“To the degree that Mr. Trump is serious about pursuing policies that improve the lives of working families in this country, I and other progressives are prepared to work with him. To the degree that he pursues racist, sexist, xenophobic and anti-environment policies, we will vigorously oppose him.”
I largely agree with this. Look, it's still too early to say, and confusing given all of Trump's flip flopping back and forth to know what a Trump presidency will look like, but I do think that we may be looking at a far more moderate Republican party than we've seen in a while here. Trump still sounds horrifying on issues like abortion and climate change, but he is quickly moderating his positions on other issues and I do think when he has a good idea, we should support him.
While I would like a further left and more extreme democratic party, I am going to advise against acting like the tea party. The tea party opposed Obama on everything no matter how reasonable he tried to be, and this was very offputting to me. It eventually made Obama look like the only sane person in the room, with the republican party going nuts and opposing stuff just because Obama was for it.
Democrats should not oppose every policy Trump proposes. However, we do need to make principled stands on policies that will be destructive and harmful to the people. We shouldn't support policies that harm peoples' human rights. We shouldn't support policies that are harmful to the environment. We should vigorously oppose anything that strips away worker protections or welfare or anything like that, unless there's a suitable replacement.
Honestly, to use an ironically Clinton phrase, when the republicans go low, we should go high. We should be reasonable in response to reasonableness on the part of the Republican party, but if they start going all tea party on us, we should oppose them with everything we got.
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