Democrats are facing looming decisions over how to advance their movement as President Donald Trump’s agenda at times appears to overlap with the party’s best interests.
Gun control is one of the fronts on which the Democratic Party is finding itself in a dilemma. While such measures are typically in line with the party’s ethos, the White House is rumored to be pitting gun control policies against another favored Democratic priority: the LGBT movement.
The ideological turmoil began with the recent shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church, in which a transgender-identifying biological male killed two young girls, which some conservatives argued mirrored five similar incidents since 2018 in which a transgender-identifying shooter opened fire. Should Trump’s Justice Department decide to pursue a possible ban on transgender people from owning guns due to mental health concerns, Democrats will be forced to choose between backing elements of firearm regulations that are in line with the party platform or painting the measure as anti-transgender policy.
The gun control debate is not the only one that has left Democrats vulnerable ahead of the midterm elections, in which the party hopes to make a political comeback.
The party’s outspoken opposition to Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., has left it wide open to accusations from Republicans that it is ignoring data showing crime in the district has gone down since the president’s emergency order. And it places Democrats in a quandary of whether to continue putting a target on Trump for the order at the risk of appearing to dismiss crime in the country’s capital that has reached record highs in recent years.
Democrats’ national resistance to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk as an effort to target waste and fraud at federal agencies, has also left the party exposed to attacks from critics who have equated hostile attitudes to a defense of bloated government. The party could pay a political price for the anti-DOGE strategy in the wake of data showing voters overwhelmingly believe there is room to slash bureaucratic inefficiencies.
“People … know these programs have fraud, but Democrats start to scream about cuts and say Elon is going to steal your Social Security check,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said in February. “Then nothing gets done. Well, we are now very serious about this, and we need to face the reality. People are abusing the system, and it will take [a] Congress with a backbone to make improvements. We have a mandate, and we need to get President Trump’s back on this. Americans are fed up, and Congress needs to get it done.”
Immigration is another issue that has emerged as politically murky territory for the Democratic Party as it fights Trump tooth and nail. Key aspects of the president’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants, while controversial in some aspects, have broad popular support, leaving the opposition party vulnerable to backlash from voters worried it is siding with criminals over citizens.
On that policy and others, Democrats are increasingly facing two options ahead of the 2026 elections: continue to embrace the anti-Trump brand that has come to define the party, or abandon the resistance agenda in favor of a more nuanced approach that could win it more favor with a larger chunk of an electorate that decisively voted the president in for a second term last November.
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So far, the anti-Trump strategy has appeared to yield little fruit. Despite Democratic resistance, the president has pushed a major tax-cut package known as the “big, beautiful bill,” immigration reform legislation embodied in the Laken Riley Act, and multiple other pieces of his agenda through Congress and executive orders. In March, the Democratic Party’s popularity reached an all-time low, according to an NBC poll that also confirmed their willingness to engage in the bipartisan politics of compromise had also plummeted.
“We know the work in front of us,” Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin said during the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis last month. “Rebuilding trust with so many people in this country right now who’ve lost faith in the Democratic Party.”
