President-elect Donald Trump is in charge of a party falling apart at the seams before he even takes office, wrote Amanda Marcotte in a Salon analysis published on Monday.
This comes amid reporting that Trump is already needled by Democrats' newly emboldened attack strategy of painting him as second fiddle to tech billionaire Elon Musk, who by all accounts was the architect of last week's chaos that collapsed a bipartisan spending deal and briefly appeared to put America on track for a government shutdown over the holidays.
With hours to spare before that shutdown would take effect, Marcotte noted, "Democrats handed Musk — sorry, Trump — the first major loss of his presidency, a presidency which technically doesn't start for another month. The funding bill passed, with all the major provisions Musk tried to strip out returned. The fight left the Republican coalition divided and weakened. It also revealed that an aging, tired Trump is currently controlled by his biggest donor."
Trump had been counting on the media to puff up his strength and invincibility into the start of his term, following his narrow popular vote plurality. But now, wrote Marcotte, "it's clear that the GOP is being held together with safety pins. MAGA was never coherent ideologically but held together by Trump's cult of personality" — and Democrats appear to be done licking their wounds and are now ready to fight, with a newly found strategy that is genuinely doing damage.
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Their message, though, goes beyond simply saying that Trump is beholden to Musk and hoping it drives him up the wall, Marcotte argued — it's a coherent, ideological narrative that could become Trump's Achilles heel for holding together his entire coalition.
"Democrats are ... using this to drive home a simple but important message: Trump and Republicans are puppets of predatory billionaires," wrote Marcotte. "The 'President Musk' jokes flew fast and furious, helping reinforce the point that Trump is in this to enrich himself and his friends, at the expense of the poor souls who believed his lies that he wanted to do something about inflation."
The lesson of the last week, Marcotte concluded, is that "All it takes is a little discipline and a little spine, and Democrats can get Republicans to hate each other so much that getting work done feels impossible for the would-be fascist leaders."
