The man is back in town.
President-elect Donald Trump returns to Washington, D.C., Monday to be inaugurated, but in Michigan everything feels much different from the first time this happened.
Sure, the mechanics of transitioning to a new administration are happening. Biden appointees like Michigan’s two U.S. attorneys — Dawn Ison and Mark Totten — are stepping down before the swearing-in.
Michigan people like former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra are being appointed by Trump.
Hoekstra is stepping down as state Republican Party chair after Trump tapped him to be ambassador to Canada.
But this isn’t 2017.
When Trump first took the keys to the Oval Office, the protests were all over the place. Remember Gretchen Whitmer launching her gubernatorial run from the Capitol steps in front of the largest state Capitol protest in modern history?
“If we stick together and if we fight, we can be a force of nature that no one can stop,” she roared at the time.
Now, Whitmer is reaching out through back channels to work with the guy, she conceded on WKAR’s “Evening with the Governor” last week.
She’s not alone in changing her tune. The outrage in 2016-‘17 has simmered to about nothing publicly, at least in Michigan. The pushback is “strangely muted,” said Bill Ballenger of The Ballenger Report.
The election results were different, of course. Trump won the popular vote nationally in 2024, not just in Michigan.
After the billions of dollars spent against the Republican nominee, Trump still won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The Democrats needed all three to retain the White House. They didn’t get any.
He’s now the “Grover Cleveland” of the 21st century, said Ballenger. He’s only the second president to be elected to two non-consecutive terms.
And, yet, the difference is striking.
In 2016-’17, Democrats had what Ballenger called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” It’s all they could talk about.
This year, the pink “pussy hats” remain in storage. Democrats are yelping about Trump’s questionable appointments. About Trump, personally? The president is drawing national leaders to his inaugural.
Now the grumbling feels more internal. What gives?
To this, Mark Grebner of Practical Political Data quoted philosopher Karl Marx, who wrote, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as a farce.”
“It doesn’t mean that the second time was less tragic, but only that our ability to appreciate the tragedy has been exhausted,” he said. “So, the natural reaction to a second Trump term is to accept it as fate’s sick joke on all of us.”
Grebner, a Democrat and longtime Ingham County commissioner, is admittedly not a fan. Someone who is, conservative journalist James David Dickson, has a different take.
He said Trump was an unknown commodity to a lot of people in 2017.
Now, he’s got a record. It’s a record that’s been exaggerated, again and again, he said. Beating at it through more protest or public outcry would be, politically, an act of futility.
“A lot of the anti-Trump fervor was fake news or things that didn’t happen,” said Dickson, who hosts Michigan’s Enjoyer Podcast. “You saw how Barack Obama reacted to Donald Trump at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Obama commented in the campaign that he thought Trump was the end of democracy — and now we saw him sit next to the guy and joke around with him.”
For Democrats, it can’t be about Trump
Democrats already have a challenge in keeping the governor’s position in 2026. Since the Great Depression, Republican and Democratic candidates have routinely traded the position.
With Whitmer being term-limited in 2026 and Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan running for the office as an independent, the eventual Democratic nominee will have a challenge winning a plurality of voters.
If the Democratic nominee wants to use Trump as a foil, history will show it to be a failing strategy, said Katie Jesaitis of Bellwether Public Relations. Jesaitis was a longtime aide to Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Dingell.
Dems need to focus on what they’re doing to support voters, she said. Why are people feeling disenfranchised, economically stifled, unsupported within their own communities and unprepared for their futures?
What, Jesaitis stressed, are they doing to reach and support those voters? What policies are needed to solve these problems? Which individuals can best address these challenges while motivating voters to trust their solutions?
“Once Democrats can answer these questions, they can win back their base, and more of the middle,” she said.
Focusing only on Michigan counties, Trump in 2020 won 74 of Michigan’s 83 counties. In 2016, he won 75. This is more than any presidential candidate from either party since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide.
Someone who watched Democrats attack Trump relentlessly for nine years is Republican strategist Jason Cabel Roe. Most recently, Roe worked to get Tom Barrett elected to Congress.
He said people are desensitized to Trump-bashing. They internally pivot from the Trump attacks to their own personal lives.
The government is asking more of them, while doing less. All the while, the cost of living is eating up take-home income, while “progressive politicians focus on irrelevant issues at the expense of kitchen table issues.”
“A few Democrats have pulled their heads out of their asses, but most are still enjoying the fragrance of their flatulence,” Roe said.
In Michigan, the race to succeed Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes is coming down to three people. The frontrunner is former state Senate Curtis Hertel Jr.
Having lost the 7th Congressional District race in 2024, Hertel knows firsthand that Democrats fixate on Trump to their own peril.
“We have fallen into the trap about Donald Trump,” he said. “We are a party of working people and have to get back to a working people message.”
Democrats must be ready to push back when “terrible things happen,” but they can’t make their entire agenda on what Trump does or doesn’t do in the White House, he added.
Does Donald Trump make the job of the next Democratic Party chair easier or harder?
Historically speaking, it should be easier.
A second-term president nearly always faces bad news in the midterm election, according to Brookings Institution research. For more than 150 years, until 1998, no second-term president’s party had gained seats in either the House or Senate at the midterm election.
Clinton broke this string in 1998 when Democrats picked up five House seats. The Senate numbers did not change. Keep in mind, though, that Clinton’s party lost so badly in 1994 that there was less to lose, and the impeachment and trial of the president rallied what might otherwise have been a divided Democratic Party.
“Whether it’s harder or easier will come to pass at some point,” Hertel said. “We shouldn’t be counting on anything other than our own work.”
This past week, Hertel scored the AFL-CIO endorsement, putting him in a prime position to be elected to succeed Barnes at the Feb. 22 convention.
He does have as an opponent in MDP Rural Caucus Chair Mark Ludwig, who said Trump is still a topic of conversation wherever he goes.
Trump’s choices for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth; education secretary, Linda McMahon; and national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, are “breathtakingly crazy,” Ludwig said.
“You don’t know where it’s going to go, but you know it’s nowhere good,” he said.
Will Trump Part 2 be trying to pivot toward actual governing — which Trump Part 1 wasn’t particularly good at — Ludwig said, or more bomb throwing?
Ultimately, he sees the Democratic Party “suing the dickens out of the Trump administration” and keeping the base motivated all the while.
Internal squabbles come with political parties, Ludwig conceded. If nothing else, Trump gives Democrats something they can always agree on.
“There’s always plenty of material to work with all of the time. We’ll just have to see what Donald Trump we’re getting this week,” he said.
The third Michigan Democratic Party chair candidate is Detroit community organizer Al “BJ” Williams.
For Republicans, it’s all about Trump
Last week, four well-known Michigan Republicans made their pitch in front of some activists in Frankenmuth. Why are they the best choice for party next chair after Hoekstra leaves for Canada?
None of four candidates — now, anyway — have Trump’s endorsement. It’s not certain Trump’s support would earn them a victory, anyway. It did not work out for Matt DePerno in 2022.
Still, each one went out of the way to espouse their Trump bonafides.
We had MeShawn Maddock, a ground-floor resident of the 2016 Trump movement in Michigan, who said “celebrating President Trump’s first 100 days is going to be a big part of my administration.”
Joe Cella, whom Trump named U.S. ambassador to Fiji in 2019, said, “We have to be steeled with resolve to advance the American First and Michigan First policies.”
Scott Greenlee is a political consultant who has had around 100 winning campaigns (and some losing ones, too) dating back to the early 1980s. He said Trump’s 2016 campaign was the most important election he’s worked on. Cella agreed with him on that.
State Sen. Jim Runestad, of Oakland County, didn’t say Trump ’16 was the most important race he’s ever work on. Trump ’24 was.
“I thought, ‘If we don’t win this, we’re toast. I honestly believe that if we had not won this, there would not be a United States of America. They would flood this country with another 40-50 million people who have no loyalty to this country, and that would be the end.”
During the hour forum, Trump’s name was uttered 35 times — more than once every two minutes.
The Trump legacy
Yes, Trump has been at least the titular head of the Republican Party since his nomination in 2016, but his authority feels more complete in 2024. Nobody internally is disputing it anymore. No one is fighting it.
After winning a second term, Trump is approaching rarified air among Republicans — the kind belonging to conservative icon Ronald Reagan.
“I think Trump is already there,” said Dickson, the conservative journalist and Michigan Capitol Confidential alum. “I think Reagan didn’t face the adversities that Trump has. They both got the assassin’s bullet. Both had the other party line up against him.
“But look at Jimmy Carter’s funeral. You had the Bush legacy and the Clinton legacy and the Obama legacy and the Biden legacy. They were all there. Trump ended them all by his lonesome.
“And look at the sacrifices he’s made. This is a New York billionaire. He’s been black-tie since the 1970s. He’s going to be making less money than he ever has, and he’s having the least amount of fun he’s ever had, and he’s doing it for service.”
How long will this influence last?
Remember, Trump has never done well carrying anybody but himself into the winner’s circle in Michigan when he’s not on the ballot.
Republicans took a bath in 2018. They lost every single statewide race and control of both chamber of the Legislature in 2022.
So, yes, the GOP is more unified than ever in their praise of the man. Once a divisive figure in GOP politics, Trump has — some would argue — become the Republican Party.
His oft-repeated “Make America Great Again” slogan has already been lifted by the GOP gubernatorial candidate in the 2026 field, state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, who closed his announcement email with a pledge to “Make Michigan Great Again.”
Having any prominent state officials in the Trump era, though, is something Michigan has lacked.
In other battleground states like Georgia or Arizona, Republicans were able to see victories in off-year elections. Not so in Michigan.
“The 2018 election decimated the leadership of our party and Trump maintained a very loyal following among the grassroots,” Roe said. “There was no alternative voice to Trump in our party.”
Voices from the traditional wing of the Republican Party have long been shouted down. The Republicans’ former presidential candidates — George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain until his death — have wanted nothing to do with Trump.
Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, went as far as to say he was voting for Kamala Harris last year.
Anyone who has wanted to stay in Republican politics has had little choice than jumping on the Trump train.
“There were plenty of reasonable, well-meaning Republican elected officials who chose to step back or no longer pursue office when they realized that standing in lockstep with Trump’s Republican Party would undermine the morals and values they had pushed for so many years,” said Jesaitis.
“Now the party, devoid of those beacons, has to move forward in a new direction. At this point, I don’t see those disaffected Republicans represented in the party in any kind of significant way.”
And, yet, Trump’s legacy, among Republicans, may end up rivaling that of Reagan, who was held up as the conservative politics’ standard until 2016.
Roe lost his position as the Michigan Republican Party executive director back in 2021 because he didn’t buy into Trump’s unproven claims of election fraud.
Yet, he said he understands that Trump’s popularity within the party over the last 10 years dwarfs that of Reagan’s. Depending on what happens over the next four years, Trump could establish him as a defining icon of the party for years to come.
“Love him or hate him, he’s made his mark.”
Trump has made a mark, but Grebner doesn’t see it as a positive one.
“Reagan guided existing Republican attitudes in ways that were a natural extension, updating and redefining them,” Grebner said. “It wasn’t a hostile takeover, and looking back 40 years, you never hear Republicans talk about undoing the change he brought about.
“Trump is something else entirely. The fact no previous Republican presidential nominee would even endorse him is amazing. Operating the party as a cult of personality simply can’t continue once that personality becomes unavailable.
“Trump has destroyed the traditional foundations of the party, and he’s leaving behind a trash-strewn lot defended by a pack of stray dogs. Once he leaves the scene, Republicans are going to find their agenda is set for them: reform and rebuilding.”
Ballenger thinks Trump’s legacy could outlast even Reagan’s if the Republicans can cement their incursions into the working class and minority groups from 2025 to ‘28.
“If someone like, say, JD Vance or Marco Rubio can carry the Trump legacy forward and articulate the Trump message effectively and charismatically, they are positioning the GOP for long-term success.”
Asked specifically if Trump’s legacy will rival Reagan’s, Jesaitis said:
“Ronald Reagan was the mold from which all Republicans sought to cast themselves from the 1980s until 2016. What Trump and the MAGA movement has done to the Republican Party has nearly replaced the legacy of the Reagan conservative movement from the party.
“Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory changed the makeup of this country within Congress that still persists today. Donald Trump created a divide within the Republican Party that may similarly fester for decades. For Republicans, Trump’s strongest legacy will not be a positive one of economic power, international prowess or domestic strength.
“It will likely be a negative one that leans into the continual fracturing of the Republican Party and national unity, more than anything.”
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