I want to take a moment to address a few questions I’ve gotten about a potential standoff with President Trump over the DOGE wilding gangs he’s allowing to run free through the executive branch. The most frequent and very reasonable question is: Let’s say Trump agrees to a deal of some sort. How do you enforce the agreement? More specifically, after Democrats help pass either a continuing resolution or a debt ceiling hike, what prevents Trump from reneging on the deal a week later after the Democrats have ceded their leverage?
Let me answer this on two levels, the first attitudinal and the second concrete. If I were in such a negotiation and the person on the other side of the table absolutely needed what only I can give I’d say, you figure that out. You need me. I don’t need you. So you come up with something binding, some mechanism that doesn’t require me to trust you. If it seems meaningfully binding to me, cool. Then we can talk. Otherwise find your own votes. I’ve never been involved in a negotiation beyond the finances of a tiny perpetually cash strapped small business. But those were always hugely important negotiations to me. And this is always the position I’ve taken when the person on the other side needed or wanted something more than we did. The fundamental issue in any negotiation, especially adversarial negotiations, is properly assigning whose problem it is.
So how do you make sure Trump doesn’t renege on the deal? His problem to figure that out because he’s the one who wants the deal. Never get fooled into taking on a problem that isn’t yours.
More practically, I can think of a few possibilities. The most obvious of which is simply a very short-term CR. Let’s say 6 weeks. Or you can just say one that requires renewal on the first of each month for six months. There are a slew of ways you could lock in such a deal. The best initial approach is not taking it on as your problem. Don’t rent space in your head for Trump’s problems.
The second, more in the background question is the one we’ve heard a ton of since November. Where is the resistance? Why is it so muted when it was so hot out of the gate eight years ago? First I would say that as a friend of mine noted to me a few weeks ago, it was always the ordinary, normie organizing in groups and clubs in towns and counties around the country that really hobbled President Trump far more than the marches and protests and performative resistance, though those also played a very key and salutary role. (I want to be clear: I’m not deriding those efforts. They played a key role. But it was more secondary than it often seemed.) Second, while it hasn’t yet percolated up to DC journalists something very dramatic started happening among rank and file Democrats roughly two weeks ago. It only started registering with elected Democrats in DC mid-last-week.
“The Resistance” is a specific word about a specific time and it is one mainstream discourse has already significantly made a pejorative, not in every case for bad reasons. But why the difference? Some certainly is just a deep demoralization coming out of the 2024 election. But the fundamental reason is that at a very basic level most people thought Trump’s first election was an accident, and not just Democrats. Most of Trump’s own party was fundamentally hostile to him, though they were happy to make use of him to pass favored legislation. Part of this was the pure shock of the event. Part of it was that Trump lost the popular vote by a significant margin, the first time since 2000. He also just scraped by in the critical northern swing states. Then just after the election information began to emerge about Russia’s interference in the election and Trump’s connivance in that interference.
At a very basic level it seemed not just bad or in some sense unfair but an accident. Because it seemed like an accident there was a perception that mass protests, mass delegitimizing of his presidency might simply break it. Maybe it would all just fall apart and he’d resign. That in many ways was the premise behind the mobilization around airports in the first days of his presidency, the women’s march and more.
I am absolutely not criticizing these efforts. I’m trying to place them in a particular time and a particular set of assumptions. The 2024 election was very, very different. It’s wrong to say that people voted for every last thing that is happening now or whatever he happened to say at one point or another on the campaign trail. That’s not how voting works. At least a quarter of the electorate votes with only the vaguest sense of what each candidate is proposing. But it is certainly true that almost everyone had a general sense of what kind of person Trump was and what kind of president he’d be. He’d already been President, after all. What’s more the entire campaign had been run with the clear understanding that Trump winning was a very real possibility. So people couldn’t vote for him thinking it was a throwaway vote with no consequence. He didn’t just slip through. It was a very close election. But he won a plurality if not a majority of the vote and he reclaimed the industrial midwest.
This led not only to a profound demoralization that Democrats are only now emerging from. It also made his presidency seem far less fragile than it had seemed when it was perceived (and to some degree was) an accident eight years ago. The logic of mass demonstrations and other kinds of performative resistance just doesn’t play the same way. People are also in the midst, very much the targets of a far-ranging shock and awe campaign from which they are only now after a couple weeks recovering their wits. So some of the difference people are noting isn’t just demoralization or giving up. It’s a rational response to a different set of circumstances. A few big hits won’t end this. This is for the long haul.
There are various things about the Trump I resistance that now seem dated, ephemeral or even cringe. But things evolve. We can look back at those things and learn from the excesses and areas of wasted energy. But we shouldn’t give in to the shallow cynicism that looks on the opponents of Trumpism as somehow more discreditable than Trumpism itself. The situation is different so it calls for different tools and strategies. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some of the Democratic torpor of the first weeks of the second Trump presidency is just what it seems like: demoralization, some people wanting to simply check out. But it is also (and I expect increasingly so over time) an accurate perception that everyone is now in this for the long haul. None of this will be quickly shortcircuited and endurance and canniness are as important as aggression or display.
