I’m a lawyer. When I look at Democrats today, I see myself. That’s not a good thing.
Let’s consider the 2024 presidential campaign. Democrats appeared to adopt the classic lawyer tactic of saying, “My client didn’t do anything.” There’s good reason this has become a cliché: You win in court by showing that your client followed the law and the other guy didn’t. Which is why as a lawyer, you do everything in your power to make it seem like your client was off flying kites with his kids or staring out the window at pretty clouds while the other guy was doing the most.
In other words, you try to make your client seem like Kamala Harris and the other guy seem like Donald Trump.
As a lawyer, you also always put the focus on the opposition. If you talk too much about your own client, that might encourage people to look too closely and begin to notice their flaws. So you make your client’s story all about the person across the aisle: It’s hardly ever about “my client did good” and almost always about “my opponent did bad.” That’s exactly what the Democrats did last year, seeking to undermine the opposition’s case (“Here are all the reasons Trump is bad”) instead of building their own case (“Here are all the reasons Harris is good”).
There was a moment in the campaign — right after Joe Biden backed out of the race — when that dynamic shifted and Democrats actually kept the focus on themselves. For one brief, brilliant month in the summer of 2024, as Harris commanded the media’s attention and united the delegates and the party insiders at once, we watched as her apparent political awkwardness suddenly revealed itself to be far-thinking craftiness, and her “kooky” demeanor transformed from a liability into a surprisingly effective tool to paint a vision of America that was thrillingly non-apocalyptic. For one exhilarating moment, the campaign felt upbeat and exciting — “Make America Fun Again!” — and the story was all about her.
But like any good lawyer — and Harris is unquestionably a good one — she then put the focus back on her opponent. And the Democrats’ vision of the future once again became negative — in other words, all about what it wasn’t, rather than what it was or what it might be. And to be fair, that’s not a bad courtroom strategy against an opponent who is almost pathologically predisposed to putting his foot in his mouth.
Here’s the funny thing about voting, though: It doesn’t happen in court.
The similarities didn’t stop there. Democrats seemed intent on avoiding policy specifics, while also pronouncing a series of vaguely progressive policy goals. That was another classic lawyer move: Keep your positions just specific enough to point out the other side’s flaws, and just vague enough that it’s hard to attack them in court.
When you’re a lawyer, you also never want to make it sound like you’re saying something dramatically different from what people have said before, because you win with a judge by showing that what you’re asking for is consistent with existing law. In a campaign, that line of argument almost makes itself when your candidate for president is also the current vice president.
And no matter what, as a lawyer, you stick close to the facts. You don’t say anything unless you have the evidence to back it up. Because if you can’t point to that evidence when the judge asks you for it, you lose. Democrats did this at a highly professional level, building their messaging almost entirely around facts that not even Republicans would dispute (e.g., Trump says wild things, many of which aren’t true). It didn’t make a lick of difference.
Here’s the bottom line: In 2024, the Democrats ran a campaign out of a lawyer’s wet dream, and Kamala Harris seemed like the perfect client, painting a picture of a future that didn’t offend anyone. And it changed absolutely nobody’s mind. Trump was a client who would give any good lawyer nightmares (and surely has done so). His vision of the future was chaotic and offensive. And he won.
The thing about lawyers is that we’re great at being lawyers and terrible at virtually everything else. This is partially by design: Lawyering is a specialized profession that requires a real depth of knowledge. But some of it is also by circumstance, since lawyers often work in environments that consist roughly 99% of other lawyers. While there are certainly benefits to this kind of specialization, there are drawbacks too: an inherently narrow viewpoint; an unwillingness to take the opinions of non-lawyers seriously; and a reluctance to acknowledge that the letter of the law is not the only thing that matters.
These drawbacks are particularly glaring when it comes to running, and winning, a presidential campaign.
As a lawyer, I buy what Democrats are selling. But as a voter, I don’t. Because as a voter, I want to feel like my vote has power. And you don’t demonstrate power with dry, technical arguments; you demonstrate power by making people feel. Even now, I don’t really know what it would feel like to live in the Democrats’ world, except that it’s not Trump’s. And even though that “not Trump” vision certainly has its appeal, on an emotional level, it’s hard to get excited about not going somewhere.
By contrast, what Trump did better in this election was painting an affirmative vision of what the world could be like, and making people feel like it was real. That’s why I can understand why people voted for him (even if it’s a separate question entirely whether they’re getting what they hoped for). Because if you want to feel like your vote has the power to change the world, you vote for the person who makes you feel like they can do that And it’s hard to dispute that Trump makes you feel like he’s changing the world.
Moreover, unlike Biden — who, despite significant policy accomplishments, was rather lackluster at making me feel the scope of those accomplishments — Trump will never let us forget what it feels like to have him in charge. The first month of his administration has made that obvious: It is difficult to do literally anything without being reminded of him. That feeling will be a big part of American life for the next four years — and that is exactly the point.
Democrats, who now understandably appear to be overwhelmed, seem to be taking refuge in the facts. In other words, they’re falling back on the real legal weakness behind much of what’s been happening in Washington since Jan. 20. They are accurately pointing out that many of Trump’s executive orders constitute a dramatic overreach of the executive branch’s constitutional authority; that the judiciary is already issuing injunctions against some of his more egregious initiatives; that in spite of the inarguable erosion of political norms over the last decade, there are still checks and balances left in American government that can and should be leveraged to stop him.
They’re not wrong about any of that. But they’re also missing the point.
Facts are great when you’re a lawyer in court or when you’re a wonk writing policy briefs and refining legislative language. But when you’re trying to convince people to buy into a possible future, facts don’t really matter. What matters is offering people an affirmative story — not a reactive one, not a story whose climax is “at least we’re not him” — and being able to sell it. Facts and policy can certainly serve as proof-points for that story, but they can’t be the story itself. And while Trump’s initiatives are unquestionably flawed from a legal standpoint, from a storytelling standpoint, they are flawless. This isn’t about the next four years anymore — it’s about the years after that, in this country and elsewhere. That’s what Trump seems to understand instinctively.
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Good governing takes good lawyers. But good politics — and especially good presidential campaigns — takes bad ones. Governing and campaigning are fundamentally unrelated skills. Like too many lawyers, Democrats seem to believe that only the governing part matters, and that the kinds of lawyerly arguments that work well in courts are also going to work well with the public.
In normal litigation, the existence of the courtroom itself is not at stake. The courtroom’s presence is physical and immutable, and no matter what happens on any given day in the course of a lawsuit, lawyers from both sides will have to walk into that same courtroom the following day and play by the same rules. But in a presidential election like the one we just had, and likely the next one as well, the existence of the system itself is exactly what’s at stake. It’s not about which side leaves the courtroom with a win; it’s about what the courtroom will look like the next time around, or whether that courtroom will still be there at all. That’s why being a good, risk-averse lawyer — where, by definition, you take the law as a given — is an incredibly risky strategy in a presidential campaign, particularly one where both sides have ratcheted up the stakes to existential levels. Because if you’re telling people that the future of the courtroom itself is in doubt, you also need to tell them what the new one should look like, or they’re going to vote for the person who does.
Trying to create a new future takes boldness. It takes risk. It takes imagining a world that does not yet exist and making it feel like it does. In other words, it takes a whole host of qualities entirely alien to the lawyerly mind. If Democrats want people to start buying into the future they’re selling, they’ll have to become worse lawyers and better storytellers. If they can’t do that, the party of lawyers might have no future at all.
