Veteran strategist James Carville argued during a podcast episode that Democrats are “overwhelmed” and that he has not figured out a way the party can combat the flurry of news President Trump has made since returning to the White House.
“Bannon is right. We are flooded in s— and we are searching for a way to deal with this. These are extraordinarily difficult times,” Carville said Thursday on the “Politics War Room” podcast which he co-hosts with Al Hunt.
Carville was referencing former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s quote from 2018 when he said “the way to deal with [the media] is to flood the zone with s—.”
The long-time Democratic operative, who steered former President Clinton’s campaign, said that Democrats are “getting overwhelmed and that “things that we thought that would kill a political career, would be poisonous for whatever reason, this guy [Trump] keeps chugging along.”
Since Trump’s second White House term started on Jan. 20, Democrats have failed to coalesce around a unified message to effectively oppose the president, who has moved to reshape the government. Democrats have grown frustrated over his recent decisions, including directives to shut down agencies and entire departments. Some within the party, particularly in the progressive wing, have argued that a harder stance needs to be taken.
“While Elon Musk is pouring gasoline and dropping lit matches across the federal government, voters don’t want their elected representatives acting like deer in the headlights,” Karthik Ganapathy, a progressive political operative who worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), told The Hill.
Carville said during the podcast that he is unsure how to counter Trump.
“And I don’t know how you accentuate. Do you oppose one thing? Do you oppose all five? Is it a personnel issue? Is it a policy issue? I’m struggling here a little bit, so maybe some of our really smart viewers can help us untangle it a little bit,” he said. “It’s really tangled now because no one knows where to land. It’s all too incomprehensible.”
