Donald Trump’s attempts to distract from interest in his connection to the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein keep failing. Last week, Trump accused former President Obama of treason and released files on Martin Luther King Jr., but to little effect. The controversy got so bad that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) shut down the House for the summer early to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files.

Democrats are thrilled. They think they finally have an issue that works against Trump, and they plan to use it.

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It’s a sign of just how out-of-touch Democrats are that they somehow believe that a MAGA-led conspiracy theory is going to be their ticket out of the political wilderness. As much fun as it must be to join the handful of far-right House Republicans who are demanding complete transparency about Epstein, is it possible Democrats really believe that this controversy is going to be the one that helps them win in next year’s midterm elections?

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Apparently, they do. The thinking seems to be that Trump’s longtime friendship with Epstein damages his credibility as the candidate who will drain the political swamp. One Democratic consultant said that the reason the issue works against Republicans is because “it confirms that there are two systems of justice in this country: one is for the powerful, and one is for everyone else.”

The problem with that logic is that the reason most people hate Democrats is because they see them as the party of the elite, otherwise known as “the powerful.” Putting aside the thudding irony of a self-proclaimed billionaire president whose campaign was funded by the world’s richest man, Democrats should know that tarnishing Trump’s image isn’t going to burnish their own.

People are looking for something different, and Democrats just aren’t giving it to them. That’s why you get these strange voting patterns: people who voted for Obama and Trump, or Bernie Sanders and Trump. There is even a cohort of people who voted for Donald Trump and then voted for Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in the New York mayoral primary. Two candidates with policies more diametrically opposed can’t possibly be imagined.

What these candidates do have in common is that voters think they understand how much the current system is stacked against the average American. In Trump’s case, that belief is wildly misplaced, to say the least, but that’s the snake oil he’s been selling to his followers.

But what he has tapped into is a broad dissatisfaction with American life. “Populism is not an ideology; it’s an emotion,” Mario Nicoletto, campaigns committee chairman for the New York Young Republican Club, told the Washington Post. “People are pissed off and they’re upset about the status quo and how the elites have failed the younger generation — or I’d argue, all generations of the country.”

However, faced with an angry electorate, the Democratic leadership has by and large responded with pablum. The establishment ignored the fury of the base and complained that activist groups were pushing them too hard to be confrontational against Trump.

It’s also an excuse. There are numerous rear-guard actions that Democrats could have taken to mobilize opposition to Trump. Their base was hungry for it. Just take the thousands of people who turned out for the Sanders-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Last week, some Democrats demonstrated that they were perhaps willing to fight Republicans on their own terms. When Trump suggested that Texas redraw its Congressional maps outside of the normal period when they should to guarantee more GOP seats, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) suggested that they would be open to doing the same for Democrats.

Yet many Democrats seem to see themselves as the stewards of political norms. In the face of creeping authoritarianism, Democrats aren’t willing to pull out all the stops to protect democracy. That doesn’t mean breaking the law, but it does mean breaking from conventional thinking.

Instead, the party is saddled with strategists from decades past giving them bad advice. James Carville, who advised Bill Clinton more than 30 years ago, told Democrats to play dead because Trump would self-destruct. Rahm Emmanuel, who helped Obama get elected in 2008, says Democrats are “weak and woke,” as if culture war issues were the drivers of the party’s problems. (Emmanuel revealed his own bias by recently trashing transgender people in an interview with Megyn Kelly.)

The correction to these problems would be a lot of primary challenges, which of course terrifies feckless (and geriatric) incumbents. They say primaries will weaken them in the general election, but really, how much weaker can they get?

The stakes are high in next year’s elections. Democrats have to win back at least one house of Congress to check Trump. However, they also need to figure out how to win in 2028, and that means recognizing that Trump has inescapably changed the political landscape.

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