Un-Trumping America

"Could this be it?" I thought to myself at the beginning of the scandal that sparked the fourth impeachment proceedings in American history.1 "Would this be the thing that finally caused some in the Republican Party to break with Trump?"2

If it was true—as the Washington Post and others were reporting—that during a call with the newly elected Ukrainian president, Trump used the specter of military aid to extort the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden, then Trump would be guilty of a crime more serious than anything Nixon was accused of during Watergate.

To date, Trump's presidency had been far from successful. His poll numbers had vacillated between mediocre and historically terrible. He had few legislative accomplishments, and most of his executive orders were caught up in the courts because they were poorly thought out and even more poorly executed. But Trump had escaped true political accountability despite saying and doing things on a near-daily basis that would have ended most presidencies.

As I have done every day since the 2016 election, I tempered my optimism. There was no upside to getting my hopes up. After the much-anticipated Mueller report landed with a thud, I—like most Democrats—had conditioned myself to expect disappointment in the scandal department. The problem with the Mueller report wasn't that it didn't include ample evidence of wrongdoing by the president; the report was a none-too-subtle road map for impeachment. But it went nowhere. The press treated it as old news, the Democrats seemed ready to move on before the ink was dry, and Republicans just lied about it. I feared the same thing would happen again. Don't get me wrong, I had little doubt Trump was guilty of wrongdoing—it was just a question how explicit his crime was and how definitive the evidence. Trump's efforts to collude with Russia and obstruct the Mueller probe had been so ham-handed that the lines between his criminality and his incompetence were blurred.

My preemptive sense of disappointment deepened the next morning when Trump announced that he would be releasing the transcript of the call. To say Trump is not the sharpest knife in the drawer is an insult to butter knives, but even he is not dumb enough to release a transcript of a call that would implicate him in global criminal conspiracy to interfere in an American election.

Right?

Wrong.

In the transcript, Trump sounded like a crooked capo trying to pressure a local businessman. Trump called his conversation with the Ukraine President—the "perfect call," but it was an imperfect crime.3

In the following days, we would learn that the efforts to cover up this obviously impeachable offense involved the White House, the National Security Council, the intelligence community, and the Department of Justice. As an example, Attorney General Bill Barr who helped cover up the Mueller report played a similar role in this affair. Barr didn't recuse himself from the investigation even though Trump names him in the call with Ukraine as a participant in the criminal conspiracy.

Additionally, the witnesses to the crimes were not partisan actors but decorated veterans, career diplomats and national security professionals, as well as Trump's own staff. It's easy to miss the historical significance of what Trump did. Our national attention span is so short and the pace of events so frenetic that it's nearly impossible to step back and take stock of the moment.

Trump handled the beginning of an impeachment inquiry with his usual aplomb. In a period of about 96 hours, Trump

• called for the execution of the whistleblower and the administration officials that corroborated their account;
• referred to six members of Congress as "savages"—the six members Trump chose were two Jews and four women of color which wasn't a coincidence.
• suggested a second civil war would be an appropriate response to impeachment;4
• posted eighteen tweets5 in five minutes attacking the weekend anchor of Fox & Friends for having the audacity to ask a barely tough question of one of Trump's defenders6
• said that the Democratic chair of the Intelligence Committee should be arrested for treason, which happens to be a crime punishable by death; and
• reportedly committed another crime by agreeing to back off legislation to mandate background checks for gun sales in exchange for the National Rifle Association contributing to his legal and political defense.7

In the early days of the impeachment inquiry, public opinion moved decidedly in the Democrats' direction. Majorities backed the inquiry, and even some Republican voters were troubled by Trump's actions. There was a drumbeat of credible firsthand witnesses. Before long, there could be no doubt about what happened. The call and the extensive effort to cover it up were a crime higher than any of the crimes committed during Watergate.

Yet, Donald Trump is still president.8 In the end, none of it mattered very much. A few Republicans expressed private concerns. Some even sent a few sad tweets. But no one actually did anything. Large swaths of voters believed he had committed a crime, but few expected him to face any accountability.

As a nation, we were uncomfortably numb to crimes being committed in the Oval Office.

The whole thing was deeply depressing, but it was also final confirmation of something that had been eating at me for years.

The American political system is fundamentally broken—a fact the Republican Party has ruthlessly exploited to rig politics in their favor.

This notion was not a new one to me. The fact that the Republican Party was out of control has been obvious for a long time. They were radical, rabid, and often racist the entire time I worked for Barack Obama. Their approach to government was nihilist on the best day. They were people who just wanted to see the world burn.

At the time, I thought this was a temporary affliction on the body politic. One that would be cured by the passage of time and the 2016 election.

I cockily assumed that Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump in resounding fashion. The Republicans would learn the error of their ways and take a couple of steps back from the brink. My confidence that Clinton would win emanated from an unyielding—and mistaken—belief in the health of our democracy. Instead, Trump rode into office on the back of our broken democracy. He won with fewer votes and benefited from a raft of laws passed by Republicans to make it harder for people to vote.

The future of American democracy now depends on a Democratic Party that is eyes wide open about who the Republican Party is, what they have wrought, and what it takes to undo the damage.

Democrats have spent much of the Trump era engaging in an internal debate about the future of the party. This to be expected and healthy. We have entered the post-Obama era of the party, and we need to figure out what comes next. However, this divide is usually framed on ideological terms: moderates v. progressives. Should the party embrace the bold progressive policies advocated by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or more centrist solutions? There is often confusion in our political discourse between ideology and policy. In my experience, most voters have policy preferences but rarely view politics through the lens of one specific ideology. A candidate's ability to tell a story about why his or her policies are the right ones is exponentially more consequential than whether those policies are left, right, or center.

The focus on ideology masks the larger issue. The biggest divide in the Democratic Party is not between left and center. It's between those who believe once Trump is gone things will go back to normal, and those who believe that our democracy is under a threat that goes beyond Trump.

Everything flows from this debate. If you believe the former, simply surviving the moment is enough. If you believe the latter—as I do9—then you have to be willing to contemplate ideas that were off the table even a few years ago.

I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing more important than beating Trump, but beating Trump is not nearly enough. The Democratic Party needs an aggressive strategy to fundamentally reshape American democracy. We have to come to terms with who the Republican Party is and what they have done. We have to recognize that Donald Trump is not an aberration or an accident. There will be no Republican epiphany during or after Trump. The media won't save us.10 Bob Mueller didn't save us. And Trump's propensity for committing impeachable offenses won't save us.

It took me a long time to come to this conclusion and to embrace the solutions in this book. I am an institutionalist by nature. I have spent nearly twenty years working in Democratic politics. I have served a president, a vice president, three senators, and the Democratic Party. I spent most of my career working at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

I chose politics for my career because I thought working within the system was the best way to bring change. I believed politics and government got a bad rap. Despite cynical media coverage and reductionist Hollywood portrayals, the politicians I met were not inherently corrupt or incompetent. They were imperfect humans working within an imperfect system to do what they thought was best for the country. I believed this to be true no matter the party.11 I believed that our democracy was messy but worked. I trusted institutions and believed in norms. I thought the arc of American politics was long but ultimately bent toward democracy.

During the Obama presidency, I viewed it as our responsibility to protect our political institutions because we were the party that believed in the power of government to do good. I believed the filibuster had merit and the Electoral College was a feature, not a bug, of the system. And even if I was deeply skeptical of the motivations of the Republicans in Congress, I remained optimistic that they would one day see the folly of their ways and begin to take governing at least a little more seriously.

But I was wrong. I have been radicalized by Trump's election and everything that has happened since. I believe we need bigger, bolder solutions. The same old politics simply won't do.

Removing Trump is not enough. America is a "democracy" governed by antidemocratic institutions, a country where a growing progressive diverse majority is being governed by a shrinking conservative white minority.

My fear as we sit here on the eve of the 2020 election season is that too many Democrats in Washington remain blind to the stakes of the moment.

If Democrats don't get smarter and tougher about how we conduct politics and embrace the bold activism of the grassroots, we are going to continue to come up short. We might win some battles, but we will lose the war.

I believe that un-Trumping America involves three elements: First, understanding who the Republicans are and what their strategy is. Second, winning in 2020. And finally, using our newfound political power to fix American politics to ensure we never have to deal with someone like Donald Trump ever again.

Tim Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, used to have a saying that became a mantra in the Obama White House—"Plan beats no plan." My version of Geithner's saying was "Memo beats no memo." In the first few days in the White House, there was a staff meeting to discuss whether Obama should do a press conference. In the room were all of the new president's top advisors and me. As the then deputy communications director, I was the lowest ranking person in the room. By title alone, I shouldn't have made the cut. I think I was invited out of habit. On the campaign, which was much less hierarchical than the White House, I was always around for a meeting like this. I didn't really agree with the idea of the press conference, but no one asked my opinion and I wasn't sure I should offer it. The group quickly decided the press conference was a good idea. As everyone was gathering their things, Rahm Emanuel, the new White House chief of staff and one of the few people around the table who had worked in the White House before, said, "If we are going to do this, the president needs to be prepared. Who's writing the briefing memo with possible questions and answers?"

Everyone looked at each other in silence for a moment. No one was volunteering for this seemingly mundane and time-consuming task.

All of a sudden, I felt the collective gaze turning to me. I tried not to make eye contact, but it was too late.

"Pfeiffer?" someone said.

"Great idea," someone else said.

The rest of the room concurred, with a palpable sense of relief that they had avoided a homework assignment.12

Before I knew it, everyone was gone and I was stuck writing a memo. I was pissed. No one had acknowledged my presence in the meeting until it came time to assign some work.

As I trudged back to my new office, I ran into Stephanie Cutter, who had been Michelle Obama's chief of staff on the campaign and was now working as a top advisor at the Treasury Department. I told her how annoyed I was that I was going to be at the office all night working on the memo. Stephanie told me I was looking at it the wrong way: "In the White House, you always want to be the person who writes the memo. Being the one who holds the pen gives you the most influence on what the president says and does. Plus, they have to invite the author of the memo to the meeting."

That encounter opened my eyes. Being the person who wrote the memo, whether it was prep for a press conference or the strategic plan for the next quarter, became my golden ticket. It gave me a voice larger than my station. It gave me the opportunity to drive the strategy in the direction that I thought best. Over the next six years, I always volunteered to write the strategy memos and learned the tremendous value of being the one with the pen.

Un-Trumping America is my much longer, post–White House memo to the Democratic Party and the millions of activists that have joined the fight since Trump won. It lays out my ideas on how to defeat Trump and restore American democracy while staying true to who we are as Democrats.

This book is informed by the lessons learned in the Obama White House as we watched the rise of Trumpism and the humility of not fully understanding the danger we were facing. It's also inspired by the next generation of activists who were born out of Trump's victory—people who channeled their anger into activism and helped lead the Democrats to victories in 2018 and have pushed bolder and more progressive policies. They are the present and future of the party—if it embraces them.

And while the White House taught me the importance of being the one with the pen, Pod Save America has taught me the importance of talking (and writing) about politics in an accessible and (hopefully) entertaining way. Too often political discussions are filled with jargon and indecipherable acronyms. This isn't an accident. It's designed to separate those in the "know" from the masses. Too much political messaging is about serving spinach and then wondering why people aren't coming back for seconds and thirds. There is a reason Jon Stewart is a more influential figure than the folks who host the nightly news. There's no law13 that says politics can't be fun. So my hope is that this book is more fun than spinach.14

While the premise that Trumpism will outlast Trump can seem dark, I remain hopeful.15 Despite everything that has happened since Election Day 2016, I know we can relegate Donald Trump and this version of the Republican Party to the dustbin of history. But it's going to take a lot of work, and that work starts with understanding how we got into this mess and who we are up against.