If you were looking for a solid indictment of the Trump Administration’s disastrous policies, which can also serve as a template for writing a first-rate opinion column about current politics, E. J. Dionne, Jr. has it in “The night the tide turned against Trump and Musk,” cross-posted here from The Washington Post:

At The New Republic’s Daily Blast Greg Sargent reports “Trump Hit by Brutal New Polls on Econ as GOP Tariff Panic Goes Nuclear,” and writes: “President Donald Trump is set to announce that he’ll impose sweeping new global tariffs on imports, and congressional Republicans are already scrambling wildly to try to shield their states and districts from the fallout. Meanwhile, a Fox News poll finds that Trump is sliding on the economy, with the public turning against tariffs in particular. And an Associated Press survey also has terrible news for Trump on this front. Notably, all these negative consequences kicked in well before the tariffs have even started. We talked to Jared Bernstein, former chair of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers and now a visiting scholar at Stanford, who has a new piece on his Substack predicting the consequences could be dire. He explains why the tariffs are so wrongheaded—and why they’re likely to cause major backlash against Trump and his party. Listen to this episode here. As Bernstein writes at substack.com, “Everyone knows that tariffs are a tax (on imports). I’ve seen scores between $1-2 trillion over ten, so they can potentially raise real revs, but, as I point out to Ms. Claman, they’re taxes on the wrong people. Low-cost imports are a larger part of the market basket of middle- and low-income households. Tariffs are a regressive tax…The serious research that caught my attention this weekend was a new forecast from the Goldman Sachs (GS) macro team, which I follow closely as they’ve been ahead of the crowd in accurately forecasting stronger growth and downplaying recession worries in ‘22-‘23. In advance of “Liberation Day,”—this Wednesday when the next tranche of tariffs will be announced—they’ve taken the real GDP growth forecast for Q1 down to 0.2%. They raised their forecast for core PCE inflation for this year by 0.5% to 3.5% and their unemployment rate forecast by 0.3% to 4.5% “at end-2025 to reflect weaker GDP growth and the effects of federal spending cuts and layoffs. We raised our 12-month recession probability from 20% to 35%, reflecting our lower growth forecast, falling confidence, and statements from White House officials indicating willingness to tolerate economic pain.”…Along with the rest of us, I’m a lot less sure the president is going to make the right choice. I fully expect him to make the wrong one and, like I said, those GS folks have a good track record. If they’re right, the only liberation we’ll get from Liberation Day will be the U.S. economy’s liberation from the ongoing economic expansion the Trump administration inherited, along with consumers’ liberation from paying lower prices on imports.”

In “Of Course Trump Will Tank the Economy. It’s What Republicans Do,” Michael Tomsk writes, also at The New Republic: “Where are we headed? A recent survey of corporate chief financial officers finds 60 percent of them agreeing that we’re headed for a recession this year. Is anyone surprised? This is what Republicans do. They screw up the economy. Later down the line, Democrats get elected and have to fix everything. Then the media characterizes the economic first responders as the tax-and-spend liberal wastrels—lather, rinse, repeat. This has been happening since 1990, and it’s happened three straight times. You’d think the American people might have noticed by now.” Tomasky shares a detailed history of economic meltdowns under Republican presidents, and adds, “The last three Republican presidents wrecked the economy. The last three Democratic presidents had to fix things. One statistic for you. Net jobs created under Clinton and Obama: 33.8 million. Net jobs created under Bush, Bush, and Trump: 1.9 million. That is not a typo…And with Elon Musk’s help, the next time we tot up job gains under recent GOP presidencies, we may look back on that paltry 1.9 million with nostalgia: “Remember when Republicans were merely steaming mediocrities, and not economic arsonists?”…Then there’s the Republican ideology, as being played out in the House and Senate budgets. It has been driving the country to the brink of financial ruin for 35 years. Why should that change?…the next Democratic president will be charged with cleaning up the fourth consecutive Republic economic calamity.”

Erkki Foster’s “CNN Data Guru Gives Damning Verdict on Musk’s Election Fail” provides these observations at The Daily Beast: “CNN data analyst Harry Enten has a warning for Republican candidates: Stay far, far away from First Buddy Elon Musk…“Elon Musk, simply put, is an unpopular guy. He is political poison,” Enten said on Wednesday’s edition of CNN News Central, arguing that the billionaire’s high-profile involvement in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race has backfired on the GOP….Enten highlighted polling that shows Musk’s favorability ratings are deep in the red, sitting at negative 12 points in Wisconsin and negative 17 points nationwide, according to Enten’s aggregate and a Marquette Law survey…Trump, apparently rattled by his senior adviser’s humiliating fail in Wisconsin, told his Cabinet that Musk will be stepping down from DOGE in the next few weeks, Politico reported Wednesday.” Of course, Republican candidates will continue to kiss up to Musk, if only to get some of the billionaire’s money. But don’t expect to see many photo-ops of GOP candidates with Musk.

“Two favorite Republican tactics failed, The Working Families Party explains at working families.org.”unrestricted money and fearmongering. Brad Schimel and his enablers couldn’t buy this election and they couldn’t scare Wisconsinites into voting against the things we care about – public safety, reproductive freedom, and affordable healthcare and housing,” said Corinne Rosen, State Director of the Wisconsin Working Families Party. “Wisconsin voters denied Musk’s money in what will be the first in many defeats as voters realize and exercise our people power.”…To meet this challenge, the Wisconsin Working Families Party executed one of its largest field programs ever leading up to the Spring 2025 general election. The Party had more than 25,605 1-on-1 conversations with voters via canvassing and phones on behalf of Judge Susan Crawford. And 703 volunteers sent 36,868 personal postcards to voters about the Supreme Court race. All told, the Party made 661,330 attempts, 44,841 contacts, and 15,408 voters identified for Judge Susan Crawford…“With millions of dollars spent attacking Susan Crawford as ‘soft on crime,’ the GOP turned Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race into a referendum on public safety,” said Insha Rahman, Director of Vera Action. “At the ballot box, Wisconsinites faced a clear choice between Brad Schimel’s tough-on-crime rhetoric or Susan Crawford’s solutions for safety, accountability, and justice. The results speak for themselves. Leading with real solutions, not scare tactics, on what works to prevent crime and break its cycle is both good policy and good politics—and a lesson for Democrats across the country to not stay silent or mimic the GOP’s stale tough-on-crime rhetoric.”…“The Working Families Party’s canvassing events for Susan Crawford were powerful and effective,” said John Drew, Chairperson, UAW Wisconsin State CAP Council. “WFP focused on working class neighborhoods in Milwaukee where its messaging led to meaningful conversations with voters and moved them to take action.”

Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech this week broke all kinds of records, obviously. But it also should make Democrats rethink the idea that some bumper-sticker-length message is the key to beating Trump, as I argued at New York:

My initial take on the news that Cory Booker was going to hold the Senate floor for many hours to dramatize his opposition to Trump 2.0 was a bit despairing: Having demonstrated that they no longer have any leverage over the administration and its supine congressional allies, Senate Democrats would now just talk as long as they could, as the chamber’s rules allowed. It wouldn’t change anything, but what was the harm?

But now that Democrats everywhere are greeting Booker’s historic non-filibuster filibuster with joy, I realize there was a practical benefit to his feat of endurance beyond consigning Strom Thurmond’s 1957 speaking record to the dustbin of history, where it belongs next to the segregationist cause it served. After months of strenuous efforts by Democrats to identify a precise silver-bullet argument against Trump’s agenda and how it was being pursued, Booker showed pretty unmistakably that a general indictment of the administration and its enablers, delivered with passionate intensity, is actually what alarmed Americans are craving.

Booker didn’t concentrate on Trump’s potential Medicaid cuts, illegal deportations, cruelty to public employees, abandonment of Ukraine, violations of civil liberties, reckless tariffs, usurpations of legislative powers, rampant corruption, or thuggish threats to federal judges. He talked about all this and more as a way to dramatize the ongoing assault on both democracy and the well-being of poor and middle-class Americans.

It’s the sheer avalanche of bad policies, bad administration, and bad faith that makes the current situation such an emergency. And forgetting about that in order to identify some single poll-tested nugget of messaging has been a mistake all along. Among other things, the coolly analytical approach of sorting and weighing Trump outrages robs such criticism of the moral outrage circumstances merit. Booker wasn’t just appealing to a rhetorical tradition in treating today’s challenges as a “moral moment” requiring the “good trouble” exhibited by the civil-rights movement. He was calling attention to the fact that the MAGA movement truly has mounted a sustained, comprehensive assault on decades of slow but steady progress toward a wide array of worthy goals involving the health, wealth, liberty, and happiness of the American people, all in pursuit of a hallucinatory, often destructive vision of “American greatness.”

This does not mean other Democrats should emulate Booker by seizing the nearest megaphone and talking for many hours. But it does mean a broad coalition of resistance to Trump 2.0 may require an equally broad message about what’s going on in this country and why it’s urgent to push back. Calling to mind the wide variety of outrages underway could also help Democrats develop a broad, credible agenda for what they intend to do if and when they return to power. Every day, it’s becoming more obvious that just returning to the federal policies and personnel in place on January 19, 2025, won’t be advisable or even possible. Rebuilding an effective set of public institutions and domestic and international relationships will involve the work of many hands, and many words of inspiration from leaders like Cory Booker.

An excerpt from, “Democrats trounced Trump with their Musk-focused playbook in Wisconsin” by Liz Crampton, Elena Schneider, Alice Miranda Ollstein and Brampton Booker at Politico:

Democrats just won their biggest electoral victory of the second Trump era. And Elon Musk lost big.

Democratic voters came out in force on Tuesday in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, a sign that the once-latent resistance is raring to go. Musk put in a ton of money — but so did Democrats, amping turnout to midterm-level performance and showing the party’s strength outside of low turnout specials elections. And Democrats now have a legal bulwark to defend their positions on abortion rights and congressional maps in the closely divided state.

By defeating Republican-aligned candidate Brad Schimel, Susan Crawford secured a seat on the state’s highest court — and rejuvenated Democrats nationwide as they cast Musk as the No.1 villain of the second Trump era. Democrats framed the result as an explicit rejection of President Donald Trump, who endorsed Schimel.

The following graph is cross-posted from ‘Data for Progress:

At Politico, Elena Schneider writes, “Rep. Greg Casar wants Democrats to “pick villains” in the GOP and drop purity tests in primaries…The Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, a 35-year-old Texas millennial who took over its leadership in December, thinks his party lost its working-class identity, while becoming too cautious and too boring in its fight against Republicans. He’s meeting privately with other members to discuss ways to steer the party toward a more populist economic message — being “known as the party of working people, first and foremost,” Casar said — and he’s mounting an aggressive public relations campaign to push it…Casar, along with Reps. Chris Deluzio (D-Penn.) and Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.), have been meeting informally with about a dozen Democratic members to talk about how best to shift the party into emphasizing economic populism..“Republican officials have figured out how to elevate social issues that impact only a small number of people and make them the dominant issues in elections,” Casar said. But after “knocking on thousands of doors” in Texas, even the most conservative voters “never opened the door and said, ‘Thank God you’re here. I want to talk to you about the appropriate level of testosterone for somebody to compete in the NCAA [sports].”…”If we’re willing to say…the richest people on the planet want to steal your Social Security check in order to enrich themselves and their friends, well, now you’re cooking with gas,” Casar said. “Be willing to explain that — to win a voter’s trust by telling people we are willing to actually go up against the villains that are screwing them over.”…“There’s a lot of different approaches to the economy that can appeal to working class voters, that involve honoring hard work, ensuring that everybody has an opportunity to earn a good life and that doesn’t involve ‘fighting the oligarchs,” [Third Way Founder Matt] Bennett said. “If that becomes their litmus test, then we’re right back in the same boat.”

 In her “Letters from an American” Substack post for March 30, Heather Cox Richardson notes that “the top seven donors to the 2024 political, cycle together gave almost a billion dollars to Republicans, with Elon Musk alone contributing more than $291 million. The list, compiled by Open Secrets, shows that Democratic donors don’t kick in until number eight on the list, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave slightly more than $64 million to Democrats. George Soros, the Republicans’ supervillain, didn’t make the top 25. As those wealthy donors wish, the Trump administration is shredding the post–World War II government and has prioritized tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations…Trump is digging into the position that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. Today he told NBC News that he is considering a third presidential term, although that is explicitly unconstitutional. “I’m not joking,” he said, “There are methods which you could do it.”

At The Bulwark, Lauren Egan shares some observations about demographic change that will have a big impact on Democratic strategy in the near future: “Thanks to a decades-long flood of cross-country migration from states like California and New York to states like Texas and Florida, the South has emerged as an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse. Tech companies are relocating to Austin; movies are increasingly being produced in Atlanta; and more students from the Northeast are attending SEC schools—and then staying in the South after graduating—than ever before. The region accounted for more than two-thirds of all job growth across the United States since early 2020, and it now contributes more to the national GDP than the Northeast does…All of that means that the South is on track to make historic gains in the 2030 census. Florida and Texas are projected to gain four or more congressional seats, while North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee could each gain a seat. Meanwhile, reliably blue states like California could lose as many as five; New York might lose three. Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin could also see declines…All told, nearly four in ten Americans could hail from the South by the next census, according to a recent Brennan Center analysis. That not only means the path to a House majority runs through the South—it also means the party’s reliance on the “Blue Wall” will no longer be viable in future presidential elections. (The number of Electoral College votes a state gets is determined by how many congressional districts it has.)”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,  and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Unless you have been living without an internet connection for the last few weeks or so, you have certainly encountered a book called Abundance, which argues that Democrats must face up to the failures of liberal governance and embrace a politics of plenty. I note somewhat immodestly that I was for an “abundance agenda” before it was cool.

Back in 2022, when I was exasperated at the direction of my lifelong political party, I wrote a three-point plan to fix the Democrats.

The second point was precisely that “Democrats must promote an abundance agenda.” It would be good politics and good policy, I argued, for the party to take steps to increase the supply of essential goods and services. They should embrace regulatory reform, efficient governance, and the rapid completion of public and private projects—things that had been the purview of Republicans and the center-right. And they should back technological innovation and productivity rather than settling for the redistribution of scarce resources.

In other words: more stuff people actually want, more of the time.

More and more people seem to agree.

With Abundance, the OGs of the abundance movement, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have aimed to write a definitive mission statement. But they aren’t alone. An ever-growing number of organizations, networks, blogs, and other initiatives are devoted to aspects of an abundance agenda, from housing to energy to transportation infrastructure to technological progress.

More and more, liberal analysts now lament Why Nothing Works, as the title of Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book puts it, and elicit widespread nods of agreement, rather than howls of denial. Brian Deese, Joe Biden’s director of the National Economic Council and a paid-up member of the Democratic economic establishment, just published a lengthy essay in Foreign Affairs on “Why America Struggles to Build”—the clear implication being that the Biden administration failed to do so.

Given my belief that without an abundance agenda this country is more likely to limp along than to soar, I can only applaud these developments. From the profound shortage of housing where America needs it most, to our shockingly expensive and slow infrastructure projects, this country is not delivering what its people need.

One infamous example—and one the new Abundance book focuses on—is California’s failure to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America,” said then–President Obama the year after Californians voted in favor of the new line. It was supposed to cost $33 billion and be up and running by 2020. The cost is now expected to be more than triple that figure. The first tracks were laid only this January, and the first third of the line is not projected to open any sooner than 2030. As Klein noted in a recent New York Times piece, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail since 2008, when Californians voted to approve a plan to build the new line.

Why the delay? A big part of the answer is an overly burdensome environmental review process. As Klein explained, “Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner.”

But while the abundance agenda is badly needed, how likely is the actually existing Democratic Party to embrace it? In some alternative universe there may be a Democratic Party for whom this would be an easy sell. But this Democratic Party in this universe? I have my doubts.

Let’s start with an awkward reality: The Democrats were just in power for four years and did absolutely nothing that would recognizably be part of this agenda. Their revealed preference was to spend money on popular party priorities like the massive American Rescue Plan and the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Actrather than reform the system so things actually got done and money was not wasted.

Stories of Biden’s boondoggles are already passing into legend: the failure of a $42 billion allocation for rural broadband in the 2021 infrastructure bill to connect anyone at all so far; the absurdly slow build-out of EV charging stations from a $7.5 billion allocation in the same bill—only a few dozen chargers are now operational from the 2021 bill.

There are countless examples of such inefficiencies and delays. The culprit is a Democratic Party that puts ideology and special interests ahead of good governance. It is committed to ensuring that development is not socially harmful in any way, and does not transgress the interests of any “stakeholders.” In reality, that amounts to a promise that nothing will get done. The result is endless paperwork and litigation by those stakeholders—or, more accurately, interest groups that claim to represent those stakeholders. This includes countless environmental and “social justice” NGOs, local NIMBY groups and, of course, the army of lawyers who make their living from this sort of thing. Costs balloon and projects are delayed.

Nothing demonstrates the problem more clearly than the ongoing effects of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. These environmental review laws, first passed in 1970, have become a major obstacle to progress and prosperity. As the liberal economist Noah Smith points out:

NEPA and other environmental review laws (like California’s CEQA) are the most important kind of regulation holding back American development, be that housing, green energy, or reindustrialization. These are procedural requirements—even if a development project obeys every single substantive environmental law, NEPA allows NIMBYs to sue to force the developer to complete years of onerous paperwork for the courts before proceeding. This exerts a massive chilling effect on new projects, because developers know they’ll get sued and might have to spend years on paperwork….

America went way too far with anti-development regulation in the 1970s, and left itself utterly unprepared to deal with the new challenges of the 21st century—the housing shortage, Cold War 2, the green energy transition, and re-industrialization. We froze our built environment in amber in the 70s.

Progressives had the chance to change all that when it become apparent that a 1970s-style world was no longer sufficient. They passed on that chance.”

And what do progressives have to say about fixing this issue? Almost nothing. Their ideology, “the groups,” the nonprofit-industrial complex, and the priorities of liberal, educated voters to whom so many Democratic politicians are beholden all make it extremely difficult for the party to tackle this kind of problem—or embrace many other parts of the abundance agenda.

Read more…

The following article, “What’s Missing in Democrats’ Economic Debate?” by Dustin “Dino” Guastella is cross-posted from The Center for Working-Class Politics newsletter via substack.com:

Liberals are in the middle of an economic debate over the “abundance agenda,” and whether the electorate wants an “angry moderate” or a “combative centrist” to deliver a sensible pro-growth economic program. But what’s missing in all of this, at times generative, debate is discussion of the very thing the economy needs so badly: more power for workers.

A new consensus has emerged, (or rather, an old consensus has reemerged) among liberals. From populists to self-declared neoliberals, all have agreed to leave the culture war behind. They, by and large, agree that the Democrats need to win back the working class. And they agree that delivering real economic gains in policy, with a laser focus on economic rhetoric, is the way to do it.

Some on the Left have been banging this drum for a long time. Others have returned, like the prodigal son, to their old-ways. “It’s the economy stupid!” was once the unofficial slogan of the 1992 and 1996 Clinton campaigns. And true to form, today the Clintonian think-tank Third Way again insists that every time Democrats open their mouths they ought to say something about the economy. Prominent liberal writers like Matthew Yglesias have made the same case. And now New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have released a book “Abundance” which make the positive case for exactly how Democrats can talk about the economy.

This is a good development, and the debate has generated some good ideas. But for all the newfound attention given to economic issues, moderate liberals seem surprisingly silent on the question of working-class jobs and wages. For all their talk about the need to win them back, the emerging Democratic economic consensus seems really short on an agenda for workers. And that’s a problem. After all, the Democratic brand is underwater among blue-collar workers specifically on the question of work itself. As POLITICO recently reported:

Just 44 percent of those polled said they think Democrats respect work, while even fewer — 39 percent — said the party values work. Only 42 percent said Democrats share their values. A majority, meanwhile — 56 percent — said Democrats are not looking out for working people.

Many moderates are under the impression that working-class voters are helplessly conservative on economic questions. And so, much of the new policy agenda for centrist Democrats looks a lot like the old policy agenda for centrist Democrats. That is, its what economists call a “supply-side solution” to economic hardship. It’s about lowering costs. Not raising wages.

Cut red tape, incentivize growth, unleash the awesome power of the market to bring costs down, down, down.

There is, of course, some usefulness in this approach. It’s obscene, for instance, that almost every infrastructure project is mired in bureaucratic and legal hangups that result in insane delays and astronomical costs. But loosening supply-side constraints, as helpful as they might be, probably isn’t enough to fix whats really broken.

The fundamental problem in the economy can be summed up as follows: the rich have too much money and workers have too little power to force them to invest it.

Even preeminent neoliberal economist Larry Summers has, belatedly, recognized this. He complains of an “investment death” and a “savings glut.” In other words, the hoarding of wealth by the über-rich has become a huge drag on global economic growth. Billionaires just won’t invest their money at the scale needed to promote broad economic prosperity. And even when they do, their outsized social and political power ensures that wages remain stagnant. By removing supply-side constraints we could induce more investment but, given the falling costs of capital goods and the downward pressure on wages posed by automation, supply-side solutions won’t do much to prevent even more money accumulating at the top.

What’s needed, then, is more power for workers, so they can demand higher wages and increase the general rate of effective demand.

Now, some moderates may reply: ‘Okay, okay, but no one has any appetite for that!’ It’s true that many working-class voters aren’t interested in traditional tax-and-redistribute welfare programs. That’s why Third Way’s big economic idea is “middle-class tax cuts.” But is this really the horizon of progressive economics? Hardly.

It turns out workers have a number of good (and popular!) ideas for tilting the economy away from the power of the rich. As we noted a few months ago:

Our analysis of a host of questions from the 2021–22 waves of the ANES, GSS, and CES indicates strong working-class support for progressive economic policies, ranging from the 87.9 percent of working people who support lowering prescription drug prices to the 67.9 percent in favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. The list goes on: 69.1 percent of working-class Americans favor import limits to protect US jobs, 64.8 percent prefer greater investments in state education spending, and 54.8 percent even have a positive view of a federal jobs guarantee. Likewise, substantial majorities of working-class Americans support policies to strengthen workers’ economic leverage, including 70.5 percent who support raising the minimum wage, 68.8 percent who favor putting workers on corporate boards of directors, and 54.8 percent who favor labor unions (a figure on the low side of other credible estimates).

In a forthcoming analysis, the Center For Working Class Politics, finds broad support for a number of populist economic programs that increase the power and leverage of workers and promote a more equal economy. What’s more, we believe that new policy proposals to stop stock buybacks that induce mass layoffs, legislation to speed up first contracts for newly unionized workers, and means to trigger big investments in high-wage industries, are no less likely to have popular support if only there were progressive tribunes to champion them.

Crucially, these policies all have a lot to do, not just with economic fairness, but with jobs and work. And as Sherrod Brown recently noted, to win back workers, progressives must put “the dignity of work at the center” of all they do.

Populist policies built around that goal are one means to do that.

Why is Team Trump moving so fast in its tumultuous executive actions? At New York I examined one explanation that might provide a silver lining for Democrats, at least if democracy survives the experience.

Various theories are kicking around to explain the speed and lack of caution surrounding the initial blizzard of executive actions in the second Trump administration. The most conventional is simply that having four years to mull what happened in his first term, Trump and his top advisers came prepared to hit the ground running. That may account for developments like the early start on Cabinet nominations, but there have been plenty of second-term presidencies that did not begin with breaking every norm constraining executive powers, so something else is clearly going on.

One very plausible explanation is that both Trump and Russell Vought, the OMB director at the wheel of the executive branch, are very invested in a tremendous expansion of presidential powers at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. Moving ahead rapidly with executive orders, funding “freezes,” and plans for presidential impoundments made a lot of sense as part of a very deliberate power grab.

Then, even more obviously, there’s the truly unanticipated X-factor in Trump 2.0: Elon Musk and his DOGE initiative, which was apparently put together on the fly at some point between Election Day and Inauguration Day with about as much preparation as might normally be associated with a Tesla joyride in the country. Musk is famously deploying the same shock-and-awe tactics he used in earlier corporate takeovers, based on the Silicon Valley motto of “move fast and break things.” He has indeed done that, with the chortling glee of a toddler overturning a Lego structure. So perhaps he’s running wild, beyond the control of the congressional leaders and the Cabinet whose authority he has usurped. Or maybe Musk and Vought together have joined forces to hit the disruption accelerator.

But at some point it must occur to the more thoughtful minds of Team Trump — Susie Wiles, anybody? — that the politics of this onslaught of chaotic activism is a bit backward. For generations, conservatives have come to Washington, D.C., clutching an agenda of limited government and tax cuts. By and large, the former goal, which requires cuts in highly popular federal programs and deflationary reductions in federal employment and contracting, is tough politically; it’s the broccoli on the plate, allegedly good for you but unpalatable without hollandaise sauce. Tax cuts supply the tasty dessert. Serving up dessert first is the best way to encourage broccoli consumption. That’s the lesson of George W. Bush’s successful push for tax cuts and then budget cuts in the early 2000s. The strategy was known as “starving the beast” (as anti-tax guru Grover Norquist put it): Deny “the welfare state” (the early 2000s term for the “deep state”) the resources to expand its programs and services and budget cuts would flow naturally and with less public angst.

That’s not how Team Trump is proceeding. And in fact, on top of all the pain and paralysis Trump and Musk are causing throughout the federal government, the administration is insisting on moving fast with another unpleasant agenda item: widespread tariffs, which both economists and the public believe will reignite inflation — the very issue that most clearly led to the 2024 election result — and could even induce the ultimate hell of stagflation, a shrinking economy with spiraling prices.

So why is the administration and its party insisting on front-loading so many politically hazardous actions? The most likely answer is that they believe they are living on borrowed time and have to smash the deep state and then grab the tax cuts made possible by budget cuts before the American people react in ways that might quickly reduce their power. For many years now, it’s been clear that an agenda of cutting programs like Medicare and Medicaid (and perhaps even Social Security via the indirect method of disabling its administration) and shutting down major agencies like the Department of Education in order to finance tax cuts for the rich was not a big crowd-pleaser. So upon taking office, the leaders of Trump 2.0 had a distinct choice: Build up their political capital carefully with popular steps that would give them the credibility to take less popular steps later, or move fast and get what they wanted while they can. It does make a certain logic, and not just for political neophytes like Musk or stone anti-government Christian nationalist ideologues like Vought, but for the 78-year-old narcissist serving in his final public-sector job.

In an interview with Ezra Klein, conservative wonk Santi Ruiz explained the psychology as reflected in DOGE’s modus operandi:

“[W]hen you talk to people in and around DOGE, you hear the debt come up over and over again — that if we don’t take this one opportunity now, while the window is open before the midterms, before public opinion naturally swings back and we lose the House, there’s a green field to run into to try and cut, cut, cut. And this will never happen any other time.

“There’s a strong instinct here that this is our one shot. So if we’re going to err on one side, we have to err on the side of cutting too much….

“[T]hat’s very much the instinct: The Dems are going to stop us. They’re going to come in, and we’re going to do crazy oversight in the House in a year and a half. Public opinion will just change over time because cutting things is unpopular.”

From that perspective, which may be shared more broadly within Team Trump than we realize, it doesn’t really matter what the polls show, or how more rational Republican politicians focused on their own futures want, or whether the whole revolution is doomed to eventual defeat. It’s all carpe diem, baby, and let tomorrow take care of itself.

To gain a better understanding of how Americans view and relate to our two dominant political parties, give a read to “The Partisanship and Ideology of American Voters” at the Pew Research Center, which was published a bit less than one year ago,  An excerpt: “The partisan identification of registered voters is now evenly split between the two major parties: 49% of registered voters are Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, and a nearly identical share – 48% – are Republicans or lean to the Republican Party…Four years ago, in the run-up to the 2020 election, Democrats had a 5 percentage point advantage over the GOP (51% vs. 46%)…The share of voters who are in the Democratic coalition reached 55% in 2008. For much of the last three decades of Pew Research Center surveys, the partisan composition of registered voters has been more closely divided…About two-thirds of registered voters identify as a partisan, and they are roughly evenly split between those who say they are Republicans (32% of voters) and those who say they are Democrats (33%). Roughly a third instead say they are independents or something else (35%), with most of these voters leaning toward one of the parties. Partisan leaners often share the same political views and behaviors as those who directly identify with the party they favor…The share of voters who identify as independent or something else is somewhat higher than in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a result, there are more “leaners” today than in the past. Currently, 15% of voters lean toward the Republican Party and 16% lean toward the Democratic Party. By comparison, in 1994, 27% of voters leaned toward either the GOP (15%) or the Democratic Party (12%)…While the electorate overall is nearly equally divided between those who align with the Republican and Democratic parties, a greater share of registered voters say they are both ideologically conservative and associate with the Republican Party (33%) than say they are liberal and align with the Democratic Party (23%)…A quarter of voters associate with the Democratic Party and describe their views as either conservative or moderate, and 14% identify as moderates or liberals and are Republicans or Republican leaners.”

“Will Democrats finally start to place class issues at the center?,” Michael Sean Winters asks at The National Catholic Reporter, and writes: “There’s a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much Trump’s vote share increased,” Shor said. “In counties like Queens, N.Y., or Miami-Dade, Fla., Trump increased his vote share by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy.”… How crazy? “Our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10% of the electorate.”…When Trump and Elon Musk portray themselves as blowing up “the establishment,” working-class voters love it. The establishment hasn’t done a lot for them in the past 40 years of neoliberal economics practiced by both parties. They aren’t as scared of tariffs as college-educated people because free trade decimated their towns in the 1990s and they do not have robust 401(k)s taking a hit in the markets today…The establishment — the term was coined by the late, great Henry Fairlie — is disconnected from the working-class…Trump seized on the disconnect. He may be selling snake oil, but at least he pays attention to working-class people and does not disrespect them or their choices publicly. He shows up at wrestling matches. He never speaks in academic jargon. He identifies working-class grievances and offers up a simplistic explanation or enemy as the source of those grievances… It worked in 2024 and it will keep working unless the Democrats learn what’s on the mind of the people who shower after work.”

In “The Emerging Democratic Minority,”John Judis writes at Compact: “Democrats began to lose support within the working class (defined roughly in polling terms as voters without a college degree) as far back as the 1960s, but they reached a new low in 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost this demographic by three points—and the white working class by 27 points. (In citing poll numbers, I give precedence to Catalist post-election compilations when comparing 2016 and 2020, AP/VoteCast on 2024 numbers, and the Edison Exit polls on any trends that go back before 2016.  Where there is a wide disparity, I will try to explain the difference.) Biden gained back some of these votes in 2020, but Kamala Harris lost them by 13 points and the white working class by 31 points. Harris lost 16 percentage points among Latinos without a college degree and three points among blacks without a degree…The Democratic share of the rural and small-town vote began falling in 1980, but the big decline, as political scientists Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea demonstrate in The Rural Voter, began with the 2010 midterm election, when the Republicans flipped 31 House seats in rural districts and 20 in districts that mixed rural and urban. Democrats reached a new low of 34 percent among rural voters in 2016. Biden rebounded slightly, but Harris dropped back to Clinton’s level of support…Beginning in 1980, Democratic presidential candidates began enjoying more success among female than male voters. That is what the term “gender gap” referred to. In the 1992, 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020 presidential elections, Democratic victories were attributable to this gender gap. But when Republicans won elections, they enjoyed rising success among male voters that overcame the Democratic gender gap. In 2016, Clinton’s margin among women allowed her to win the popular vote, but she did worse among men than Barack Obama had. In 2024, male voters went over to Trump by 13 points, easily overcoming Harris’s six-point margin among women. Key male constituencies included black males, among whom Trump gained 12 points from 2020, Latinos, among whom he gained 19 points, and young (18–29-year-old) men, among whom he gained 14 points…In the 2024 election, Democrats’ opposition to strict border security and support for a transgender-rights agenda that went far beyond protection from discrimination, including the participation of biological males in women’s sports, proved to be part of the party’s undoing.  Trump’s most effective ad in wooing swing voters cited Harris’s support for state funding of sex-change operations for detained illegal immigrants.

Judis continues, “The most important single issue in the election cycle was the Biden administration’s lax stand on illegal immigration…In a poll of voters in factory towns in swing states, Lake Research found that the single greatest “negative perception” of the Democrats was that they “were obsessed with LGBT transgender issues instead of focusing on kitchen table economic issues.” In a post-election poll of swing voters conducted by YouGov, Greenberg Research found that the top reason voters opposed Harris was they believed she was for “open borders.” That was followed by prices being too high and by Harris and the Democrats’ assumed support for transgender athletes and for “ultra-left and woke Democrats.”…According to a Brookings study, 45 percent of the men aged 18 to 29 say they face discrimination as men. According to a Pew poll, 38 percent of men who identify as Republican say “women’s gains have come at the expense of men.” As the “mommy party,” the Democrats were sure to invite the wrath of many male voters. Many of these voters were also working-class and many lived in rural areas and small towns, but Harris also lost young men with college degrees—a group that was formerly in the Democratic corner…It may take another defeat or two in national elections to convince leading Democratic politicians that they have to listen to the public rather than to their activist lobbies or their billionaire donors. For me, that represents a looming disaster. For all their faults, the Democrats remain the party of constitutional adherence and of a government dedicated to overcoming the failures to which a society is prey if it lets the market run free.”

An idea is kicking around the chattering classes that needs to be addressed critically, so I tried to do so at New York:

Without any question, rank-and-file Democrats are furious right now. They are angry at the Trump administration, of course, for the multi-pronged attack underway on the public sector; on judges; on immigrants; on universities; on our allies; and on the U.S. Constitution. They are angry at a Republican Party that is egging on Trump, Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and the unruly gang of social-media trolls, Christian nationalists, and tech bros who have been empowered by the new administration, at the expense of congressional Republican authority. But most of all, they’re angry at their own party’s leaders for losing a winnable 2024 election and then retreating into confusion and fecklessness in dealing with emergency conditions that look a lot like every authoritarian takeover in modern world history.

Democrats are losing confidence in their party at historic rates, with Chuck Schumer’s abrupt decision to abandon a filibuster against a GOP/Trump spending bill becoming a real flash point. A recent Quinnipiac survey showed 49 percent of self-identified Democrats disapproving the job performance of the congressional party. The palpable unhappiness at the grassroots has led multiple observers to suggest that we may be on the brink of an intraparty revolt similar in intensity and significance to the tea-party movement that convulsed Republicans during the Obama administration, and which (many believe) paved the way for the equally angry MAGA movement that is now in charge of the country.

It’s true that the tea party of the right began with angry grassroots Republicans infuriated by Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, the 44th president’s bold legislative agenda, and the GOP Establishment’s difficulties in countering it. And it did most strikingly manifest itself in a midterm primary upset of a congressional Republican leader, when a nobody named Dave Brat defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his Virginia stomping grounds. We are now being told that Democrats in Congress who aren’t sufficiently “fighting” Trump could meet the same fate.

But the differences between the current moment and the one that sparked the tea-party movement are at least as striking as the similarities. The most important difference is that the uprising on the right was sharply ideological, and went far beyond demands for greater partisan combativeness. Its impetus was pretty clearly the bipartisan actions taken to mitigate the financial collapse that occurred late in the Bush administration, including the TARP bailout of investment institutions, but more importantly, the relief provided to regular folks who defaulted on mortgages.

The tea-party movement’s moment of birth was famously “Santelli’s Rant,” an on-air tirade by business telejournalist Rick Santelli aimed at the deadbeats turned freeloaders who took on unsustainable debt and expected their more responsible fellow citizens to rescue them with taxpayer dollars. This very pointed complaint metastasized into broad-based resentment of income redistribution and a near-libertarian belief that much of the modern welfare state violated the U.S. Constitution. While tea-party protests may have been aimed at TARP and then Obamacare, they really represented a revolt against the New Deal and Great Society legacy of beneficent government and a clear and powerful right turn for the Republican Party. Much of what the hard-core conservative House Freedom Caucus stands for came right out of the tea-party movement, along with some significant MAGA flourishes added by Donald Trump.

While progressives certainly believe the unprincipled character of party centrists has contributed materially to Trump’s return to power and the paralysis of congressional Democrats, it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:

“Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.”

I’m reasonably sure very few of the original tea-party activists wanted the GOP to become “more moderate.”

So if an ideological uprising is not in store for Democrats, how is the current wave of anguish likely to manifest itself, or to be resolved?

Congressional leadership, rather than garden-variety Democratic incumbents, seem the most likely target of grassroots rage going forward, which would mean a shakeup within the Senate and possibly the House leadership to show a willingness to deploy more aggressive tactics. But before that sort of revolt can take shape, the underlying conditions in the country could change the intraparty dynamics. If, for example, federal courts indeed slow down or stop the most outrageous actions of Team Trump, and particularly if the Supreme Court reestablishes constitutional “guardrails,” then perhaps Democrats will become less insistent that their elected leaders throw themselves upon the MAGA ramparts. And inversely, if Trump, Musk, and company intensify their authoritarian efforts and are not restrained by the courts (either because the judiciary surrenders or is simply ignored), the anger, fear, and panic among the Democratic grassroots could move onto the streets in open resistance instead of being focused on Democratic members of Congress who obviously can’t be expected to stop an extraconstitutional coup.

In a less apocalyptic scenario, the closer we get to the 2026 midterms the more likely it is that Democratic activists will be focused on winning general elections and flipping Congress rather than on purging Democratic incumbents who have failed to turn the tide. Already, small-dollar donors are pouring money into long-shot Democratic candidacies in two Florida special elections to fill House seats.

In general, we’re not likely to see left-of-center activists don tri-corner hats and scream about DINOs out of anguish at what Trump’s doing to their country and its institutions. As longtime tea-party observer (and sometimes supporter) David French noted, it’s not a good temperamental fit anyway:

“[T]he Democratic Party is more of a party of institutions — including government institutions — than the Republican Party is now. This means they’re less likely to want a demolition than to urge a renovation. If the Tea Party revels in being the bull in the china shop and glories in the wreckage, the Democratic Party might want better inventory or new management, but it doesn’t want to trash the place.”

Despite the alleged proclivity of Democrats to form “circular firing squads” and fall into “disarray,” the odds are good that they will focus more on the common enemy.