Republicans didn't decide to become Donald Trump's party.

They surrendered to him little by little.

Year after year in plain sight. Democrats

swear the rise of socialism is different,

but there's a lot of reasons to believe they could be wrong.

I'm Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios.

and I am struck by the rise of socialism.

I think people are underestimating how powerful this movement is.

You've seen socialist candidates when in New York, in Denver and Washington, D.C.,

and often defeating establishment candidates inside the Democratic Party.

1 or 2 is an anomaly.

This many is a trend.

And you have a lot of Democrats, who are very worried

that they have their own version of the Republican Tea I would argue

the Democratic version of it is a new Tea Party, but it's on steroids.

Is this the Tea Party on the left from your vantage point?

Yeah, absolutely. It is the progressive Tea Party.

kind of this rebel movement that they worry is not sellable

outside of big cities that's catching fire because there's such a passion to it.

It's attractive to young people, and it's kind of a rage

against the Democratic machine after a lot of Democratic losses.

The question is, when can you change a party holistically?

When can you transition it from believing one set of things

to believing something very different?

That's what we saw with Donald Trump, right?

He basically took a party that was very small government,

low taxes, aggressive overseas, and he rebuilt it in his image.

one that is now hostile to a lot of our allies overseas,

hostile towards free trade, dictating the behavior of individual companies.

That's kind of socialism in and of itself.

And you now have Republicans adapting that, being friendlier

with Vladimir Putin.

Unthinkable when Mitt Romney was running not long ago.

The truth is, these things tend to follow cycles.

So I want to walk you through those stages and kind of talk about

where Democrats are at and kind of what to watch for, to

see if this is something bigger than Madame Momentum.

Thanks so much for watching behind the curtain.

We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsor, Accenture.

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Let me just quickly walk you through the stages.

And I've written about this for Axios.

Stage one is recoil.

You had everyone trashing Donald Trump.

Lindsey Graham, who recently passed away, was talking about him being evil

and being a huckster.

He's a race baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.

little by little, a decade later, he was his best friend.

But initially they recoil, which you see Democrats doing right now.

Oh, socialism can't sell. This is a one off.

Nobody would ever adopt that nationally.

Stage two is you squint and you kind of support without looking.

It's kind of like, well, I didn't really see that tweet.

There's a couple of things directionally I like, but I don't really think

that's the direction that we're it's a little evolution, right?

That little bit of a squinting.

And now I might be able to accept Stage three is rationalization.

This is the yes.

But you start support their policies.

But then always add a qualifier.

You saw this with Trump.

Well hey actually directionally I like what he's saying about China.

Directionally I like what he's saying that NATO nations should spend more

overseas. Directionally.

I agree with him that we're getting screwed on tariffs.

But I don't like his style.

But I don't like some of the language that he uses.

But I wish his personal life weren't so messy, that rationalization stage.

And we really saw this kind of in the early days of his first run.

Step four is submission.

This is where you go from rationalizing it to the hell with it.

I'm buying into it,

I've never seen anything like it over the last decade here in DC.

People who I know are personally, when I talk to them privately, abhor

so many things about Donald Trump.

But when you see them in public or you look at their votes, they're all in.

They love Trump, they support Trump, they vote 100% with Trump.

That is submission.

And that submission comes because of the power of that politician

and the power of that politicians base.

And we've seen that time and time again with Donald Trump, Stage

five is amplification.

Not only have I submitted to the ways like, I'm that guy, I'm a Trumper

now I'm going on the mega podcast, I'm going to start cursing.

I'm going to start going on social media and being a bully, things where you're

now taking the things that work so

well for that politician and you're amplifying them.

And then the final stage is purging.

We're basically you get rid of anybody

who doesn't fully support Trump publicly and in their votes.

Liz Cheney, a great example of this.

You think about the Cheneys, you go back ten years.

You might argue they are the most conservative family,

the most Republican family in all of America.

I mean, Dick Cheney was the boogeyman for Democrats forever.

They thought he was crazy.

I was way too conservative.

And Liz Cheney ended up getting booted out of the party

because she stood up to Donald Trump on a couple of issues.

There's no room for her.

Tom Massie, no room for him, John Cornyn, my God,

the guy was an establishment

Republican, gave tons of money to his colleagues into his party,

pushed out, the entire party got behind Trump to do that.

so all of this

begs the question of where are Democrats right now?

And I think there's kind of in the stage 2 or in the pre rationalization state,

you have Democrats leaders who are still saying this stuff is poison,

that's socialism or anything that smacks of socialism

will not sell outside of big cities and outside a very liberal states.

And that it would be Kryptonite to the vast majority of swing voters.

And that probably is true.

But certainly that's what people thought about Donald Trump early on.

You have most Democratic leaders, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer

out there campaigning for the more moderate,

the non-socialist candidate in most of these races.

And so that's where they stand right now.

What you want to watch for is if candidates win in more states

like Michigan and Wisconsin, do you move into the submission stage?

Do you both,

like, rationalize it and say, okay, wait, there's something bigger happening?

So now you have Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer or other leaders

adopting a lot of that language and not just saying

affordability and things like housing, which I think every Democrat agrees on,

but really being harsher

on business, really being harsher on artificial intelligence,

really taking a harder line on the topics that socialist care most about.

that's very possible.

If socialists ring up

a couple more victories, I'd be shocked if you didn't see more and more Democrats

moving that way, trying to tap into whatever mandate tapped into.

There's a couple of things you should watch.

It might make it harder for Socialist to actually take off like Trump did.

Number one, you need a Trump mandate.

Can't run for president. Right.

And so you need somebody who is a charismatic leader

who can take a movement that right now is in a couple of different cities

or a couple of different states, and turn it nationally.

That does require a strong leader like a or Haytham Trump was that he gave voice

to a very specific ideology, and he was tireless,

and he was charismatic to the people that he needed to be charismatic to.

The second part is Democrats operate in a different media ecosystem.

Right.

But Republicans are kind of used to Fox News.

They're used to creating this media ecosystem

where the coverage very much favors the momentum inside the party.

And Trump was able to build not just MAGA as a movement,

but MAGA is a media ecosystem and really kind of

communicate directly with the people he was trying to reach.

That's a little bit harder on the left, because the left has big establishment

media institutions like Miss Now, The Atlantic, The New York Times.

Yes, you have some rising kind of socialist or socialist

like personalities on YouTube

or doing podcasts or starting their own media companies.

But the power of those big institutions is is immense,

and they tend to be more skeptical of

their own party, and they tend to have a lot of establishment like thinkers

on their editorial pages or kind of making their editorial direction.

So the thing I would look for is,

do you get a charismatic leader who's Trump like, does that person emerge?

And do you start to see more and more signs that there's a real market for media

aimed at the kind of the socialist community, the socialist mentality?

If you see those two things happen, it's moving to stage 4 or 5 and six.