Election 2024

Carbajal Confronts the New Normal of Donald J. Trump

What Went Wrong and What Dangers Must Be Faced

It was Day Two after this month’s presidential election. Sitting under a brisk autumn sun, Santa Barbara’s Democratic Congressmember Salud Carbajal and his spokesperson Ian Mariani were trying to figure out the right words to describe the impact of Trump’s election on Carbajal. The first word out of Carbajal’s mouth — “bumming” — they disowned immediately. Carbajal, a lifelong Democrat, quickly leafed through his mental thesaurus of emotions. “Distraught,” he said. “Devastated.” What he was really feeling, he said, was considerably more intense. That, he insisted, needed to stay off the record.

It’s not like Carbajal hasn’t been here before. He and Donald Trump were first elected to their respective offices in November 2016. Then as now, Trump made the deportation of immigrants in the country illegally the centerpiece of his campaign platform. He says the number is 21 million, a figure disputed by most official statistical sources as wildly exaggerated.

“I just worry about the fear and the panic this is going to cause,” Carbajal said. “We all know he won’t try to deport 21 million people off the bat. He’ll start by going after people with criminal records. But how precise will he be? How many non-criminals will get caught up? What effect will all this have on families? The fear and panic will be something else. It will be enormous.”

Carbajal knows something about the immigrant experience. He came to the United States from Mexico as a 5-year-old kid. His family landed eventually in Oxnard. By the time he was seven, he was speaking English with fluency. Carbajal’s and Trump’s political trajectories make for an odd juxtaposition.

“You have to understand what ‘normal’ has been for me. For me ’normal’ has been chaos,” Carbajal stated, launching into his laundry list of weird and crazy. “It’s been the January 6 insurrection. It’s been attempting to overturn the Affordable Care Act. It’s been government shutdowns, the longest in American history. It’s been two impeachments. It’s been the speakership debacle. It’s been chaos, extremism, and lack of basic competence at running the government. It’s been COVID and what a nightmare that was. So that’s ‘normal’ for me. I don’t know what normal is. Ask Lois [his predecessor Congressmember Lois Capps]. She could tell you about normal.”

But when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris replaced Trump and Mike Pence in the White House, Carbajal — an upbeat, wise-cracking radical moderate famous for his insistence on “reaching across the aisle” in search of “win-win-wins” — found himself suddenly in heaven.

During that period, Carbajal had a hard time containing himself, at times crowing about all the landmark legislation launched by the Biden–Harris administration. He called it the most productive in history. Congress passed a very small but still significant gun control reform that Carbajal authored — a red flag bill funding bill designed to keep armed weapons out of the hands of those with serious mental health histories or who committed violent crimes.

More significantly, the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a multi-trillion-dollar spending bill designed to fight global warming, create new infrastructure projects, and create jobs. Carbajal’s district has received $1 billion so far, he noted; 13,000 jobs will be created.

But when voters went to the polls — or mailed in their ballots — they weren’t feeling the effects of any inflation reduction. Instead, they were remembering and feeling the all-too-real economic pain inflicted by inflation. “They just out-messaged us,” Carbajal said. “It was the economy. We were bested on the economy. We were bested on the messaging.”

There’s been a worldwide wave of political upheaval in the most recent election cycles, he noted. Pretty much every administration in power, across the globe, got tossed out, he stressed. Inflation has been a global phenomenon, largely brought on by COVID and its impact on the global economy. “It was an anti–status quo thing.”

In a subsequent statement released after last week’s interview, Carbajal elaborated, “It’s clear the American people are unsatisfied with the status quo and the direction of our society and that many of the people who voted for Trump did not do so out of total agreement with his policies or personality, but out of feeling unheard on the issues that matter to them most.”

Although Carbajal is now solidly ensconced among the ranks of the comfortable middle class, he said he experiences sticker shock every time he buys groceries. For families trying to cover child care costs the burdens are very real. “I feel it. You go shopping and you can’t believe your eyes.”

In addition, Carbajal acknowledged widespread frustration “with the chaos at our Southern border, public safety risks from crime and gun violence, and the deadly threat of fentanyl.”

In 2016, he said, Trump had to figure out what he wanted to do. He had to get an executive team in place. Many of those early appointees sought to slow things down. But in the second term, Trump will proceed with greater speed and abandon, Carbajal said. He is surrounding himself with loyalists and extremists who won’t question the implications of Trump’s policies. “Just imagine how expensive food is going to get if Trump’s immigration policies are put into place and he tries to deport all the people he says he is. Imagine the impact on the economy. We should be fearful.”

At the time of this interview, Republicans had won the Senate, though the fate of the House was still unclear, Carbajal thought it likely the Republicans would take the House. But even so, he suggested the margin of victory would be sufficiently slim that on certain issues Republican members could be persuaded across the aisle to vote with Democrats, for example, to save funding for programs popular — or relied upon — by their constituents.

In his recent statement, Carbajal noted that during Trump’s first term, Democrats managed to preserve the Affordable Care Act despite having a minority in both chambers, and they effectively blocked a Muslim ban. Whether that’s as likely now, with far fewer Republican mavericks still on the political landscape, remains to be seen.

In conclusion, Carbajal reminded his constituents that the times in which he’s served have been “unprecedented,” adding, “We haven’t stopped facing them since then.” He expressed a willingness to keep working “to get back to a place where you can forget about the history we’re living for a few moments,” but added, “But I can’t do it without the engagement and advocacy of all of you.”