This week’s election results in Wisconsin had a pretty clear message for Democrats, as I explained at New York:

The most tiresome intra-Democratic debate of them all soon reached crisis levels after Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory. Should the “party of the people” focus on the threat to democratic institutions MAGA authoritarians most definitely pose? Or should they instead pursue lost non-college-educated voters via the ancient “populist” formula of class warfare over purely economic issues? The debate has often become very personal, with “populists” tending to dismiss arguments about democracy as elitist mumbo jumbo unintelligible to working stiffs who just want to see the money, and people frightened about fascism worrying that Americans will cheerfully sell out our heritage of liberty for $2 a gallon gas.

Fortunately, and just in the nick of time, a figure has emerged at the highest levels of government who can instantly unite “populists” and “defenders of democracy.” That would be Elon Musk, who is simultaneously the richest man on earth (and in modern history) and an even greater threat to democratic institutions than Trump. He is, moreover, via the DOGE initiative, waging aggressive war on public-sector programs that restrain his tiny class of corporate predators and benefit the general public while violating every constitutional norm imaginable. And suffusing this entire assault on the people and the institutions to which Democrats should feel loyalty is a nihilistic personality exhibiting some of the worst impulses of the human race: narcissism, messianism, ethnocentrism, worship of power and technology, and a testosterone-poisoned lust for combat and destruction. It’s as though Bruce Wayne had decided to become the Joker instead of Batman.

Terrifying as Musk is, Democrats should thank their lucky stars that he doesn’t simply operate in the background of the MAGA movement, financing Trump’s antics but otherwise remaining anonymous. No: He has insisted on a very public place on the stages of politics, commerce, and culture, rivaled only by his benefactor and enabler in the White House. And the more people see of him, the less they seem to like him.

This week’s judicial election in Wisconsin shows what happens when this peculiar man makes himself the center of attention in a popularity contest not limited to his sycophants on X. The most polarized electorate in the entire nation fed by the most expensive campaign ever to revolve around judges decided by a healthy margin that they did not want Elon Musk in charge of their destiny (much less the “destiny of humanity” he so fatuously claimed was at stake). And better yet, the dispirited ranks of Democrats turned out disproportionately at the polls in the first electoral test since last November’s disaster.

It’s now clear that so long as Musk is the most powerful figure in the administration and the living symbol of Trump 2.0, Democrats should make Musk-bashing even more of a daily preoccupation than it has already become. Populists can draw fresh attention to the very real class implications of DOGE’s assault on corporate regulation and on practical services like Social Security offices accessible to old folks and medical facilities that can keep middle-class people alive. Defenders of democratic institutions can continue to expose (and attack in courts) the arrogant pretense that self-appointed engineers who brag about their destructive intentions should be entrusted with “reforming” government. And everyone can keep exposing the deeply sinister tech-bro worldview Musk and his accomplices exemplify, aimed at converting the United States of America into a privately held corporate oligarchy governed by insanely wealthy elites deploying AI at will and treating life itself as a video game in which the losers are the rest of us.

Musk-bashing won’t solve all the problems facing Democrats. They still need to regain public trust about their own values and competence. For one thing, DOGE’s very existence remains a terrible indictment of the contempt for government that is now so epidemic, and that Democrats have for so long either ignored or tried to buy off with popular benefits; they need their own credible “government reform” agenda and the determination to carry it out.

But make no mistake: Elon Musk is a political gift, particularly if his ego and Trump’s reliance on his support mean he will insist on keeping himself front and center, showing up at Cabinet meetings and MAGA rallies alike while indulging his endless glossolalia on X. So long as he remains the face of Trump 2.0, Democrats would be wise to make sure that face is the first thing Americans think of when they survey the political landscape. If Musk and DOGE crash or are subdued by the jealous god in the Oval Office (as some reports suggest Trump has signaled may happen), that is a very good thing in itself and a worthy goal for the opposition.

 

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.

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.

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.

Bernie Sanders said something this week that really upset this yellow-dog Democrat, so I wrote about it at New York:

At a time when plenty of people have advice for unhappy progressive Democrats, one of their heroes, Bernie Sanders, had a succinct message: Don’t love the party, leave it. In an interview with the New York Times, he previewed a barnstorming tour he has undertaken with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but made it clear he wouldn’t be asking audiences to rally ’round the Democratic Party. “One of the aspects of this tour is to try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party,” Sanders said.

In one respect, that isn’t surprising. Though he has long aligned with the Democratic Party in Congress and has regularly backed its candidates, Sanders has always self-identified as an independent, even when he filed to run for president as a Democrat in 2020. Now, as before, he seems to regard the Democratic Party as inherently corrupted by its wealthy donor base, per the Times:

“During the interview on Wednesday, Mr. Sanders repeatedly criticized the influence of wealthy donors and Washington consultants on the party. He said that while Democrats had been a force for good on social issues like civil rights, women’s rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, they had failed on the economic concerns he has dedicated his political career to addressing.”

Still, when Democrats are now already perceived as losing adherents, and as many progressives believe their time to take over the party has arrived, Sanders’s counsel is both oddly timed and pernicious. Yes, those on the left who choose independent status may still work with Democrats on both legislative and electoral projects, much as Sanders does. And they may run in and win Democratic primaries on occasion without putting on the party yoke. But inevitably, refusing to stay formally within the Democratic tent will cede influence to centrists and alienate loyalist voters as well. And in 18 states, voters who don’t register as Democrats may be barred from voting in Democratic primaries, which proved a problem for Sanders during his two presidential runs.

More fundamentally, Democrats need both solidarity and stable membership at this moment with the MAGA wolf at the door and crucial off-year and midterm elections coming up. Staying in the Democratic ranks doesn’t mean giving up progressive principles or failing to challenge timid or ineffective leadership. To borrow an ancient cigarette-ad slogan, it’s a time when it’s better to “fight than switch.”

That said, there may be certain deep-red parts of the country where the Democratic brand is so toxic that an independent candidacy could make some sense for progressives. The example of 2024 independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn of Nebraska, who ran a shockingly competitive (if ultimately unsuccessful) race against Republican incumbent Deb Fischer, turned a lot of heads. But while Osborn might have been a “populist” by most standards, he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a progressive, and in fact, centrist and progressive Nebraska Democrats went along with Osborn as a very long shot. They didn’t abandon their party; they just got out of the way.

Someday the popularity of electoral systems without party primaries or with ranked-choice voting may spread to the point where candidates and voters alike will gradually shed or at least weaken party labels. Then self-identifying as an independent could be both principled and politically pragmatic.

But until then, it’s important to understand why American politics have regularly defaulted to a two-party system dating all the way back to those days when the Founders tried strenuously to avoid parties altogether. In a first-past-the-post system where winners take all, there’s just too much at stake to allow those with whom you are in agreement on the basics to splinter. That’s particularly true when the other party is rigidly united in subservience to an authoritarian leader. Sanders is one of a kind in his ability to keep his feet both within and outside the Democratic Party. His example isn’t replicable without making a bad situation for progressives a whole lot worse.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the fresh analysis of the 2024 elections by Democratic data hound David Shor, so I tried to summarize his findings and their implications at New York:

Arguments over how Trump won and Democrats lost in 2024 remain in the background of today’s political discourse: Trump fans are focused on exaggerating the size and significance of the GOP victory, and Democrats are mostly settling scores with one another. But there’s also some serious analysis of hard data underway. And this week, an election diagnosis from Blue Rose Research’s David Shor, who was interviewed by Vox’s Eric Levitz and the New York Times’ Ezra Klein, is drawing particular attention.

Shor’s findings largely confirm the conventional wisdom about how Trump won in 2024, including three main points: (1) Trump made significant gains as compared to his 2020 performance among Black, Latino, Asian American, immigrant and under-30 voters; (2) Trump did better among marginally engaged voters than did Kamala Harris, reversing an ancient assumption that Democrats would benefit from relatively high turnout; and (3) inflation was the overriding issue among persuadable voters, even as Democrats overemphasized the threat to democracy posed by Trump’s return to power.

It’s Shor’s explanation of why these trends occurred that’s most interesting. Among every Trump-trending slice of the electorate, unique pressures related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic inflation that followed undermined support for the incumbent Democratic Party. But there were some other things going on. For example, the non-white-voters trends reflected, Shor told Levitz, a delayed ideological polarization that had hit white voters decades ago:

“If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.

“But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57 percent of Hispanic moderates, which is really very similar to the 51 percent that Harris got among white moderates.

“You know, white people only really started to polarize heavily on ideology in the 1990s. Now, nonwhite voters are starting to polarize on ideology the same way that white voters did.”

To put it another way, non-white voters were disproportionately loyal to the Democratic Party for many years, and that loyalty inevitably began to wear off. The intense ideological polarization of the 2024 election sped that process along, even though one might expect that Trump’s barely concealed racism and overt nativism would slow it down. Why didn’t they? Mostly, Shor suggests, because Trump-trending voters weren’t viewing or reading media coverage of the 45th president’s horrific views and conduct:

“People who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.

“And I think this is just analytically important. People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.”

The massive impact of diverse media consumption is most evident in Shor’s analysis of the single-most-stunning finding about the 2024 results: the huge gender gap among young voters, with Trump doing exceptionally well among young men, as he explained to Klein:

“18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics …

“If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.

“If I were going to speculate, I’d say phones and social media have a lot to do with this.”

Klein suggests some very specific points of divergence between young men and young women that Shor agrees with entirely:

“It seems plausible to me that social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. If you’re a 23-year-old man interested in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and online, you’re being driven into a very intensely male online world.

“Whereas, if you’re a 23-year-old female and your interests align with what the YouTube algorithm codes, you are not entering that world. You’re actually entering the opposite world. You’re seeing Brené Brown and all these other things.”

Finally, Shor provides some definitive evidence that Democratic messaging about Trump’s anti-democratic characteristics fell on rocky ground. By an astonishing 78 percent to 18 percent margin, voters said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important than “preserving America’s institutions.” This finding suggests that in 2024, and right now, Democrats should exploit Trump’s broken promises about the economy and other practical concerns instead of focusing on how Trump has broken those promises. This isn’t a binary choice as much as a perspective on how to talk about outrages like Elon Musk’s assault on the federal government, which negatively affects the benefits and services Americans rely on and is intended to benefit Musk’s fellow plutocrats via skewed tax cuts and paralysis of corporate oversight, as Shor told Levitz:

“Trump and Elon have really spent the first part of their term diving into the biggest weaknesses of the Republican Party — namely, they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires, they’re cutting essential services and causing chaos for regular people left and right, while trying to slash social safety net programs. It’s Paul Ryan–ism on steroids.”

 

Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:

For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.

Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.

This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:

“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”

The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:

“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …

“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”

Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.

Having closely watched congressional developments over the last few weeks, I’ve concluded that one much-discussed Democratic tactic for dealing with Trump 2.0 is probably mistaken, as I explained at New York:

No one is going to rank Mike Johnson among the great arm-twisting Speakers of the House, like Henry Clay, Tom Reed, Sam Rayburn, or even Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he still resembles Winston Churchill’s description of Clement Atlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about.”

But nonetheless, in the space of two weeks, Johnson has managed to get two huge and highly controversial measures through the closely divided House: a budget resolution that sets the stage for enactment of Donald Trump’s entire legislative agenda in one bill, then an appropriations bill keeping the federal government operating until the end of September while preserving the highly contested power of Trump and his agents to cut and spend wherever they like.

Despite all the talk of divisions between the hard-core fiscal extremists of the House Freedom Caucus and swing-district “moderate” Republicans, Johnson lost just one member — the anti-spending fanatic and lone wolf Thomas Massie of Kentucky — from the ranks of House Republicans on both votes. As a result, he needed not even a whiff of compromise with House Democrats (only one of them, the very Trump-friendly Jared Golden of Maine, voted for one of the measures, the appropriations bill).

Now there are a host of factors that made this impressive achievement possible. The budget-resolution vote was, as Johnson kept pointing out to recalcitrant House Republicans, a blueprint for massive domestic-spending cuts, not the cuts themselves. Its language was general and vague enough to give Republicans plausible deniability. And even more deviously, the appropriations measure was made brief and unspecific in order to give Elon Musk and Russ Vought the maximum leeway to whack spending and personnel to levels far below what the bill provided (J.D. Vance told House Republicans right before the vote that the administration reserved the right to ignore the spending the bill mandated entirely, which pleased the government-hating HFC folk immensely). And most important, on both bills Johnson was able to rely on personal lobbying from key members of the administration, most notably the president himself, who had made it clear any congressional Republican who rebelled might soon be looking down the barrel of a Musk-financed MAGA primary opponent. Without question, much of the credit Johnson is due for pulling off these votes should go to his White House boss, whose wish is his command.

But the lesson Democrats should take from these events is that they cannot just lie in the weeds and expect the congressional GOP to self-destruct owing to its many divisions and rivalries. In a controversial New York Times op-ed last month, Democratic strategist James Carville argued Democrats should “play dead” in order to keep a spotlight on Republican responsibility for the chaos in Washington, D.C., which might soon extend to Congress:

“Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing and, at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle-class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.”

Now to be clear, Congressional GOP dysfunction could yet break out; House and Senate Republicans have struggled constantly to stay on the same page on budget strategy, the depth of domestic-spending cuts, and the extent of tax cuts. But as the two big votes in the House show, their three superpowers are (1) Trump’s death grip on them all, (2) the willingness of Musk and Vought and Trump himself to take the heat for unpopular policies, and (3) a capacity for lying shamelessly about what they are doing and what it will cost. Yes, ultimately, congressional Republicans will face voters in November 2026. But any fear of these elections is mitigated by the realization that thanks to the landscape of midterm races, probably nothing they can do will save control of the House or forfeit control of the Senate. So Republicans have a lot of incentives to follow Trump in a high-speed smash-and-grab operation that devastates the public sector, awards their billionaire friends with tax cuts, and wherever possible salts the earth to make a revival of good government as difficult as possible. Democrats have few ways to stop this nihilistic locomotive. But they may be fooling themselves if they assume it’s going off the rails without their active involvement.

As an inveterate poll-watcher, I have been waiting for the moment when Donald Trump’s job approval numbers went underwater, his accustomed position for nearly all of his presidential career. It arrived around the time he made his speech to Congress, as I noted at New York:

Even as he was delivering the most partisan address to Congress maybe ever, Donald Trump’s public support seemed to be regularly eroding. An updated FiveThirtyEight average of Trump’s approval ratings on March 4 (released just as news broke that ABC was shutting down the revered data site) showed him going underwater for the first time since reoccupying the White House, with 47.6 percent approval and 47.9 percent disapproval. That puts Trump back in the same territory of public opinion he occupied during his first term as president, where (per Gallup) he never achieved more than 50 percent job approval, and averaged a mere 41 percent.

Perhaps Trump will get lucky and conditions in the country will improve enough to validate his agenda, but it’s more likely that the same sour public climate that overwhelmed Joe Biden will now afflict his predecessor and successor.

The Reuters/Ipsos survey that pushed Trump’s numbers into negative territory showed a mood very different from the 47th president’s boasts about a new “golden age” for our country:

“Thirty-four percent of Americans say that the country is headed in the right direction, compared to 49% who say it is off on the wrong track. When it comes to several specific issues, Americans are more likely to say things are off on the wrong track than going in the right direction: cost of living (22% right direction / 60% wrong track), the national economy (31% right direction / 51% wrong track), national politics (33% right direction / 50% wrong track), American foreign policy (33% right direction / 49% wrong track), and employment and jobs (33% right direction / 47% wrong track).”

So all the hype about Trump being a popular president who was in the midst of engineering a major realignment of the American electorate is already looking more than a bit hollow. Trump has a solid Republican base of support and a solid Democratic opposition, with independents currently leaning towards the Democratic Party on most issues. Perhaps Trump’s agenda will gain momentum and support, but since he’s not trying to reach out beyond his party’s base at all, he’s going to need a lift from Americans who only voted for him in 2024 as the lesser of evils and may not vote in the 2026 midterms at all.

At present Trump has lost whatever presidential “honeymoon” he initially enjoyed after his return to the White House, and needs to find new converts to return to genuine popularity. He’s not off to a great start.

Democrats obviously don’t have a lot of leverage over the disastrous decisions that Trump, Musk and their congressional allies are making. But they must use what they have instead of throwing up their hands and relying on the courts, as I argue at New York:

It’s a demoralizing time to be a congressional Democrat. As the Trump-Musk-Vought demolition team continues to dismantle federal government functions and fire personnel, the Republicans who control Congress are standing by passively despite the explicit and implicit threats to their own authority represented by DOGE raids, OMB-ordered freezes and layoffs, and presidential executive orders asserting total control over spending. They may whine about it, but they aren’t willing to buck Trump, who so far seems to be chuckling with pleasure at DOGE’s excesses and even egging Musk on. Meanwhile, Democrats have been excluded categorically from the formal budget process whereby Congress makes long-term fiscal plans, which are designed to be enacted in a huge package (which cannot be filibustered) via a strict party-line vote.

But Democrats in Congress have one big leverage point: Annual appropriations bills, providing the money to keep the federal government going, have to pass both chambers of Congress and can indeed be filibustered in the Senate, which means 41 of the 47 Democratic senators have the absolute power to say no. Democrats have additional leverage in the House, where the tiny GOP majority, combined with an assortment of Republican fiscal hard-liners who never vote for spending bills, means appropriations bills can’t pass without Democratic votes. As the assault on the federal government and on Congress developed in the first days of the second Trump administration, Democrats appeared to be aware of their leverage and ready to use it, as reflected in a comment by Senator Patty Murray to Punchbowl News earlier this month:

“Democrats are, as always, committed to responsibly funding the government, but it is extremely difficult to reach an agreement on toplines — much less full-year spending bills — when the president is illegally blocking vast chunks of approved funding, when he is trying to unilaterally shutter critical agencies, and when an unelected billionaire is empowered to force his way into our government’s central, highly-sensitive payments system [at the Treasury Department]. Democrats and Republicans alike must be able to trust that when a deal gets signed into law, it will be followed.”

With the stopgap spending authority enacted in December due to expire on March 14, now is the time for Democrats to use their leverage to refuse any deal that doesn’t include meaningful curbs on executive usurpation of congressional spending powers. Yes, if executed, this gambit could result in a government shutdown, and Republicans from Trump on down (including those who love all government shutdowns as a way to show how useless government actually is) would seek to blame it on the minority party, despite the GOP’s comprehensive, swaggering control of Washington. But at a time when Democratic constituencies are screaming from every rooftop that they expect their representatives in Washington to do something, refusing to go along with spending bills that the administration will just brush aside seems like a no-brainer.

But now that the moment of truth is approaching, there are signs some congressional Democrats are inclined to flinch in the face of a GOP-engineered choice to shut it or gut it, as Politico explains:

“Democrats are insisting on the guardrails for Trump and Musk amid deep anger on the left about the president’s unilateral dismantling of the federal government. Following a meeting of top GOP appropriators and party leadership Wednesday morning, Republicans officially rejected the proposal.

“Democratic leaders now face a dilemma: Do they hold firm, refrain from bailing Republicans out and allow an unpopular shutdown? Or do they fold and risk the ire of liberal voters eager to see the party stand their ground against Trump and Musk? So far, they are treading carefully.”

In this case, carefully appears to be a synonym for fearfully. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sure isn’t drawing any lines in the sand:

“[Jeffries] deferred to House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut when asked Wednesday whether Democrats could support a funding deal that doesn’t restrain Trump and Musk.”

This is not exactly a “hell no.” More explicitly, Vermont Senator Peter Welch spelled out how Democrats might rationalize a surrender of their leverage, per Punchbowl News:

“‘What makes us think if we put more language in there, [Musk is] gonna pay any attention to that? He’s on a lawless rampage, and there’s nothing stopping him,’ Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) told us. ‘The big question will be if he faces a judicial order and disregards it.’”

This is another way of just throwing up one’s hands and hoping the courts rein in the stampeding chief executive and his turbulent agents. In the meantime, presumably, Democrats can cut their little deals on spending, keep the federal government open, and hope for the best.

If that’s the way the wind is blowing among congressional Democrats, it may represent an extreme version of the belief that the voters don’t care anything about the Constitution or lawful behavior and can be mobilized only to resist Trump by extremely specific cuts in services or programs they value. But if there’s a silver lining to the vast power Elon Musk has been given by the 47th president, it’s that his indifference and even hostility to the very concept of government having any value is so blatant as to shock even the most diffident or inattentive voter. Here’s how my colleague the longtime Musk watcher John Hermann puts it:

“[H]e wants to fire as many people as possible. Punishing workers is a cause and a purpose unto itself, inseparable from a grandiose conflation of personal desires and successes with the fate of humanity. It’s an ecstatic project with an accelerationist character. “I am become meme,” he declares, as his team of private-sector loyalists harasses federal employees with spiteful emails threatening to get rid of them. The message from the largest employer in the country to its disfavored employees could not be much clearer: You are waste, you are fraud. We want to make a spectacle of your misfortune. We cannot wait to fire you.” 

Musk is already unpopular, and he doesn’t really care if the pain suffered by government workers or the “parasites” who depend on the benefits or services they provide make his project a political handicap for Trump and the GOP. Shining as bright a light on what DOGE is doing as possible is really the only play for the opposition party right now. If that means daring Republicans to trigger a government shutdown that MAGA folk will not be able to stop themselves from conspicuously enjoying, so be it.