How Trump broke both parties — and where Democrats go from here: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the campaign trail, the White House and Capitol Hill.

In today’s edition, senior national political reporter Jonathan Allen explains why Democrats need to retool their economic message during Donald Trump’s second term. Plus, senior national politics reporter Matt Dixon writes that the battle to succeed Trump in four years is already underway. And “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker asks Trump about his mass deportation plans in an interview.

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How Trump broke both parties — and where Democrats go from here 

By Jonathan Allen

Over the course of the last decade, President-elect Donald Trump broke both national political parties.

He first stormed into the 2016 Republican primaries with both an agenda and a style that sharply cut against GOP conventions. Since then, the Democratic Party has defined itself by opposition to him, rather than its own values and platform. President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 looks, now more than ever, like an electoral brake tap in a race away from the establishment.

For most of the last 20 years, American voters have been screaming that they don’t believe their government serves them well. Before Trump, Democrats nominated — and the country twice elected — Barack Obama, a candidate who ran against leaders that walked the country into forever wars and a finance-and-housing crisis that nearly toppled the economy.

Add to that this nugget: This is the first time since 1896 that voters have ousted the incumbent party in three straight presidential elections. (In the 1880s and 1890s, they did it four consecutive times.) 

In this election, there was no greater symbol of the aimlessness of the two parties’ old guards than the Cheney family and the Democratic presidential nominee wrapping their arms around each other in an embrace that they somehow didn’t find awkward. Their marriage of convenience gave more credence to Trump’s arguments that elites serve their own interests first.

Like Obama’s two elections, Trump’s second win was decisive by modern historical standards. There’s no need to tally how many thousands of votes he won by in the closest swing states. 

But if there’s a silver lining — or a ray of hope — for Democrats, it is that the national shift in the electorate can still be measured as a handful of percentage points. This wasn’t Ronald Reagan taking everything but Minnesota and the District of Columbia in 1984. 

Democrats have time now to assess how their party can become more responsive to public sentiment as they look forward to the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., harshly criticized them for alienating white, Black and Latino working-class voters. He might be the wrong person to make that case — given that he was an architect of and cheerleader for Biden’s economic agenda — but he has a point.

Democrats would be smart to start with the issue that Trump hammered on — and which was the top concern of the plurality of his voters: the economy.

For four years, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris tried to convince voters that their plans were working instead of shaping their agenda to respond to the economic pain so many Americans feel. First, they said inflation wasn’t a problem. Then they said it was transitory. Eventually, they noted that its rate was slowing. With little exception — hard-to-implement promises to ban price-gouging — they hardly stopped to acknowledge the harm cumulative inflation wreaked on working families.

They threw out facts and figures to explain that the economy is in better shape than its counterparts across the world. Harris’ economic policy offerings were largely expansions of Biden proposals, such as more generous homebuyer and child tax credits than he called for. In the political equivalent of Bill Buckner booting a ground ball in the World Series, Biden didn’t warn the public when he took office that the pandemic spending of the previous year was likely to cause inflation.

 But the other thing Biden and Harris failed to do — despite the president’s reputation for empathy — was listen to the outcry for help and shape their agenda around it. Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves if they don’t figure that out before the next election. 

In the interim, Trump now has the power to reform government — the institutions of democracy — because he has rebuilt the Republican Party around a more populist and protectionist vision for the economy that proved persuasive to the electorate. 

To fight effectively for the issues they care most about, from the form of government to abortion rights, Democrats have to make sure voters don’t see them as a threat to economic prosperity.

More post-election fallout

🗳️ The postmortem: Alex Seitz-Wald, Henry J. Gomez and Natasha Korecki have the inside story of how Trump won and Harris lost, based on more than 35 interviews with operatives and officials from both parties and campaigns. Read more → 

🔵 Despondent Democrats: Natasha Korecki and Yamiche Alcindor also have more on how Democratic officials are grappling with Harris’ loss and starting to place blame on messaging decisions, Biden and current party leaders. Read more →

🗣️ Voters weigh in: Democratic voters in battleground states said they were disappointed but ultimately not surprised by Harris’ defeat, and that their party could have done more to address economic concerns. Read more →

Trump’s win maintains his hold on the GOP. It also kicks off plans for a succession.

By Matt Dixon

Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has done something no political opponent could: put an end date on his time atop the Republican Party.

Well, sort of.

Trump single-handedly remade the party in his own image, not only becoming its unquestioned leader but also rewiring what the Grand Old Party stands for. After he emerged on the scene in 2015, former party heavyweights who did not abide by the new MAGA ethos either were cast off to irrelevance or became the subjects of intense lines of attack from Trump and his supporters.

But the fact is that the Constitution bars him from running for president again after a second term. And because Trump cannot run again, the process to figure out who will lead the party next has already begun, featuring a slate of ambitious and eager Republicans who have been eyeing the opportunity for years — and a fight that will be shaped by the now two-term president.

A dozen Republican elected officials, fundraisers and consultants said in interviews that, at least in the near term, it does not matter whether Trump can run again. He will still cast an unshakable shadow over the GOP, one that influences who can ascend, who will descend and whether the party resets at all to resemble its pre-Trump state or keeps following a path focused much more on new policy fascinations like isolationism, culture war-infused fights and tariff-focused economic policy.

“He will hold on to the party as long as he is still alive,” said one longtime Republican operative.

Read more from Matt →

Trump tells NBC News there’s ‘no price tag’ for his mass deportation plan

By Kristen Welker and Alexandra Marquez

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday told NBC News that one of his first priorities upon taking office in January was to make the border “strong and powerful.” When questioned about his campaign promise of mass deportations, Trump said his administration would have “no choice” but to carry them out.

Trump said he considers his sweeping victory over Vice President Kamala Harris a mandate “to bring common sense” to the country. 

“We obviously have to make the border strong and powerful and, and we have to — at the same time, we want people to come into our country,” he said. “And you know, I’m not somebody that says, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ We want people to come in.”

As a candidate, Trump had repeatedly vowed to carry out the “largest deportation effort in American history.” Asked about the cost of his plan, he said, “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

It’s unclear how many undocumented immigrants there are in the U.S., but acting ICE Director Patrick J. Lechleitner told NBC News in July that a mass deportation effort would be a huge logistical and financial challenge. Two former Trump administration officials involved in immigration during his first term told NBC News that the effort would require cooperation among a number of federal agencies, including the Justice Department and the Pentagon.

Read more from the interview →

That’s all from the Politics Desk for now. If you have feedback — likes or dislikes — email us at politicsnewsletter@nbcuni.com

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