Pelosi-Schumer tactics won't beat Trump. Stop cowering and hiding, Democrats Courage is not uncivil. And the Democrats don’t have it. Before the audacity to hope, they must have the audacity to show up.

Alexander Heffner and Liam Dalton | Opinion contributors

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump: Chuck and Nancy 'all talk,' 'no action' President Donald Trump says Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi have been 'all talk' and 'no action' after they cancelled a planned meeting with Trump and Republicans Tuesday. (Nov. 28)

Democrats and their allies take to Twitter to criticize the cowardice of Donald Trump. But who will literally stand up to him? Not their leaders, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, who refused to attend a meeting at the White House on enemy territory last week and tell him how wrong he is to his face.

If you’re not going to show up at the White House, you do a stand-until-you-drop (or they, the news media, drop) press conference, and you show up at all the decaying American airports, bridges and roads that Trump promised he alone could fix. You are creative and passionate and invigorating. The Democratic leadership is not.

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We must wrestle with the reality that rhetorical sparring may not be sufficient to match Trump’s appeal to visceral emotion and unreason. His third-world machismo is a powerful political hallucinogen; it is the fuel for delusions and blinds his followers to obvious hypocrisy.

In Trump’s Fake News era, facts must be rediscovered. Being civil toward Trump does not honor America’s tradition of civility, which is rooted in democratic norms and truth — not merely timid decorum. The Democrats have to fight against Trump’s viral feed of bigotry and dysfunction. His intolerance cannot be tolerated; it has to be fought.

Moreover, opponents have to call out the cause and effect of Trump’s erratic behavior and the crises it precipitates, and then politically capitalize on them. But Pelosi and Schumer display a startling lack of imagination when challenging the president’s agenda.

Successfully cutting through the post-fact present is a problem for anyone seeking to challenge Trump. What matters is conviction. In 2020, no candidate wins unless he or she eviscerates his virility; put simply, in soundbite form, “You were not man enough to win without help from the Russians.”

In the aftermath of Trump’s attempt to intimidate Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill with a show of support for her likely opponent, Attorney General Josh Hawley, there is yet another opportunity to counterpunch more effectively than Schumer and Pelosi.

Instead of saying on NBC's Meet the Press that her job was not to fight the president, imagine if McCaskill took this approach: Trump’s tweets are not conservative. His conduct is not conservative, and it does not befit his office. He is what he tweets: Wacky & totally unhinged ... Don’t you dare call me "weak." I prosecuted sex crimes like the ones Trump bragged of committing. The Democrats want law and order. Trump is lawlessness and disorder. And my opponent is aiding and abetting.

If you are McCaskill, Jon Tester of Montana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota or Joe Manchin of West Virginia or any other House or Senate Democrat running in a conservative state, you say the stock market bonanza is Fake News to Main Street. You show that the tax bills passed by the House and Senate, Trumpeconomics, completely fail the American family and its declining worth. You point out that the GOP refused to give permanent tax cuts to the middle class.

The new generation of economic and moral values voters is out there, critical of the fraud of bots, trolls, Facebook and Trump, and they voted en masse for Democrats in 2017. But in order to compete, the party must take authentic ownership of its pre-Obama and Clinton Democratic identity.

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On election night last month, the winning Democrats refused to do that.

“There isn’t a conservative or progressive, Democratic or Republican way to build a bridge. When you’re focusing on infrastructure, that’s stuff that affects everyone,” said Virginia state delegate-elect Danica Roem.

“When someone’s life is at stake, they don’t care whether you're a Democrat or Republican, they just want someone to help,” added governor-elect Ralph Northam.

But the party that wins does matter. There had been the hope that Trump would be a dealmaker in the best sense to bring together Democrats and Republicans. That never materialized. Instead, as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo accurately diagnosed on election night 2017, the people “resoundingly rejected Trump's philosophy and the disciples of the extreme conservative gospel.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Democratic Party rescued capitalism from itself. The candidate and message that defeat Trump will rescue democracy from itself. There was a time in this country when an unapologetically principled, brilliantly tactical liberal lion was elected to the presidency for four straight terms, including by the states with Democrats vulnerable in the 2018 midterms.

Trump will not simply self-destruct; that is a media conceived myth. It will take a force of human courage, an FDR or an LBJ, genuinely rooted in the New Deal and Great Society, to win.

Alexander Heffner is host of The Open Mind on PBS and Liam Dalton is former editor of Taegan Goddard’s Wonk Wire. Follow them on Twitter: @heffnera and @liam_dalton13