Republicans are imitating Obama’s approach by needling Democratic voters to the point that they take leave of their senses. And it could backfire.

R epublicans with long memories are experiencing some foreboding déjà vu.

The Democratic Party’s loudest, if not most representative, voters are spitting mad. They appear to reserve most of their manic hostility not for their Republican opponents but their fellow Democrats. They demand catharsis from their legislators — grand futile gestures that trade tactical soundness for visceral pique. And they are increasingly succumbing to magical thinking.

Of that, the ongoing government shutdown is illustrative. In the weeks leading up to the present impasse, Democratic lawmakers were positively funereal when describing their unenviable position to reporters. “We may not have the luxury of a victory scenario,” said Democratic Representative Jared Huffman. He was one of many Democrats who could not conceive of what a shutdown could possibly accomplish but who were resigned to one if only because they would be pilloried by the firebrands in their party if they didn’t surrender their better judgment to the mob.

For example: “This is about people being able to insure their children,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Tuesday night. “What I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance.”

That’s the sort of cheap demagoguery that puts butts in seats. There is, however, no logical sequence of events that gets Democrats from point A, the shutdown, to point B, the fruition of all their worldly demands. If you clap hard enough, perhaps you can force Republicans to reverse their only major legislative achievement of this Congress. And if the GOP continues to balk, it’s because you didn’t clap hard enough. Don’t dare ask how. Only those with the stomach for the fight — even a doomed, foolish, strategically incomprehensible one — have the gumption to meet the measure of the moment.

If that sounds familiar to you, you’re not imagining things. According to the most recent Pew Research Center survey, the Democratic rank and file’s opinion of their elected officials is lower than it has been at any point in the last decade. Indeed, the Democratic mood is eerily redolent of the fatalistic outlook that consumed the GOP in the middle of the last decade.

At the outset of 2015, the Republican Party maintained a 247-seat House majority. They held 54 seats in the U.S. Senate. Republicans controlled 31 governorships, 68 of the country’s 99 legislative chambers, and, in half the union, the GOP claimed “trifecta” control of all the levers of government. That was also when the Republican Party’s “base” voters convinced themselves that Republicans only ever lose. Their opposition was perfunctory — “failure theater,” they called it. Even in victory, the GOP wasn’t worth much because its pointy-headed tactics and attachment to scruples no one else observed ceded the country to malign forces. The nation was so far gone that there wasn’t even much worth salvaging. Perhaps it was time to “burn it down” and let something better emerge from the ashes.

It was illogical and impulsive, but it wasn’t unprovoked. Democrats and their media allies probably don’t remember the degree to which they made goading Republicans into a sport, whipping their members and representatives into a deliberate fury with the aim of exploiting their blinding rage.

They don’t fully recall the radicalizing campaign to brand Mitt Romney a homicidal racist, nor do they remember the similar verdict they pronounced on his voters. They have forgotten the Republican Party’s “war on women” contrivance predicated on a knowingly misleading reading of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. They don’t remember the “code words” only they could hear, the efforts to transform the assassination of police officers into a national conversation on the legacy of slavery, or the degree to which the liberal activist class nakedly celebrated the “gift” represented by the deaths of unarmed African Americans for the rhetorical opportunities they presented.

Nor do they recall the president’s condescension. Not even a dim recollection comes to mind when Republicans reflect on Obama’s efforts to blame Republican bigotry for his administration’s failure to contain the spread of radical Islamist terrorism, with the willing complicity of the media. There’s no indication that Obama’s efforts to mock concerns over the last decade’s refugee crisis — grown men “scared of 3-year-old orphans” — rings any bells. If they remember that administration’s attempt to anathematize Fox News and exile it from the White House grounds, they only remember it as righteously justified.

At the time, it wasn’t even especially controversial to observe that Obama and his allies loved “bringing out the worst in Republicans” because it “serves both his political and his policy purposes,” as liberal blogger Bill Scher put it. Slate’s editors deemed Obama’s approach to politics “refined cynicism,” but the article by CBS News broadcaster John Dickerson put a finer point on it: “This is trolling,” he wrote.

That’s exactly right. Obama’s efforts to provoke, not for provocation’s sake but to put his enemies on their back foot, cloud their judgment, and mask his party’s electoral failures from its voters was quite effective. It achieved all of those objectives, radicalizing the unstable as well as the well-adjusted but deeply and sincerely concerned.

Obama’s agitation drove Republican voters to distraction, and, as a result, the GOP did become marginally less appealing to the American voting public. Not since 2015 has the Republican Party approached the level of political dominance it enjoyed at the time, after all. But the GOP was not shut out of power. Voters prioritize many things, and sometimes their public policy objectives trump other concerns.

Indeed, those other concerns have ensured that Donald Trump has stood astride the American political landscape like a colossus for a decade. There is a lesson in that for Republicans as they successfully imitate Obama’s approach — needling Democratic voters to the point that they take leave of their senses.

There are too many such incidents to count. Only the most recent involve making an AI-generated video featuring Chuck Schumer denouncing his party alongside Hakeem Jefferies bearing a handlebar mustache and wearing a cartoonishly large sombrero. Episodes in which Pete Hegseth muses publicly about using American cities as “training grounds” for urban warfare exercises and the president’s profligate prodding of Democrats with Trump 2028-branded merchandise feature prominently in that list. Threatening the city of Chicago, which is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” in a social media post featuring an image of Donald Trump as Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now flanked by a fleet of Huey helicopters against the Windy City’s skyline, serves no higher purpose than to drive Democrats insane.

Well, it’s working, but perhaps not to the Republican Party’s long-term benefit, to say nothing of America’s. If the Democratic Party’s trajectory resembles the GOP’s, its beleaguered doyens who no longer understand their own voters will be gone soon — swept away in primary challenges or retiring from public life in advance of their voters’ judgments. Those Democrats will be replaced by a feistier sort, more ideologically dogmatic and less inclined toward compromise. Democratic voters may summon from the ether a demagogue who reflects and harnesses their passions in much the same way that the GOP manifested Trump. And just because that intemperate, maximalist version of the Democratic Party seems to depart from the erstwhile American civic consensus, that doesn’t mean voters will block its path back to power.

So, beware Republicans. That emotionally gratifying troll sure is tempting, and your Democratic targets willingly give you exactly the reaction you’re looking for at every turn. But you risk unforeseen consequences when your prey resolves to mete out revenge and voters give them the tools to pursue it. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Don’t say you weren’t warned.