Nevertheless, D.C. Democrats seem to be some of the last people to learn that there is nothing left to learn about Trump. Trump’s first week back seems to have caught them off guard, so much so that they’ve largely spent the last few days tiptoeing around as multiple crises unfolded. They’ve been careful, circumspect, cautious—and they’ve gotten absolutely banjaxed as a result. It wasn’t until Trump tried to turn off the entire federal government that they recovered a bit of fighting spirit, vowing to escalate the conflict with the GOP into a “street fight.”
On Tuesday morning, The Bulwark’s Sam Stein reported on BlueSky that Democrats were planning to do a press conference on Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6ers—which occurred a full week prior—even as the effects of the Trump administration’s funding freeze were making headlines. The Democrats’ approach raises serious questions about their pathological inability to participate in the modern news cycle. Moreover, the pardoning of the January 6ers became a fait accompli the moment Trump won the election. The time to start raising a hue and cry over those pardons was thus November.
Trump’s actions were of course preceded by copious warnings, most notably in the form of Trump repeatedly saying that he planned to tear down the civil service and replace it with loyalists willing to use the federal government as his own instrument of plunder and revenge. In addition to these warnings, many stories generated well ahead of time elucidated Trump’s purge plans—a tightly reported piece from Jonathan Swan in Axios and two well-trafficked features from The New York Times and Vanity Fair among the biggest stories detailing Trump’s shock-and-awe schemes for the civil service.
There’s a long list of bad habits that Democrats need to break at this point, but we’ll add this to the list: Be ready to respond to the things that Republicans plan to do when they’ve given you several months of head start. If there is a takeaway for Democrats after Trump’s first 10 days in office, it’s that procrastination and lollygagging really kills. Fortunately, there’s still an easy way for them to get two steps ahead of the curve.
Based upon all of this, it seems pretty clear that this administration is just going to keep making its way through Project 2025’s pages. Democrats could probably finagle a copy of that document, given that it is publicly available, and maybe even start messaging against it.
Yes, I know that Trump has repeatedly said that he would not sign a national abortion ban that comes across his desk into law. In the first place, yes, he absolutely would (see above: “lying”), but more importantly, he does not need a bill to arrive on his desk to enact a ban. As we have rather relentlessly reported here at The New Republic, Trump’s Department of Justice will enforce a law that’s already on the books known as the Comstock Act to ban abortion, something that Vice President JD Vance asked Merrick Garland’s DOJ to do when he was still an Ohio senator.
Democrats have some reason to feel a little gun-shy about ramping up these kinds of attacks. The media, too often, reported on Trump’s denials of Project 2025 and his assertions about signing a national abortion ban way too credulously. But that’s a reason to start naming and shaming the media personages who got it so badly wrong. More to the point, Democrats need to spur, if not entirely resuscitate, a popular opposition to Trump and start planning an electoral referendum of what will be another round of failure and misrule. That begins with something that resembles energy and action, no matter how constrained you may be in parliamentary terms.
You look stupid when you’re a week late to a news story, and pathetic when saying you weren’t warned about the stuff that Trump publicly and repeatedly said he’s going to do. This administration wants to burn it all down, and measured responses won’t work as a counter; you can’t wait for your lawyers to go over the text of Trump’s executive orders and for your pollsters to focus-group the optimal response. Besides, you shouldn’t need to when you can just say, “Trump is fucking up the country and plundering the federal government.” Hopefully this week will prove to be a teachable moment heralding a quick course correction, because there’s one thing that Democrats can never say about Trump’s plans: that they weren’t told.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. Read More Details
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