Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A major dereliction by the feeble Democratic Party leadership is their unwillingness to address the political amnesia they have allowed corrupt, lying, cruel, outlaw tyrant Trump to enjoy with political impunity. Trump has been more than willing to fill the vacuum created by this abdication. That is his business and political modus operandi (MO). His daily lies, boasts, and fantasies have polluted the political landscape. Moreover, his false claims are rarely rebutted by the haughty Dems who view his diatribes as beneath them to counter.
The Democratic Party leadership needs a compelling “REMINDERS” platform for their current electoral campaigns that they can pin on the Trump rubber-stamping GOP candidates at the Congressional and state levels. Here is a sample:
1. Trump was a failed gambling czar and a frequent user of bankruptcy as a competitive tactic, as he brazenly described it, to stiff his creditors, employees, and consumers. He also used hundreds of undocumented workers for his construction projects, whom he exploited with low wages and bad working conditions.
2. Trump is a serial sexual abuser of women. There are dozens of credible accusations and legal actions against him by his victims. Michael Cohen— Trump’s former personal lawyer even arranged to pay Stormy Daniels to cover up the story about Trump’s 2006 sexual encounter with her. Remarkably, since 2019, the Dems have been AWOL on this predator’s past, while eating their own for a tiny fraction of Trump’s transgressions. (See the February 24, 2020 OPEN LETTER TO THE WOMEN IN CONGRESS).
3. Trump derided and minimized for weeks in early 2020 the spreading COVID pandemic. A Columbia University report conservatively estimated that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths were attributable to the failures of the Trump administration’s delays. Have you heard much about his lethal, arrogant incompetence in the Democrats’ campaigns?
4. Trump’s tax cuts for the super-rich and giant corporations mean huge deficits and a lack of these tax dollars for public services, public works and jobs in communities everywhere. Democrats can highlight what specific and recognized needsthese communities were denied because of Trump’s tax giveaways to the fat-cats.
5. Trump is the consummate climate denier. Each time there are uncontrollable wildfires, floods, heat domes related to climate disruptions by burning of fossil fuels, Democrats can remind people of his ridiculous assertions that global warming is a “hoax” or a “scam,” and start naming these disasters “Trump Hurricanes,” “Trump floods,” “Trump wildfires.” Doesn’t he like things named after him?
Moreover, he has starved the budgets of FEMA and other agencies that combat the impact of these disasters. He is also refusing to pay the underpaid firefighters a living wage and or to expand OSHA’s authorization to protect their safety.
6. Dems should remind people how Trump is the extorter-in-chief. He has discriminatorily cut back on FEMA assistance, mass transit assistance, and other federal outlays for Democratic blue states to punish them for their pro-electoral resistance, including their refusing to give his outlaw regime control over state election data and machinery.
7. Trump has never backed down from his outrageous claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The Dems are too sporadic in condemning Trump’s massive drives TO STEAL this Novembers’ elections. Democratic Party leaders almost never use the word “steal” against Trump, compared to his constant harping falsely about the 2020 election being stolen from him. (See The Wrecking Ball Comes For the Midterms by Jonathan M. Winer).
8. Trump is a major league racist against African Americans and Hispanics, among countless other groups with his stormtrooping ICE, his selective military firings, his shattering of safety net programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps disproportionately needed by low-income ethnics, his sick frothing such as “shit-hole” countries, unlawful deportations, and only admitting as “refugees” white South Africans.
9. Trump has pardoned hundreds of convicted violent criminals and fraudsters, politically on his side, many of whom have since committed crimes. By comparison, in 1988 the GOP used unfairly against presidential candidate Michael Dukakis the Willie Horton case (Horton committed a crime while on a prison furlough) to inflict considerable damage on Dukakis.
10. Trump’s words about “law and order” exclude his corporate crime cronies. He has dismissed well over a hundred pending Justice Department cases against corporate crooks stealing from and harming innocent Americans, virtually closed down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and thrown out SEC cases—especially against his cryptocurrency buddies from whose shenanigans he and his family have personally profited. “CORRUPTION” IS THE UNPRECEDENTED “COIN OF THE TRUMP REALM” — THIS IS THE MESSAGE THAT SHOULD RING THROUGH THE LAND.
11. Trump’s cruelty to children knows no bounds. He supports strip-mining the successful Head Start programs, cutting budgets for children’s services, exposing children to unregulated toxic pesticides, and refusing to put forward an authentic child tax credit. His barbaric actions affect both conservative and liberal families.
12. Trump enabled the criminal enterprise DOGE, led by Elon Musk, to rampage through federal agencies in 2025, closing down some vital lifesaving programs and pushing out the door tens of thousands of civil servants doing their work daily for the public. The DOGE criminals were unleashed gangsters goaded on by the hateful, vengeful, unstable Trump. Never in American history has an administration broken or destroyed a sliver of what Elon Musk’s DOGE did on Trump’s orders. Millions of poor people and children abroad will die because of the closing of USAID with its medicines, vaccines, food supplements, and safe drinking water. The annual cost of operating this lifesaving agency is less than a week and a half of the current bloated Pentagon budget that crooked Trump wants to increase by another $500 BILLION!
13. The Dems should remind people of Trump’s crazed hatred of solar and wind energy—life-sustaining—in favor of goodies for the homicidal oil, gas, and coal corporations heating the planet. Psychiatrists, you are needed here. (See the Statement from Medical Professionals, Congressional Record—Senate, April 30, 2026).
14. Finally, voters will be stunned by Trump’s plethora of vote-losing epithets such as “losers and suckers” to describe those who are killed in combat, like those buried World War II GIs in a French cemetery, as this draft dodger related to his chief of staff, retired General John Kelly. Or “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situations.” Or “I like this inflation,” or in 2016, “American workers are overpaid,” and endlessly more. The Dems should demand that Trump’s Republican candidates publicly disavow these and other outlandish lies and defamatory claims during debates.
It is, of course, true that the Democrats have to run on what they are for. Their leaders, who don’t like progressive mandates, have rejected putting forward such cohesive, long-overdue pledges as given them by Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, or by the undersigned (see Robert Reich’s “What Democrats Must Pledge to America” December 5, 2025; and my column “LONG OVERDUE DOMESTIC COMPACT FOR AMERICA” August 29, 2025). It is up to the candidates in the field to offer such authentic compacts or their own cohesive agendas.
Most GOP candidates are running on their unbreakable fealty to Trump. Therefore, they should be held accountable for all the ugly drawbacks of Trump that they have been backing to the hilt including his cruel and vicious Cabinet secretaries.
Political amnesia by the public is easy to fall prey to because it is so often covered up by the culprits and allowed by incompetent opponents. The Democratic Party knows how to lose. It allowed Trump’s worst GOP in history to win in 2024!
