THE TRUMP SUGAR HIGH

Why Democrats Keep Picking Fights — and is this the party’s version of “own the libs”? (“Own MAGA”?)

There’s a new and unmistakable pattern emerging in Democratic politics: if you want to raise your national profile, if you want to become interesting overnight, if you want to be taken seriously in a party that isn’t sure who its next generation of leaders are, then the fastest route is surprisingly simple:

Pick a fight with Donald Trump — or any MAGA-adjacent figure who can deliver you into the bloodstream of the moment.

Or hope Trump or his orbit targets you first.

We’ve now seen it work enough times for it to feel less like a coincidence and more like a strategy.

Gavin Newsom didn’t become an early 2028 frontrunner because of California policy achievements, though he has them. He became a national figure the moment he turned his fire outward — sparring with conservative media personalities, jousting with DeSantis in an actual debate, then taking up the cause of fighting Texas’s redistricting strategy with a successful counter-effort in California.

Those confrontations, not his governance, made him look like a 2028 contender. After all, California voters have given him middling job ratings at best these last few years. It’s clear it wasn’t governance that catapulted him — it was the fight.

Mark Kelly discovered the same thing almost instantly. For years, he was respected but not especially visible — a serious, understated senator whose national identity never quite extended beyond “former astronaut.” But one televised confrontation — Pete Hegseth taking a swing at him, Trump amplifying it — and suddenly Kelly mattered in a new way. He became interview-worthy, clip-worthy, contender-adjacent. The nature of the exchange mattered less than the fact of the fight. He looked like a Democrat who wouldn’t be rolled.

And Kelly is already using this new visibility to raise money for others. Here’s how he opened a recent fundraising pitch on behalf of Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs:

“You’ve been hearing a lot from me lately about the threats and attacks made against me from Donald Trump and his Administration, what they represent, and why this is such uncharted territory for all of us. I can’t thank you enough for all the support you’ve shown me, my team, and my family.

But today, I’m writing to urge you to support Katie Hobbs’ re-election campaign.”

Kelly has fundraised for Democrats before — but never with this kind of viral moment to leverage.

Then there’s newly minted Texas Senate candidate Jasmine Crockett, who may have distilled the entire formula into its purest form.

Her statewide announcement video opens with a long stretch of silence as Trump’s insults fill the screen — his voice booming, his contempt center stage. She barely moves. She doesn’t speak. She lets Trump define the stakes for her.

The whole thing is a thesis statement in visual form: I’m running because of that. And if he’s attacking me, I must be worth rallying around.

It’s powerful. It’s smart. It fits the moment we’re in — a moment where political identity is shaped less by ideology and more by who you’re willing to stand up to. “Own the libs!” meets “own MAGA!” Crockett didn’t need to outline a platform or position herself on the ideological spectrum. She only needed to show she was in the fight.

And that’s the part Democrats have internalized:

The shortest distance from obscurity to national relevance is a confrontation with Trump.

It’s not a long-term strategy; it’s not a governing theory. It’s the political equivalent of a dopamine burst — instant, potent, and impossible to sustain for very long. But in a party hungry for fighters, it works.

And it’s reminiscent of how Republicans have been running since Trump took over the party: just promise to “own the libs,” and that will suffice.

Of course, there’s another layer to all this — especially when you look at Newsom and Kelly.

Both men are, by nature and policy instinct, business-friendly center-left Democrats. Neither would be the progressive base’s dream candidate on ideology alone, and both know it. They also know that a direct ideological appeal to the left could backfire or look inauthentic.

But a fight with Trump?

That’s a universal solvent.

It’s a way for moderates to earn the left’s emotional allegiance without having to contort themselves ideologically. Progressives may not love every policy choice Newsom or Kelly has made, but they love seeing Democrats who punch back. They are motivated by the fight as much as by the platform.

Newsom understands this better than most. He genuinely believes he’s a moderate — that California Democrats have been caricatured nationally as uniformly far-left, and that he himself is less progressive than the brand assigned to him. He may be right. But he also knows this perception is a problem he can solve after he is taken seriously as a front-runner. And right now, thanks to his high-profile confrontations, he pretty much is.

Kelly benefits from the same dynamic. He didn’t move left. He didn’t change his priorities. He simply showed a willingness to throw a punch — and suddenly the progressive world was praising him for his toughness rather than scrutinizing him for ideological purity.

In other words:

The fight substitutes for the litmus test — at least for now.

And that’s why this tactic works so well for moderates. It closes the ideological gap through emotional demonstration. It turns a centrist into a warrior. It creates the kind of moment that can’t be achieved through governing alone.

But the question that lingers — and the question this column is ultimately trying to wrestle with — is whether these moments, as effective as they are, come with real costs.

Because the more our politics orients itself around the “moment” — the more candidates chase the instantaneous thrill of going viral via Trump-world confrontations — the more we lose something far more important:

the ability to discuss, debate, and solve the problems that actually matter to the country.

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The 51–49 Issues We No Longer Debate

The most important challenges in American life right now are not the 80–20 culture-war topics that dominate social media and partisan media. They’re the 51–49 issues — the kinds of problems where the public broadly agrees on the goals but not the implementation. Problems that require real trade-offs, long explanations, and a certain amount of shared patience.

These issues don’t lend themselves to the performative style of politics that Trump ushered in and that both parties now mimic. They can’t be condensed into a clip. They don’t generate outrage on demand. They don’t deliver the same sugar high.

So instead, they get crowded out. They disappear beneath the viral churn.

Take immigration. There is wide agreement on the fundamentals: strong borders, more legal immigration, a functional citizenship pathway, modernized worker visas, humane enforcement. But we seldom debate those things because they’re complicated. They require acknowledging contradictory preferences, budget trade-offs, and demographic realities. It’s far easier — and far more viral — to fight over “open borders” vs. “xenophobia,” neither of which captures where most Americans actually are.

Public education is no different. “School choice” has become the shorthand conflict, not the debate. Most Americans simply want better public schools: safer classrooms, competitive teachers, modern curricula, and pathways that prepare students for a different economy. But improving public education is a 51–49 problem full of structural questions — funding formulas, teacher retention, AI in classrooms, and the purpose of high school itself. None of that goes viral, so none of it gets debated.

Housing fits the same pattern. Nearly everyone agrees housing is too expensive and that we need more supply. But zoning reform, density decisions, regional planning, addiction services, and insurance markets are politically painful debates. It’s much easier to focus on encampments, NIMBY villains, and moral absolutes than on the structural reforms needed to fix the problem.

Technology — the defining economic and geopolitical force of the next decade — suffers from the same dynamic. Americans aren’t polarized on the need for digital rights, data privacy, and guardrails around AI. But those guardrails require Congress to think clearly for more than five minutes, and our political incentives don’t reward that kind of focus. So we fight over TikTok bans and “censorship” narratives rather than build a national framework for navigating digital life.

Even health care, perhaps the most chronic 51–49 issue, has been swallowed by the performative void. The country isn’t debating whether health care is a right anymore; it’s debating how to make it affordable. But affordability is a structural problem — insurance design, provider incentives, pharmaceutical contracting — that doesn’t fit neatly into a viral clip or partisan slogan.

Again and again, the same pattern emerges:

The issues Americans most want addressed are the issues our politics is least capable of debating.

And the more the political system rewards “the fight,” the worse this gets.

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The Cost of the Sugar High

This is the long-term cost of the Trump-era attention economy that Democrats — intentionally or not — are now participating in. The Trump confrontation is great at generating energy and terrible at generating substance. It elevates candidates but doesn’t elevate ideas.

And because it works — because Newsom, Kelly, Crockett, and others have gained real traction this way — it becomes harder and harder for anyone to justify doing politics the slower, harder, more deliberative way.

Voters end up with fighters, not problem-solvers.

Campaigns end up with moments, not agendas.

And the country ends up with the wrong debates.

None of this is to say the fights don’t matter. They do. Trump remains the dominant figure in our politics, shaping everything in his shadow. Candidates who challenge him signal something important about themselves.

But governing is not shadowboxing.

Governing is choosing.

And the country has a lot of choices it’s simply not making.

Which brings us back to the real question:

Are these viral Democratic moments building the next generation of leadership — or simply feeding the same attention cycle that made Trumpism possible in the first place?

Because the 51–49 issues aren’t going away.

And the longer we avoid them, the harder they become to solve.