What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing.... I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.He continued:
“It’s going to be easy pickings here in six weeks,” [Carville] said of opportunities for Democrats. “Just lay back.”As I noted at the time, thirty days after this podcast appearance, Trump was at 47.5% approval and 49.6% disapproval in Nate Silver's polling average, and was at 47.9% approval and 48.8% disapproval in the Real Clear Polling average. His numbers didn't collapse on their own. It took active resistance on the part of Democrats (starting with Senator Chris Van Hollen's defense of Kilmar Abrego Garcia's right to due process, along with resistance by No Kings demonstrators, anti-ICE protesters, and anti-Trump lawyers) in combination with Trump's mismanagement of America to drive his poll numbers down. Just kicking back and doing nothing wasn't enough.
Abrams asked, “You literally think 30 days to six weeks, the Trump administration is effectively going to collapse in terms of public support?
Carville predicted Trump would find it impossible to pass any agenda items and that House Speaker Mike Johnson would be forced to reach across the aisle to ask House Democrats for help.
“We’re in the midst of a collapse,” Carville said. “It’s over.”
In the meantime, Trump was highly effective, getting his One Big Beautiful Bill through Congress, and imposing other horrors on America -- DOGE cuts, preposterous tariffs, the militarization of American cities, the dismantling of scientific research funding, and finally a ruinous war -- through executive action.
Nevertheless, Grampa Carville is back with a new "just chill and Trumpism will die on its own" fantasy:
James Carville is refusing to back away from his extraordinary prediction that President Donald Trump will quit the White House next year....This isn't new. In June, Carville said of Trump, "I genuinely think that he will resign next spring." He subsequently said, “I’m telling you, this guy, by Easter of 2027, is just gonna walk away from this job.”
The veteran Democratic strategist revisited his prediction Thursday on his Politicon podcast after listeners asked what a President JD Vance might look like if Carville’s forecast actually came true.
Carville went further than merely standing by his earlier claim, predicting Vance “will be president next April” and describing what he believes would be a severely weakened Republican administration.
“... yeah, Trump’s two years are one thing, alright, he was a year ago everybody had to pay attention to him, everybody had to return his phone call,” Carville said.
He argued Trump’s political influence was already diminishing and predicted Republicans would suffer major electoral losses in the midterms, leaving Vance without control of Congress....
“And then the whole Republican Party is going to fall apart when they lose all these seats because they’re going to know that Trump doesn’t protect him.”
Carville concluded: “So JD Vance, in my opinion, will be president next April. He will be the most constrained, ineffective, babbling president in the history of the United States.”
I hope no one believes this. I hope no Democratic leader or key strategist believes it's going to be this easy to wrest power from Republicans.
First of all, resignation is the last thing we should expect from Trump. He fears prosecution, which becomes more likely if he's out of office. Moreover, there's nothing Trump fears more than appearing weak. I'm not sure his aides and family will acknowledge that he's no longer president even if he dies in office.
Why does Carville want to believe this? I think it's because Carville, like most Boomer Democratic insiders, suffers from 1980s PTSD. He thinks the three presidential trouncings in that decade prove that America hates Democrats, and his solution is for Democrats to "play possum" all the time, minimizing their differences with Republicans in the hope that enough of them will still be elected for the party to stay in the game. Carville really doesn't like it when Democrats who want to do something make demands, as becomes clear in the full version of the first quote above from that February 2025 podcast appearance:
What I have said very publicly is that Democrats need to play possum. This whole thing is collapsing. It doesn’t need Elizabeth Warren and somebody screaming to pacify some progressive advocacy groups in Washington, which, by the way, I wish these people were just useless. They’re actually worse than useless, that they’re detrimental. And they never, ever learn to shut up. And so then this is what I believe. I believe that this administration, in less than 30 days is in the midst of a massive collapse and particularly a collapse in public opinion.(Emphasis added.)
Also see this passage from that February 2025 op-ed:
... 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.As I wrote then:
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.People like Carville believe -- or at least want to believe -- that power will drop in Democrats' laps if Democrats never draw attention to the fact that they're Democrats. Carville believes this because he thinks normal people hate Democrats, even though Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last nine presidential elections.
And even if Carville's fantasy were to come true, it's absurd to argue that President J.D. Vance would be "the most constrained, ineffective ... president in the history of the United States." He'll still have the Supreme Court on his side. He'll have the veto pen. (Democrats can't possibly win enough seats to override presidential vetoes, and Republicans in Congress will never break ranks with a Republican president in significant numbers.) He'll have a massively funded anti-immigration machine still at his disposal.
And we still don't know whether we'll have fair elections in 2026 It's quite possible that the Supreme Court will end genuine democracy in America by greenlighting Trump's assault on mail voting. And even if this doesn't happen, Republicans are probably plotting to prevent the seating of enough Democratic midterm victors to maintain a Republican majority in the House, as Michael Luttig warns.
Which means Democrats can't just hang out on the porch in a rocking chair, as Grampa Carville's fantasies suggest. They'll have to fight like hell for every victory, and never stop fighting.
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