Don’t Scold Us For Laughing At Trump and Musk

Democrats, your talking points are not a suicide pact.

As you probably noticed, yesterday Donald Trump and his billionaire sugar daddy Elon Musk had a falling out in which they both threw themselves on the floor and started spraying cheese whiz and battery acid on each other. Musk said Trump’s tariffs were the work of a shithead and would cause a recession and that Trump was in the secret Epstein files showing that he was a sexual abuser (which we already knew since Trump was literally declared liable for sexual assault in a court of law.) Trump responded by threatening to withdraw all of Musk’s billions in federal contracts. Tesla stocks crashed, Trump’s beautiful bill to destroy healthcare seemed endangered, everyone pointed and laughed. It was fun!

Some Democratic leaders, though, did not want the fun. Senator Chris Murphy—who has been pretty obviously running for the 2028 presidential nomination—took to bluesky to chastise us all for cheering as the fascists gutted each other.

A lot of people pointed out to Murphy that Musk and Trump were in fact arguing about this very bill; Musk feels the budget doesn’t make deep enough cuts. Musk doesn’t get a vote, but a riff in the GOP and an open conservative attack on the bill could potentially scuttle it. That’s one reason people were pleased about the spat.

More than that though…Democrats have just spent several months in a self-flagellating doom loop bemoaning the fact that they come across to much of the electorate as humorless scolds. So what does Murphy do when the entire internet is reaching for the popcorn and cheering as Hitler and Henry Ford disembowel each other? He pops up to remind us he’s a humorless scold, and we shouldn’t have a moment of joy as our enemies gratuitously slap each other around.

What is Chris Murphy’s problem. Well, Democrats seem to have looked at a bunch of polls and learned from them that Trump’s attack on Medicare and Medicaid is incredibly unpopular. They are determined, therefore, to talk about Medicare and Medicaid cuts and nothing else, world without end, forever.

This isn’t necessarily bad in itself; Medicare and Medicaid cuts are going to harm millions of people. It’s important to fight that, and derailing the bill, if possible, is a priority. I don’t have a problem with Democrats focusing on it or with message discipline.

Message discipline, though, should not be a suicide pact. You don’t need to be distracted by everything that happens. But you also shouldn’t treat everything that happens as a personal affront designed to somehow trick you into abandoning your talking points for the day.

The scolding tone, and the resentment of people focusing on something else than what you are focusing on (or really on a slightly different aspect of the same thing you are focusing on) also speaks to what I think is a flawed conception of leadership.

Murphy seems to think that leadership is telling people what they should be concerned about, and chastising them if they aren’t concerned enough, or if they’re concerned about other things. This echoes the current centrist obsession with “the Groups”—a term used to describe progressive activist organizations and also, I think, a dog whistle for people who aren’t white cishet men. No one quite says that one “Group” is trans people arguing for basic rights. But it’s not hard to read between the lines.

These centrist pundits frame the Groups as enemies; politicians should focus on embracing poll tested positions and talk only about the best, most poll-validated topics. The Groups, in contrast keep asking them to talk about rights for marginalized people or demanding they respect the dignity of all people and irritating shit like that.

I’m not against polls, just as I’m not against message discipline. But what this all seems to miss is that a big part of what people want their politicians to do is listen to them and acknowledge their worth and their perspective.

This is pretty basic to democracy. Representatives are supposed to consult with their constituents; they’re supposed to be accountable to their constituents; they’re supposed to even, sometimes, change their minds and their approach in response to constituent concerns. Maybe Republicans want a big Daddy to chastise them and take away their health care. But in theory Democrats have a different model of governance—one based on reciprocity and mutual respect.

One easy way to demonstrate that respect is to assume, as a baseline, that your constituents aren’t easily distracted sheep who need to constantly be directed to talk about the one and only thing you want to talk about. One way to demonstrate reciprocity is to listen to what your constituents think is important and maybe adapt your message to incorporate that. Rather than saying, “you dopes, how dare you enjoy the leopards eating each other’s face, we should be talking about healthcare,” you could say, “I too enjoy the leopards eating each other’s face, in part because I, like you, hope that they will be so distracted devouring each other that they’ll forget to rob us of healthcare.”

I’m not saying that nuances of messaging like this are likely to have a huge effect on election outcomes. But I do think that a representative like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who is able to appreciate their constituent’s joy, their constituent’s anger, their constituent’s wit, and their constituent’s priorities, is a representative who will be able to serve their constituents better than a representative who cannot do those things.

Strategy for the fight is good; a plan for the fight is good. But you don’t want to get so obsessed with your own to do list that you forget that what we really want, and what we really need, is representatives who want to fight not near us, and not above us, but with us. Even if that fight, sometimes, means taking a moment to enjoy the fact that the fascists are so loathsome that even the fascists hate them.