Having lost to Donald Trump and the Republicans, the Democrats have been deafeningly silent. Kamala Harris has been recovering from her blistering defeat. Even defining who leads the Democrats is an interesting question. Chuck? Hakeem? Gretchen? You can sense the faint hope among Democrats, curled in the fetal position, that Donald Trump will self-destruct with his nitwit policies, immigrant dragnet, political prosecutions, and unvetted appointments. But hope is not a strategy.
After George W. Bush narrowly defeated Al Gore in 2000, Hillary Clinton allies helped found a progressive think tank, the Center for American Progress, to take on conservative foes. It may have done some excellent work, but it is not the dynamo that can reenergize the party any more than the Democratic Leadership Council founded in 1985 after the disastrous Reagan-Mondale landslide would refurbish the party today. The party and America need fresh ideas, and that’s where the Washington Monthly and others come in, as Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief of this magazine, recently wrote, but it also needs a clear voice while Donald, Vivek, Elon, Kash, Tulsi, and J.D. run amok.
The Democrats could follow the English model and form a Shadow Cabinet—a group of loyal and eminent Americans with experience in government and/or the private sector, to bring the fight to MAGA. As the Democratic National Committee searches for a new chair, and Democrats are in the minority in both chambers of Congress, there’s a pressing need for the party to have a coherent message and to showcase its considerable talent—all those great governors, retired generals, and intelligent House members—so that it’s not whoever Fox News or MSNBC bookers ring on any given day.
In the United Kingdom, the Shadow Cabinet, of course, is the team of senior spokespeople chosen by the opposition leader to birddog the government cabinet ministers across their particular focus. Each Shadow Cabinet member leads on a specific policy, questioning and challenging their counterpart in the official cabinet during the famed question time in Parliament. In this way, the opposition seeks to position itself as a government in waiting, displaying its wares to the voters and pressuring the incumbents.
Obviously, the differences between a parliamentary system and ours are myriad, which is why there are many good ideas across the pond that can’t happen here—Presidential Question Time! Shorter campaigns! Tea time! But this one could if there were someone to organize it. It might not be an official opposition government, but it could provide a healthy sense of what an alternative would look like after a nominee is chosen.
Forming such a group might be challenging for Harris, who may find it hard to round up followers at this dark moment—what with so many donors wondering how some $2 billion in campaign and allied funds didn’t do the trick. No one potential candidate could do this. But this is something Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, could form with the Democratic Governors Association. They could give it a name other than Shadow Cabinet, but it would be a broad collection of messengers covering their departments across the government, and it can represent a range of views. The party’s not monolithic, nor should the U.S. version of the Shadow Cabinet.
Leaving the choice of Democratic spokespersons to the next DNC chair is unlikely to fix the problem. The top candidates for chair, while great organizers, are mediocre communicators or familiar pols. Just leaving to chance who goes on Meet the Press is a roll of the dice.
It would be ridiculous not to take advantage of every Trump misstep, and every day Democrats wait to field a team of voices, they’re digging a deeper hole for themselves.
Look at high prices. Trump’s administration has already fired a shot across the bow to the north and south—and straight into its foot. Trump’s tariff madness has alarmed our number one trading partner, Canada, and our neighbor to the south, Mexico, whose cooperation we need to make immigration and our economy work, and it promises to raise prices for everyone. As my colleague Bill Scher pointed out, Trump made a self-aggrandizing effort to amend and rename the NAFTA agreement and forge the USMCA. Now, he’s shooting down his signature achievement. Of course, Trump may be bluffing, but even if he’s not, he’s risking a massive trade war, threatening 100 percent tariffs on any country that devalues its currency. It’s essential for Democrats to decide who goes on camera and explains why this neo-Smoot-Hawley idea is a bad one. It could be a progressive like Representative Ro Khanna or a billionaire centrist like Mark Cuban.
Likewise, with Ukraine. Europeans widely fear Trump will whip up a hasty ceasefire with Putin, prevail on the Ukrainians to accept, and give Moscow time to regroup and resume the invasion. “Peace in our time” didn’t work when Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain signed their Munich agreement. Europeans will widely see any ceasefire as a pause before renewed aggression is directed at Georgia, Moldova, and, perhaps, even NATO members, Poland and the Baltics, as a weakened NATO watches in horror. The New York Times reports a Kremlin jubilant over Trump’s victory, not because of Ukraine, but because they think it heralds the beginning of the end of the U.S. as a world power.
Doesn’t anyone remember the Budapest Memorandum of 1994? Ukraine agreed to transfer its nuclear weapons to Russia and join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state. In exchange, Ukraine received security assurances from the United States, Britain, and Russia, including commitments to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty within its borders.
Doesn’t anyone remember the Minsk Accords of 2014 and 2015 on Ukraine, which Russia also violated?
To our dismay, we learned that the domino theory didn’t apply in Southeast Asia. The fall of Saigon didn’t mean Communists marching on Bangkok or Manila as was widely feared. However, containment is a proven deterrent for European dictators. Appeasement is encouragement.
A shadow cabinet could remind the public that Democrats stand for a strong defense, including sticking with American allies and not cutting and running. Former Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen or a Naval Academy vet like Representative Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey could effectively make these points.
Trump’s mandate was impressive, but it is still ephemeral and needs to be treated as such. It turns out he’s not the first Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of the popular vote since 2004, as was widely assumed in the first days after the election. Yet he insists that he has an “unprecedented and powerful” mandate to govern, but it’s a Big Lie like so much of what he says. Democrats can go out and say, at every turn, that they understand people were angry about a lot of things, but did they mean to vote for a chaotic retreat from Russia and higher prices?
Yes, Trump has broadened his appeal across nearly all groups of voters since his 2020 defeat. But it was a much closer contest than the MAGAs suggest. “It feels grandiose to me that they’re calling it a landslide,” argues Chris Jackson of the polling firm Ipsos. Trump’s claim to have a historic mandate “may be overwrought,” says Jackson, who claims the language of Trump and his supporters was a tactic used to “justify the sweeping actions they’re planning to take once they have control of the government.”
Jackson argued that Trump’s language suggested overwhelming victories when, in fact, a few hundred thousand votes in critical areas propelled Trump back to the White House.
So, a shadow cabinet can make the point, just by its existence, that Democrats, while suffering a defeat they must reckon with, came close to winning, are ready to govern, and can lead in ways that matter in people’s real lives. Trump’s mandate is conditional on doing what voters want, not giving a job to every unqualified loyalist, even those accused of sexual abuse.
Britain itself reminds us that public opinion can be volatile. Last July, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won the British general election in a landslide victory, ending 14 years of Conservative rule. Three months later, his approval ratings tumbled by 49 percent from the +11 rating Starmer garnered just after the election to -38.
And now, four months after Starmer’s election victory, MPs will have to debate an online petition for a new election that garnered over 2.8 million signatures. The petition, sparked by the reactionary extremists Nigel Farage and our own Elon Musk, called for a re-run of July’s general election.
The petition will not lead to another election, but Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, who is Black, female, telegenic, and smart, is using it to taunt Starmer in the House of Commons. Badenoch said it showed “two million people asking him to go.” That some Tories are urging Badenoch to be more aggressive about proposing alternatives only points out the need for a center/center-left push here. That’s why each member of a Democratic Shadow Cabinet should be armed with data and ideas, enough staff, and a Washington Monthly subscription to keep them up to date.
The other advantage of a shadow cabinet is that it can distract from things Democrats don’t want to discuss, such as Hunter Biden’s pardon, which may have merits but is not the path back to the White House. Likewise, as Harris privately considers another presidential run in 2028 or a bid to become governor of California in 2026, Trump continues to steal the march unchallenged. A day does not go by when he doesn’t announce what he will do, and he isn’t even in power. He’s already speaking with foreign leaders like he’s president and jetting to Paris this weekend for the reopening of Notre Dame like he’s already been inaugurated.
The Democrats cannot afford to wait. There can be no honeymoon with an incoming president who denied one to his successor and tried to overturn the 2020 election. Former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton observed Trump 2.0: “The common theme–Trump learned this from his first term-is he wants loyalty. He wants ‘yes men’ and ‘yes women.’…Running through all these nominations, I think that’s the real common thread.”
So why not a shadow attorney general of eminence and stature to show the public that Pam Bondi is a hack, loyal to Trump, and not to the rule of law? Let Jamie Raskin, Sheldon Whitehouse, and former state AGs like Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro get out there.
Why not a shadow secretary of defense (preferably not an accused sexual assaulter) who has some experience in national security, preferably with some cred at the Pentagon, who doesn’t think it’s such an excellent idea to witch-hunt woke generals and fire them or remove women from combat or dishonorably discharge transgender people from the armed forces. Paging Evelyn Farkas, Elissa Slotkin, and Abigail Spanberger.
We could have a shadow director of national intelligence who is not a security risk.
Let’s have a shadow secretary of state who tells us we must not desert Europe or NATO and give in to Vladimir Putin.
Let’s have a shadow secretary of Health and Human Services who believes in science, not voodoo. Hawaii Governor Josh Green is a physician and a Democrat. (Fluoride wasn’t added to water in George Washington’s day, and his false teeth are in a case in Mount Vernon.)
Let’s have a shadow trade representative and leading economist publicly argue that Trump’s tariffs will increase inflation, which is the very issue that brought the septuagenarian to power for a second time.
We have never had shadow governments, but desperate times call for desperate measures, even British ones.
