One week into Trump’s second presidency, the outlines of worst-case scenarios imagined by some us are already heaving into view. Here’s a partial-list of the serious, worrisome (to say the least) developments so far: purges of inspectors general charged with investigating government corruption; orders intended to scare and induce departures among federal workers; pardons of insurrectionists; an executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants; an apparently unquenchable obsession with buying/invading/annexing Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal; the appointment of a drunkard white nationalist as defense secretary; an ominous pause on federally-funded medical research; efforts to deny the existence of trans people; the deployment of the military within the United States to repel a supposed “invasion” by unarmed, destitute immigrants who made the mistake of being born poor and brown-skinned; the continued corrupt influence of billionaires on government policy; and Trump’s vicious attacks on a bishop who dared use a sermon to gently ask the president to be kind to the indigent and vulnerable.
In particular, by immediately violating his oath of office with the January 6 pardons and intent to ignore the plain language of the Constitution by repudiating birthright citizenship, Trump has made clear that his presidency will be lawless and anti-democratic — nothing we didn’t know prior to his inauguration, but nonetheless chilling to witness in real time.
Alongside this developing crisis of an authoritarian presidency, we are plagued by a parallel emergency: the broad failure of the Democratic Party to act as a pro-democracy opposition party in the face of this long-advertised onslaught of executive orders, proclamations, and illegal firings. With a handful of notable exceptions, and with some possible further stirrings in the past few days, congressional Democrats have hewed to a largely non-confrontational approach that emphasizes the idea of finding common ground with Trump while holding him to account on the narrow grounds of whether he’s working to lower prices for American consumers. Every day that goes by without strong Democratic opposition to Trump’s agenda brings us one step closer to the normalization of the abnormal, and to the rule of the powerful over the rule of law.
Most shocking to date is the Democrats’ lack of effort to define the nature of the Trump presidency for citizens. In the absence of such an initiative, Trump has had free rein to do what many warned that he would do, which is to overwhelm the American people with so much disorienting activity that the whole seems both unstoppable and unintelligible. Even in a more ordinary political environment, defining your opponents is politics 1A; in our present situation of studied efforts to overwhelm the body politic’s ability to comprehend Trump’s extremism, the Democrats’ lack of effort is borderline incomprehensible.
What’s particularly infuriating is that the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t need to be particularly complicated, particularly at this early stage of Trump’s presidency. Over at Talking Points Memo, for example, associate editor David Kurtz has proposed that the Trump administration be viewed through what he calls the “three horsemen of the Trump II apocalypse”: retribution, corruption, and destruction. Kurtz suggested this trio of angles not only because they broadly capture key aspects of Trump’s second term agenda, but as an acknowledgment that the MAGA onslaught demands a framework to help us grasp it.
Complementarily, The Editorial Board’s John Stoehr observed recently that the country is facing the unprecedented challenge of a “demented criminal president” who is likely to ignore the Constitution and the rule of law, relying on subordinates to carry out his illegitimate orders with the knowledge that he will simply pardon them to avoid any possible repercussions. This, too, is a great frame for understanding the Trump administration, capturing both his fundamental lawlessness and a baseline insanity that’s arguably much more advanced than eight or even four years ago.
Alongside the Democrats’ lack of urgency in defining the corrupt and authoritarian ends of the Trump administration, they’ve been remarkably lackadaisical about identifying the forces beyond Trump that are benefitting from and abetting his rise to power. The religious right, the billionaire class, white nationalists: all are societal actors that must also be countered in different ways, and whose influence, once properly acknowledged, could help build opposition to how Trump is working to benefit such groups at the expense of the rest of us. We are not just facing “a demented criminal president,” but a broad reactionary movement (effectively described by historian Thomas Zimmer and others) that seeks to push American society back at least half a century, funnel wealth ever upwards, and impose extremist Christian beliefs on an unwitting citizenry.
I’ve harped so much over the need to frame events for the American people not only because it’s inherently right to help citizens understand their political reality, but because a proper understanding of this reality is necessary in order to counter MAGA’s attack on America government, society, and freedoms. Here’s one example among many possibilities: last Friday, Trump declared that he had fired a dozen or more inspectors general. This action violated the legal requirement that Congress be given 30 days notice of such terminations, yet was largely buried by major news sources like the New York Times. Trump and his allies presented the firings as both normal for a new administration and necessary to root out government corruption. For an ordinary person casually following the news, it all could come across as no big deal, and even as evidence as Trump is cleaning up Washington (as Greg Sargent observed in a recent episode of the Daily Blast podcast). But if the Democrats had already worked to alert Americans to the coming retribution, corruption, and destruction (to use Kurtz’s framing) of the Trump presidency, they would have had a hook for attacking these firings — they could talk about how Trump was illegally firing the IG’s so that he and his cronies could better engage in corrupt activities, given that they are empowered to act as watchdogs against waste and abuse in government agencies. The blur of the news could have been arrested, and the Democrats would have been much better positioned to do both short- and long-term damage to Trump’s agenda.
I want to emphasize that describing the depravities of the Trump administration in broad, easy-to-grasp terms is just a starting point, though a necessary one. We obviously are all still figuring out how to stop an authoritarian movement that is willing to ignore the law and subvert government to its own ends. As Stoehr admits, “Like a lot of liberals and Democrats, I don’t yet know how to resist a president who is criminal enough to ignore the courts (or turn a blind eye to crimes committed in his name) and demented enough to ignore public opinion. I don’t yet know how to think about politics as applied to a president who won’t act like any president who came before him.” But it’s going to be a lot harder to figure out winning political strategies if Democrats don’t help ordinary Americans understand what’s going wrong in the first place.