Following the massive repudiation of US President Donald Trump in the 2026 midterm elections, the Democratic Party has launched a campaign to rescue the Trump administration.

As is universally acknowledged in the media, the 2026 midterm election was the greatest electoral repudiation of a sitting president in over half a century, and one of the largest in American history. The shift against Trump ran through every region of the country and every section of the population, and it was sharpest among rural voters, young men and workers whom Trump had claimed as his base.

The vote was a rejection not only of Trump but of the entire agenda of his administration. It expressed mass opposition to the growth of social inequality, war, the assault on immigrants and attacks on democratic rights.

Yet the Democrats came out immediately offering bipartisanship.

Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become speaker of the House in January, declared that Democrats are “ready, willing and able to find bipartisan common ground” and that “the American people don’t want us to get even.” He added that not a single member of his caucus had raised impeachment with him.

Barack Obama declared that Americans “want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them.” The same line was repeated in various forms by newly elected Democrats: a call to “restore a sense of decency and bipartisanship in Washington,” (Kansas Senator-elect Adam Hamilton); the assurance that “come January, we will be forced to work together,” (Iowa Governor-elect Rob Sand); a disavowal of any interest “in moving Minnesota to the left or the right,” (Minnesota Governor-elect Amy Klobuchar).

James Talarico, elected to the Senate from Texas, said he had not been elected “for retribution.” On immigration, the policy of mass roundups, detention camps and deportations, he said one should “give the president credit where credit is due.”

This response demonstrates the fraudulent character of the elections and the imperviousness of the ruling elite to the will of the population. The Democrats are not acting as an opposition party that has defeated the government. They do not need Republican support. They will hold substantial majorities in both the House and the Senate. Why, then, are they talking about bipartisanship at all?

They treat the losing party as if it had won, and a hated president as a suitor whose favor they seek. It is as if Abraham Lincoln, reelected in November 1864 on a program of prosecuting the war to victory and abolishing slavery, had responded by offering “common ground” to the Confederacy.

What do the Democrats really want? They are looking for a quid pro quo, above all on the war against Russia. The Democrats are a party of the military-intelligence apparatus, with a substantial component drawn directly from the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and their sharpest attacks on Trump over the past year have been over what they see as his insufficient aggression toward Moscow. With control of both houses of Congress, the Democrats will use their position to press for a more aggressive war.

Beyond this, the ruling class needs the two parties to work together on a whole series of issues, beginning with the economic crisis. The election took place amid extreme financial turbulence, with Wall Street dependent on an enormous speculative bubble in artificial intelligence stocks. On Thursday, the Nasdaq fell 5.5 percent and entered a correction, and the Dow fell 1,833 points, as investors, in the words of Reuters, “reassessed implications for the AI data center buildout from the Democrats’ sweeping wins.”

With the national debt above $40 trillion, fueled by war and the endless bailout of the rich, the ruling class is demanding an assault on social programs. Such cuts require the cover of bipartisan agreement, and the Democrats are preparing to provide it.

Then there is the war against Iran, which remains live. Amid far-reaching plans by Trump to carry out an attack, the Democrats have not called for an end to the war. They want to ensure that the election does not derail the drive of American imperialism to dominate the globe, and the Middle East in particular.

Above all, the Democrats are hostile to anything that would encourage a movement from below and further destabilize a state apparatus whose authority is already badly eroded. The Democrats’ task is to contain opposition to the Trump administration before it becomes a movement against the oligarchy that controls both parties.

In all of this, the Democrats are drawing inspiration from none other than Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member and Democratic mayor of New York, who has played the leading role in forging a political alliance with Trump, having met with him three times in the past year.

Asked on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday for his “advice for Democrats on working with the president,” Mamdani replied, “I think you can,” calling on Democrats to adopt a policy of “looking for a place of shared purpose” with Trump. Mamdani continued: “I think there’s always an opportunity. And you always have to make the ask ... I will still call the president if there’s something else that can help New Yorkers.”

The statement was explicitly offered, and received, as a model for the Democratic Party. Claire McCaskill, the former Democratic senator from Missouri, said of Mamdani’s approach, “And that’s what we’ve got to do as Democrats now.”

All of this explodes the claim promoted by the DSA that the elections, including the victories of its own candidates, would push the Democratic Party to the left. Far from pulling the Democrats to the left, the DSA is playing a leading role in the accommodation with Trump.

The “shared purpose” Mamdani invokes is the defense of the capitalist system and the interests of the financial oligarchy. He is reprising the language of Obama, who, the day after Trump’s first election in 2016, called the contest “an intramural scrimmage” and declared, “We’re actually all on one team.” That team is the financial oligarchy, and its opponent is the working class.

Tuesday’s vote recorded the opposition of millions of working people to war, oligarchy and dictatorship. This opposition will not stop with the election. It will come increasingly into conflict with the Democrats and their “progressive” and DSA auxiliaries, whose role is to channel it back behind the party of Wall Street.