Back when Rahm Emanuel was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, the idea that a political operative once nicknamed Rahmbo could be a viable candidate to succeed his boss would have seemed a little far-fetched. But when Emanuel suggested to Politico last week that he was considering a run, what was previously unimaginable suddenly made some sense. Emanuel, also a former mayor of Chicago, has a reputation for being a bulldozer. He has little time for niceties. He articulates his ideas in bombastic and often quite pungent sentences. As the former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, who spent years working closely with Emanuel, has said, “He understands how to win and speaks bluntly in an idiom that most folks understand.” That’s the nice way to put it. His style is tough, and tough is what the Democrats seem to be looking for.

Whether or not he has a real shot, Emanuel is very politically astute, and he understands that this might be his moment. The same could be said of Andrew Cuomo, who is running for New York City mayor. When challenged over his tarnished record—the small matter of having resigned as governor over numerous allegations of sexual harassment—he is counterpunching with his record of hardheadedness. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but has said he is “truly sorry” for instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) “We don’t need a Mr. Nice Guy. We need a Mr. Tough Guy,” Representative Ritchie Torres said in his endorsement of Cuomo. Last month, speaking to donors, the former governor said he saw Donald Trump as a “bully in the schoolyard.” And Cuomo knows how to handle bullies. “He puts his finger in your chest,” Cuomo said. “And if you take one step back, he’s going to continue to put his finger in your chest.” You put a finger in his chest, Cuomo seemed to imply, and he’ll break it.

“What if the path to Democratic Party renewal was always just to bring back the biggest assholes, like Rahm and Andrew Cuomo?” the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, a Trump supporter, posted on X.

As Emanuel might have put it, maybe it takes an asshole to fight one. At least that’s what polling is picking up. A new NBC survey found that 65 percent of Democrats want their lawmakers to oppose Trump even if it leads to gridlock, compared with 32 percent who are willing to broach some compromise. (These numbers were practically flipped when the same question was asked roughly this far into Trump’s first term.) And in a poll conducted by Ruffini, 57 percent of Democrats said they approved of Representative Al Green’s cane-waving disruption of Trump’s recent congressional address.

David A. Graham: America’s Andrew Cuomo problem

This desire for roughness has erupted into scathing anger over the past few days, finding its target in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose style is more Mr. Beloved Uncle With a Stain on His Shirt than Mr. Tough Guy. Schumer decided not to block the Republicans’ spending bill, thereby avoiding a government shutdown. His reasons were legitimate; not only would Trump relish the chance to blame the shutdown on the Democrats (surely schumer shutdown bumper stickers were already being printed), but a shutdown would give Trump the power to close government agencies and programs he deemed “nonessential”—Schumer worried specifically about food stamps—and the pain would have been counterproductive to Democratic interests. The argument for a shutdown was simpler: Do something, anything. Many Democratic lawmakers argued that signing on to the spending bill would make them look as if they were acquiescing to DOGE’s power grab. Even Nancy Pelosi, a longtime Schumer comrade, called his decision “unacceptable.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries offered the Capitol Hill equivalent of a shiv in the back when he was asked whether the Senate needed new leadership. “Next question,” he said.

I’m sympathetic to Schumer, who was thinking about the actual implications of a shutdown beyond the performance and the politics. But he is in the wrong movie. Democrats are desperate for someone to start poking their own finger into Trump’s chest. The only problem is that they have no leverage at the moment; the shutdown was pretty much the only sand congressional Democrats had to throw in the gears. How else could they show their constituents their fighting spirit?

Toughness, as a value, has long been a fixture in American politics—but it has been inescapable since 2016. In interview after interview following the latest election, voters told reporters that Trump’s pumping fist, raised seconds after July’s assassination attempt, sealed the deal for them. Even before the incident, he was often styled in MAGA social media as, yes, Rambo.

Trump’s style has worked for him, and it makes sense that Democrats, who are dejected and more unpopular than ever, are looking to answer mano with mano. Commentators are already forecasting a liberal version of the Tea Party movement, the grassroots backlash to Obama’s win in 2008 that coalesced around the idea that establishment Republicans were too weak to fight him. The movement was short on actual policy, besides a desire to kill the Affordable Care Act and cut taxes and regulations. What it had plenty of was anger—against elites, against the perceived foreignness of America’s first Black president, against a globalizing world. Behind the anger was a push for toughness, and in that arena, the Tea Party bore fruit: The 2010 midterms brought in a wave of more ideologically rigid congressional members. It elevated bullying as an end in itself, and set the stage for Trump.

I’m not sure toughness will work for candidates who merely attempt to mirror Trump’s modus operandi. For one thing, Democrats seem to have less patience for the kind of shamelessness and blame-shifting that are the president’s trademark. Emanuel and Cuomo are on the comeback trail precisely because they have already offended Democratic voters through Trumpian behavior. When he was mayor of Chicago, Emanuel was widely condemned for mishandling the police shooting of a Black teenager, Laquan McDonald, in part by delaying the release of damning dashcam footage for more than a year. The resulting ill will played no small part in his decision not to run for reelection in 2019. As for Cuomo, some say the directive his administration issued early in the coronavirus pandemic, requiring nursing homes to accept patients who had tested positive, greatly spread the virus and caused death. Then a New York state audit found that Cuomo had underreported those deaths by as much as 50 percent. The sexual-harassment allegations added fuel to a Democratic backlash that was already in motion.

Rahm Emanuel: How not to lose to Donald Trump

Even when it comes to style, Democrats need to beware of copying and pasting. When Tim Walz, the former vice-presidential candidate, drops his aura of midwestern nice to call Elon Musk a “dipshit” and a “South African nepo baby,” as he did in front of an audience the other day, it just sounds a little strained and ridiculous. Take also Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and currently a very possible contender for the Democratic nomination for president in 2028. In a much-mocked effort to show his ability to cut it in the manosphere, he has been hosting a podcast and has brought on right-wing figures including Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon as guests.

The Bannon episode looked like a split screen of styles. Bannon talked over and through Newsom’s questions, goading the governor at certain points, gently mocking him at others. Newsom brought none of this heat, starting many sentences with “I appreciate that” no matter what provocations Bannon had just uttered. At one point, they found convergence in their hatred of Musk, arguing only over which one of them was more culpable for empowering the tech titan. Newsom tried to land his blows—“You seriously want Starlink to take over the FAA?”—but he was no match for Bannon’s snarling. Even in jeans and an open-collared shirt, Newsom looked like he’d be more comfortable at a French Laundry dinner party than on a pugilistic podcast.

Democrats would be better off finding their own model of toughness—not one that extols aggression and strong-arming. Maybe they should channel, as the Democratic strategist James Carville suggested, the fighting technique of the older Muhammad Ali: rope-a-dope. Absorb punches until Trump tires himself out or, more likely, the American people get tired of all the chaos and disruption. This might be what Schumer has in mind.

Or maybe there is another kind of toughness, something more like the wiliness of a survivor. When you have no leverage, when your party is polling at 27 percent approval, you also have nothing to lose. The way to counter the destructiveness of DOGE, if you can’t literally stop it, is to put out a barrage of creative ideas, to flood the zone with stuff that will inevitably be better than anything Trump or Musk has to offer. Democrats believe in government, so they tend to govern better, while Republicans are better at campaigning, because they oppose it. This strength is hard to show off when you’re not actually in power, but maybe what’s called for is a shadow Cabinet, like those organized by British opposition parties, with the Democrats demonstrating, day after day, what they could do if they were in charge. The writer Timothy Snyder suggested something like this in January, arguing that it might “remind us of how much better things can be.”

To crib Isaiah Berlin’s famously overused metaphor, Democrats are foxes and Republicans (especially MAGA ones) are hedgehogs. The hedgehog’s advantage is to have one core narrative that explains everything, and hammer it with force, whereas the fox knows many things, and can think a few steps ahead. In politics, being a fox is not always preferable or easy, especially in a media environment that loves itself a hedgehog. But it has also proved to be a winning approach before. Bill Clinton and Obama were, let’s remember, successful foxes; they knew how to juggle priorities, how to code switch, how to parry a punch. It’s precisely in such a fallow moment that it makes sense for Democrats to rediscover this other kind of toughness.

Finding someone to out-Trump Trump might look like an expedient solution to an immediate problem. But it also means fighting a war that the Democrats have already lost.