analysis

It’s not just Republicans the president has indelibly altered.

For years, a growing stripe of Democrats has argued that what their party needs is a leader willing to shatter old assumptions, a radical disrupter.

Well, Democrats already have found their transformational figure for the 2020 campaign. His name is Donald Trump.

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No one could miss the obvious ways this president—despite his deviations from traditional conservative orthodoxy—has turned the Republican Party into the pro-Trump party. It could be easy to miss, however, some of the less-obvious ways Trump also has made himself the defining force of the anti-Trump party.

All presidents tend to reshape the politics of their era, sometimes in ways that long outlast their time in office. JFK’s mastery of television infused once-dowdy progressive politics with a measure of glamour that politicians spent decades emulating; Reagan’s success in using well-turned anecdotes and homilies to drive a conservative movement shapes the presidency to this day.

It is striking, though, how true this has been even in the 2020 Democratic primary, in which the competition is over which candidate can most credibly claim that he or she will not just beat Trump but repudiate all he stands for.

On stylistic and even substantive grounds, Trump is arguably exerting more gravitational pull on Democratic politics than the party’s most recent president, Barack Obama, who left its down-ballot infrastructure in tatters, and far more than another Democratic figure, Bill Clinton, who once could claim that he had remade the party in his own fashion.

From the once-unthinkable candidates vying to replace this president to their mimicry of his hard-punching way of politics, Democrats are showing that it is possible—even unavoidable—simultaneously to loathe Trump and be swept along by his disruptive current. Here’s how Trump has indelibly altered how Democrats run for president:

1. Anyone’s Plausible

The most immediate way Trump is driving the Democratic debate is in the size of the presidential field—unprecedentedly large—and in its diversity, filled with candidates who surely would have flunked the plausibility test in an earlier time.

The threshold question confronting any candidate is basically a matter of imagination: Does it seem conceivable this person could really be president of the United States?

That question will never be the same in a Trump context. What is inconceivable compared to a reality-TV star and habitue of the New York tabloids with a decades-long trail of financial and sexual controversies?

Virtually every top-tier candidate on the Democratic side is benefiting to some degree from Trump’s demolition of old standards of presidential plausibility. Not long ago, a 77-year-old small-state socialist would have been deemed inconceivable, but Bernie Sanders is not. So would a 37-year mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana, but Pete Buttigieg is not. Nor Beto O’Rourke, who made few waves in just two terms in Congress and did not win his statewide race. Nor Elizabeth Warren, a liberal Massachusetts law professor who didn’t run for office until she was in her sixties, nor Julian Castro, who in years past would find few takers that his time as HUD secretary was a likely path to commander in chief. Even the most conventional pol, former Vice President Joe Biden, would at age 76 three decades after his first presidential run be seen as a highly improbable contender.

Some version of “Well, if Trump can win…” is the principal engine behind the fact that there are two dozen candidates—a number that itself would have been wildly improbable. In fact, it is candidates with impressive traditional credentials—senators like Amy Klobuchar and Michael Bennet and governors like Jay Inslee and John Hickenlooper—who are struggling most to clear the give-me-a-break bar.

Trump’s example has not only broadened the standards of presidential qualifications, but is helping erase old lines about disqualifications—unofficial standards that were nonetheless primly enforced by political insiders and the news media. If O’Rourke’s presidential campaign flops, it won’t be because arrests (charges later dropped) for drunken driving and burglary from the 1990s were an obstacle to his campaign, nor is the fact that Kamala Harris once publicly dated a married man (then-San Francisco mayor Willie Brown) around the same time. The more recent controversy over whether Biden is too handsy and familiar in ways that made some women uncomfortable has passed quickly. Never mind the phenomenon of Andrew Yang, whose geekiness would have made him a laughingstock in years past; or that of spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, who will likely make the debate stage along with sitting lawmakers Kirsten Gillibrand and John Delaney.

Simply put, it is impossible to imagine the current field or the broader story arc of the Democratic race so far were it not for Trump shattering traditional norms.

2. Cable Is King

Speaking of outdated norms, there was once a president who made it is his signature to boast about his dignified distance from the raucous uproars and obsessions du jour of the modern media cycle. That president was Obama, who struck a superior air while boasting constantly of his indifference to “cable chatter.”

But it is impossible to imagine Obama’s successor becoming president without his fixation with cable television—by many reports he watches several hours daily, and even records his favorite shows–and his mastery over how to manipulate the hyper-accelerated news cycle powered by the social media-cable ouroboros.

When Trump’s rise from noisy celebrity to presidential contender began four years ago, his path was cable—not simply the televised debates of 2015 and 2016, but the way his performances dominated channels for days afterward. Every Democratic presidential candidate, including Biden as frontrunner, is acutely conscious of the need to perform well at cable debates starting next month, and along the way to demonstrate that they are capable of competing with Trump on equal terms in the general election battle of media narratives. No Democrat could credibly claim to be indifferent to “cable chatter,” or would regard that as something to boast about.

3. Message Discipline Is for Losers

Not long ago, one of the paramount tests of effective campaigns was “message discipline,” the ability to stay on one’s own themes and avoid getting dragged into the daily rumpus. Operatives worked to make sure their candidate always managed to seem “presidential”—that is, with a certain dignified reserve and detachment from the seamier parts of the business.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan (“We are the change”) Trump can credibly boast: “I am the rumpus.”

And with the possible exception of Biden, there aren’t any top-tier candidates on the Democratic side laboring to stay above the fray.

This has a substantive component, seen in the way candidates jostle with each other to be first to break from the crowd on questions like whether Trump should be impeached or whether they endorse the “Green New Deal” unveiled by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward Markey. As a Washington Post writer recently noted, it used to be virtually unheard of for presidential candidates to attack corporations and their leaders by name. But following Trump’s lead, Democratic candidates including routinely unload on such companies as Amazon, ExxonMobil and Facebook.

The stylistic dimension is even more vivid. Pre-Trump, operatives likely would have worried that Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten Buttigieg, was making a spectacle of himself on social media with his free associations about their pet dogs, his Harry Potter obsession, the guy drinking ginger ale next to him on an airline flight, as well as more reflective posts on what the campaign has meant to him. As it is, the candidate’s spouse’s fluency on Twitter makes him an important asset. O’Rourke is mocked in some quarters for livestreaming his haircut, but on balance his willingness to share his fascination with self on social media is considered a good thing. Even Elizabeth Warren is tweeting videos of throwing back beers or greeting her dog.

Trump has firmly set the precedent that if a thought is on his mind it is on his keyboard; even as most Democrats don’t emulate his regular stream of insults they are plainly in debt to his example. Understatement and reserve as signatures of a presidential style are in the past.

4. Deficits Don’t Matter

A few days before Obama was sworn in at his first inaugural, he gave an interview with the Washington Post during which he was at pains to emphasize his commitment to fiscal discipline. He announced a “fiscal responsibility summit” and, expanding on rhetoric from the campaign, said he was determined to address unsustainable costs to entitlement programs like Social Security “under my watch” rather than “kick the can down the road.”

That’s a reminder that even progressive leaders used to feel an obligation to match their appeals for expensive new domestic spending with furrowed-brow professions about how they realized there is a cost to everything. These statements were aimed not so much at conservatives but at moderates within the Democratic Party.

Trump has offered scant evidence rhetorically or substantively that he cares about budget deficits or entitlements costs. This has given Democratic presidential candidates a green light to blow off these questions, too. No top-tier Democrat is emphasizing deficit reduction or cost-control, and they are under no particular pressure from the media or voters to do so. Instead the competition is over who can present the most ambitious and pulse-quickening ideas—Medicare For All, free college, teacher raises, massive infrastructure investment and so on. That is a change from the environment faced by Hillary Clinton, Obama, John Kerry or Bill Clinton in their turns as nominees, and Democrats have Trump to thank.

5. Being a Uniter Is So Yesterday

Trump did not create the ultra-partisan politics with which he is so associated—this had been building for a quarter-century or more before his election. One difference with him, however, is that most of the time he never pays rhetorical deference to the notion of the presidency as a national unifier.

Every president from George H.W. Bush (“a kindler, gentler nation”) to Bill Clinton (who said he wanted to be “a repairer of the breach”) to George W. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider”) to Obama (“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; There’s the United States of America”) produced signature lines emphasizing the desire to bridge differences. Hillary Clinton called herself a “progressive who gets things done” by working with all sides.

This kind of rhetoric is largely absent from the Democratic contest. The partial exception, again, is Biden, and he is learning fast about the perils of offering himself as bridge-builder at a time when even many party moderates believe that Trump Republicans are so not on the level there is no point in trying to get along. His statement that Vice President Mike Pence is personally “a decent guy” caused an online uproar on the left and forced Biden to say he didn’t think Pence’s policies or politics were decent.

It was a reminder that Biden, probably more than any candidate, formed his political sensibilities in an earlier era—and long before many Democrats concluded that the right way to beat Trump is by embracing the reality that he has changed the way to run for president.