The Devil You Dine With
Why forced civility from Democrats empowers Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” – President Joe Biden, September 1, 2022
“Trump not only embraces the violence of January 6th, he’s running on it.” – President Joe Biden, April 25, 2024
“Donald Trump will destroy our democracy.” – President Joe Biden, August 2022
“Trump is even more dangerous now. No, I’m serious. He’s unhinged. He snapped.” – President Joe Biden, July 12, 2024
There is no hymn for the devil at the dinner table. No psalm for the menace you invite into your house to sit by the fire. And yet, Democrats have largely learned to light the flames, to pour the wine, to say, “Welcome.” No devil has ever been defeated by cozying up to it, by calling it something softer: misunderstanding, tradition, inevitability. The demons are fed by our complicity, their appetite bloated by our respectability, politeness, and palatability. They know the heart of every house is its threshold, and so long as we keep opening the door, the devils will keep coming in.
In this country, the devil almost always wears a suit. It smiles through a thousand teeth on television screens. It shakes hands, signs deals, poses for photo ops. It speaks in the language of compromise while gnawing at the bones of the marginalized. But the devil has no interest in compromise. The devil is not impressed by respectability or desire to keep the peace.
The devil knows that cozying up to it means setting the table for our own undoing. Which is why I was so deeply frustrated—and enraged—by Joe Biden's decision to invite Donald Trump to the White House the week following the election, a move that not only signals complicity but sets the table for our collective downfall.
Biden invited Trump to the Oval Office on November 13, 2024, just days after Trump’s crushing defeat of Kamala Harris in the presidential election. The meeting was framed as a gesture of “decency,” a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power. But who, I wondered, is this performance really for?
It’s important to note the bitter irony of the moment. After the 2020 election, when Trump lost to Biden, there was no reciprocal invitation. No cordial meeting, no symbolic handshake. Trump broke with tradition, refusing to welcome Biden to the White House, even skipping his successor’s inauguration—an act that cemented his disdain for the very democratic principles he claimed to uphold (he was also a bit busy trying to leading an insurrection).
Yet here was Biden, insisting on taking the high road. He shook hands with the man who had spent years dismantling the very structures Biden had pledged to protect. And the media, the pundits, the architects of America’s collective denial, called it decorum, civility, leadership. But what is civility to the oppressed? What does decorum mean to those whose lives are under constant threat? Who is this gesture really saving?
What, after all, has civility ever done for the marginalized?
Civility is the armor of powerful people such as Joe Biden, polished to a gleam that obscures our vision to the real purpose—to shield the “haves” from the consequences of maintaining the status quo that makes sure the rest of us remain the “have nots.” Ask yourself, how does meeting with Donald Trump help feed the hungry, house the houseless, protect migrants families, protect women’s rights, ease the economic burdens awaiting us under the Trump administration?
Joe Biden and Democratic leadership have condemned Donald Trump with every name short of Satan himself, yet in the same breath, they roll out the welcome mat for the sake of a glowing MSNBC or CNN headline praising their commitment to “decorum.” But decorum won't save the countless women who will die from lack of access to abortion care. It is a hollow gesture, a meaningless performance, when lives are at stake. And it is exactly what is wrong with the current leadership of the Democratic Party.
At its core, the expectation of civility in the face of oppression is another form of violence, another mask of bigotry dressed in the finery of good intentions. Civility is the velvet glove over the iron fist, a polite smothering of rage, a refusal to allow the oppressed the dignity of their pain and truth. To expect civility from those who bear the weight of systemic injustice is to demand silence, to insist on their complicity in their own suffering. It is a deeply American paradox: to laud the supposed pursuit of justice while recoiling from the noise it necessarily makes.
Civility, as it is so often wielded, is not a virtue but a weapon. It is a tool used to shame the discontented into compliance, to frame the righteous anger of the oppressed as uncouth, unworthy, and unproductive.
Right now, people deserve to be righteously outraged—and then should be led towards the things we have to tear down for our survival.
People across America and around the world must grasp the gravity of Donald Trump’s return to power. It is not hyperbole to say his presidency will bring danger—real and immediate—to those who exist outside the narrow definitions of his vision for this country. The rhetoric of resistance that characterized both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s campaigns against him cannot fade into quiet acceptance. It must grow louder, more resolute, because the stakes are not just political—they are personal. Lives are on the line, and we must prepare ourselves for the whip of white supremacy, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, xenophobia, and classism that Trump has always championed.
The path forward cannot be paved with decorum and civility. Political theater and symbolic gestures will not protect those most vulnerable to Trump’s policies and ideology. Instead, we must ask: how can we form resistance—political, economic, physical, emotional, and spiritual—that will not only endure but also push back against the tide of injustice? This has always been the only way America has inched, however painfully, toward progress. Resistance, not appeasement, is the lifeblood of any movement seeking liberation.
History, if we are willing to learn from it, offers ample evidence of what works and what doesn’t. During the Civil Rights Movement, progress was not achieved by dining politely with segregationists or meeting them halfway. It was achieved by challenging their systems of oppression through direct action, from sit-ins to boycotts to mass marches. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, lasted over a year. It wasn’t polite or convenient, but it struck at the heart of an unjust economic system and forced change through collective sacrifice and strategy.
Contrast this with the failures of Reconstruction after the Civil War—a period rife with symbolic gestures of unity and political compromises that allowed white supremacist structures to regroup and solidify. The federal government’s unwillingness to maintain military enforcement in the South led to the rise of Jim Crow, proving that when civility is prioritized over justice, oppression flourishes.
Similarly, consider the suffragettes, who did not win the right to vote by asking nicely. They faced imprisonment, hunger strikes, and physical abuse because they understood that progress demands discomfort (unless we are talking about progress for Black people, which suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony absolutely did not want). And yet, time and again, we see leaders like Biden choosing the path of least resistance, mistaking invitations and photo ops for meaningful action.
What Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership should be doing right now is reckoning with the weight of what they are about to hand over. These final weeks are not a time for pageantry or placation, not a moment to host dinners at the end of an era marked by unfulfilled promises and half-measures. No, this is the time for boldness. For action. For the kind of governance that does not fret over optics but delivers for the people it claims to serve.
Instead of hosting Trump at the White House and pretending this is just another peaceful transfer of power, Biden and the Democratic leadership should be standing at the podium every day, using the full weight of their platforms to tell the truth. They should speak plainly about what is coming—the legislation that will erode basic freedoms, the judicial appointments that will calcify inequities, the policies that will condemn countless lives to precarity. This is not the moment to soothe the nation with talk of unity; it is the moment to prepare it for resistance.
In these waning weeks, Biden should issue executive orders that expand protections for the most vulnerable. Every tool of the presidency, every lever of federal power should be wielded not as an olive branch but as a shield for the people who will soon face the brunt of Trump’s return to power. If Biden and the Democrats are serious about the principles they claim to champion—equity, justice, democracy—then they should spend these final weeks governing like they have nothing left to lose. Because for so many people in this country, that is precisely the truth.
And yet, as the fires burn, the Democrats toast to civility. They serve hors d'oeuvres to the man who will set the table for their undoing. They smile for the cameras while the margins tighten and the safety nets fray. There is no hymn for the devil at the dinner table, but perhaps there is a prayer for the ones who forgot that power is a tool, not a trophy.
If we are to resist Trump’s agenda, we must do so with the understanding that progress is never a gift. It is won through collective struggle, through the building of coalitions that can withstand the weight of systemic oppression. Resistance requires not just passion but planning—organizing communities to wield their political and economic power, creating networks of mutual aid to protect the most vulnerable, and fostering spaces where people can find emotional and spiritual strength to endure the fight ahead.
If we do not meet his return with a resistance as fierce and unwavering as the harm he represents, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. We cannot afford to waste time on symbolic gestures that soothe the privileged while doing nothing to shield the oppressed.
Civility has its place, but it is not here. Not now.
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Exactly this. All of it. But I don’t think Harris or Biden were ever scared for Trump. That’s the most maddening part. The decorum and the fear mongering seem to all be part of the same act. They are just ruthless elites that want power and proximity to power - and the rest of our heads are just stepping stones paving the path.
This meeting made me so angry, a veneer of normalcy, covering up the unacceptable.
I kept thinking about the fact that Nazis painted fake clocks on the walls at death camps so when prisoners arrived, they would see these clocks and their brains would signal a sense of normalcy.