Now that Donald Trump is deep into his second term, it’s time for the Democratic Party to face some uncomfortable truth. One of the only people who tried to stop this disaster before it happened was Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez.
Back in early 2024, long before the debate disasters, before the donor panic, before the late-July dropout, Gluesenkamp Perez had the political courage to say what too many others wouldn’t: President Joe Biden should not run for re-election.
She wasn’t grandstanding. She wasn’t playing some intra-party power game. She was being honest, about what she saw, what voters were telling her, and what the stakes really were. If we had listened to her, we could have held an open primary. We could’ve trusted democracy inside our own party. We might not be living through Trump 2.0 right now.
Instead, the Democratic establishment dug in. The DNC circled the wagons. Staffers were told to toe the line. Voters were told Biden was our only option. And when he finally did drop out in July, the party fast-tracked a new nominee instead of letting the democratic process unfold.
We handed Trump the narrative, and the keys to the White House. Now here we are: reproductive rights under attack nationwide, mass deportations ramping up, entire federal departments purged of non-loyalists. We’re watching the courts shift, climate action stall, and democratic norms decay faster than anyone imagined. And none of this was unpredictable.
