Bernie Sanders is ready to negotiate with Donald Trump

“Donald Trump is nobody’s fool”.

With that in mind, just how much trouble will Democrats cause over the next two years?

In America there is always another election. They felt that American security had diminished in a unsafe world and were uncomfortable with the radical social engineering of the Obamacare health reforms. That judgment was, at a minimum, premature. He left it in place, however, for the Supreme Court. And now, the remaining Democrats in the Senate are planning a strategy that benefits those voters, and takes advantage of the split between the old GOP and the Trump version.

Democrats are having a hard time dealing with it and so instead of examining why they and their policies were so roundly rejected, they have chose to take a familiar path.

And that is exactly the mistake Democrats have been making for the past eight years.

“The president of the United States should not have a racist by his side”, Sanders told his Washington audience, according to the Los Angeles Times. Heitkamp’s state went for Trump by 36 points; Tester’s, McCaskill’s, and Donnelly’s by 20 points or slightly less. This was one of the closest and most evenly split presidential and congressional elections in American history. Clinton lost states like MI and Wisconsin that her campaign did not believe were even in play in this election. Trump, unusually for a Republican, put forward an anti-free trade message and a promise to bring back manufacturing jobs. Democratic voters were less enthusiastic about their candidate, and many stayed home. Trump ran on many possibles that upended the Republican establishment in ways that benefit working class whites, allowing him to win over a demographic that had historically voted Democratic.

“Sanders will also serve as the top Democrat on the Budget Committee”, notes the Huffington Post. Republicans prevailed at all levels of government.

“As elected representatives of millions of Americans from diverse backgrounds, religions, and ethnicities, we strongly urge you to reconsider your decision to appoint Mr Bannon to White House Chief Strategist”, the letter said.

While he can expect the Republican Senate to confirm the vast majority of his choices, the party’s narrow 52-48 edge and early infighting could slow or doom controversial ones. It was never going to be enough to simply not be Donald Trump. That can only mean more Republican victories in the future. Or maybe she thought she didn’t need to, given who she was up against.

Another example of this is President Obama’s infamous declaration that he had “a pen and a phone” that he would use to push his agenda on immigration and energy through executive orders that entailed an unprecedented expansion of executive power. The alternative is the abrogation of our republic and Constitutional rights in favor of the tyranny of the majority. A party almost always does better in Congress and state races when it can rail against the guy in the White House.

On Wednesday, Sanders was elevated to an obscure position among Senate Democrats’ leadership team.

Trump’s campaign rhetoric was vague, off-base, and offensive. Greg Abbott carried it by four points in the 2014 governor’s race, and Mitt Romney essentially tied Obama there in 2012. If he is pragmatic, he may actually be able to get things done.

Even as Sanders offers to work with Trump on the populist components of his economic program, critical differences remain. In business, if your strategy isn’t working, you change the strategy. For this, he will need to build coalitions. Her time in the Senate, as secretary of state and indeed marriage to a USA president would suggest otherwise.