HOW WE GOT HERE

Politico published this over the weekend:

Trump is everywhere again

The president’s first week showed a stark contrast with his predecessor.

Joe Biden promised Americans a four-year break from thinking about the presidency every day. That hiatus ended at 12:01 p.m. Monday, when Donald J. Trump took the oath of office....

The former reality TV star followed his inaugural address in the Capitol rotunda with an off-the-cuff speech to his supporters, a 47-minute gaggle with reporters in the Oval Office and remarks at three formal galas. By week’s end, he had tweeted multiple policy announcements, weaved his way through a two-part prime-time interview with Sean Hannity and made speeches at recovery and disaster zones in Asheville, North Carolina, and Los Angeles.

Yes, Trump was eager to sign all those executive orders reversing Biden’s policies. But the bigger flex for Trump, 78, was to contrast his accessibility, aptitude and activity with his predecessor, who was so often shielded from public view by aides wary of showcasing the 82-year-old’s growing limitations....

Although Biden did take questions from reporters here and there, his more informal exchanges with the press were sporadic and rarely lasted more than a few minutes. More often than not, he was out of view.

How did we get here, with Trump running rampant and more popular than ever (though still not genuinely popular), and with Democrats seemingly as out of fashion as they appeared to be after Ronald Reagan's 49-state landslide in 1984, even though the election they just lost was close? Why do so many political observers believe that Democrats are in deep trouble? Why do so many Democrats seem to believe that?

Here's a parable.

Imagine you're Coca-Cola. After a year with record-breaking sales, you decide on an unusual course of action: You intend to stop advertising your products entirely for four years. No TV ads. No billboards. No online ads. You even take down the Coca-Cola logos that are part of diner signs.

During these four years, Pepsi advertises relentlessly. Pepsi reaches out to new media and finds inventive ways of getting attention. And not only that: Pepsi also promotes every negative story and bad rumor about Coke through all its messaging routes. Did they really find rat poison in a batch of Coke? Are Coke cans radioactive?

Coca-Cola is aware of all these negative stories, but it doesn't respond to them. Its executives conclude that responding to the stories will just draw attention to them. Coke says nothing. It doesn't even find a way to say that Coke is working hard to maintain high standards of quality control. The rumors spread and spread.

At the end of these four years, Coke sales have declined approximately 8%. That's not a lot -- but as a result, Pepsi is now outselling Coke by a small margin.

What conclusion do Coke executives draw?

"People hate Coke."

And that's the wrong conclusion. People don't hate Coke. Coke was the #1 carbonated drink, and now it's slightly less popular, after four years when the public heard almost nothing positive about Coke and a great deal that was negative.

This is where Democrats are now.

Democrats won the popular vote in 7 of the 8 presidential elections between 1992 and 2020. They were Coke -- unquestionably the more popular party, at least at the presidential level.

But the president they elected in 2020 struggled to speak publicly, and so Democrats decided that they'd have to go four years without a party leader who could talk. The vice president and Cabinet officials weren't asked to be the voices of the party. The party's congressional leaders weren't very good at public speaking either.

Democrats effectively went silent. They didn't respond to attacks. They never mastered podcasts or TikTok.

And still, largely because they belatedly turned the leadership of the party over to someone who could talk last summer, they came close to winning the 2024 election.

But Donald Trump seems hip and popular now. His poll numbers will probably go up after his standoff with Colombia over immigrant flights, which is widely seen as a victory for him.

Most Democrats are still largely silent. They want to continue the failed experiment of the past four years.

The party's policies aren't why there seems to have been a pro-Trump "vibe shift." The shift is happening because, over the past four years, Trump and the GOP marketed themselves and Democrats didn't. Trump and the GOP have attacked Democrats and Democrats have neither responded nor done any effective attacking of their own. For far too long, they behaved as if there was no point responding to attacks on inflation and immigration. To be fair, they did attack Trump as a threat to democracy. But democracy is an abstraction. The attacks weren't effective, and they didn't find new ones that worked better. (Tim Walz's "weird" was an attack that actually did work, but they abandoned it.)

Americans might not want the firehose of attention-seeking behavior they're getting from Trump now, but when things seemed to be going wrong they wanted at least some sense that the president and his party were aware of the discontent and were taking action. Too much noise might be exhausting after a while, but the public prefers it to silence.