The incident has left Democrats and Republicans bracing themselves for yet another showdown between the president and his political opponents — one that threatens to usher in a new era of the kind of crippling hyper-partisanship that often characterized the eight years of the Obama administration.
David Axelrod, former senior strategist and aide to President Obama, called Lewis “as genuine and decent a person as you’ll find,” but he worried that Democrats risk adopting an originally Republican playbook in their dealings with Trump and that it won’t advance the party’s interests.
“The question is how much can a democracy take of cycle after cycle of one side claiming illegitimacy,” Axelrod said. “I as much as anybody else appreciate the anger because I was there when we basically faced a Republican blockade, even on things that Republicans had supported in the past. I saw how destructive that was and how difficult that was.”
“If you care about our democracy, how do you proceed now? Do you pay him back in kind?” Axelrod asked.
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