TRUMP'S POWER IN PRIMARIES IS A GIFT TO DEMOCRATS, IF THEY'LL USE IT

Let's assess where we are.

Approximately 60% of the country despises Donald Trump. That's a very solid majority in a country that's been seen as 50%/50% for most of this century. The people who hate Donald Trump are the normal people. "Donald Trump is a terrible president" is largely an agreed-upon fact in America.

But a relatively small percentage of the country -- less than 40% -- worships the ground Trump walks on and will do anything he tells them to do:

For the second time this month, Republican primary voters sent a message about the price of defying the president, this time by retiring Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Mr. Trump in his impeachment trial after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The outcome in Louisiana on Saturday followed losses by a group of Indiana state lawmakers whom the president targeted for political payback. And it arrived just ahead of another big test on Mr. Trump’s retribution tour: a House primary in Kentucky on Tuesday.

Cassidy finished third in a four-way race. He didn't even make it to a top-two runoff. That's how loyal the freaks and weirdos of the MAGA cult are to Trump. In Kentucky on Tuesday, they'll defeat Thomas Massie, on behalf of a president 60% of America hates.

This is an opportunity for Democrats to start saying what they should have been saying for years: not "Trump is bad," but "The entire Republican Party is bad."

Over clips of news stories about Trump's successful campaigns of revenge against Republican dissenters, Democrats can say:

Tired of Trump? Don't expect Republicans to do anything to help. Republicans can't. If they challenge Trump, their political careers are over.

This is where I'd like to see Republicans represented as a crowd of non-player characters saying what actual Republicans in Congress have effectively been saying for the past year and a half:

And while the message that follows this might be hard to craft -- many Democrats haven't exactly been brave anti-Trump warriors -- this is a good setup for a Democratic challenger who promises to fight. Incumbents, meanwhile, can say, We want to fight Trump, but first we need to change control of Congress.

This isn't the full message I want to hear from Democrats. The Republican Party is bad and was bad long before Trump. It's bad in many ways that have nothing to do with Trump. (For instance, Trump isn't the one removing Roots from school libraries in Knox County, Tennessee. That was based on a state law passed in 2022, when Trump was out of office.)

But it would be a start. Democrats could attack all Republicans as Trump bootlickers knowing that Trump is massively unpopular and that hating Trump is America's default mode now. Eventually they need to say that Republicans are massively out of step with normal Americans -- on taxation of the rich, on healthcare, on the minimum wage, on abortion. But they can begin here.