Democrats Are Bad At Counterprogramming
This is strange and off-putting political malpractice
“These are not normal times,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told a small crowd attending the Change.org “People’s State of the Union” at the National Mall on Tuesday night. “And Democrats have to stop behaving normally.”
Murphy appeared with Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Sen. Adam Schiff of California, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland as Joy Reid tried and failed to get the crowd to join her in singing a song they did not know.
Meanwhile, Rob Potylo, who goes by the moniker Robby Roadsteamer, wore a giraffe costume to the “State of the Swamp” event as he referred to Donald Trump as “pumpkin spice Satan”. Potylo bragged that he has been arrested three times during anti-ICE protests.
DEFIANCE.org, the all-caps organization that held the State of the Swamp shindig, was started by Miles Taylor, formerly Chief of Staff to the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration. Like ‘hope’ and ‘joy’, the slogan is supposed to be the instruction.
“Tonight I defy Trump and his authoritarian project by standing in joyful, radical, peaceful resistance with the Portland Frog Brigade,” Rep. Maxine Dexter of Oregon told a small crowd. “We answered with frog costumes, dancing, singing and joy when Trump wanted us to cower in fear.”
She credited the frog costumes for preventing the National Guard from coming to her city. This was a slightly more rational statement than Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts declaring that Trump “sounds like your drunk uncle” when Trump was simultaneously dismantling Democrats by asking them to stand up.
Lest we forget, in the immediate aftermath of the Democrats’ epic defeat in November 2024, Moulton broke ranks to declare that he did not want his own daughter forced to compete at sports with boys. In response, angry activists picketed his office and threatened to cut off his supply of volunteers. Today, Moulton is among the most ardent champions of ‘trans kids’ in the Democratic Party.
During the Swamp event, Robert De Niro compared patriotism in the time of Trump to an “abused spouse professing love for their abuser.” He shared the stage with Antifa frogs. Started by Portland-area leftist Seth Todd, the plastic costumes are supposed to make it harder for law enforcement to paint protesters as violent. Todd still manages to get arrested, though.
There was a big fuss about the Superbowl this month. Bad Bunny was a controversial, and it seems unpopular, halftime show act. Meanwhile, TPUSA held an alternative halftime show of their own. In the television scheduling business, this is called counterprogramming.
Put together on short notice with minimal star power, it still seems to have drawn a large enough share of the world’s largest television event audience to justify future repeats, effectively putting the NFL on notice: stop hating your fans with virtue signals, or else watch the advertisers stop paying millions for a 30-second spot in the first quarter.
Counterprogramming is not a new idea, and the organizers of Tuesday night’s absurdities were not inspired by TPUSA. Rather, these new examples serve to illustrate that our hyperpartisan, divided country is holding separate, contrarian events more and more often. It is becoming normal to our atomized civil life.
Of course, “stop behaving normally” and “DEFIANCE” are prima facie calls to disordered oppositional behavior, whereas Erika Kirk just had Kid Rock pretend to sing. These things are not the same. However, they are both happening more frequently in the second Trump administration.
Cringe is common to the products of the left these days. Former MSNBC personality Joy-Ann Reid does not convince anyone of the rightness of her cause with foul language and attitude. “DEFIANCE” does not attract the moderate, the true independent, the normie voter. It is not supposed to. It is a form of politics that aims to whip ‘the base’ into a frenzy, so that they will vote harder. That will convince us all, surely!
Fractures were apparent before Trump. For several years until 2011, RightOnline was the conservative equivalent of Netroots Nation. This shadow conference would travel to the same city, often staying at the same hotels, creating opportunities for civil discussions at the bar with people who held the opposite set of political views.
After Andrew Breitbart crashed Netroots in Minneapolis that year, the organizers inserted a noncompete clause in the contract with the city they chose for the next year — basically a restraining order against RightOnline. While Netroots Nation is still a concern, it is a shade of its former self. RightOnline is long gone, having dissolved into other conservative infrastructure, such as TPUSA.
I do not expect this era of counterprogramming to age well, at least not for Democrats. By contrast, the president chose his battles with them shrewdly on Tuesday night, and the speech will age well. Trump spoke for two hours, defeating efforts to frame him as cognitively impaired. His moral framing of each issue was calculated for mass appeal, whereas the piqued state of Democrats is directly proportional to the marginal positions that the party forces them to take.
Donald Trump could be the worst person in the world and the Democratic Party would still find a way to look worse by comparison. He could be completely insane and they would still find a way to look even more mad than him. We do not live in normal times because they cannot be normal, right now, and maybe not ever again.