News that Elon Musk has told Tesla investors he plans to cut back on his destructive service to Donald Trump and pay more attention to his troubled company felt like a victory to many Democrats. But at New York I warned that it might not matter as much as we had hoped:

This has been one of Washington’s favorite games lately: When will Elon leave? The planted axiom is that Elon Musk’s bizarre and wildly destructive adventures as head of the shambolically established Department of Government Efficiency can’t last long, for multiple reasons.

First, his far-flung corporate empire could use more of his attention, and his extracurricular activities haven’t exactly helped his bottom line (notably at Tesla, where public reaction to DOGE’s antics severely damaged the once-cool brand). Second, it’s assumed that infinitely large egos like Musk’s and Donald Trump’s (not to mention the other highly self-regarding MAGA veterans in the Trump Cabinet) cannot perpetually coexist in the same public and private space for very long, particularly since there are elements of the Trump 2.0 agenda, like his trade war, that may not enchant the chief bankroller of the 47th president’s 2024 campaign. Third, the incredible yet deliberately induced chaos that has been DOGE’s signature contribution to public administration must soon give way to some sort of sustainable operating model for delivering benefits and services. And fourth, Musk’s own lagging popularity (punctuated by the defeat of a Republican judicial candidate in Wisconsin whom Musk had bankrolled and personally campaigned for) isn’t helping the Boss’s own gradually eroding job-approval numbers.

But assuming Musk’s days at the helm of DOGE are numbered (his original appointment as a “special government employee” expires next month, and the entire DOGE operation is supposed to wrap up in July of next year), can his minions sojourn on without him?

They probably can. DOGE employees are now routinely “embedded” in federal agencies, typically at the very peak of the administrative pyramid and with top-shelf access to the all-important data. They are typically working hand-in-glove with Trump political appointees who share their deep hostility to agency missions and to career civil servants. In many parts of the federal bureaucracy, the mid-level managers that might push back against DOGE demolition efforts are already gone or are so terrified of losing their jobs that they do exactly what DOGE staffers tell them to do. They no longer need much adult supervision.

Perhaps just as importantly, there is a powerful permanent institution in the Trump administration that shares DOGE’s hatred of the “deep state” and is much better equipped to manage a gradual transition from slash-and-burn cuts in spending and personnel to a regularized if downsized bureaucracy devoted to the administration’s policy goals. That would be the Office of Management and Budget and its director, Project 2025 co-author and Christian nationalist zealot Russell Vought.

Vought formed an alliance with Musk shortly after the 2024 election, when DOGE was just an evil glimmer in the Tech Bro’s eye, based on their shared vision of a vast purge of the bureaucracy to root out non-MAGA influences and blow up programs and policies that did not serve the reactionary cultural and economic agenda of Trump 2.0. And the deeply experienced OMB director has almost certainly played a key role behind the scenes in coordinating DOGE’s raids on federal agencies with OMB’s plans and harmonizing both with what the administration is demanding from its congressional allies. Vought is the “glue guy,” to use a sports metaphor, who keeps the team together. And his authority will likely expand if Musk leaves Washington, as Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin explained earlier this week:

“A Trump administration official, who requested anonymity to share internal discussions, says Vought is widely perceived as preparing to pick up wherever Musk leaves off. Where Musk has shown a zeal for smash and grab, Vought has the institutional knowledge—and perhaps the patience—to make the DOGE cuts stick. Vought, this person says, ‘is waiting in the wings.’”

Unlike Musk, Vought knows the federal government’s many nooks and crannies like the back of his hand and is perfectly positioned to deploy Musk’s orphaned raiders in a much more coordinated campaign to take DOGE and its hollowed-out agency hosts to the next level (or, in the eyes of their victims, the next level of hell). They don’t need their turbulent creator around with his attention-grabbing habits and over-the-top cartoon-villain malevolence. Vought’s dull knife will cut even deeper than Musk’s chain saw, and a lot less noisily.

There’s a mini-debate among Democrats at the moment over the propriety of fighting against the deportation and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia when other issues beckon, and I made my own thoughts known at New York:

As the story of the abduction, deportation, and detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia plays out in El Salvador and U.S. federal courts, the politics of the situation are roiling many waters. For the most part, Republicans are following President Trump’s lead in wallowing in the misery of Abrego Garcia and other deportees; exploiting unrelated “angel moms” and other symbols of random undocumented-immigrant crimes; and blasting Democrats for their misplaced sympathy for the “wrong people.” Even as Team Trump risks a constitutional crisis by evading judicial orders to grant due process to the people ICE is snatching off the streets, it seems confident that public backing for the administration’s mass-deportation program and “border security” initiatives generally will make this a winning issue for the GOP.

For their part, Democrats aren’t as united politically on the salience of this dispute, even though virtually all of them object in principle to Trump’s lawless conduct. Most notably, California governor and likely 2028 presidential contender Gavin Newsom warned against dwelling on it, as The Bulwark reported:

“Asked to comment on the ongoing standoff between Trump, El Salvador, and the U.S. judicial system, Newsom scoffed. ‘You know, this is the distraction of the day,’ he said. ‘This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue, as they’ve described it …’

“’Those that believe in the rule of law are defending it. But it’s a tough case, because people are really — are they defending MS-13? Are they defending, you know, someone who’s out of sight, out of mind in El Salvador? … It’s exactly the debate [Republicans] want, because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs. They don’t want to be accountable to markets today … They want to have this conversation. Don’t get distracted by distractions. We’re all perfect sheep.’”

Newsom is reflecting an ancient Democratic “populist” prejudice against non-economic messaging, which was revived by the 2024 presidential election, in which warnings about the threat to democracy and to the rule of law posed by Trump were widely adjudged to have failed to sway an electorate focused obsessively on the economy and the cost of living. And it’s true that the Abrego Garcia case arose precisely as Trump made himself highly vulnerable on the economy with his wild tariff schemes.

But the emotions aroused by the administration’s cruelty and arrogance in launching its mass-deportation initiative have struck chords with major elements of the Democratic base, particularly among those attuned to the constitutional issues involved. And it’s not a secret that even though Trump enjoys generally positive approval ratings on his handling of immigration issues, they begin to erode when specifics are polled. It’s also quite likely that whatever the overall numbers show, deportation overreach will hurt Trump and his party precisely in the immigrant-adjacent elements of the electorate in which he made crucial 2024 gains.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of communications strategies that turn message discipline into message bondage, persuading political gabbers and writers to grind away on a single note and ignore other opportunities and challenges. In the current situation facing Democrats, strategic silence on a volatile issue like immigration (which was arguably one of Kamala Harris’s problems during the 2024 campaign) enables the opposition to fill in the blanks with invidious characterizations. In politics, silence is almost never golden.

Perhaps more to the point, as G. Elliot Morris argues, there are ways to link messages on different issues that reinforce them all:

“One way to focus messaging on both the economy and immigration, for example, might be to show how unchecked executive power is dangerous. After all the most unpopular parts of Trump’s agenda — tariffs and deportations for undocumented migrants who have been here a long time and committed no crimes — are a direct result of executive overreach.

“The power that gives Trump the ability to levy extreme tariffs was given to the president when Congress expected him to be forgiving of tariffs on an individual basis as an act of diplomacy, not to plunge the world economic order into crisis. Similarly, the judiciary has said Trump’s deporting of Abrego Garcia, as well as hundreds of Venezuelans, runs afoul of multiple Court orders.”

Even if you conclude that “unchecked executive power” is too abstract a line of attack for today’s paycheck-focused swing voters, it shouldn’t be that difficult to hit two messages simultaneously, particularly since the message on Trump’s tariffs doesn’t require a whole lot of reiteration from Democrats: Voters can see it in the stock market, and soon enough they will likely see it in the prices they are paying for goods and services.

But the real clincher in persuading Democrats to take the Abrego Garcia case very seriously is this: Anything less than full-throated opposition to the administration’s joyful embrace of Gestapo tactics and un-American policies in deportation cases will undoubtedly dishearten constituents who already fear their elected officials are unprincipled cynics who won’t lift a finger to fight Trump without first convening a focus group of tuned-out swing voters. Politicians don’t have to emulate Senator Chris Van Hollen’s decision to fly down to El Salvador and meet with his imprisoned constituent to recognize that his willingness to do so was impressive and authentic. As he told my colleague Benjamin Hart in an interview earlier this week, “The issue here is protecting the rights of individuals under our Constitution … I do believe this is a place that we need to stand up and fight.” It’s hard to do anything else without shame.

Like many Americans, I’ve been watching with fascinated horror the Trump administration’s first big steps towards mass deportation, and wrote about the political underpinnings of the issue at New York:

To those who are worried about the threat to the rule of law represented by the first president to enter the White House as a convicted criminal, the brinkmanship being exhibited by Team Trump over court orders involving an erroneously deported immigrant seems ominous.

The Trump administration has been taunting the judiciary via dilatory tactics and obfuscation in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This protected-status immigrant from El Salvador, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has three children, was shipped off to a brutal Salvadorian rent-a-prison without due process, based on a faulty identification.

U.S. district court judge Paula Xinis has ordered the administration to find and return Abrego Garcia so that he can receive due process prior to deportation, and a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court concurred that the order must be obeyed, albeit with some consideration of the complications of the case. But even though Judiciary Department lawyers have admitted in court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of an error, the White House has stalled in complying with Xinis’s order. And in a bizarre Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president (and self-described dictator) Nayib Bukele, Trump and his attorney general suggested it was now Bukele’s problem. The Salvadoran leader said he would not “smuggle” a “terrorist” back into the United States. Right there in front of the cameras, White House policy director and infamous nativist Stephen Miller misstated the Supreme Court decision and kept referring to Abrego Garcia as a terrorist, the disputed attribution at the very center of the legal case. It all seemed like an extended mockery of the rule of law.

The administration is clearly playing rope-a-dope on the entire situation. And while it may ultimately comply with the courts, extract Abrego Garcia from prison, and give him a real hearing, the political question is why Team Trump is dragging this out in the glare of global bad publicity. Is this really the ground on which the 47th president will trigger a much-feared constitutional crisis by openly defying the judicial branch of government, including the Supreme Court that has been so very good to him? That’s what a lot of Trump critics believe is happening before our incredulous eyes.

I personally believe the administration will eventually submit to the courts, albeit as minimally as possible. But it’s possible Team Trump thinks the president’s foreign-policy powers, which they claim are at stake in such cases, are strong enough that it’s the Supreme Court that will submit to Trump’s authority to do as he wishes with immigrants.

Politically speaking, this is a fight the administration is eager to take on even if it temporarily loses, because it’s all happening on Trump’s favored turf at the intersection of the immigration and crime issues. At a time when the president is losing popularity steadily thanks to his economic policies, and particularly his tariff policies, it’s probably a relief to get back to the argument that America is succumbing to an “invasion” by criminal immigrants eager to rape, pillage, and eat pets. It seemed to have worked in 2024. Why not in 2025?

Recent polls regularly confirm that of all the controversial things Trump has done in the first 11-plus weeks of his second term, his handling of immigration policy is the most popular. This is true in polls that rate his overall job performance negatively (an April 8 Economist–YouGov survey giving him a net minus-seven approval rating overall but a plus-six approval rating on immigration) and positively (an April 10 Harvard–Harris survey giving him a net plus-two approval rating overall but a plus-seven approval rating on immigration). It’s entirely possible, and even likely, that when the full implications of the Trump-Miller immigration agenda become manifest, particularly when legal immigrants and even citizens are affected, this general-public approbation will fade or even head due south. Indeed, pollster G. Elliott Morris has published an analysis arguing that support for Trump’s positions declines steadily as questions about them become more specific:

“[W]hen various pollsters asked if they would support deporting immigrants who have been here more than 10 years (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), U.S. adults said “no” by a 37 percentage point margin; Americans disapprove of deporting immigrants who have broken no laws other than laws governing entry; they oppose deporting U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to foreign jails, such as [El Salvador’s] CECOT, and they oppose housing migrants at Guantanamo Bay while they are processed. All of these are policies the Trump administration has now floated or is actively carrying out.”

So the administration may be guilty of rhetorical overreach on immigration at a time when the mass-deportation program is actually going pretty slowly. But what about all the constitutional fears raised by cases like that of Abrego Garcia? Won’t Americans recoil at those signs of a presidency determined to become imperial? Maybe not.

Team Trump has clearly internalized one of the big lessons of the 2024 presidential election: that threats to “the rule of law” or “the Constitution” or “democracy” don’t mean a lot to persuadable voters who are most concerned about living costs and their own sense of well-being. If what Trump tried to do on January 6, 2021 doesn’t rise to the level of a voting issue for well over half the electorate, then is there any reason to believe that Abrego Garcia’s “due process” rights will matter? What is “due process,” anyway? Like the “presumption of innocence” from which Abrego Garcia should also benefit, it’s a legal concept that an awful lot of regular folks either don’t understand or find problematic, particularly when applied to someone the president of the United States has labeled an alien criminal terrorist.

So Team Trump is happy to defy the rule of law, at least at a level short of overt defiance, in any controversy involving immigrants. It pleases the nativist MAGA base immensely to see the administration run circles around “activist judges” in ridding the country of the people Democrats allegedly brought in to “replace” the country’s historic white majority. And it’s unclear at this point that Democrats and other Trump critics can make smash-and-grab ICE operations that land peaceful American residents in overseas hellholes as frightening as they should be. But as with the increasingly unpopular Trump tariff program, the immigration agenda may lose support the longer, the louder, and the more chaotic it becomes.

I realize trade policy has been a very contentious issue among Democrats during the last 30 years or so. But they absolutely must seize the current opportunity to go after Trump’s tariff program, as I argued at New York:

For months, Democratic elected officials have been trying to figure out a compelling message on Donald Trump’s agenda that will gratify the grassroots Democratic demand for vocal and united opposition. At the moment, the headlines are full of extremely high-profile turmoil involving Trump’s “Liberation Day” agenda of tariffs and trade warfare. It is likely getting the attention of not only politically active people but anyone whose investments or 401(k) accounts are affected by equity markets. And there is zero question that rank-and-file Democrats hate what Trump is trying to do with greater unanimity than on any of the other things they hate about Trump 2.0. If you have any doubts about that, check out the very latest, post–Liberation Day findings from Quinnipiac:

“97 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of independents and 44 percent of Republicans think the tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy in the short-term. Forty-six percent of Republicans, 19 percent of independents and 2 percent of Democrats think the tariffs will help the U.S. economy in the short-term. …

“95 percent of Democrats, 57 percent of independents and 10 percent of Republicans think the tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy in the long-term. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans, 35 percent of independents and 3 percent of Democrats think the tariffs will help the U.S. economy in the long-term.”

You don’t see polling that conclusive very often, even in this era of hyper-polarization. But beyond the simple fact that the Democratic base instinctively hates Trump’s tariff agenda, this should strike Democratic politicians as a heaven-sent opportunity to expose Trump on an issue of maximum vulnerability: the cost of living. One would think, given the crucial importance of this issue to his victory over Joe Biden last November, that the 47th president would do anything imaginable to avoid a spike in consumer prices anytime soon. But instead, Trump is courting exactly the worst kind of disaster, and voters across the board recognize it:

“Most Americans are bracing for higher prices on a wide range of consumer goods following President Donald Trump’s move to impose sweeping new tariffs on imports from most of the world, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

“The three-day poll, which concluded on Sunday, found that 73% of respondents said they thought prices in the next six months would increase for the items they buy every day after the new taxes on almost all imports took effect.”

So in recognition of this potentially earth-shaking own-goal by Trump, the product of his economic ignorance and long-held ideology, Democratic elected officials should be issuing a trumpet call of great volume and total clarity, right?

Check out this description in the Washington Post of a speech by one of the Democratic Party’s brightest stars and see if it reflects the total opposition to Trump’s tariff agenda that is clearly called for at this particular moment:

“Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, sought Wednesday to distinguish herself from fellow Democrats who have been strongly criticizing President Donald Trump and his tariffs, offering a more nuanced assessment during a speech emphasizing bipartisanship in Washington.

“The speech came ahead of a meeting with Trump at the White House, her second since Trump returned to office.

“Whitmer made clear that she disagreed with Trump’s sweeping and abrupt use of tariffs, saying it has been ‘really tough’ on her state and the auto industry that powers its economy. But she withheld more pointed criticism of the president, saying she understands the “motivation” behind his tariffs and agrees that Americans ‘need to make more stuff in America.'”

Now, as it happens, Whitmer made her mixed message immeasurably worse by immediately going into a private Oval Office meeting with Trump that the president (either craftily or fortuitously) turned into a photo op in which the Michigan governor stood there while he signed some particularly obnoxious executive orders. It’s not exactly the picture of vicious hand-to-hand combat with the authoritarian of the White House that grassroots Democrats have been demanding. But Whitmer’s not alone in struggling to bring herself to blast Trump’s tariffs entirely, as Jonathan Chait quickly pointed out at The Atlantic:

“Two days after President Donald Trump’s shambolic “Liberation Day” announcement, which set off a full-scale economic meltdown, House Democrats released a video response. It was oddly sedate, almost academic in its nuance. The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, ‘A wrong-for-decades consensus on “free trade” has been a race to the bottom’ and ‘Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.’

“As the American public was screaming, ‘Please, God, no!’ the Democrats were calmly whispering, ‘Yes, but.’”

From a purely historical perspective, this anti-anti-protectionism is astounding. Until very recently, basic support for free trade (albeit sometimes with exceptions) was the oldest continuing policy tradition of the Democratic Party. Every Democratic president from Martin Van Buren to Barack Obama favored expanded global trade to create new markets and reduce consumer prices. But, as Chait observed, that changed with Joe Biden, who embraced “a decade-old strategy designed to co-opt Trump’s appeal to working-class voters by backing away from the party’s general support for free trade under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama” (and, I’d add, under Wilson, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, and Carter). This reversal was reinforced by multiple factors, including the longtime protectionism of manufacturing unions, the hostility to globalization among progressive activists, and the pivotal role Rust Belt swing states have played in the politics of the Trump era. It’s no coincidence that Whitmer represents one of those states, and one in which Democrats have long embraced trade restrictions.

In the current Trump 2.0 emergency, maintaining an anti-anti-protectionist position is incredibly shortsighted. Democrats do not need to declare themselves 100 percent free traders in order to 100 percent deplore what Trump is doing, instead of tut-tutting that he’s doing a good thing in a bad way. Trump’s innate 19th-century protectionist instincts will always create enormous pressures for falling economic growth and rising consumer prices; indeed, the ultimate economic nightmare of stagflation is precisely what some economists consider the most likely consequence of a MAGA trade war.

If Democrats believe half of what they are saying about the threat to democracy Trump 2.0 represents, they’ll recognize that a strong pushback against Trump’s tariffs is absolutely the best way to undermine his political position and divide Republicans, a majority of whose elected officials are stone free traders in the Reagan-Bush tradition. Democrat thinkers and political practitioners have plenty of time to figure out exactly what their own international economic policies will be if they regain the White House in 2028. But if they don’t take full advantage of the present opportunity to unite grassroots Democrats and inflation-hating voters generally and exploit Trump’s unforced errors on trade policy, they will have nobody but themselves to blame if power continues to remain elusive.

Taking a closer look at some of the 2024 trends that have alarmed Democrats, it’s possible to see some silver linings, and I wrote about a couple of them at New York:

In the 2024 presidential election, Republicans performed better among marginal voters than the opposition, which meant that a boost in turnout would improve their percentage of the vote, reversing a longtime Democratic advantage. A second and even-better-known development was a significant boost in the Republican vote among Democratic “base” constituencies, particularly Latinos and Gen-Z voters.

These are both good long-term signs for the GOP. But in the very short term, as in the elections between now and 2028, they could portend underwhelming results for Republicans. For one thing, their new success among marginal voters in a high-turnout presidential election will not matter much in special, off-year, or midterm elections, when the voters Democrats now rely on are relatively sure to show up, particularly given the current panic over Trump 2.0’s radical early shape. And as Politico notes, right there in the 2024 returns are signs that the GOP’s overperformance among Democratic base voters probably won’t carry over to non-presidential elections. That’s because there was a lot of ticket-splitting last November, notably among Latinos:

“Underlying the 2024 election results was a subtle trend that could signal a dramatic reshaping of the electorate: a surge in ticket-splitting among Latino voters who shifted sharply toward Donald Trump but also supported Democratic House and Senate candidates.”

This helps explain why Democrats managed to win Senate races in four states Trump carried (Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin) and no less than 13 House races in districts carried by Trump. It seems entirely probable that downballot Democratic strength will carry over to the midterm congressional elections of 2026, as Politico suggests — unless, of course, 2024 reflected a more fundamental shift that will intensify even without Trump on the ballot:

“Heavily Hispanic and Latino areas that saw significant ticket-splitting are key to many swing districts and battleground states. The party that can win over those voters — Republicans converting Trump supporters into reliable GOP voters, or Democrats bringing them back into the fold more firmly — will have a clear electoral advantage in the years ahead.”

I wouldn’t count on long-term trends toward the GOP mattering much in the midterms, particularly given the other dynamic we are likely to see in 2026: an almost invariable loss of support by the party controlling the White House. One leading indicator: Of the 13 House districts that went for both Trump and a congressional Democrat in 2024, six have electorates that are at least 40 percent Latino. Democrats in those districts should do pretty well without a presidential candidate dragging them down.

Right now, I don’t think many Democrats are all that worried about how they’ll do in 2028 or 2032 or 2036. A comeback right away would be most welcome both in boosting Democratic morale and warning Republicans that all the over-the-top triumphalism we’re hearing from MAGA folk is built on a fragile foundation.