The Democratic Party’s most prominent think tank held its annual conference on Tuesday, and the overall message was as unmistakable as it was unspoken: The party is rejecting the restorative mission President Joe Biden’s administration dedicated itself to after President Donald Trump’s first term in office.

Democrats, instead, seem determined to respond to Trump’s second term by attempting to echo his tactics and attempts to radically reengineer the government rather than trying to pretend Trump is an unfortunate blip.

The message was delivered, perhaps incongruously, by a corps of Biden loyalists. The head of CAP, Neera Tanden, was a high-level White House appointee. Biden’s secretary of state, ambassador to the United Nations, the chair of his council of economic advisers and another White House senior adviser all spoke. The highest-profile speaker at the event, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, went out of his way to say he “reveres” Biden.

But he did not revere Biden’s tactics.

“We have to be as ruthless as our opposition,” Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, told the crowd of policymakers at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. “I’m sick of just winning arguments, with all due respect to the niceties. It feels good, but we’re going to lose our republic.”

In his interview with Tanden, Newsom mocked Democrats’ fondness for the bipartisan political fantasies of Aaron Sorkin. He pledged to “fight fire with fire,” and his success at pushing through a referendum to gerrymander California in response to the GOP’s own gerrymandering efforts meant he was entitled to a hero’s welcome.

He was not alone in prioritizing strength over political politeness. Even the more moderate speakers at the event were focused on Democrats moving with speed rather than allowing debates — whether in Congress or on executive action — to drag on forever.

“We cannot be the party of strongly worded letters,” said New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who laid out a series of steps she’s taken to lower energy costs since being sworn into office earlier this year. “We cannot wait for 10-year studies.”

And Democrats seem as interested in copying Trump’s use of executive power as they are in rolling back his efforts to steadily chip away at congressional powers. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said Democrats cannot react to Trump’s abuses by supporting an “executive who can do very little.”

“We need for the next Democratic president to be able to act aggressively, to rebuild everything that DOGE tore down, and to be able to implement policy quickly,” Casar said.

They don’t plan on pressing pause on the redistricting wars, even if Trump has seized the advantage for the moment. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the party would try to draw new maps in seven blue states ahead of 2028: New York, New Jersey, Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland.

“We’ll have new maps in these states all across the country to wipe away any advantage that they may try to gain,” Jeffries said of the GOP.

Biden entered office with a much different vision of his charge. He dedicated his four years in office to rebuilding the political norms, international alliances and centuries-old institutions he came to revere during his decades in the U.S. Senate. He pursued executive action reluctantly. He viewed Republicans not as his “opposition,” but as a group of reasonable legislators who simply need to be removed from the malign influence of Trump.

Democratic voters had their doubts about this approach in 2020, but ultimately trusted Biden to win the year’s presidential election. The former president’s ultimate failure to stop Trump’s return to office led to an unprecedented break in trust between the Democratic Party’s leadership and its voting base, and set the party out to wander in the wilderness without power for at least two years. Newsom seems to have summed up the party establishment’s ultimate conclusion.

“A year ago, my sense was that our path back as Democrats — weak and ineffective were the buzzwords — was through the center, but I increasingly think that it is through the fight,” Newsom said. “People want fighters, people want people with conviction and clarity; not ideological argument or interesting evidence.”

There are parts of the Democratic coalition who will not love this answer. Many moderates argue the party will be at a permanent disadvantage in the Senate without moving to the center on social issues. Progressives will say the Biden-era leaders, many with their roots in Bill Clinton’s three-decade-old administration, simply can not be trusted to change the party in a meaningful way. Many Republicans will scoff at the idea Democrats are not already ruthless.

There were limits to the aggression. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) used his speech to call for a reform of America’s food system, saying he relished the opportunity to talk about something he supports instead of what he opposes. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) focused on a pitch for universal childcare. And for all their many, many, many attacks on Trump’s corruption, Democrats seemed uninterested in impeaching him if they take back the House next year.

“I think that spending all of our time on impeaching a president that is not going to get convicted — it’s happened already two other times — is not the best use of all the energy that Democrats have,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. “Trump does an impeachable offense every week. We could spend an enormous amount of time going through that process, or we could do everything we can to stop the Trump agenda.”

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