Democrats have not tried infiltrating MAGA en masse from within

Politics & Elections
1

Over the past nine years, Democrats have tried nearly every possible tactic against Trump, with poor or limited effect.

They called him out for his 13,000+ lies. They called him a racist, sexist, Islamophobe, impeached him twice, called him an insurrectionist, threat to democracy, Hitler II, tyrant - whatever label there was in the dictionary, it was used. They did protests in many cities, correctly blamed him for Covid, etc. They got judges to block Trump’s orders. They fundraised billions of dollars against Trump. They wrote countless op-eds in the media warning about the dangers of Trump. You would be hard-pressed to name a single thing Democrats could do against Trump and MAGA that they didn’t do.

The results overall…weren’t all that great. Trump won in 2016, getting a majority in the House and Senate as well. To be sure, the Democrats won in 2020, but that was by a shockingly close margin (Biden actually only won the pivotal states of AZ, WI, GA by a combined margin of just 44,000 votes - half the capacity of a football stadium.) Democrats did decently in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

But as of right now, where have nine years of Democrats’ resistance against Trump gotten to?..As of this current moment, Trump is still president, again, and Republicans have both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court is now 6-3 conservative. In other words, the outcome of all those many years of resistance is that the situation now looks grimmer than ever for Democrats.

IMHO, this is because there is one tactic that Democrats have not yet used. At no point did the Ds try to infiltrate Trumpism and MAGA from within. All of the anti-Trump resistance took place from outside of MAGA.

The MAGA mindset is intensely allergic to opposition from the outside. It’s just human nature; nobody wants to heed their enemy’s words or obey/listen to the advice of their enemy. But that’s all the Democratic resistance to Trump was - opposition from the outside. The Democrats were abhorring MAGA and trying not to touch it with a 39.5-foot pole. Of course MAGA isn’t going to listen to “the enemy.”

But the best way to defeat anything is to sabotage it from within; a fifth column. Democrats could have - and still can - infiltrate MAGA en masse. They could have people participating in MAGA rallies holding billboards either subtly pushing MAGA in a pro-Democrat direction, or even more overtly, misrepresenting or distorting MAGA. Democrats could have gone into right-wing subreddits and many other online message boards to subtly hijack the conversation. They could have steered QAnon in such a direction that the MAGAs would turn on each other, thinking that other MAGAs are mutual traitors.

This tactic would be highly effective because MAGA folks tend to be highly gullible and accepting of things that “their own people” tell them from within. They are every bit as trusting of insiders as they are distrusting of outsiders. All of the Democrats’ tactics from the outside to resist Trump have done nothing but galvanize MAGA, but if they were to become a cancer from within the movement, they could completely splinter it from the inside.

2

It’s not the messaging, it’s the ability to get it out there.
Conservative media is obviously very pro-Trump and not afraid to lie on his behalf. Local news is largely owned by Sinclair, so is also conservative media. The mainstream media includes FOX, but putting them to one side, the rest just tries to be “centrist”, and while they do indeed criticize Trump they don’t do enough to fight the false talking points.
And social media was made for stuff like MAGA; telling the rubes what they want to hear with misattributed images and sensational (and false) captions.

You mean like establishment republicans tried to do and have been kicked out of the party?
At the end of the day, MAGAs enjoy the bigotry and love Trump. You’re not going to be able to steer that ship very far. Just days ago a bishop asked Trump to not be cruel to gay and trans people, and MAGAs (and even some church leaders) have talked about deporting her.

Sorry to sound so pessimistic about all this, I just don’t see it personally. The best bet in the short term would be if someone like a Rogan threw in occasional doses of reality even while still praising Trump overall. Other than that, I think the country needs to go to absolute shit (e.g. a depression) before any MAGA would even begin to listen to alternate views.

3

But the bishop is an example of the kind of opposition I was talking about - someone who is perceived as an outsider, trying to influence Trump and MAGA. She wasn’t presenting herself as, “Hey, I’m a fellow conservative MAGA and I love Trump but I think deportations are going to make us worse off.” She was presenting herself as, “I’m a liberal, I’m anti-MAGA, and I think Trump should be nice to undocumented immigrants and LGBT.” By presenting herself as a liberal outsider, the ears of MAGA were already instantly shut off to start with.

4

Nope, don’t see “infiltration” working.

Assuming enough Democrats could tolerate the nausea of closely associating with Trumpites, such a campaign would just feed the paranoia of hard-core MAGAs and drive them closer together.

The cult only dies when its leader does.

5

You think the response would have been different? As I say, there used to be moderate Republicans who pushed back in that way. Used to be.

I must have missed the part where she said that.

Those are labels applied to her now, because she did not show fealty, and did not repeat the intolerance they now expect from the church.
Heck, her message was essentially “Let’s not make this you’re either with us, or against us” and the response was to label her as being the enemy.

6

Heck, when Trump himself started talking up vaccination, what was their response? And what was his response?

7

Right. He creates a monster by feeding conspiracy theories, and then even he can’t tell said monster about reality.

8

Once in awhile the sorcerer loses control of his creations.

But overall I must admit that trump (with the help of sycophantic propaganda outlets) have a very successful track record of controlling the narrative his followers accept as Truth and Wisdom.

That excellent track record is a large part of how / why we find ourselves in the current predicament.

9

It is damn hard to infiltrate the MAGA crowd and still stay clean. In fact, they probably bet that those who try will eventually see their side and turn for real.

10

I’ve said on the boards before, I think we should have tried portraying Trump as a buffoon. Pointing and laughing. The one thing a tyrant can’t stand is not being taken seriously.

This was very briefly successful when Harris began her campaign and they were using the word “weird”. It sort of caught on, but then they stopped doing it. I think that was a mistake.

The first response to every Trump idea and spoken word should have been riotous laughter, in person and elsewhere. Nothing else has worked and that hasn’t been tried. I think it could have been effective.

11

Sure, but it’s not just about influencing MAGA themselves, it’s about influencing the swing voters too. By false-flagging MAGA and dressing themselves in the garb of MAGA, Trump opponents could do a lot of things to piss off swing voters and make them vote against Trump.

12

I think of Liz Cheney who is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who was excommunicated for the crime of not bending knee to Donald Trump. When you have a cult of personality, anyone who criticizes said personality, whether a member of group or an outsider, will be pilloried. We’ve seen that happen multiple times where Republicans tear themselves apart when someone isn’t sufficient loyal to Trump. And I’ve seen it as well, my first presidential election was 1996 and I voted for Dole. I went on to vote for Bush, McCain, and Romney, but in 2016 I could not bring myself to vote for Trump. Other Republicans were not interested in why I didn’t like Trump, instead labeling me a RINO.

13

Instead of thinking infiltration why not think in terms of narrowing the divide between the two parties. The wide division is scaring people. Immigration all by itself lost the election for the democrats. Why not just take a reasonable approach to immigration? The gender issues also cost a lot of votes. Why not look at that a little closer and make some adjustments there?

14

That is raging nonsense. If swing voters were not already motivated to vote against trump there are only two things your putative fifth column could have done. Make trump seem more mainstream or make him seem more crazy. The former is likely to attract swing voters towards voting for trump and the latter is likely to encourage closet but disinterested MAGAs to vote for trump.

Either way it’s a losing soliloquy.

15

Quoted for truth, as they say.

As has been pionted out, sane Republicans did speak out against Trump. Trump said they were not real Republicans. They were shamed and voted out of office.

The swing voters have already been presented with the horrible truth about Trump many many many times. They know what he did during his first term. They know, from his officially endorse ads, what he promised to do this term. If by this point they have not decided to vote against Trump, they never will.

16

the Democrats in general and Harris in particular are and were taking a reasonable approach to both issues. As has often been said on the Doper, voters were not voting against anything done or said by the Democrats. They were voting against the lies and dsitortions Trump fed them, and which they accepted without question

17

The border bill was incredibly conservative and featured none of the usual liberal red lines, like a path to citizenship.
And border policy has barely changed since the trump administration, the main difference was stripping out some of the cruelty.

Fat lot of good any of this has done in changing perceptions it seems. Painting democrats as “open borders” was great rhetoric.

Once again, a bishop said we should be compassionate to LGBT and trans and that’s been labelled as an extreme view now. There is no reasonable middle ground.

What could help is fighting the disinformation; I heard about “57 genders” or whatever so many times on conservative media, and precisely zero times from anyone on the left. Getting a voice out there is job #1 and facing down the bull

(Before anyone leaps in with a cite: I don’t doubt that someone, somewhere has attempted to list all permutations of gender expression. I am doubting that this is, or ever was, a significant part of trans rights or liberal ideology)

18

This. I disagree with your initial premise because the problem Democrats have, at least when it comes to winning elections, isn’t with MAGA, it’s with the swing voters. People who voted for Obama and Biden but stayed home or voted for Trump when Clinton and Harris were running. And the problem with getting those voters isn’t with the message, but with the messenger. Sure, people don’t want to be given bad news, but politicians like JFK (ask what you can do for your country, not what you’re country can do for you) and FDR were able to manage it back in the day.

The problem is that Democrats tend to come off as a college professor lecturing freshman students in a class they have to take for their degree program but would otherwise prefer not be there. What we need is a combination of more plain talking candidates like John Fetterman and firebrands like AOC. The university professor style of recent candidates like Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton, and even as far back as Al Gore back in the day before MAGA was a thing isn’t going to work. We need to stop showing up to a street fight insisting that the opponent fight by Marquess of Queensberry rules and then complaining about how they don’t fight fair when we lose.

19

This is a fantasy that would be successful only in the context of preaching-to-the-choir fictional entertainment like The West Wing or The American President. The real world is not a TV show.

20

Easier said than done. To be a MAGA member, you have to boldly say things that are known to be false. “The vaccines killed more people than covid.”…“Biden stole the 2020 election.”…“Climate change is a hoax”.

I know this, because I spent about 9 years arguing with right-wing kooks on right-wing message boards about Trump.

I used to be a Republican (something I’m now not proud of). Those boards used to have arguments about the size of government, and libertarianism and socialism and so forth. Now, it’s just screaming matches where MAGA kooks try and gang up on anyone who is sane.

Even a delicate suggestion from a fair-minded person gets attacked. Trying to influence MAGA on right-wing message boards doesn’t work, and I don’t care how nice you are to them.

This is all true. What we’ve done so far has not worked.

^^^^THIS…

The Dems don’t need to “infiltrate” MAGA. We need think about how we’re going to scale-up our propaganda and defeat them by reaching voters who currently don’t even hear our arguments. The Dems used to have an advantage, but this has been lost, as large Social media outlets and large Mainstream media outlets have fallen into the hands of the right-wing. We need to build up our own Propaganda institutions, and for lack of a better term “out yell” MAGA. Beat them at their own game, except we’ll be yelling the truth instead of lies.