During President Donald Trump’s first joint address to Congress, Democrats accidentally exposed a large rift within their party as many of its members displayed a lack of discipline in the House Chamber. But Thursday and Friday, the Democratic Party’s civil war has gotten much worse.
Normally, the party that marches in complete lockstep with its leaders approached the high-profile joint address on March 4 with a schizophrenic message. To one side, there was the far left, who waved paddles and wore pink, virtue-signaling and disrupting the address. The other side, perhaps best captured by Democratic Michigan Sen. Elisa Slotkin, who delivered her party’s rebuttal, was more solemn, an attempt to appeal to a wider range of voters, not just the most rabid members of the base. The antics served as a bigger metaphor for the party’s rudderless approach to addressing the second Trump administration.