Cory Booker's filibuster and Senator Chris van Hollen's upcoming trip to El Salvador, signaling a move away from past leadership figures like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Hi, I'm Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. Former President Joe Biden just gave his first post-presidential speech since he left office and all this started happening. I am joined to talk about that with Lauren Egan, our resident dim whisperer at The Bulwark. Lauren, let me just pre-prejudice everybody, get everybody a little bit mad before you even start talking. I did not watch the whole speech. I watched maybe the first half of it. It was putting kids down and stuff. But when he got up on stage and he got up in there and the music was still playing

and he launched right into his remarks and you couldn't hear him at all and the music was still going and they had to yank the speaker like 15 seconds into his speech. He kind of kept talking quietly all through that. The PTSD that I felt brings you back in that second. Yeah, I mean, what? Oh, yeah.

Talk us through the Biden speech. What was he up there? What was going on? Yeah. Tonight with the former president. Look, this was supposed to be like his first speech since he left office.

And it was to a group of disability advocates. It was mostly about social security and the need to protect that. But I mean, you know, it's just like most presidents play a role within their party after they leave office. The Bidens are obviously trying to figure out what that role looks like for them, especially since his legacy in the party right now is so fraught. But he gets up there on stage and you're just kind of like, people don't really want to hear from him right now. A poll after poll shows that the president, you know, it's kind of like toxic politically within the Democratic Party at the moment. And it's the same stuff where he's just

like really struggling to finish the sentence, really struggling to communicate clearly or to get a point across. So, yeah, it did give me a little bit of PTSD from 2024, which is not fun, you know? Yeah, yeah. And it's so hard. I mean, like, I feel like I got right back on that treadmill where it was always the same thing with Biden, where like, yeah, fundamentally, the stuff he's saying, I would love to have a country that still stood for all this stuff that still was into like protecting social security and just fundamental decency and, you know, being good to your neighbors and all those sorts of things. But it's just, it's so hard to extricate that from the messenger right up there. Who's this guy who had this, you know, totally tragic and horrible self-destruction of his presidential campaign

last year and, uh, and kind of set us on the glide path to where we are today and just rolling out all the same sort of jokes that he was always doing on the trail. I mean, it's just, it's gotta be impossible to be that guy. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's what makes him such a complicated figure and the party right now where, you know, it's not abnormal to have the, uh, the former president up there giving a speech at an event like this. But when he's saying things about like how awful he recognizes the Trump administration for being. Who in the hell do they think they are? I really think they, I mean, just basic, just basic decency. Who do they think they are? It's kind of like yeah dude we know like what why did you kind

of set the country on this on this path uh and just like this lack of acknowledgement um obviously that he has for kind of the role he played in getting us here um it's why i think like a lot of democratic voters just are and a lot of Democratic strategists, too. And candidates that are running for for midterm elections just don't want anything to want him to stay away. They don't want to hear from him. They think it'd be better off for the party if they could just move on and not kind of like remind voters constantly that Democrats really know, dropped the ball in this past election. Yeah, yeah. How much, I'm curious about this. Obviously, you know, Biden's political career is over. I mean, he will finish out, you know, he will still do these speeches, these sorts of

things as a president emeritus for as long as he wants to do them. He's not, obviously, obviously not running for anything again. One thing we were talking a little bit about in kind of the pre-show here is how much all that applies to Kamala Harris, you know, who has gone from, you know, the sort of by default era parent of the party, who if she'd, you know, overperformed by a couple percentage points would literally be president right now, to this sort of penumbral figure where it's not clear whether she's going to be able to kind of escape the gravitational black hole of having been in that White House, been on that ticket, failed to land the plane of keeping Trump back out of the White House. Where are Democrats kind of right now as far as Harris is concerned?

They extend a lot more grace to her than they do with Biden. I think Biden's just like pretty toxic. I mean, you know, he's been asking to get more involved and go campaign and raise money. And the DNC sent out like a fundraising email from him, which, you know, they say actually didn't perform horribly. But point being, they're not really eager to put him out on the campaign trail or like get him to headline any big, splashy DNC events. Any of these like town halls that we've seen, they're not putting him out there. There definitely is a lot more sort of, like I said, grace that's extended towards Harris. It wasn't her decision to, you know, have Biden stay in the race that late. And Democrats, I think, have a lot of goodwill towards her because I feel like she did run a really good campaign in those, you know, that just few short

week period that she had. At the same time, her legacy, no matter what, and her political brand is still tied to Biden's. And that's going to be a really big challenge for her as she's trying to figure out what she wants to do next with her career. We know that the New York Times reported that she offered to go to Wisconsin to campaign in that Supreme Court race that just happened, that Democrat did win. And they didn't want her there. They thought it'd be a distraction and just kind of like bring up a lot of like messiness from 2024 that doesn't actually help Democrats. So instead, she had a Zoom call with volunteers and organizers in Wisconsin. But what was interesting about it is that they didn't even post about that Zoom call until after the polls were closed. And then Harris tweeted out some pictures and some videos from that Zoom call, which to me just is so interesting that they

just view sort of obviously Biden, but Harris, too, is just this really complicated figure. And all that just kind of speaks to how leaderless the Democratic Party is right now. I mean, you think back to the first Trump administration, the former president then for the Democrats, Obama was not this toxic figure. And he's definitely stayed quiet if you recall those first few months of the first Trump administration. But they look to him for leadership in a way that like no one is looking to Joe Biden for leadership in this moment. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a little bit of a Rorschach test as well. Right. Because because you you mentioned the way that the that the Democratic Party, there's this humongous, humongous power vacuum just in terms of like, who are our leaders from

now on? If you're Democrats, like who's who is going to step up like the whole ticket is now gone. You know, the former president has sort of shuffled off into the sunset. His former vice president just suffered this excruciating defeat, is still figuring things out as far as her future in the party is concerned. And meanwhile, everything is happening, as we've all seen it happening, sort of demanding a new leadership, a new opposition. And there kind of are two strains of thought here, right? One, I mean, there are some Democrats who don't think it's a giant problem, that there are no figureheads sort of leading Democrats into the breach right

now because they think the job right now is almost for Democrats to just sort of sit down and shut up and let Trump self-destruct. I mean, that's what, you know, James Carville has been arguing for a while now. Democrats need to play possum. I believe that this administration in less than 30 days in the midst of a massive collapse. At the same time, there's a lot of other people who are saying, look, the country's burning down around our ears. We better get organized and figure out what the plan is, what the punchback is here. How are you reading that? I mean, like, like, like what, where are we in the tea leaves just in terms of, of the beginnings of, of somebody, anybody stepping up to fill that kind

of gap that's been left? I think we've seen a little bit of that in the past few weeks. I mean, Cory Booker's the notable person that's kind of stepped up recently with his filibuster. And Democrats, I think, were really pleased that that filibuster, which was obviously quite impressive, that that broke through so much. And I think there'd been a lot of, you know, anxiety that they hadn't really been able to break through the news cycle, that they weren't able to like, you know, even like have any sort of cultural relevance on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. And when Booker did that filibuster, that was, everyone kind of like was like, thank God, like we have finally something to like feel proud about and feel like it gives us some sort of hope that we can maybe find an effective leader. That's not to say that Democrats are, you know, banking everything on Booker or anything like that.

But we're starting to see Democrats like him sort of try and experiment a bit more and try and see, you know, whether or not they can break through like that. But it's still, you know, a big, like, that's the challenge for Democrats right now. And there's not a ton of confidence that, you know, Schumer is, that's like the next obvious person, right, in terms of hierarchy in the party, not a ton of confidence that he's the man for the moment either um and same with with jeffries uh on the house side um so you know it's a thing that they're constantly sort of having conversations about and and struggling over um and i think there's some hope that with the midterm elections there's going to be some new candidates and some like fresh faces i do think there's some hope that with the midterm elections, there's going to be some new candidates and some like fresh faces. I do think that there's an acknowledgement that Democratic voters really

want just like someone new, some new people to get excited about that haven't been in D.C., that haven't, you know, had any sort of like establishment connections to the Biden administration. So this midterms, you know, the party is obviously going to be looking to see what sort of candidates kind of like pop off and might become sort of more of a national figurehead that can rally the party a bit more. Yeah. Yeah, man. And it's just such you go you go around and around on it. Right. Because obviously, first, obviously, you know, that's that's the next opportunity for them to inject it, inject some some new blood, get some new people excited, you know, take a message again to voters in a really systematic way. At the same time, we're what?

We're like 90 days into our way to go. Yeah. I mean, it's who knows what we're all going to look like in late 2026. And I think part of the messaging struggle is just figuring out, all right, we're going to war with the army we have right now. And how are we going to do that right now with the weapons we have right now, which are few? I mean, they have so little institutional power anywhere in Washington. They don't have the presidency. They don't have either house of Congress. They're outgunned 6-3 in the Supreme Court. The liberal side obviously doesn't break down quite the same way in the Supreme Court. But even just figuring out how to take those first baby steps toward getting their message

to people where to sort of cross counter-programming the like what is turning out to be the alarmingly large and formidable sort of right wing messaging machine that has been such a force. Yeah. And to that point, I think right now, one of their biggest tools is shaping public opinion and trying to kind of like do some, you know, like for lack of a better term, like media stunts to sort of shape the narrative. The problem, though, is like there just aren't that many people in the Democratic Party right now who are really good at that. And that's part of the challenge that they're facing. The filibuster with Booker was a good start. But like you said, like, we're not that far into this presidency, and we've got a long way to go till midterms. Who's going to kind of be that person that can step up and, you know, is really effective online

and effective in front of a camera and effective at shaping a narrative. And there's no obvious person who's really, really good at that right now in the party. Let's talk about one other thing that is happening for Democrats this week. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland has been really plugged into this developing crisis around the White House gearing up to seemingly defy a Supreme Court order, ordering them to basically go get Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was mistakenly and wrongly deported to El Salvador with a bunch of these other Venezuelans a few months ago. A lot of proper nouns in that sentence. You all know the story.

We're all following along. And Senator Ben Holland is from Maryland. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a Maryland resident before he was before he was, he was, you know, booted, uh, into this concentration camp in El Salvador. Um, and, uh, and he announced today, uh, he's been talking about it for, for days. He announced today he's going there. He's gonna, he's gonna organize a trip, uh, down to El Salvador. I think tomorrow, is that what he said? He's going to be on a plane tomorrow going down. Um, yeah. How do you see that? I mean, do you,

do you think that's the kind of thing that's going to prove fruitful for Democrats? We're going to see more of or just what do you make of it in general? Yeah, I mean, I think we'll have to see how the trip goes tomorrow. But I do think that this is an important step for them to take. You know, we're talking about how you shape public opinion or how you really, you know, hold Trump accountable for some of the things that he's doing. This is how you do it when you're in the minority and don't have a ton of legislative power. There was some frustration in the party that this didn't happen sooner, right? It's been about a month now, I think. There were some strategists that I've been talking with who said, you know,

this should have been something we did, you know, when it became immediately became apparent that the Trump administration was going to ignore court orders. But Democrats have had a really hard time figuring out how to talk about immigration. It's something they still feel really uncomfortable about. I do think that this situation, though, gives them kind of a natural first opportunity to create a contrast with Trump on immigration, because this is not popular. This is, you know, I know that the Trump folks think that this is like giving red meat to their base, but polls do show like once you actually explain to people what the particulars of this and what exactly they're doing, it's not, this is not necessarily like a winning thing or winning policy for the trump folks to pursue and so now the democrats i think are like aware of that um and they can feel like a little

bit more comfortable obviously and kind of like going there and really trying to make this a bit of a wedge issue um and drawing a more clear contrast with him um so i'm super curious to see how this trip goes and what other Democrats might go as well. There was a few other House members that came out and said like Maxwell Frost said he would be interested in going. I think Cory Booker also said that he'd be interested in organizing some sort of trip. So this could definitely like turn into a thing where we see a bunch of Democrats start going to El Salvador, depending on how long this drags out. So yeah, I'm curious to on how long this drags out. So yeah,

I'm curious to see how this, this trip ends up going. Yeah, well, we'll definitely keep following it. Thank you, Lauren, for coming on and talking through some of this stuff with us. And thanks to all you people out there for, for following along, listening and watching.