According to a new “CNN Poll: Most Democrats think their party needs major change, while the GOP coalesces around Trump” Ariel Edwards reports at CNN Politics. As Edwards writes, “In the wake of the 2024 election, most supporters of the Democratic Party say it needs to make significant changes and that they feel “burned out” by politics, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. The party faces its lowest ratings in more than 30 years….Donald Trump’s return to office is also remolding the GOP, with a majority of the party’s backers now saying that support for the president-elect is central to being a Republican….Those shifts are playing out against a broader backdrop of political unhappiness, with even Republicans far more likely to say they’re disappointed and frustrated by politics than to express optimism, inspiration, or pride….A 58% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say that the Democratic Party needs major changes, or to be completely reformed, up from just 34% who said the same after the 2022 midterm elections, when the party retained control of the Senate but lost the House. Over that time, the share of Republicans and Republican leaners who feel the same way about the GOP has ticked downward, from 38% to 28%….Only 49% of Democratic-aligned adults say they expect their party’s congressional representatives to be even somewhat effective at resisting GOP policies, while more than 9 in 10 Republican-aligned adults expect their party’s congressional representatives — who now control both chambers of Congress — to be at least somewhat effective at passing new laws to enact their agenda….But across party lines, the predominant political mood is one of discontent. Most adults in the US describe themselves as disappointed (70%) and frustrated (64%) with the nation’s politics today, with nearly half calling themselves burned out. About 4 in 10 say they’re angry, rising to 52% among Democratic-aligned women. Fewer than 20% say they’re optimistic, fired up, inspired or proud.”

“We don’t need to waste time trying to parse the differences between the last three elections. In all three, he won—and lost—with historic vote tallies,” Robin D. G. Kelley writes in “Notes on Fighting Trumpism” at The Boston Review. “The message has been clear since 2016, when Trump, despite losing the popular vote to Hilary Clinton, still won the electoral college with nearly sixty-three million votes, just three million fewer than what Obama got in 2012. Trump lost in 2020, but received seventy-four million votes, the second-largest total in U.S. history. For an incumbent presiding disastrously over the start of the Covid pandemic, that astounding number of votes should have told us something. And if we were honest, we would acknowledge that Joe Biden owes most of his victory to the uprisings against police violence that momentarily shifted public opinion toward greater awareness of racial injustice and delivered Democrats an unearned historic turnout. Even though the Biden campaign aggressively distanced itself from Black Lives Matter and demands to defund the police, it benefited from the sentiment that racial injustice ought to be addressed and liberals were best suited to address it….Yet in all three elections, white men and women still overwhelmingly went for Trump. (Despite the hope that this time, the issue of abortion would drive a majority of white women to vote for Harris, 53 percent of them voted for Trump, only 2 percent down from 2020.) The vaunted demographic shift in the 2024 electorate wasn’t all that significant. True, Trump attracted more Black men this time, but about 77 percent of Black men voted for Harris, so the shocking headline, “Why did Black men vote for Trump?” is misdirected. Yes, Latino support for Trump increased, but that demographic needs to be disaggregated; it is an extremely diverse population with different political histories, national origins, and the like. And we should not be shocked that many working-class men, especially working-class men of color, did not vote for Harris. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is right to point to the condescension of the Democrats for implying that sexism alone explains why a small portion of Black men and Latinos flipped toward Trump, when homelessness, hunger, rent, personal debt, and overall insecurity are on the rise. The Democrats, she explained on Democracy Now, failed “to capture what is actually happening on the ground—that is measured not just by the historic low unemployment that Biden and Harris have talked about or by the historic low rates of poverty.”

Kelley concludes that “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Putting that into practice means thinking beyond nation, organizing to resist mass deportation rather than vote for the party promoting it. It means seeing every racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic act, every brutal beating and killing of unarmed Black people by police, every denial of healthcare for the most vulnerable, as an attack on the class. It means standing up for struggling workers around the world, from Palestine to the Congo to Haiti. It means fighting for the social wage, not just higher pay and better working conditions but a reinvestment in public institutions—hospitals, housing, education, tuition-free college, libraries, parks. It means worker power and worker democracy. And if history is any guide, this cannot be accomplished through the Democratic Party. Trying to move the Democrats to the left has never worked. We need to build up independent, class-conscious, multiracial organizations such as the Working Families Party, the Poor People’s Campaign, and their allies, not simply to enter the electoral arena but to effectively exercise the power to dispel ruling class lies about how our economy and society actually work. The only way out of this mess is learning to think like a class. It’s all of us or none.”

In “The single most unconstitutional thing Trump did yesterday, explained: The president cannot unilaterally repeal parts of the 14th Amendment,” Ian Milhiser argues at Vox: “The most alarming of these immigration orders seeks to strip millions of future Americans of their citizenship….There isn’t even a plausible argument that this order is constitutional. The Constitution is absolutely clear that all people born in the United States and subject to its laws are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The Supreme Court recognized this principle more than 125 years ago…. Nevertheless, Trump’s order, labeled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” purports to deny citizenship to two classes of Americans. The first is children born to undocumented mothers, whose fathers were not themselves citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time of birth. The second is children whose fathers have similar immigration status, and whose mothers were lawfully but temporarily present in the United States at the time of birth….Almost immediately after this executive order was released, pro-immigration advocates started naming prominent Americans who might not be citizens if this order were in effect when they were born — including former Vice President Kamala Harris. That said, the order does not apply to current US citizens, and is not retroactive: It only attempts to deprive “persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order” of citizenship….It is likely that immigration advocates will obtain a court order blocking Trump’s executive order soon — a group of civil rights groups, including the ACLU, already filed a lawsuit seeking such an order. And, because the Supreme Court has already ruled that birthright citizenship is the law of the land, any lower court judge hearing that lawsuit should be bound by the Court’s 125-year-old decision.” Trump knows that this executive order is toast. But he doesn’t really care because he still gets credit for playing hardball on immigration and that adds to his image as the great warrior against open borders.

From “It’s time for Democrats to go low” by Peter Rothpletz at The Guardian: ”

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.

Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.

Trumpism has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them….As the commentator SE Cupp recently observed, “it doesn’t get said enough, but Trump’s enduring legacy will be convincing BOTH parties to lower the bar, and that possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters”. Democrats can either bemoan the fact the fundamental rules of politics and discourse have changed or they can adapt to it. In the four years to come, emboldened voices on the right will work to expand the Overton window. Democrats’ reaction to this effort must not materialize as feigned – or earnest – injury and horror. Take the punch and return the favor.

Rothpletz argues further, “This new, more muscular messaging strategy must be combined with a far more aggressive war footing in the halls of Congress….Mike Johnson, the House speaker, will have only a 220-seat majority. However, Republicans are poised to lose three seats (if not more) as members resign to join the Trump administration. That will leave them with a majority of 217-seats, meaning Johnson can only afford to lose one member on major – and minor – votes…..Johnson will need to pass a bill to fund the government. Democrats must not help him.”

Also, “Time and again congressional Democrats have swept in to save Republican leaders – and Republican voters – from their own lawmakers. This generosity must end. The Dems must bleed the Republican party of its political capital at every opportunity….On a Bulwark podcast this week, the writer Jonathan V Last channeled Alan Moore’s iconic comic book anti-hero Rorschach to describe the mentality Democrats should adopt: “The politicians will look up and shout ‘save us,’ and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’”

Democrats do need to toughen up. But they don’t have the luxury of behaving as lawless and morally bankrupt as Republicans, who routinely get away with behavior that would doom any Democrat. For example, ask yourself what would happen if Democrats staged a riot at the U.S. capitol, which resulted in the death of six police officers. Then those rioters are set free by a Democratic president, and the same Democratic senators who condemned the riots later condone it.

Or look at how the double-standard played out with respect to Supreme Court confirmations. It would take a hell of a lot of inflation to enable Democrats to get away with half the sleaze that Mitch McConnell and Republicans shrug off as business as usual. Yes, Dems can play tougher. Few voters would care if Leader Jeffries poached a couple of Republicans to switch parties with political inducements. But any such moves should be carefully calibrated.

“The Democratic Party begins 2025 with several looming questions about its future,” Stephen Fowler writes in “After major 2024 defeats, the Democratic Party searches for a new direction” at apr.org. “Among them: how to recover from losing the White House and the Senate, in an election that saw Democrats lose ground across nearly every demographic group; who will lead its national party apparatus; and how it will handle President-elect Donald Trump’s second term….But as Trump prepares to retake the White House Monday, Democratic leaders have highlighted other results that show November’s losses are not fatal….For example, many down-ballot Democrats outperformed the top of the ticket in competitive races, with the party managing to gain one seat in the House. That shrunk the margin for an already-tight GOP majority that struggled with infighting during the last Congress….Democrats also saw record fundraising last year, and point to years of behind-the-scenes investment in voter data and campaign resources that they say has created a more coordinated and robust party infrastructure for future election cycles….At an in-person forum in Detroit Thursday, candidates seeking to help run the DNC largely agreed on the path forward for Democrats to regain power and the trust of voters who stayed home or supported Trump: year-round organizing efforts, more resources for state and local parties and spreading the Democratic message beyond traditional and friendly media sources.”

In “Democrats’ future crisis: The biggest states that back them are shrinking” Jonathan J. Cooper reports at AP, via pbs.org: “With America’s population shifting to the South, political influence is seeping from reliably Democratic states to areas controlled by Republicans. Coming out of a presidential election where they lost all seven swing states, Democrats are facing a demographic challenge that could reduce their path to winning the U.S. House of Representatives or the White House for the long term….If current trends hold through the 2030 census, states that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris will lose around a dozen House seats — and Electoral College votes — to states that voted for President-elect Donald Trump. The Democratic path to 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency, will get much narrower….“At the end of the day, Democrats have to be able to win in the South or compete in the South” if they want to control the levers of government, said Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Otherwise, it’s a really uphill battle every time.”….The Brennan Center, which is left-leaning, projects Democratic states in 2024 would lose 12 seats in the next census. The right-leaning American Redistricting Project forecasts a similar blue-to-red shift but pegged the loss at 11 seats, not 12.”

Cooper continues, “To control the White House, House or Senate, Democrats will likely need to do better in the three southern swing states. Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina lean conservative but have elected Democrats at a statewide level….Alternatively, they could try to achieve their long-elusive goal of turning Texas blue or reverse the recent trend toward Republicans in Florida, once a swing state that has shifted hard to the right…. And while Harris won more than half of Hispanic voters, that support was down slightly from the roughly 6 in 10 Hispanic voters that Biden won, according to AP VoteCast. Roughly half of Latino men voted for Harris, down from about 6 in 10 who went for Biden….Democratic resurgence will require much more investment in state parties and a frank assessment of how to appeal to parts of the country that supported Trump, said James Skoufis, a New York state senator running to be chair of the Democratic National Committee….“It requires a reorientation of how we speak with voters,” Skoufis said. “It requires emphasizing our working class values again. And if we’re being honest with ourselves and we’re owning some of what just happened two months ago, we need to shed this perception that we are an elitist party.”

From “2024 Election Post-Mortems: The Elephant Under America’s Political Rug” by Washburnb at Daily Kos: “The oligarchs have acquired and weakened the ability of legacy news media icons like the WaPo and LA Times to warn their readers about the corporate takeover of the US government. The oligarchs and their theofascist allies have also built a modern, think-tank-driven media ecosystem designed to push RW propaganda and misinformation 24/7 for 52 weeks a year. That media ecosystem includes corrupted and shrunken social media platforms like Facebook and X(Twitter). Even TikTok is vulnerable because of its ownership by a Chinese oligarch with ties to the Chinese government—not to mention the national security issues that ownership raises….President Biden’s January 15th farewell address sounded a clear alarm about the corporate/oligarch takeover of American democracy. His labeling of this authoritarian movement as a new tech industrial complex echoed President Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the threat of a rising military industrial complex to American democracy….The Democratic Party and its progressive allies must build a progressive,grassroots-based media/think tank ecosystem that can effectively counter the RW narrative of fear-based cruelty and domination. This work must be done as the Dems mount an effective 50-state/12-months-a-year campaign to reclaim the White House, Congress, and SCOTUS….It’s time for all of us to reclaim and rebuild our American democracy. Let’s agitate, educate, and organize our communities to build the future that we want for our children and their descendants….No one is going to save American democracy from oligarch-financed theofascism but We the People. President Biden made this point perfectly clear at the conclusion of his January 15th farewell address.”

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

Cast your mind back to the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. It was then that Joe Biden emerged as the “Great Moderate Hope.” Recall that by the time the first Democratic presidential primary debates were held in late June 2019, leading candidates were seeking to outflank one another to the left. The thinking was that a Democratic electorate radicalized by the Trump presidency would respond favorably to maximally progressive positions.

Many of these candidates endorsed a wide range of radical policy options: “Medicare for All” reforms that would eliminate private health insurance; a Green New Deal with an aggressive timeline for reducing reliance on fossil fuels; banningfracking; decriminalizing unauthorized migration over the Mexican border; providing health insurance to illegal immigrants; allowing prisoners to vote; abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and promising reparations to the descendants of slaves.

Joe Biden, by and large, did not participate in this race to the left. Instead, he took advantage of both his primary opponents’ radical ideas and the chaos of Trump’s governance by striking a moderate note, promising to pursue progressive but sensible policies, restore the “soul of America,” provide the help Americans needed to get through the crisis, and, of course and above all, beat Donald Trump. This was a congenial message to the Democratic primary electorate, starting with black voters in South Carolina on February 29 and running through every demographic on Super Tuesday and beyond. It turned out that, despite the strenuous appeals of many candidates to the party’s rising left, most Democratic primary voters had more pragmatic and moderate views than the media-anointed advocates for a more radical party. Other candidates’ failure to understand this emptied the field for Biden, who cruised to the nomination after Super Tuesday.

Then a funny thing happened which was a “tell” on whether Biden intended to govern—as opposed to run—as a moderate. Usually, candidates attempt to move toward the center in preparation for a general-election campaign. But Biden did the reverse. He formed six “unity task forces” jointly coordinated by Biden and Bernie Sanders campaign figures, covering climate change, criminal-justice reform, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. The co-chairs included such lions of the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, then-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the task forces themselves were well stocked with Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) supporters. The task forces produced a blizzard of positions and language considerably to the left of the “moderate, normie” politics upon which Biden had built his successful campaign. And these positions and language found their way into the Democratic Party platform, were incorporated into Biden’s campaign promises and, importantly, determined how the Biden administration made staffing and policy decisions. Despite Biden and his team’s initial insistence that the strenuous leftism found on Twitter wasn’t real life, by the end of the campaign they seemed to be quite happy to act as though it was.

Sure enough, once the Biden administration was up and running, moderation was conspicuous by its absence. First, there were the executive orders that, among other things, dramatically loosened the rules for dealing with illegal immigrants (pleasing progressive immigration advocacy groups), cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline and paused oil and gas leasing on Federal lands (pleasing progressive climate groups) and instituted a sweeping, government-wide effort to promote “equity” (pleasing the congeries of progressive identity-focused groups). He also signaled his support for transgender activists by appointing a transwoman, Rachel “gender-affirming care is settled science” Levine, as Assistant Secretary for Health and de factoadministration spokesperson on transgender issues. And Biden repeatedly referred to transgender equality as “the civil rights issue of our time.”

None of this suggested a moderate approach targeted to the bulk of voters who had put him in office but rather one focused on pleasing the progressive wing of his party. The ordinary voters that supported Biden had bought the image of moderate “Scranton Joe” who would restore normality to the country after the stormy Trump years and the double whammy of a pandemic and subsequent economic crash. They were not really looking for a “transformational” president.

Biden, however, did aspire to be one, not least in the economic realm where he pursued an amazingly aggressive agenda despite his narrow victory and thin congressional majorities. The first indicator of this was the American Rescue Plan (ARP). While there was a reasonable argument for a stimulus package of some size, Democrats, with Biden’s support, opted for a super-sized $1.9 trillion package that included $1,400 per person direct payments to households, an increased, fully-refundable child tax credit, $350 billion to state and local governments and much, much more. This was on top of well over $2 trillion in stimulus spending already passed at the end of the Trump administration. Larry Summers warned that a stimulus of the size pushed by Democrats had a high probability of spiking inflation.

And spike inflation it did. While some inflation was likely unavoidable due to supply-chain issues as the economy revved up, there seems little doubt that over-stimulating the economy made the inflation surge substantially worse than it would otherwise have been. As it happened, the inflation rate did indeed go up dramatically in the aftermath of the ARP eventually hitting 9 percent, a 40-year high, in mid-2022.

Read more…

In thinking about the choices any new presidential administration faces, something occurred to me about Donald Trump that may be worth considering by Democrats trying to cope with him, so I wrote about it at New York:

Having never lacked faith in himself, Donald Trump probably feels completely entitled to his 2024 election win, the governing trifecta it created, and the relatively high levels of popularity (for him, anyway) that made it all possible. But the odds are very high that between the weighty national problems he inherits and the controversial nature of some of the things he wants to do, he’s probably at the summit of his popularity. As Ross Barkan recently argued at New York, there may be nowhere to go but down:

“Now are the days of wine and roses for MAGA because Joe Biden is still president and Trump’s reign remains hypothetical. On January 20, the script flips: The inflation and affordability crises are Trump’s problems. So is governing, which he has never excelled at. While Trump’s second term may promise, in theory, less chaos than his first, there isn’t much evidence that his White House will evince the grim, rapacious discipline of the Bush-Cheney years, when Republicans actually dominated all policymaking at home and abroad.”

Trump does, however, have some control over how much popularity he is willing to lose. Like anyone who becomes president with some political capital and the ready means to use it (i.e., controlling Congress as well as the White House, and having a lot of friends on the U.S. Supreme Court too), the 47th president will have to decide whether to take some risks on policies that are very likely to reduce his popularity or, instead, play to the galleries. To put it even more simply, he can cash in some chips on stuff he wants to do that could offend or even shock some of the people who voted for him or keep building his stash for the future. Given Trump’s almost unlimited control over his troops in Washington, he can probably go in either direction, but that choice of direction could have an enormous impact on those of us who would greatly prefer a less ambitious MAGA agenda.

There are a lot of reasons Trump may not care if he remains popular while fulfilling his presidential goals. This is the final presidential term of a 78-year-old man; for him, the future really is right now. Yes, forcing unpopular measures through Congress might endanger the fragile Republican control of the House in the 2026 midterms. But history indicates it’s very likely Democrats will flip the House no matter what Republicans do, and let’s face it: The long-range future of the Republican Party may not be of great interest to the president-elect. Even after being nominated as its presidential candidate three straight times while gradually grinding down intraparty opposition to a fine dust, Trump still acts suspiciously toward his party’s Establishment and clearly views it as a vehicle rather than a cause. This is more speculative, but given his personality profile the 47th president may even prefer, or at least not mind, a falloff in the GOP’s electoral performance once he’s gone.

Add in Trump’s impulsiveness, which doesn’t suggest someone for whom delay of gratification comes naturally, and it seems a “go big, then be gone” attitude is likely. Beyond that, it’s unclear how sensitive this man is to changes in popularity: He’s never been in an election he didn’t think he’d won, and he has a tendency to ignore the polls that give him news he doesn’t want in favor of the one or two that show support for his agenda and message always remaining sky-high. If he did something that made his popularity crash, would he even notice it, and if not, would any of the sycophants around him break the bad — and possibly fake — news?

All in all, the best bet is that Donald Trump will pursue his maximum agenda with little regard to how anyone feels about it so long as he’s getting it done. Perhaps Republican officeholders (e.g., his vice-president) who have plans beyond 2028 can talk him into more prudent conduct; but in case you haven’t noticed, he’s stubborn, and it will probably take a lot of blatant, in-your-face adversity to change his course. Democrats can supply some of that, of course, but a stronger than usual popular backlash could matter most.

 

In “Trump’s Tax Plan: A Guide for Advocates,” Navigator Research shares the following “key takeaways” from a poll they conducted last month:

• Democrats are more trusted to make sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes, while Trump and Republicans are more trusted to handle the level of taxes paid by the middle class.

• Only one in five have heard “a lot” about Trump’s tax plan, with Americans divided along party lines on initial support.

• The framing of Trump’s tax plan is critical: framing the plan as giving “tax cuts to the rich and big corporations while shifting the burden to the middle class” drives opposition up to more than three in five Americans, while Republican messaging drives support up to a similar level.

Drilling down,

“Americans trust Democrats more on “making sure the rich and big corporations pay their fair share in taxes” (net +11 trust Democrats more), while Republicans hold an advantage on “the level of taxes paid by the middle class” (net +5 Trump and Republicans)….Among independents, Trump and the Republican Party have an advantage over the Democratic Party on both items.

Views of Trump’s tax plan are polarized along partisan lines, as seven in ten Democrats oppose the plan (net -59 support) and two in three Republicans support it (net +58 support).

Framing Trump’s tax plan as giving “tax cuts to the rich and big corporations while shifting the burden to the middle class” drives opposition up to more than three in five Americans (62% oppose), while Republican messaging drives support up to a similar level (64% support).

After reading Democratic messaging about Trump’s tax plan, nearly three in five (57%) say it “would hurt people like me.” By comparison, after reading Republican messaging about the plan, only a plurality (45%) say it “would help people like me.”

Among those who read Democratic messaging about Trump’s tax plan, the top concern was that it “wouldn’t help middle- and working-class people struggling to deal with rising costs” (35% top two concern).

It appears Democrats have much to gain by pressing their case against Trump’s tax policies.

In trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in news from Washington, I pointed out some issues in the Trump transition that ought to encourage Democrats, and wrote about them at New York:

Even before Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, we were being assured — or in some cases warned — that Trump 2.0 would be a lean, mean MAGA machine in sharp contrast to its chaotic predecessor regime. There were an immense number of predictions that the 47th president would “hit the ground running” the very moment he was inaugurated, having gotten a head start with an unusually early roster of major appointments and enjoying total power over a Republican Party in which pre-Trump habits have been hunted to extinction. He claimed a historic mandate to do whatever he wanted, and the only big doubt was whether the revolution he promised in American life and government would be most rapidly promoted by his lapdog Congress or via his own lordly exercises of executive power.

In an interview with Politico, longtime Trump intimate Steve Bannon thought it important to rebrand the transition in order to capture the breathtaking speed with which everything would happen:

““I tell people, “shock and awe was a ’17 concept.” ‘Days of thunder,’ I think are gonna be the concepts starting next Monday,’ Bannon said. ‘And I think these days of thunder starting next week are going to be incredibly, incredibly intense.'”

Despite all the hype, as Inauguration Day approaches, there are signs that Trump 2.0 may actually be off schedule in important respects. The only major nominee who is likely to be confirmed by the Senate on Day One is the least controversial, Marco Rubio as secretary of State. Trump’s fantasy of getting the entire Cabinet instantly approved, which appears to have driven his timetable of appointments, is dissipating rapidly. There’s still considerable uncertainty over the scope of initial executive orders and pardons. But most importantly, the administration’s loyal troops in Congress are still in disarray over their basic legislative strategy for implementing the 47th president’s agenda — disarray that extends to many important details.

In 2017, prior to Trump taking the oath of office, congressional Republicans quickly agreed on a two-stage legislative strategy for the year, with one filibuster-proof budget-reconciliation bill being devoted to the repeal of Obamacare and other spending measures and another designed to enact tax cuts. They enacted a budget resolution to set up all this legislation a week before Inauguration Day (Democrats did the same prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021). But House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have yet to agree on the most basic blueprint for 2025: the number and scope of budget-reconciliation bills, which in turn will determine how rapidly they can move to implement the Trump agenda, as Politico reports:

“Under the best-case scenario laid out by Johnson this week, it will be late February before Republicans find themselves similarly situated this time — and even then, the one-bill-versus-two-bill question might not be settled.

“The inability to answer central strategic questions now foreshadows much bigger problems ahead.”

Even if Johnson bends the knee and agrees to a two-bill strategy enabling an initial budget-reconciliation bill on border security and energy as Thune prefers, it won’t come with the speed that made this strategy compelling to senators in the first place. It appears, for example, that the administration won’t have the money to really get mass deportation rolling immediately, as they wished. And despite the pleas from both chambers that Trump resolve the strategic deadlock between House and Senate, the president-elect has refused to play referee, all but saying out loud that it’s not his job. Beyond the one-bill/two-bill dispute, GOP members of Congress are quietly begging Trump to delete items from his executive-order blitz that they might need legislatively to generate budget savings to pay for border spending and tax cuts. There’s zero clarity about how Elon Musk’s DOGE will enter into the equation, beyond the scary recognition that he commands a gigantic troll army that will order Republicans in Congress to massively cut spending wherever and whenever he and his unpaid tech bros suggest. And there’s no consensus at all as to how Congress will satisfy Trump’s demand for a debt-limit increase, which most Republicans hate like sin itself.

Perhaps the administration’s and Congress’s plans will all come together even as the new president appraises the crowd size at his second inaugural event, but it’s increasingly clear that all the MAGA cackling over the incredible efficiency and harmony underlying Trump 2.0 has been grossly premature. The problems may simply reflect the stubborn resilience of objective reality: It’s really not very easy to remake American government while cutting taxes and deporting millions of immigrants and somehow not denying Americans the benefits and services they want and think they deserve. You can’t “hit the ground running” unless you have a clear idea of where you are going, a realistic sense of feasible outcomes, and a strategy for keeping 77 million Trump voters onboard despite their hallucinatory expectations that he’ll lower grocery prices while ushering in world peace.

At Daily Kos, Emily Singer shares some poll stats, which bode poorly for Republicans: As Donald Trump prepares to take the oath of office for a second time, he claims to have a “massive” mandate to enact his destructive agenda. But new polling shows that’s far from the truth….A NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll released Wednesday shows that just 44% of Americans view Trump favorably, while 49% view him unfavorably. That’s nearly identical to the 45% approval rating Trump has in Civiqs’ tracking poll….The fact that Trump is viewed unfavorably before he even takes office is a warning sign for his tenure. The start of a presidential term is usually when a president is at their high-water mark of approval…..The NPR/PBS News/Marist College poll has other warning signs for Trump….Just 31% of Americans say the tariff policy Trump plans to enact would help the economy. That should be a flashing red warning light for Trump, showing that Americans will likely blame him if those tariffs cause prices to skyrocket, as economists expect….What’s more, 62% of Americans oppose Trump’s plan to pardon people who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes for their role in the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021….It’s not just Trump who is unpopular among voters. Trump’s Cabinet nominees are also underwater….Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, has just a 19% approval rating in the NPR/PBS News/Marist College survey. And the survey was conducted before Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, when Democratic senators laid bare the nominee’s abhorrent behavior of alleged sexual assault, womanizing, on-the-job drinking, and misogynistic remarks….Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk, is broadly unpopular. Only 37% of Americans have a favorable view of him, while 46% view him unfavorably, according to the poll. That’s also a warning sign for Trump.’

If you were wondering “Who were the strongest Senate and House candidates of 2024?,” Nathaniel Rakich brings the answer at 538?abcnews.com: “One general trend here is that Democratic Senate candidates tended to punch above their weight. Democrats outperformed Harris in 23 of the 32 races in the table, helping them to win Senate races in four states that Trump carried: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. A big reason for this is probably that Democrats had more incumbents running for reelection than Republicans did (15 to 8), and, while incumbency advantage isn’t what it used to be, it’s still not nothing….” Here’s the chart showing the derails, minus color coding:

“Democrats certainly don’t want to replicate the destructive, hyperpartisan style that has characterized the GOP,” Julian E. Zelizer writes in “Partisanship Has Worked for Democrats Before. It Can Again” at The New Republic. “As a party that is committed to the continued role of government in American life and the imperative of governance, Democrats must rightly insist on maintaining guardrails that contain their own fiercest instincts. They don’t want to become a second party willing to send the nation into financial default simply to score partisan points; nor do they want to undermine the integrity of democratic institutions in the short-term pursuit of power….But in the space between bipartisanship and hyperpartisanship, there is a wide-ranging world of responsible partisanship within which congressional Democrats can operate, as became clear in the recent struggle over government funding….What are some of the partisan strategies Democrats can deploy in the year ahead? Most important will be for congressional Democrats to remain disciplined. Voting the party line and remaining on the same page will be essential if the House and Senate caucuses want to act as a coherent bloc, as they did with this battle over the continuing resolution, thereby forcing narrow Republican majorities to take the difficult positions that Trump will push on them. Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer need to make clear that any member who decides to go rogue will lose support from the party. Jeffries and Schumer must work closely with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to leverage the purse strings as rewards for loyalty….Given the stakes of the battle ahead, they must make clear to all Democrats that any serious dissension will come at a high cost. Democrats should work in unison to force issues onto the floor, such as proposals for additional federal investment in deindustrialized areas, to push Republicans into uncomfortable positions that will reveal the limitations of their populist agenda.”

The following article by Robert Reich, professor of public policy at U. Cal, Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor, is cross-posted from Alternet.org:

Trump will try to take credit for the Biden economy. Don’t let him. And don’t let Republican enablers of Trump or the media give him credit, either.

In 2017, Trump inherited a strong economy from President Obama and never stopped congratulating himself for it. He claimed that “we created the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

Rubbish. Trump tanked the economy with his trade wars and his botched pandemic response.

Now, Trump is inheriting an even stronger economy.

On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that the nation added 256,000 jobs in December, significantly more than economists expected.

The total number of jobs created under Biden’s four years is 16.6 million. That makes him the only president in history to have presided over an economy that created jobs every single month.

He has also presided over the lowest average unemployment rate of any president in a half-century, ending at 4.1 percent.

The nation gained more jobs in Biden’s four years than it did under Trump’s first term of office, or under either of Barack Obama’s or George W. Bush’s terms of office.

Working-age women are now employed at record levels.

The gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level ever.

Biden has also presided over an economy that has grown faster and created more jobs than any other advanced economy around the world. Under Biden, the American economy grew faster than did the pre-pandemic Trump economy.

Yes, the United States and every other country had to deal with inflation, but Biden brought inflation down to below 3 percent — lower than in most other countries.

Americans have every reason to be outraged at decades of policies that prioritized corporations over people. But the Biden administration cracked down on corporate price-gouging, monopolization, and trickle-down nonsense.

All this means that Trump begins his second presidency with the best economy a president has inherited in living memory.

Will he claim credit for it? You betcha.

In addition, some of the most important Biden initiatives will start to pay off only during the Trump presidency (assuming Trump doesn’t reverse them).

Biden took on Big Pharma by capping out-of-pocket drug costs for millions of seniors on Medicare. That lowered the price of 64 drugs. These changes will take place throughout 2025. More drugs are scheduled to get cheaper in the following years.

Will Trump claim credit? Of course he will.

Biden’s infrastructure law will give us better roads, bridges, public transit, and broadband access. But most Americans won’t see those improvements for a year or two, well into Trump’s term of office.

Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act will provide more American-made semiconductors, but we won’t see them for a few years, so during Trump’s presidency.

Biden’s clean energy initiatives will also pay off with greater fuel efficiency and less pollution. But here again, not for several years.

Will Trump claim credit for these successes as well? Do birds fly?

His whole life, Trump has taken credit for things he simply inherited, starting with his own personal fortune.

Just as he avoids accountability for the bad stuff he’s done, such as his attempted coup against the United States, he congratulates himself for the good stuff others have done.

If Trump doesn’t wreck the economy with his bonkers tariff plans or cruel mass deportations, you can be sure he’ll take a bow for what Biden built.

Don’t let him. Don’t let Republican politicians claim credit. Don’t let the media allow Trump or other Republicans to claim credit. Speak out. Remind America that these good things happened because of Joe Biden.

Thomas B. Edsall has a must-read column, “Trump’s Return Is a Civil Society Failure” at The New York Times. Among his insights: “A key question emerging from the 2024 elections is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028?….A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists….YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees) — primarily in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, along with 881 people elsewhere in the nation — to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment….Asked which party they trusted “more to improve the economy, protect Americans from crime, handle the issue of immigration,” majorities of respondents chose the Republican Party, ranging from 55 to 34 percent on the economy to 57 to 29 percent on immigration….Asked whether the Democratic Party or the Republican Party was “in touch or out of touch” and “strong or weak,” majorities of working-class voters described the Democrats as out of touch (53 to 34 percent) and weak (50 to 32) and the Republicans as “in touch” (52 to 35) and “strong” (63 to 23).

Edsall continues, “More significant, on two survey questions that previously favored Democrats — whether the party “on my side or not” and which party respondents trusted “to fight for people like me” — the Democrats lost ground to Republicans. Fifty percent of voters participating in the survey said that the Republican Party would fight for people “like me,” while 36 percent said the Democratic Party would….Thirty-four percent of those polled said that the Democratic Party was on their side, and 49 percent said it was not. Fifty percent said that the Republican Party was on their side, and 37 percent said it was not….In an essay accompanying the release of the poll, Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote:

The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Kamala Harris explains her support for publicly funded sex-change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”

Edsall poses the big question, “Did the Trump campaign’s focus on inflation, immigration, crime and transgender rights succeed in pushing the public image of the Democratic Party farther from the mainstream, no longer concerned with the day-to-day issues of the middle class?”

Edsall adds, “One clearly troubling development for Democrats is the failure of President Biden’s economic initiatives to win votes in either red or blue counties….While inflation was profoundly damaging to Democratic prospects in 2024, Biden administration programs like the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act paid large dividends to the regions of the country that had been economically suffering the most ­— red America……..Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, wrote by email that

a substantial fraction of Trump (MAGA) supporters believe that demographic change and changes in gender norms are a threat to their way of life and to their status in American society. Most importantly, Republicans (and influencers) have successfully convinced many people that Democrats and liberals are directly responsible for creating and supporting the social forces that they are frightened of.

Edsll notes further, however, that  “In a reflection of the scope of dispute on these issues, Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, declared in an email: “I fundamentally disagree with the proposition that Trump’s re-election is a watershed moment marking the demise of the progressive cause.”….Instead, Kupchan argued, “Trump’s victory reflected an anti-incumbent wave, not a decisive rightward shift.”….Neil Malhotra, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email that

the idea that the Democratic Party is a tarnished brand or that the Democratic Party is nearing collapse is highly overrated. An unpopular incumbent administration lost a close election. This has happened countless times in American history, and we have not claimed that a party was on its deathbed.

The 2024 elections, Malhotra continued, were

nothing compared to the 1980s when the Democrats lost three consecutive landslide presidential elections. In the 1930s, the Republican Party was shut out of power across the country except for the Supreme Court, and the party survived.

Edsall quotes James M. Lindsay, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Affairs, who argues, “The question, then, is not why the Democrats lost the White House, but why the center is not holding across industrialized democracies. The list of culprits is long. Rapid globalization. Waves of immigration that exceed the capacity of countries to absorb them. Growing income inequality. Technological change that diminishes the employment prospects for unskilled workers and will soon diminish the prospects for skilled workers. Social media that give disproportionate attention to extreme voices….So, yes, the liberal project is endangered, but it is endangered in both its right-of-center and left-of-center versions.”