The mainstream media has found a new favorite narrative for 2025: the “MAGA civil war.” Turn on any cable news network, open any political newsletter, and you’ll find breathless coverage of disputes within Trump’s coalition over H-1B visas, foreign policy priorities, and who belongs under the MAGA tent.
Just this morning, Axios had a piece out about the hunt "for holiday unity amid [a] widening civil war." With all the drama concerning the shutdown, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other Republican issues, most media outlets are hyperfixating on all the fighting in the Republican Party.
And that's not to say that the coverage is wrong, either. These disputes are real and significant issues the GOP has to work through during this midterm cycle if they want to stay in power. But what’s telling about the media's bias is often as much as what gets ignored versus what gets covered. While journalists obsess over every MAGA skirmish, there is absolute mayhem consuming the Democratic Party.
READ MORE: Hakeem Jeffries Takes Hard 'L' After Yet Another 'Dems in Disarray' Moment Plays Out on House Floor
Every disagreement between different parts of the Trump coalition has received multiple headlines and hours, if not days, of top billing during news programming. Every Democratic dispute seems to have come and gone as quickly as it appeared.
Democratic Dysfunction Gets a Pass
Consider what’s actually happening inside the Democratic Party right now:
The Shutdown Debacle: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer orchestrated a government shutdown strategy in November that spectacularly backfired when eight Democratic senators broke ranks to vote with Republicans. The resulting fury from the Democratic base and questions about Schumer’s leadership became so intense that New York politicians are already discussing who might primary him in 2028.
Internal party sources told CNN that Schumer was “angry at how much he’s being blamed” by senators they consider “disloyal.”
Translation: the Democratic caucus is at war with itself, and its leader is losing control. Did this get the multi-day, all-hands-on-deck coverage treatment? Did pundits declare a “Democratic civil war”?
The Centrist-Progressive Split: A comprehensive report from the center-left Welcome group, shared with Semafor in October, concluded that progressive rhetoric and policies have “badly weakened” the Democratic Party, causing it to lose ground with every demographic group except white liberals.
The report called for Democrats to “break with unpopular party orthodoxies” and return to Obama-era positioning on immigration and crime. Progressive groups immediately pushed back, arguing Democrats need to double down on left-wing framing, not abandon it. It's a fundamental battle over the party’s identity, values, and electoral strategy going into 2026 and 2028. But where were the wall-to-wall panels discussing whether Democrats can survive this ideological split?
DNC Leadership Chaos: The Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis devolved into public disputes over Israel policy, with competing resolutions creating such division that Chair Ken Martin had to withdraw his own proposal and create a task force instead.
Party members openly fought over whether Democrats were bringing “a pencil to a knife fight” or needed to abandon playing by the rules entirely. Some pushed for completely new approaches to fundraising and primary processes. Yet this actual chaos at a formal party meeting received a fraction of the coverage that speculative MAGA tensions generate.
The Floor Vote Fiasco: When a more moderate Democrat, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, forced a floor vote condemning fellow Democrat Jesús García for engineering his retirement to benefit his chief of staff, it triggered what Axios called “a rare moment of public infighting” with a “heated exchange” between Gluesenkamp Perez and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark.
Progressive Democrats attacked Gluesenkamp Perez for “going after a strong progressive Latino leader.” The incident exposed raw tensions between the party’s centrist and progressive wings at a moment when leadership wanted unity. But it got one story, maybe two. Then it disappeared from the news cycle.
Why the Double Standard?
The media’s asymmetric coverage reveals something important about how political journalism works in 2025.
MAGA infighting fits established narratives: Trump’s movement is unstable, built on personality rather than principle, destined to collapse under its own contradictions. Every dispute becomes evidence supporting this predetermined storyline.
Democratic chaos, by contrast, disrupts the narrative that positions the party as the “normal” alternative to MAGA extremism. Acknowledging Democratic dysfunction would require journalists to grapple with uncomfortable questions about whether the opposition party has any coherent vision beyond anti-Trump resistance.
The result is coverage that amplifies Republican conflicts while minimizing Democratic ones—even when the Democratic disputes involve senior leadership, fundamental policy disagreements, and public displays of internal warfare.
The Stakes Are Actually Higher for Democrats
Here’s what makes the coverage imbalance even more frustrating: the Democratic Party’s internal conflicts arguably pose bigger questions for American politics than MAGA’s growing pains.
Trump’s movement is debating important issues—immigration policy, foreign intervention, economic nationalism versus free-market principles. These are legitimate ideological tensions within a coalition that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.
But Democrats are wrestling with something more fundamental: they don’t know what their party stands for anymore.
Should they move left or center? Embrace or reject progressive rhetoric on cultural issues? Challenge Trump aggressively or seek accommodation where possible? Trust their current leadership or demand wholesale changes?
A center-left group’s report literally concluded that the party’s embrace of progressive ideas meant to attract non-white voters has instead caused them to lose ground with those very constituencies. That’s not a tactical disagreement—that’s an admission that core strategic assumptions were completely wrong.
Yet this gets treated as inside-baseball process stuff while MAGA Twitter feuds dominate headlines. It's predictable, but no less exhausting.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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