A Saturday vote at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) summer meeting in Austin, Texas laid bare the party’s fundamental struggle to define itself in the Trump era. After the DNC resolutions committee approved two contradictory resolutions on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the full DNC bundled them together and passed them in a single vote.

The more radical resolution imbibed the spirit of the far Left and the anti-cop feeling of the 2020 BLM movement. It called for total abolition of ICE. After heated debate, it passed out of the resolutions committee 25-12.

Meanwhile, DNC Chairman Ken Martin sponsored a less ambitious resolution calling for ICE reform; it passed the committee with greater support.

Strangely, the two resolutions were then added to a larger package of resolutions. The entire package went before the full membership, which passed it unanimously by voice vote. The resolutions are non-binding and do not change the party’s 2028 platform, but they do show the ongoing tensions for Democrats.

“We shouldn’t contradict ourselves,” complained DNC member Marge Hoffa, vice chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, “by also introducing a resolution that would now call to abolish something that we have a well-established track record of calling to be drastically reformed.”

Hoffa was appealing to basic logic. “There should be no ICE” and “there should be some ICE, albeit reformed” are flatly contradictory propositions. On Saturday, the DNC approved both propositions.

But Michele Johnson, a DNC member from Louisiana who proposed the “abolish ICE” resolution, responded by criticizing party leaders for failing to take bold stands on issues. “I think one of the reasons why people are not trusting the party is because we sound so academic,” she said. “We sound focus group-tested, we sound poll-tested. Because we’re worried about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and not just like, just stand on business, like take a position.”

Although the DNC did pass Johnson’s amendment, it did not accept her advice. Nothing says a party is avoiding having to take a position like calling to both abolish ICE and reform it in a single vote.

But Yvonne Reeves-Chong, another opponent of the “abolish ICE” measure, criticized it as too extreme to win elections. “I would strongly suggest we get to the business of winning races so we can make the policies that make a difference,” she declared.

Of course, it was this desire to win elections, when taken to the extreme, that led Democratic leaders into the trap of messaging that sounded overly “focus group-tested,” as Johnson put it. If, as Reeves-Chong suggests, Democrats can deliver “policies that make a difference,” they might avoid the trap.

But the question remains: what policies? What policies would make a difference? What policies do the Democrats stand for? When a party affirms “reform ICE” and “abolish ICE” in the same vote, it doesn’t send a very compelling message that Democrats have a plan to cure America’s ailments.

In the worst of all worlds, such two-faced messaging also exposes Democrats to whatever criticism their Republican opponents want to make. White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis responded Saturday, “Extreme radical Democrats want to abolish ICE and defund the police. Instead of trying to abolish ICE, Democrats should be thanking ICE law enforcement officers for putting their lives on the line to arrest and remove murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members from American communities.”

Democrats chose to endorse two contradictory policy messages at the same time. The White House, naturally, chose to reject the more extreme option. Would it be any surprise if American voters did the same?