CNN commentator Van Jones said on Sunday that his party was effectively broken, and unless Democrats found a way to recalibrate and get it together, they were going to continue to struggle with messaging and with reaching any policy goals.
Jones joined anchor Jessica Dean on “CNN Newsroom Sunday,” and she asked him to weigh in on the state of the Democratic Party — particularly after repeated disruptions both during and after President Donald Trump’s Tuesday address before the joint session of Congress.
“Can we ask another question?” Jones asked at first, expressing reluctance to go down that particular road. “Can we talk about Ukraine or something?”
“Look, man, we’re screwed,” Jones said, resigning himself to the topic at hand. “I mean, we don’t know, Democrats don’t know what to do. This is — this is a nightmare. You know, somebody like Donald Trump, we thought we’d at least have Hakeem Jeffries in the Speaker’s chair to hold him back if we didn’t have Kamala in there to do the right thing.”
Jones went on to address some of the reasons he believed Democrats had been struggling, arguing that they had chosen a losing message in 2024 and it was still dogging them.
“Listen, the Democratic Party is going through a massive set of internal crises. You have a party that got trapped two ways. One, defending a broken status quo that nobody likes because they thought that Donald Trump was going to make it worse. But when you’re defending the status quo, you’re going to lose,” he explained. “And then offending most people in the country, calling everybody sexist and racist and transphobic and every other name, and then saying, ‘Please follow us.’ That’s not a good strategy, folks.”
“Defending a broken status quo and offending most of the country, turns out, is not as popular as my party thought it was going to be,” Jones concluded. “And so it’s going to take a while for people to get it figured out.”
Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) gave a similar assessment during a Sunday morning appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” telling host Kristen Welker that Democrats had been “on their heels” since the election.
