Evelyn Quartz: Capitol Hill Democrats Must be Better Prepared to Talk about Democracy
By Evelyn Quartz
I have one phone, while most people swarming around me have two, one personal and one for work. I am wearing a stuffy suit that doesn’t fit right and makes me self-conscious. To my surprise, everyone is in jeans. I learned later it was a “recess day” on Capitol Hill. Members are home in their districts, so staff can unwind a bit, and ditch the suit. On this particular day, a few of them were kind enough to have coffee with me. I was an early twenties DC transplant who had just ended my first real job at a polling firm where I crunched the numbers for local democrats running in rural Wisconsin. We predicted they’d win, but they did not. That was 2016. It was also the beginning of a six-year journey, where I ultimately left the Hill as a seasoned and exhausted Communications Director for a progressive House member.
Two years later from that initial “recess day,” on a Spring afternoon in March of 2018, a few of us huddled around a colleague’s computer watching an indigent and very orange President Donald Trump praise Chinese President Xi Jinping, who’d abolished term limits. “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
We laughed.
For all of us on the Hill, it took much longer to realize that this was no laughing matter. And some people still haven’t realized it. For years, I dragged my stale late afternoon coffee across the Capitol complex to Democratic caucus-wide communications meetings in which a hundred or so fellow staffers and I sat in a post-lunch slump listening to presentations on how to talk about everything from “fixing our crumbling roads and bridges” to “curbing the costs of prescription drugs.” Despite feeling a bit like a cog in a machine, I knew we were on the right side. I would sometimes fantasize about sneaking into the Republican messaging meetings. I’d pictured staffers who’d served for decades sitting next to young MAGA enthusiasts. I can’t imagine they had much of a strategy.
In these meetings, the idea of “protecting our Democracy” often came up. I genuinely can’t remember anyone giving it much weight. As far as I was concerned, Trump was a billionaire buffoon who tapped into racism, sexism, and xenophobia to anger enough Americans that it all went terribly wrong and he won. It was an outlier, a freak accident. We just had to #Resist and fight back.
At the time, I think many of us on the Hill (myself included) failed to grasp the nuance and lacked the framework to apply concepts like oligarchy, strongman, and theocracy to someone like Donald Trump. But this time around, we do, and Democrats must embrace it. Our democracy quite literally depends on it, and Hill staffers could very well be the last line of defense.
I’ve since left Washington D.C., but if I were to go back and do it all over again, I’d want to take the mic at those meetings and say this:
CEOs like Elon Musk who seek to “double-dip” their influence by holding government positions while keeping control of their financial interests? Yeah, that is an oligarchy. Trump fuels white grievances by scapegoating an “enemy” and encouraging chants of “mass deportation now?” That is a clear echo of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Trump is far from a “populist.” He has no real agenda to serve the working class and is himself a member of the elite. He loves executive orders and tariffs because he believes he can do it alone, without involving Congress. He wants voters to place their faith in Trump, who doesn’t need political institutions. That is anti-democratic.
Trump floated launching a military invasion of Greenland and the Panama Canal to exploit natural resources in a likely ploy to make himself and his buddies richer. Putin does that too. That is a strongman. Trump’s nominee to run the Office of Management and Budget is a co-author of Project 2025, which seeks to turn America into a Christian nationalist state. That’s a theocracy.
It’s time to stop beating around the bush and speak clearly before it’s too late to speak at all. Democrats need to ditch the tired, diplomatic jargon and embrace the frameworks given to us by an increasingly visible class of scholars who’ve made it their lives work to understand men like Donald Trump. In the next four years, Trump will do many things to prove these points. It’s up to us to clearly define them – or face the costs.
Evelyn Quartz is a political communications professional, former Capitol Hill staffer, and most recently served as Deputy Press Secretary for The Lincoln Project. She is the author of a new pro-democracy newsletter, The Second Term Watch.
