“He has been held to a historically low standard of what a president should be, and I think that’s a reflection on how disconnected the American people feel from their political institutions,” Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado told me by phone Tuesday. “He just rolls over everything that is in his path. Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if Barack Obama had wandered into the DMZ with no plan, no strategy? Every day there’s something like that.”
In Miami, Democrats engaged in a substantive debate about health care and complex issues like private insurance and Medicare for All. Trump keeps promising he’s coming up with his own health care plan, but all he’s managed to do so far is bludgeon Obamacare, nine years into Republicans building an agenda out of a slogan to “repeal and replace” it, of which they’ve done neither. Democrats have been pressured to release their taxes, and battered about what’s revealed in them, like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont becoming a millionaire or former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke giving close to nothing to charity. Trump still claims he’s under what would have to be one of the most extended audits in American history, and uses that as an excuse not to release his returns.
When I asked Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton on Tuesday if he felt he and the other Democratic candidates are being held to a different standard, he responded “of course” they are. “But we should be,” Moulton told me. “We’re a party of high standards. I don’t know anybody in this party who wants to be held to the same standard as Donald Trump.”
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