Democrats need to accept that President Donald Trump has a sweeping mandate and is going to do whatever he wants, ESPN broadcaster Stephen A. Smith said on the latest episode of Pod Save America.
Asked by Pod co-host Tommy Vietor if he thought Trump was “overreaching” with his executive orders, Smith said, “Of course he’s overreaching. But why is he overreaching? Because he has the license and the mandate to do so.”
Trump won by 3 million votes, took every swing state, controls Congress, and is likely to pick up even more congressional seats during the midterms, continued Smith, whose name has unexpectedly come up as a potential Democratic candidate in 2028.
The First Take host told Vietor, a former Obama spokesman who hosts Pod Save America with three other former Obama aides, he would only run if there were no better options—which would be a major problem for the Democrats.
During their conversation, Vietor conceded that Trump had a mandate, but he pointed out that former President Barack Obama won in 2008 with 52.9 percent of the vote, beating the late Sen. John McCain by more than 9.5 million votes. But congressional Republicans still tried to block “literally” everything Obama did, Vietor said.
“I do think there’s space between, ‘Yes, Trump has a mandate,’ [and] the suggestion you see sometimes that Democrats shouldn’t be fighting back, or that we’re the problem for fighting back. That it’s the wrong optics or messaging,” Vietor said.
“Well, what I would say is that you are wrong,” Smith replied. “And the reason you are wrong is because never before has the Democratic Party been this damaged. This is bad, bro.”
It wasn’t clear, however, what the two things have to do with each other.
Even if Democrats are at their weakest point in recent memory, they’re not any weaker than the Republicans were in 2008, when the GOP filibustered with abandon.
Democrats still won 77 million votes, and since Trump’s inauguration, voters have flooded the offices of Democratic lawmakers with calls for their representatives to fight back harder against the president’s governmental purge.
Judges across the country have also blocked Trump’s orders to freeze government spending, fire civil servants, and cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts.
Smith’s statement was ripe for a follow-up question, but instead the conversation quickly veered off in a different direction.
Vietor and Smith debated whether the Democrats had ever suffered bigger electoral losses in recent history, and whether canvassing during midterms was a waste of time. Smith also said Democrats needed to run a “fearless” candidate in 2028 with box office appeal.
“I believe it is an utter embarrassment to the Democratic Party that I am a candidate in people’s eyes for the presidency of the United States,” he said. “It’s an indictment against them, and they need to get their act together.”
