... in the first Trump Administration ... Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics. We voiced outrage on social issue after social issue. We spun ourselves up in a tizzy over an investigation into Russia. We fought Mr. Trump at every corner, on every issue imaginable and muddied up our message in an unwinnable war. We were saved only by his lousy governing and a lot of effort on our side finding good candidates to run for the House and Senate in 2018. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is retreat on the immediate battlefield — and advance in another direction.No, the Democrats didn't just get lucky. The resistance worked! It fired voters up and flipped the House in 2018. It drove Donald Trump from office and won full congressional control in 2020. It kept Trump's poll ratings under water for the entirety of his first term. It pushed back on efforts to repeal Obamacare, separate immigrant families, and embrace the racist right at Charlottesville and elsewhere.
D.C. Democrats such as Carville have decided that the 2024 election was lost during Trump's first term, not as a result of public discontent on inflation and other issues during the presidential term of Joe Biden, whose lack of communication skills made him incapable of persuading skeptical voters that he could govern. Despite Biden's struggles, his vice president barely lost the election, and Democrats fell just short of winning a House majority, yet D.C. Democrats like Carville treat the 2024 election results as a 1932-style rout.
Carville's advice in this op-ed is that Democrats should meet the current constitutional crisis by doing ... nothing.
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us....The first problem with this is Carville's assumption that Republicans can't unite to ram through horrible policies. I know there's party infighting, but most Republicans vote in lockstep on most issues.
Our first major test in the art of strategic retreat comes in a few weeks, as the Trump administration must get a budget passed that raises the debt ceiling. There are deep internal Republican divides over the budget: Republicans don’t know what they want to include, they don’t agree on an agenda, and they do not have a clear path forward.
... the most radical thing we can do is nothing at all. Let the Republicans disagree with themselves publicly. Do not offer a single vote. Do not insert yourself into the discourse, do not throw a monkey wrench into the equation. Simply step away and let ‘em flirt with a default. Just when they’ve pushed themselves to the brink, and it appears they could collapse the global economy — come in and save the day. Be the competent party and not the chaos party....
This equation must be applied for the remainder of this year. 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 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.
The bigger problem is that bad budget policies are just a small part of what horrifying in Washington right now. The Constitution and the rule of law have effectively been suspended by the Trump administration, and the court pushback is slow and partial. Carville wants to believe that what matters is how Republicans want to govern, but what they're doing right now is de-governing. Until now, we've had a democracy in which elected leaders pass laws that remain in force even when control of Congress or the White House changes hands; we've had a government that attempted to keep Americans safe, to maintain a system of justice under law, to keep the food edible and the water drinkable, to keep schools and libraries and parks and the post office functioning, to sustain scientific research, to maintain global stability through both hard and soft power. The current administration wants to get rid of all that -- Trump because he's always dreamed of being a dictator, the billionaire donors behind Trump because they hate paying taxes to help the less well off, Russell Vought and his cabal because they want right-wing Christian churches to have more power than the government, and Elon Musk, presumably, because he believes most of us are inferior to what he regards as his caste of techno-Übermenschen, the people who are fit to join him in someday colonizing Mars while we Untermenschen rot and die, as we deserve to. They're destroying America root and branch, but Carville just wants to focus on the few areas where Republicans are still coloring within the lines, because he's an old man and he can't comprehend how radically -- and perhaps irreversibly -- America has changed in the past month.
Hakeem Jeffries is not an old man, but he has the same problem. Last night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow tried to explain to Jeffries that many Americans don't believe he understands the stakes.
Maddow said:
The other thing that Americans are stressed out about, though, right now is that policy doesn’t feel like it's the main conversation right now. It feels like we are in the middle of a ketamine-fueled middle-of-the-night autocratic power grab that is rendering Congress irrelevant, that's rendering policy irrelevant, and that's rendering the rule of law an afterthought, if not a joke, to those who are planning on staying in power indefinitely without benefit of further elections. I mean, it is not about a -- I mean, it is about a bad budget. That's one of the things you have to contend with. But the fight here feels like it's on a different scale than the kinds of legislative point-counterpoint stuff that I think Democrats and Republicans are used to fighting over. And I think what Americans are sort of clamoring for is to hear from you personally, as the senior Democrat in Washington, in the House, where the margins are so narrow, to hear from you that you understand the scale of the threat and you have ideas about how to interrupt what feels like something that we have not experienced since the Civil War in terms of the threat to our republic.Jeffries responds by noting that House Democrats have formed something called the Rapid Response Task Force and Litigation Working Group (could there be a clunkier name?), which is coordinating with state attorneys general and others to file lawsuits against the administration. I'm pleased that House Democrats are working on litigation, but what about the "rapid response" part of this? To me, that implies a campaign to push back on Trumpism in public. I learned the full name of this group from a Jeffries press release announcing its formation; that press release says that "it’s an all hands on deck effort simultaneously underway in Congress, the Courts and the Community." So where's the outreach to "the Community"?
Specifically, where's the rapid outreach to "the Community"? The press release is dated February 10. More than two weeks later, there's no Rapid Response Task Force website. There's no Rapid Response Task Force page on YouTube, TikTok, X, or Bluesky. Go search. You won't find them.
On Friday, Carville told Mediaite's Dan Abrams that the Trump administration "is in the midst of a massive collapse, in particularly a collapse in public opinion," and that the collapse will happen "in less than thirty days." He says this again in the Times op-ed:
It won’t take long: public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard. It’s already happening: Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls.But in other polls -- including the most recent polls from Emerson, The Economist/YouGov, Harvard/Harris, and Morning Consult -- Trump's numbers are in positive territory, in some cases over 50%. Trump's net job approval is +0.7 according to FiveThirtyEight, +1.8 according to RealClear Polling, +1.7 according to VoteHub. These aren't great numbers for a president a month into office, but they're a long way from "collapse." And remember, Trump had worse numbers in his first term and never reached the point of "collapse." He nearly won the Electoral College in 2020 -- and might have won it if his presidency hadn't been effectively framed by the resistance that Carville disdains.
The angry people attending congressional Republicans' town halls understand what Trump, Vought, and Musk are dismantling, but much of the public believes that the administration is simply overcoming government sclerosis and cutting waste. Those poll numbers might not slip into solidly negative territory for a while. And it will take even longer if Democrats sit on their hands, as many congressional Democrats seem to be doing, and as Carville recommends.
