TRUMP POSTED THAT QUOTE BECAUSE HE'S WORRIED ABOUT PUBLIC OPINION

Is this a show of strength? I think it's just the opposite:



Trump was was trolling the country when he posted this yesterday, and it worked -- political commentators and ordinary Americans reacted with shock and outrage.

Not me. First, we already knew that he doesn't believe the law applies to him. We knew that in his first term, when he repeatedly said that Article II of the Constitution allows him to do "whatever I want."



In his second term, he's clearly operating as if the law doesn't constrain him.

But the fact that he decided to say this tells me he's worried about the public response to what he's doing. He's concerned that a series of losses in court will make some of his supporters think he looks like a loser, so he wants to assert that he's right and the courts are wrong.

This is the second time in two days that Trump has shown signs of concern about public opinion. The first was this:

President Trump and billionaire DOGE chief Elon Musk accused the media and pundits on Friday of trying to create tension between them in an effort to drive them apart.

“They want a divorce. They want you two to start hating each other,” Fox News host Sean Hannity told Trump and Musk in a clip from a lengthier interview that will air next week.

Trump, 78, agreed with the Fox News host and revealed that Musk had already warned him about the media’s effort to sow discord....

“Actually, Elon called me and said, ‘You know, they’re trying to drive us apart.’ I said, ‘absolutely,’” Trump told the Fox News host....

“You know, they said, ‘We have breaking news. Donald Trump has ceded control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will be attending a cabinet meeting tonight at 8:00,’” Trump joked.

“And I say, it’s just so obvious they are so bad at it. I used to think they were good at it. They’re actually bad at it,” he argued. “Because if they were good at it, I’d never be president.”

Nothing to see here, folks! Trump is telling the public here. I'm still the president -- really!

If Trump (and Musk) have an Achilles' heel, it's the desperate need to be loved and admired. It's clear that we need to keep suing Trump, even if he defies the courts, because losing in court feels shameful to him. (And sometimes he doesn't defy the courts.) And we need to keep saying that Musk is the real president, because it gets under Trump's skin. It's clear that Trump doesn't want to rid himself of Musk -- I can't tell whether he sees Musk as the successful son he never had, as a "killer" like Roy Cohn who can make things happen for him in unsavory ways, or as an authoritarian dictator he sees as a hero, a tech Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un. Nevertheless, Trump wants us to think Musk isn't his boss. So let's keep saying he is.

WHAT CAN CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS DO? FOR ONE THING, THEY CAN DO THIS.

We know that many Democrats in Congress are annoyed because their voters want them to do more. What can we do? they say. We're in the minority.

Here's something they can do.

Congressional Democrats with decent communications skills can get out there and talk about what, specifically, is being destroyed. They can make and post short videos telling Americans what we're losing, in real-world terms.

They can talk about this, for instance:

Half of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention's Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — a group known as the CDC's "disease detectives" — were among the cuts made Friday by the Trump administration....

The CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service or EIS officers are hired in annual classes through a competitive process.

As part of the fellowship, they serve for two years around the CDC or deployed to health departments across the country, often on the front lines of public health responses....

"The country is less safe. These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, a former top-ranking CDC official and alumna of the program, in a message.

Anthrax! Mosquito-borne illnesses! We've trained people to look at these diseases so we know what to do when we see them in America, or when they might be coming to America. Now -- with zero debate, in Congress or in the rest of the country -- Elon Musk has just decided to gut the program that does this training.

This is part of a massive staff cut at the Department of Health and Human Services -- roughly 5200 people. It's bad, and it's part of a massive wave of cuts to scientific research all over the country.

Democratic members of Congress could be making videos talking about this, maybe reporting on what's happening in their own districts.

Democrats in Congress could spread the word about stories like this one -- although this story is starting to break through:

The National Nuclear Safety Administration was struggling Friday to rehire some of the nation’s top nuclear specialists after they were fired by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in an apparent massive mistake, according to reports that triggered security fears.

Sources told CNN that DOGE staffers apparently did not realize that the agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons stockpile when the employees were fired Thursday. The terminations were quickly rescinded Friday, CNN reported.

The workers were fired because “no one” had “taken any time to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security,” one source told CNN.

Or this:

The administration this week began aggressively laying off thousands of government employees across multiple agencies, hitting veterans hard....

A third of all federal employees are military veterans....

For an already understaffed VA, this is a disaster. Veterans’ medical care, disability claims, and support services depend on an adequate workforce. Slashing hiring ensures growing backlogs, worsening care, and increased suffering for those who rely on VA services. With an aging veteran population and an expanded VA mission under previous administrations, now is the time to invest in the VA, not gut it.

The makers of these videos wouldn't need to be sitting members of Congress. Maybe aspiring Democratic candidates could be the ones talking about what's going on.

At a time when many Americans no longer get their news from traditional news sources, Democrats could decide that they should be a news source for the public.

But the videos should be real and immediate. I don't always agree with the commentator who wrote the following posts, but he's right about the tone of Democratic messaging. He's talking about the Democratic response (or lack thereof) to the Eric Adams/Justice Department story, but he could just as easily be talking about the Democratic (non-)response to DOGE cuts.

Everyone is wrong about why Dem "messaging" sucks. It's not that it's not "simple" enough, or that it's not focused enough on this or that. It's that they are not engaging in the politics of the day. They're floating above it. They don't respond to things, and when they do respond, it's boilerplate.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:14 PM

Something happens, and then 24-72 hours later, some bedraggled Democrat drags himself in front of a camera to give a carefully workshopped statement about it. There's no sense that they're participating in the political day-to-day.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:14 PM

The DOJ thing has been the perfect illustration: there have been hourly developments, and Democrats just... missed them all. You and I have been able to follow along, simply by being on social media! You've probably read 1000 opinions on it by now. How many of those were from Dem electeds?

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:15 PM

All the "improved" messaging that people propose - daily press conferences, new messengers, blah blah blah - still have this same fundamental issue. They're broadcasts down to the commoners, trying to hit the right note to make the commoners feel like Dems are engaging with them.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:16 PM

But Dems could actually just engage! They could participate in the political discourse rather than treat it with fear and suspicion. They could respond to things in the same way ordinary political participants do, rather than carefully metering their interaction with the country they want to govern.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:17 PM

The problem here is that Dems are not acting like human beings. They are not acting like they care about any of this, or are part of any of this. They act like space aliens constantly looking for a new strategy to convince everyone they're a real human person.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:19 PM

I mean how is it possible that we just went through a profound 24-hour scandal and crisis in the Justice Department and we got... a handful of tweets? Eventually press release? Don't any of you have ANYTHING to say? You know, like a normal human might?

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:19 PM

Democrats complain about not getting attention, but they're in positions of massive power and would get attention naturally if they took part in society. The problem is that they conduct themselves with an astonishing degree of insularity. They keep quiet and communicate through little broadcasts.

— Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social) February 14, 2025 at 1:21 PM

Go to a place where good work is being done -- or was being done until Musk's goons showed up with their meat ax. Explain what we're losing. A side benefit of this is that you might communicate the message that Americans are actually getting something of value for their tax dollars. The predominant message about government spending for at least the past half-century is that it's all waste, fraud, and abuse. No one ever pushes back on that message. But Democrats could.

I know this won't happen. But the opportunity is there.

THEY REALLY THINK TRUMP AND CO. ARE ACTING IN GOOD FAITH

In The New Republic, Greg Sargent has a story about Hispanic voters in Reading, Pennsylvania, where they make up 70% of the electorate. Kamala Harris won Reading by a 65%-35% margin, but that was a noticeably weaker showing than Joe Biden's 72%-27% victory in the city in 2020. Sargent thinks the Hispanic voters who abandoned Democrats did so because they thought Donald Trump, the famous businessman, would make life more affordable for them. But there were also voters who thought he'd make life better for undocumented immigrants. Reading's Democratic mayor, Eddie Morán, told Sargent that during the campaign

signs saying PUERTO RICANS FOR TRUMP and DOMINICANS FOR TRUMP began to appear.

Among these Dominicans, Morán regularly found that any concerns about Trump’s immigration policies were outweighed by perceptions of his economic prowess. Indeed, that led some Dominicans to develop a particularly hopeful view of Trump. Some came to believe that when Trump talked about not wanting “illegals” in the country, he was really telegraphing that he might pursue some sort of amnesty for the undocumented who don’t merit removal.

Why would anyone believe this?

As Jamelle Bouie says,

it is beyond clear that for many americans trump is a blank slate who stands for whatever they personally want

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— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) February 14, 2025 at 7:34 AM

I've seen it argued that Kamala Harris ran a godawful campaign because no competent politician could possibly have lost to someone who's as repulsive as Trump. But millions of people don't believe Trump is repulsive. They hear his hateful attacks and assume they're all aimed at other people. They watch him sell his snake oil and really believe he's selling a miracle product that will change their lives for the better.

Smart people who should know better feel he's a decent, well-meaning person. Hagan Scotten is a conservative Republican who led the team investigating Eric Adams in the Southern District of New York. He's one of several lawyers who have now resigned because they refused to endorse a quid-pro-quo deal dismissing federal charges against Adams in exchange for his cooperation with the Trump administration on immigration. Here's an excerpt from Scotten's resignation letter, addressed to Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general:

“Some will view the mistake you are committing here in the light of their generally negative views of the new administration,” he wrote. “I do not share those views. I can even understand how a chief executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal.” But any such arrangement would be contrary to the law, he wrote.

Imagine being so naive about Trump that you think he finds this deal "distasteful." Imagine thinking he went along with it only reluctantly, even though he'd much rather maintain the highest moral principles.

People who should know better assume that Trump surrogates are also acting in good faith and with the best intentions. Case in point: Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, a strong supporter of Ukraine.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made a “rookie mistake” when he said a return to Ukraine’s pre-war borders was “unrealistic,” Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker said Friday....

“Hegseth is going to be a great defense secretary, although he wasn’t my choice for the job,” the Mississippi Republican told POLITICO on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “But he made a rookie mistake in Brussels and he’s walked back some of what he said but not that line."

"I don’t know who wrote the speech — it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool," Wicker said, referring to the pro-Putin broadcaster.

Dude, that's the policy! It's not an unfortunate misstatement of what the administration believes, written by a misguided underling. It's what Trump wants -- and Hegseth, too.

We look at Trump and the people who surround him and see corruption, deceit, brutality, and a willingness to sell out the country. But millions of people believe he's the selfless, patriotic public servant he claims to be. He talks about his good intentions so relentlessly that many people fall for it, even though to the rest of us he's obviously full of shit. I don't know how people who are so easy to fool can possibly function in the world. But there were enough of them to decide the election.

THEY WON'T THINK WE'RE SERIOUS UNTIL WE'RE MASSING ON THE MALL

This was Axios on November 24:

While President-elect Trump's 2016 win sparked shock, outrage and massive protests, the response to his 2024 victory has been more muted.

The big picture: 2016 birthed The Resistance, a political movement to protest Trumpism online and in the streets. There's still plenty of resistance to Trump across the country, but little mass mobilization.

Here was The New York Times four days ago:

Unlike the opening of Mr. Trump’s first term in 2017, little significant resistance to his second term has arisen in the streets....

And here's Semafor today, in a story about the courtroom war against Trump:

“We’ve had a great deal of success with preliminary injunctions, temporary restraining orders in the courts,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer told Semafor on Wednesday....

“Democratic attorneys general are currently batting a thousand at getting injunctions, which is great,” said Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin, who cautioned that the final outcome “remains to be seen.”

On the other hand: There are no mass protests on the Mall, few stirring speeches, and many, many angry social media posts. Around the country and on Capitol Hill, Democrats sure don’t feel like they’re winning.

I know that big demonstrations are frustrating -- hundreds of thousands of people turn out to protest, then the coverage is muted and little or nothing changes.

But clearly the media considers this an important metric for whether the opposition to Trump is serious. If the press demands big crowds in the streets, then we should try delivering big crowds in the streets.

I was surprised at the response to the Women's March on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump's first inaugural. I thought it would be seen as having too narrow an agenda because it was called the Women's March. I thought the pink pussy hats would be dismissed as cringe and vulgar. But even though it didn't upend the Trump presidency all by itself, it was portrayed as evidence that Trump hadn't won over large portions of the country. It inspired many people to join groups such as Indivisible. It began a process that led to Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms and, ultimately, led to Trump's defeat in 2020.

It also told a lot of people in America that they weren't alone, that millions of other Americans were unhappy with Trump. That's important, too.

I've been in touch with various activist groups in recent weeks, and they seem to be focused on phone calls to legislators and postcard-writing campaigns for upcoming elections. I attended one demonstration last week with members of the local Indivisible group, but it was at an office for our two Democratic senators, Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer. That was a good thing to do -- they both need to have their feet held to the fire. But these groups seem focused on "electeds" to the exclusion of any focus on the enemy. For instance, I can't seem to interest them in this:

protests at Tesla dealerships have been popping up all over the country and a decentralized call for them to happen en masse on Saturday.

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— Clara Jeffery (@clarajeffery.bsky.social) February 12, 2025 at 10:18 AM

The author of a 2019 book on Musk says he's heard from people who want to cover demonstrations at Tesla dealerships:

Please post the locations you are targeting for #TeslaTakedown protests this Saturday! I'm getting outreach from major media interested in covering these demonstrations, so let's let them know where they can go to hear your voice. If you are in NYC, LA, Chicago, or DC, please sound off below 👇

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— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 12, 2025 at 11:51 AM

This wouldn't be The Big Demonstration -- but there could be many smaller demonstrations that add up to something fairly big.

I plan to be at the Tesla showroom in Manhattan's trendy Meatpacking District on Saturday morning. The address is 860 Washington Street. It's near the High Line, the Whitney Museum, Chelsea Market, and Google. But I don't know whether anyone else will show up.

A group called Rise and Resist demonstrated there on Sunday and got some local press.

But the same group doesn't seem to be planning a follow-up on Saturday, apparently because the group is focused on joining in a series of local demonstrations on Monday, which is President's Day. Which is good! I want to go to that one, too.

One benefit of protest is that it creates the perception that Trump = unrest. If there's unrest, America won't seem great to low-information voters. The MAGA faithful will hate us, but they always do. The folks in the middle might recognize that a central component of Trumpism is creating chaos and division in America.

Lawyers can't do everything. We need to make noise.

DO AMERICANS UNDERSTAND HOW LAWS WORK?

I keep thinking about Elon Musk's opening statement at yesterday's Oval Office news conference:



Musk said:

So at a high level, if you say, "What is the goal of DOGE?" ... I think a significant part of the presidency is to restore democracy. This may seem like, well, aren't we in a democracy? ...

So, if there’s not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat — if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?

If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives, in the form of the president and the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy. So it’s incredibly important that we close that feedback loop, we fix that feedback loop, and that the public, the public’s elected representatives, the president, the House, and the Senate, decide what happens, as opposed to a large unelected bureaucracy. This is not to say that there aren’t some good -- there are good people who are in the federal bureaucracy. But you can’t have an autonomous federal bureaucracy. You have to have one that is responsive to the people. That’s the whole point of a democracy.

Long before Elon Musk became our de facto president -- long before Elon Musk was born -- many Americans felt that our government was run by a large, expensive, out-of-control bureaucracy. The Republican Party has been fanning the flames of this suspicion since the New Deal, and now it seems to be achieving its ultimate triumph over liberal ideas of government. I understand why many Americans will respond to this. They've been primed to believe it all their lives.

But I want to talk about the idea that the "will" of the voters should be "decided by their elected representatives, in the form of the president and the Senate and the House." I think that's probably persuasive to many Americans -- but only because they don't understand a simple fact about government.

Governments enact laws. In Washington, those laws are enacted by Congresses temporarily made up a particular mix of Democrats and Republicans. The bills are signed into law by presidents, some of whom are Democrats, some of whom are Republicans.

When a law is passed, the current president and the elected officials who at the moment make up Congress tell us that we should do things a certain way long into the future -- long after this particular president and Congress are replaced by future presidents and Congresses. If we don't like the laws we've passed, the president and Congress we have at this moment or in a future moment should change those laws -- but those new laws will remain in effect after the revisers are out of office.

What Musk suggests in his opening statement -- and what the Trump/Musk administration is trying to put into effect, with the passive assent of the Republican Congress -- is a system in which every new administration starts at zero, and gets to throw out any law on the books that it doesn't like.

But that's an insane way for a developed nation to operate. And the Trump/Musk administration is even trying to toss out the constitutional principle that Congress gets to decide what the government will spend money on (with the president's approval), not a dictatorial president.

I suspect that most Americans don't think we're in a constitutional crisis because we just elected a new president and he should get to do whatever he wants seems like a simple and logical idea to them. I don't think they understand that a democratic country endures in part because its laws endure. Most Americans have probably never thought about this.

This won't seem like a crisis to most Americans until something Trump and Musk are doing affects them personally. I don't think they're invested at all in the idea that we're a nation of laws -- or at least that, until January 20, we were.

REPUBLICANS WON DEMOCRATICALLY AND STILL REJECTED DEMOCRACY

I keep thinking about a quote from David Frum:

If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.

A strange thing has happened: Our conservative party actually won democratically in 2024 -- the White House, the House, and the Senate -- yet it's rejecting democracy anyway. Republicans in Congress are very deliberately sitting on their hands while their party-mates, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, flagrantly violate laws passed by previous Congresses and signed into law by previous presidents. In our system until now, once a law was passed, it was in effect until it was repealed, amended, or declared unconstitutional by Supreme Court justices who were appointed by an elected president and ratified by an elected Senate. That's not good enough for Republicans now, even though they control everything.

Republicans won the 2024 elections, but they didn't win decisively enough to enact their full agenda, which is nothing less than overturning nearly every law ever enacted by a previous U.S. government in which liberals and moderates had any influence whatsoever, as well as overturning previous Supreme Court decisions that anger them (for instance, U.S. v. Wong King Ark, the 1898 decision affirming that the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship). This couldn't be done through normal channels, not with the filibuster still in place in the Senate and a very small GOP majoprity in the House.

Why do Republican politicians and voters find it intolerable to live in a country where some laws aren't exactly to their taste? Because for decades every Republican voter and politician has absorbed and internalized the central message of the right-wing media: that all evil in the world is the work of conservatism's enemies, and that those enemies actively seek the destruction of everything that is good and decent. Democrats and liberals are so evil -- so dedicated to evil, and so powerful in pursuit of evil -- that their howls of protest are all you need to hear to know that you're doing the right thing for America and civilization.

The David Frum quote above is taken from a book he published in 2018 called Trumpocracy; the link above takes you to an excerpt from the book published in The Atlantic. In that excerpt, Frum traces the lineage of Trumpism back to its previous incarnation: the Tea Party. Frum saw the Tea Party as a movement that believed in a zero-sum world: If the "bad" people gain, the good people lose.

In a close and careful 2011 study of the politics of the Tea Party, three Harvard scholars, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, remarked, “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.” ...

In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution. I wrote those words after the 2012 election, and they apply even more forcefully after 2016.... As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.” ...

One [2017] poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified.

It's racial animosity, but it's also animosity against every other group identified with Democrats, liberals, and progressives: immigrants, LGBTQ people, feminists, academics, scientists, entertainers, journalists. It's a many-tentacled octopus and it's all evil. Liberalism is seen as providing special advantages to racial minorities and all of these other groups, at the expense of "real" Americans. Republican voters know this because Fox News says it's true, as do Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Catturd.

Republican voters think we're in a state of total war with them. They think we steal elections (though we somehow weren't powerful enough to steal the most recent one, or the one in 2016). They think liberal-aligned scientists deliberately unleashed the COVID virus on the world as a means of social control. They think the "fifteen-minute cities" we praise are gulags we intend to build so we can force suburban and rural patriots to live in them. They think every Jeffrey Epstein client came from our side. They think we're trying to dismantle whiteness, maleness, and ordinary heterosexual reproduction. They think we want to make Christianity illegal. They think climate change is a hoax and they think we know that.

You know how oppressed you feel right now thinking about how Trump and Musk are taking the American system of government apart brick by brick? That's how oppressed they've been encouraged to feel by decades of right-wing propaganda -- even though most of them live perfectly satisfactory lives in red enclaves where they're free to own all the guns they want and drive the biggest coal rollers they can afford. They barely experience liberalism except through social media or TV, yet they believe they're among the most oppressed people in world history and they have to defeat us by any means necessary.

So Frum's condition for the GOP rejection of democracy -- they cannot win democratically -- has been met: they cannot democratically win the war they think they're fighting, which is a war to remove all liberal influence from American life. And even if we eventually find a way to stop the Trumpist slide into authoritarianism, even if we begin to reverse it, millions of Americans will believe they are still fighting this existential war. We'll never truly beat them until we understand how much they hate us and how hard they're willing to fight to beat us.

THE PLUTOCRACY MIGHT BE THE LAST GUARDRAIL

I posted this on social media this morning:

Don't ask, "What happens when the Trump administration ignores the courts?" Ask, "What happens when the Trump administration ignores the courts and our politicians and judges simply allow that to happen?" The rest of us need a response, because official Washington won't respond.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) February 10, 2025 at 7:30 AM

Congressional Republicans are already engaged in quiet quitting -- they're exercising their constitutional power to appropriate funds by choosing not to exercise it. They're choosing to stand by and allow Donald Trump and Elon Musk to exercise it for them. That's because Republicans categorically oppose Democratic participation in government. It doesn't matter that the people elected Democratic presidents in the past and regularly elect Democrats to half or nearly half the seats in Congress. Republicans believe that only Republicans have a legitimate right to wield public power, so laws passed by a Congress that includes many Democrats are illegitimate and ought to be subject to Republican veto.

What do we do when a court issues a final ruling -- not just a temporary restraining order -- that prevents the Trump administration from doing whatever it wants and Trump's people go ahead and do it anyway? It would be nice to think that some part of the system can constrain the Trumpers, but if the best idea we have is what's proposed by Joyce White, a lawyer and MSNBC contributor, we're doomed:

Now we will see just how far Trump is willing to go and whether anyone in his own administration will try to function, if not as a guardrail, then at least in protest by resigning to focus public attention....

What happens if we hit that stage? Everyone, from the Attorney General to the White House Counsel and others, should write a “resign” email if Trump refuses to obey a lawful court order.

Imagine being so naive that you actually believe this could happen.

We can protest and we can keep suing. Protesting will become dangerous soon, because Trump will eventually want to use force against peaceful protesters. I'm not sure the public will respond to this the way he hopes -- middle-of-the-road Americans might simply conclude that we elected Trump and now there's chaos in the streets, blaming him (correctly) for the unrest. But he'll make protest very difficult, and he's likely at some point to invoke the Insurrection Act.

Lawsuits will still be possible. Musk and others are talking about impeaching judges:

A corrupt judge protecting corruption.

He needs to be impeached NOW! https://t.co/zgnwZuOz2Y

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

But while it takes just a simple majority in the House to impeach a judge, a two-thirds vote in the Senate is required to remove the judge. Republicans would need 67 votes in the Senate and have only 53. I don't even think John Fetterman or Ruben Gallego will vote to remove these judges, much less both of them plus 12 other Democrats.

(It's fascinating that the de facto president of the United States doesn't know this.)

Or would Congress simply abolish the specific lower courts on which Trump-skeptical judges sit, and then reestablish new courts to which Trump could appoint loyalists? I think that could happen.

I suspect that the people with the most power to stop Trump are the plutocrats. Our political culture doesn't care what Democratic officeholders think. It doesn't care what ordinary citizens think unless they're white heartlanders who vote Republican. But it does care what people with money think.

There's an op-ed in The New York Times today written by five former treasury secretaries -- Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner, Jacob Lew, and Janet Yellen-- titled "Our Democracy Is Under Siege." They're upset because Muskovites are tinkering with the federal payment system.

And a story in The Wall Street Journal (free to read here) warns that "Trump’s Next Round of Tariffs—25% on Steel and Aluminum—Won’t Be So Easily Averted," while another Journal story (free to read here) carries the headline "For CEOs and Bankers, the Trump Euphoria Is Fading Fast." From that story:

It took less than a month for the second Trump administration to cool the enthusiasm of chief executives and dealmakers.

Consumer sentiment is down and inflation expectations are rising, driven in part by worries about the impact of a threatened trade war....

Corporate bigwigs are now using phrases like “fragility,” “volatility” and “wait and see” to describe their outlooks.

They thought electing a Republican president would let them pursue unlimited mergers and other deals, but that's not the case:

The recent whipsaw on tariffs seemed to hit hardest on business leaders’ confidence. President Trump announced plans to stick 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, only to delay them for a month a few days later. A number of executives, as well as top investment bankers and other industry advisers, have said that priorities have shifted in recent days to navigating tariffs and other policy issues.

They need to settle supply routes, discuss whether to raise their own prices and figure out what is even happening. That doesn’t leave much room for thinking about big bet-the-company deals.

The reaction is evident in the deals market. Just under 900 deals were announced in the U.S. in January, according to data from LSEG. That compares with more than 1,200 transactions in the previous January and over 1,500 two years ago. Even the hope of a lighter regulatory touch has taken a knock. The Justice Department sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s $14 billion deal to buy Juniper Networks.

I haven't heard that Hewlett Packard paid the standard million-dollar bribe to Trump's inauguration fund, which probably explains why the deal is being held up.

Remember how Trump announced tariffs on Mexico and Canada, then immediately postponed them after small concessions by the two countries? Axios suggests that Canada will be hit by the new tariffs:

It's not yet clear how blanket tariffs on steel and aluminum would impact the ongoing negotiations with Canada and Mexico, against whom tariffs were paused until March 1.

... Doug Ford, the premier of Canadian steel-producing hub Ontario, on X accused Trump of "shifting goalposts and constant chaos, putting our economy at risk."

And did Trump actually proclaim that his administration doesn't consider itself obliged to pay the value of some Treasury bills or bonds? Josh Marshall thought that's what Trump was suggesting yesterday:

On Air Force One ... en route to the Super Bowl, Trump told reporters that DOGE analysts (whatever that means) had found “irregularities” in U.S. treasuries and that the U.S. may not be obligated to pay some of them. “Maybe we have less debt than we thought,” he said....

If financial markets actually thought Trump was serious about this, that he would follow through on this, they’d probably go completely haywire. As I said, I think — unless and until we hear more — they will think this is just the old man ranting.

This was quickly walked back:

cleanup on aisle 3

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) February 9, 2025 at 7:41 PM

So he's claiming that certain payments are fraudulent, not that the U.S. government will default on some of its debt.

Right now, the markets are shrugging all this off. But the plutocrats are probably the only people who scare Trump, and they don't seem happy. Their disgruntlement, and the disgruntlement of ordinary consumers, might be the only thing that can save us if all the other guardrails are gone.

CBS POLL: VOTERS APPROVE OF TRUMP BECAUSE HE'S STRONG AND WRONG

Years ago, Bill Clinton said:

"When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."

That seems to be borne out by a new CBS poll.

These aren't great early numbers for Trump -- at a similar point in Joe Biden's presidency, he had a 59%-35% job approval rating according to Politico/Morning Consult, a 53%-40% rating according to The Economist/YouGov, and a 60%-40% rating according to The Hill/HarrisX. Nevertheless, Trump is in positive territory.

Some of his policies appear to be genuinely popular. There's 59%-41% support for the deportation program and 64%-36% support for sending troops to the southern border. Also, when respondents are asked whether Trump's focus on certain issues is too much, not enough, or the right amount, "right amount" is the top answer for "Cutting government spending," "Ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs," and "Cutting U.S. foreign aid programs" (though in each case, "right amount" is chosen by less the a majority of respondents).

But some of the numbers in the poll suggest that respondents like Trump because he's very vigorously doing something, even if they don't necessarily like it or think it will work.

The numbers start to look weird when you see these paired results:

So voters approve of Trump's approach to Gaza while disapproving of what is apparently the centerpiece of his approach to Gaza.

In a separate question, respondents are asked, "What do you think is Donald Trump’s goal when he talks about the U.S. taking over Gaza?" The answers are:

Have the U.S. take over Gaza: 22%

Start negotiations with countries in the Middle East for something else: 28%

Both: 29%

Neither: 21%

If you add choices 1 and 3, it seems that 51% of respondents think Trump actually wants to take over Gaza -- which only 13% of respondents think would be a good idea! But 54% think he's doing a good job on Gaza anyway.

By a large margin, the respondents don't believe that Trump is focusing enough on prices:

In fact, 47% of respondents say that in recent weeks the prices for things they buy have been increasing, while only 3% say they're decreasing, and 63% say egg prices are going up. Trump's approach to the economy gets a lukewarm-to-negative response overall. Only 35% of respondents think Trump's policies will make them financially better off. A majority -- 51% -- think his policies will make food prices go up, while only 28% think the policies will lower food prices. The respondents aren't very fond of tariffs:

In fact, 73% of them think new tariffs will raise prices on the the things they buy, and only 32% think they'll help create U.S. jobs. Only 33% of respondents believe tariffs will reduce the amount of fentanyl in this country, while 55% think it will have no effect.

But there's a lesson here for Democrats who think they can watch all the madness and just shout, "What about egg prices?" Trump isn't addressing voters' #1 issue in the 2024 election, and the respondents in this poll know that -- and yet his job approval is positive. That tells me that voters are pleased to have a president who's taking some kind of decisive action and making sure we know he's taking decisive action -- unlike Joe Biden.

It will probably take a while for disillusionment to settle in. Democrats need to talk about everything that has the potential to go wrong, and not be deterred if the message doesn't get through right away. Right now, quite a few Americans like the administration's energy, and appreciate a few of the policies. But it's not the level of optimism that's normal at the beginning of a presidential term, and there's skepticism on several fronts. Anti-Trump messages ought to start making sense to many voters in the next few months. Let's hope the totalitarian capture of the government can at least be partly reversed by then.

JUST DISBAND CONGRESS (updated)

Here's some news:

The State Department on Friday announced a $7 billion arms sale to Israel, circumventing the congressional review process, according to Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee....

During the standard congressional review process, the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are notified of the arms sale and given time to raise concerns and ask questions. But even with questions outstanding from Meeks, the administration pushed forward with the sale.

“This move is yet another repudiation by Donald Trump of Congress’ rightful and legitimate oversight prerogative,” Meeks said in a statement Friday. “Furthermore, (Secretary of State Marco) Rubio has failed to provide adequate justification or documentation for bypassing the Congressional Committee review process.”

This is just a show of pure force. Aid for Israel would have sailed through Congress. John Fetterman would have begged the Republican majority to allow him to co-sponsor the bill. In November, Bernie Sanders tried to block a $20 billion aid package, but only 19 out of 100 senators voted to reject any portion of the outlay.

It's clear that the Republican majority in Congress won't do a thing to prevent the dismantling of America's constitutional checks and balances -- the GOP is winning and Republican members of Congress are still getting paid, so what's not to like, as far as they're concerned?

Since we don't have a functioning Congress anymore, here's a very simple bill I'd file on Monday if I were a congressional Democrat.

WHEREAS the majority of members of the party controlling both the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate have concluded that Congress no longer needs to perform its duties as laid out in the Constitution of the United States; and

WHEREAS these legislators have chosen to cede their power entirely to the Executive Branch; therefore, be it

Resolved, that the United States Congress is hereby disbanded.

The wording might not be perfect and, technically, Congress can't be disbanded with a simple bill -- a constitutional amendment would be necessary. But the Constitution is effectively suspended right now. This just makes it all official.

I realize that proposing a bill like this would be a cheap stunt, but I think a few cheap stunts would be a good idea for Democrats right now. They have the potential to become man-bites-dog stories, and even if the stories aren't written with an air of seriousness, they might get some attention. Also, it's a better look for Democrats to mock Republicans once in a while instead of howling in agony every time they do something. The agonized howls are an appropriate response, but at some point you have to look like the bratty kid who's daring the teacher to send him to the principal's office -- at least for a moment, you, the brat, seize power.

And speaking of brattiness, here's something simple we all can do:

Print out this cover, from a magazine the president takes very seriously. It depicts Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, behind the Resolute Desk.

Place it in an envelope and mail it to:

President Donald J. Trump
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500

Or maybe to:

President Elon Musk
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington DC 20500

How grumpy will Trump be if a million of us do this?

I'd give a sizable contribution to anyone willing to erect billboards in all fifty states that say ELON MUSK IS PRESIDENT. That would piss Trump off.

It would also focus America's attention on Musk's growing unpopularity. The Washington Post reports:

Constituents have flooded the phone lines at the U.S. Capitol this week, many of them asking questions about billionaire Elon Musk “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and his access to government systems....

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said the Senate’s phones were receiving 1,600 calls each minute, compared with the usual 40 calls per minute. Many of the calls she’s been receiving are from people concerned about U.S. DOGE Service employees having broad access to government systems and sensitive information. The callers are asking whether their information is compromised and about why there isn’t more transparency about what is happening, she said.

“It’s asking for a lot of clarification,” Murkowski said, noting that Alaska has a high concentration of federal workers.

“It is a deluge on DOGE,” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). “Truly our office has gotten more phone calls on Elon Musk and what the heck he’s doing mucking around in federal government than I think anything we’ve gotten in years. ... People are really angry.”

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he’s been hearing from constituents “constantly” on DOGE and Musk. “We can hardly answer the phones fast enough. It’s a combination of fear, confusion and heartbreak, because of the importance of some of these programs.”

Democrats should be in Just Asking Questions mode. Their public statements should be: What are they doing with this data? Will they cut off your Social Security check if you helped your kid make a poster for Black History Month ten years ago and posted about it on Facebook?

And: The Constitution says all these spending decisions have to be approved by Congress. Maybe you think it's good they're cutting red tape, but here's the problem: If this can break these laws, they can break any law. They can get into your bank account and take all your money. They can tell your employer that you voted for Obama once or that you or someone in your family is gay or trans. Is that what they plan to do? We really don't know. But we do know that they do whatever they want, because the Republican majority in Congress won't stop them, and they don't care if what they're doing is illegal because they think they're above the law.

Okay, that's earnest and agonized. Maybe the insolent version is this McSweeney's humor piece, written in Elon Musk's voice. What if someone posted an edited version of this on social media as if it was an actual pronouncement from Musk?

... consider the waste and bloat in how the US government used to give away taxpayer dollars via an overcomplicated system of lobbying, tax breaks, and bloated contracts. This will become much more optimized once I force the entire US population to pay a 5 percent transaction fee to conduct Social Security transactions on X, The Everything Website (20 percent if they have pronouns in their bio)....

We are also hustling to streamline and reduce redundancy in how Americans’ privacy is violated. Experian breaches, dark web data brokers, unregulated social media, Chinese PLA hacking? Who has time for it all? Now, we can get this done in one fell swoop by putting every US citizen’s Social Security number on a public Google Sheet administered by the nineteen-year-old who programmed Grok’s sense of humor.

My record speaks for itself. I have led X, which will now be crowdsourcing air traffic control via live posts, to become incredibly efficient at serving up pornographic Adolf Eichmann memes.

This is what the right would do if the parties were reversed: rewrite this slightly and post it on social media, with the words ascribed to Musk. Use bots to amplify these posts alleging that Musk actually plans to impose a 5 percent transaction fee to conduct Social Security transactions on X and intends to put every citizen’s Social Security number on a public Google Sheet. Which he might really do! So we should let the rumors spread.

(Edited to remove a musical portion of this post that seemed inappropriate.)

IT'S THE GOP, STUPID

What Axios describes here sure looks like a movement:

More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers and aides said in interviews with Axios that their offices have received historically high call volumes in recent days....

* Aaron Fritschner, a spokesperson for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), said his office's phones have been "ringing off the hook without pause since we opened yesterday morning."

* On social media sites such as X and Bluesky, another aide said, "Every Dem is getting lit up by the neo-resistance folks being like 'do more.'"

... "We had the most calls we've ever had in one day on Monday in 12 years," said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.).

* Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who has served in Congress since 1997, told Axios: "I can't recall ever receiving this many calls. People disgusted with what's going on, and they want us to fight back."

If the parties were reversed and this were happening at the start of a Democratic president's term, there'd be breathless coverage of the movement in the mainstream media, regardless of how popular the president appeared to be. Remember the Tea Party at the start of Barack Obama's term? The message of the coverage would be that Real Americans aren't on board with what the president is doing. But the movement Axios is describing is Democratic, so it will never be portrayed as the true voice of the people in the mainstream press.

Axios tells us that Democrats on Capitol Hill find this all rather annoying:

Some lawmakers feel their grassroots base is setting expectations too high for what Democrats can actually accomplish as the minority party in both chambers of Congress.

* Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told Axios: "What I think we need to do more is: Put the onus on Republicans, so that the calls that we're getting are directed toward Republicans."

* "There has definitely been some tension the last few days where people felt like: you are calling the wrong people. You are literally calling the wrong people," said one House Democrat.

But the callers are simply doing what they believe will be most effective. Since Donald Trump's first term, Indivisible and other activist groups have told voters to limit their calls to their own representatives and senators.

Members of Congress don’t care what people outside of their district (for House) or state (for Senators) think. Remember, MoCs care first and foremost about getting re-elected—and the people who can cast actual votes for or against them are their own constituents. If you can’t vote for or against them in their next election, they don’t care what you think....

For example, if Senate staffers have the sense that most phone calls are coming in from out of state, they will tell their boss that. That gives the Senator a reason to dismiss call volume as the concern of “out-of-state troublemakers” (which they don’t care about) instead of the concerns of their actual constituents (which they should and most times do care about).

But maybe it's time to start ignoring this advice. Maybe we should be making life miserable for Republican staffers, too. Maybe we should lie about where we live. If a staffer asks for an address or a zip code, maybe we should be ready with a fake one.

I agree that some angry people don't understand how little power Democrats have. But why don't Democrats have power? Because Republicans never break ranks. Republicans nearly always vote in lockstep. This was true before Trump took over the party and it's true now. Occasionally Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski votes against a GOP priority, but only when the party can spare those votes, as in the case of the final vote on Pete Hegseth's appointment as defense secretary. When the final votes are taken on Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Robert Kennedy Jr., they'll all be confirmed.

But most Americans don't know that. They don't know that our Trump problem is actually a Republican problem, just the way they didn't understand that our failure to pass meaningful gun legislation after Sandy Hook was (and is) because Republicans won't budge on guns -- ever.

Why don't voters know this? Partly it's because the media doesn't report on it. The media treats Republican party-line voting as just a fact of life and not as a choice. Pundits scold Democrats for allegedly failing to understand the concerns of right-wing voters, but no one ever scolds Republicans for ignoring voters to their left.

And Democratic politicians regarly describe a world in which bipartisanship is possible. Here's a social media message from the Democratic leader in the House:

Republicans have been ordered by their billionaire Puppet Master to end Medicare as we know it. Democrats have 215 members in the House who can stop this extreme effort. All we need is three House Republicans to join us.

— Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 7:26 AM

But that will never happen. Yet many voters don't understand that, in part because Democrats prattle on about bipartisanship and frequently praise the rare Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, who challenge the party orthodoxy on one or two issues. Every day, Republicans and the right-wing media blame Democrats and liberals for everything that's wrong in the world. Democrats attack Trump, but never talk about GOP lockstep voting. In fact, for all their willingness to be conciliatory, it's Democrats who have the reputation for ideological purity and extremism, while death-before-compromise Republicans are seen as less extreme, or extreme only because Donald Trump has intimidated them and compelled them to suppress their usual middle-of-the-road instincts.

I don't know what the solution to this is -- but issue polling and referendum voting make it clear that quite a few Republican voters disagree with their party on many issues. Abortion right referenda pass in red states. So do referenda aimed at increasing state minimum wages. Polling shows across-the-board support for higher taxes on the rich and some gun control measures. And in the present moment, the institutions Trump is threatening have strong support:

Democrats should name and shame the GOP. Who knows? Maybe Republicans' own constituents will start lighting up the phones.

TRUMP AND MUSK THINK REALLY BAD THINGS WILL NEVER HAPPEN, AND SO DO THE SANEWASHING JOURNALISTS WHO COVER THEM

After President Trump announced a proposal to forcibly remove Gazans, clear the territory, and turn it into a "Riviera," Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times assured us that cooler heads are likely to prevail and Trump is likely to walk away from the idea:

Several advisers to Mr. Trump said they expected the Gaza ownership idea to die away quietly as it became clear to Mr. Trump that it was unfeasible. And that already seemed to be happening by Wednesday afternoon.

In a separate Times story, Patrick Kingsley told us not to worry our pretty little minds, because Trump didn't really mean what he said.

But it is the very outlandishness of Mr. Trump’s plan that signaled to some that it was not meant to be taken literally.

Just as Mr. Trump has often made bold threats elsewhere that he ultimately has not enacted, some saw his gambit in Gaza as a negotiating tactic aimed at forcing compromises from both Hamas and from Arab leaders.

So relax! Trump won't actually pursue this terrible idea!

But, in fact, Trump told us on Truth Social this morning at 6:32 Eastern time that yes, he intends to pursue this:

(No, I have no idea why he's calling Chuck Schumer a Palestinian.)

You can argue that the elite media sanewashes Trump and his henchmen because elite media outlets actually support Trump and are pleased that he's doing what he's doing. But if that were true, I think stories and editorials critical of Trump would disappear altogether in these news outlets. The Times endorsed Kamala Harris. It publishes writers such as Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg who regularly denounce Trump. I think we have a different problem.

When you're a successful journalist, it's easily to fall into the habit of believing that the system works and powerful people are sincerely trying to do a good job -- after all, powerful people rewarded you with a plum position at The New York Times or CNN or The Atlantic. Your life is good, so the system must be benevolent.

If that's your worldview, it might be hard for you to imagine that functioning institutions could be taken over by madmen and simply stop working properly. You assume something like that can't really happen. The news organizations that have employed you have functioned well. The government you cover has always functioned well enough to sustain the country's status as the globe's dominant power. If you've gone from birth in an economically comfortable family to good school after good school and a series of mentor-mentee relationships that have efficiently advanced your career until you're finally at or near the top of your profession, maybe the idea of a complete breakdown in any system is impossible for you to imagine.

The two men running the country have their own problems imagining calamity. Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are sons of rich men who became even richer. Trump has experienced what should have been calamity -- at one point in his life, he was nearly a billion dollars in debt -- but he survived that. His political viability survived a mass casualty event in the final year of his first term, and lawyers, ideologue judges, and a massive army of right-wing propagandists got him through multiple legal cases.

So he thinks he's bulletproof -- as does Musk, who ran Twitter into the ground, build cars that regularly catch on fire, and is still the richest man in the world, and getting richer by the day.

Last night I watched the final episode of HBO's Chernobyl, which I'd missed when it first aired. That final episode dramatizes the events leading to the Chernobyl meltdown.

The disaster occurred while running a test to simulate cooling the reactor during an accident in blackout conditions. The operators carried out the test despite an accidental drop in reactor power, and due to a design issue, attempting to shut down the reactor in those conditions resulted in a dramatic power surge. The reactor components ruptured and lost coolants, and the resulting steam explosions and meltdown destroyed the containment building, followed by a reactor core fire that spread radioactive contaminants across the USSR and Europe.

In the HBO dramatization, an arrogant plant supervisor orders workers to conduct the test and continue carrying it out despite their strenuous objections. We all know what happened.

I thought of this while reading a CNN story about Musk's takeover of Twitter and the lessons it holds for federal workers:

... former Twitter employees say Musk sees laws, regulations and procedures as unnecessary speed bumps meant to be ignored.

... For example, in an infamous incident, the billionaire unexpectedly forced a Twitter team to take one of the company’s data centers offline for cost savings on Christmas Eve in 2022. According to [a] former senior employee, best practice would have been for the servers to be wiped clean for data privacy reasons, but they were not.

“When we were going to shut down this data center, the people from the data center team worked with him, and were basically saying, ‘Look, if we want to do this and do it safely, it’s going to take ... like six months or eight months,’” the former senior employee said. “(Musk’s) like, ‘Ah, f**k that.’”

As far as Musk is concerned, nothing terrible has happened as a result of this incident or any other moment of reckless at Twitter -- it's still up and running, it still has millions of users, it's now a highly successful far-right propaganda outlet, and he's still stinking rich. So now that he has access to government computers that can have a literal life-or-death impact on millions of Americans, he undoubtedly thinks, Fuck it -- what's the worst that can go wrong?

And Trump will continue to empower Musk and toss out reckless policy proposals because his life has been an uninterrupted luxury vacation for more than four gold-plated decades. (See also Robert Kennedy Jr., who continued to live a life of privilege, ease, and sexual excess even after his father and uncle were assassinated and he became a youthful heroin addict. He's fine. No one he knows personally has lost a child to a disease that can be prevented by a vaccine.)

And while the reporters who cover these men haven't lived lives that are nearly as soft, they fall into the habit of believing that the system -- which has always worked for them -- will prevent everything from going completely off the rails. In 2025, that's not a safe assumption.

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE COUP, DADDY?

On Monday there was a demonstration outside the headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development to protest the illegal dismantling of the agency by the Trump/Musk administration. Several members of Congress were there, and Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii announced on Monday that he was placing a blanket hold on all of the administration's State Department appointees.

These were early events in what's shaping up to be a much larger resistance movement. There was a rally at the Treasury yesterday to protest the illegal takeover of payment systems by Elon Musk. Quite a few Democrats in Congress spoke.



But some fossilized old Democrats have fixated on the Democratic response to the dismantling of USAID and concluded that it's very, very bad for the party. Politico's Rachael Bade writes:

After three months of soul-searching about how to revive their party, some Democrats this week believe they have finally found a rallying point following Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy piece by piece at Trump’s behest, starting with the U.S. Agency for International Development, lit a fire under many Democratic lawmakers — several of whom rallied Monday outside USAID headquarters.

But relaunching the resistance to defend one of the least popular corners of the federal budget could be a monster miscalculation — and some prominent Democrats told me they have serious strategic reservations about how their party is fighting back.

When I asked veteran strategist David Axelrod whether Democrats were “walking into a trap” on defending foreign aid, he literally finished my sentence.

“My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be well satisfied to have this fight,’” he said. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

Rahm Emanuel — the former House leader, Chicago mayor and diplomat — told me much the same: “You don’t fight every fight. You don’t swing at every pitch. And my view is — while I care about the USAID as a former ambassador — that’s not the hill I’m going to die on,” he said.

These people -- Bade as well as Axelrod and Emanuel -- have absolutely no idea what's happening in America right now. They think this a normal policy battle begun by a normal administration and fought by normal means. They think Democrats have chosen USAID as the centerpiece of their resistance.

We're in an all-out war to salvage what's left of America. The war can end one of two ways: with Donald Trump and his henchmen laying waste to our system of government, or with an effective fight on many fronts that pushes the totalitarians back, limits the damage they do, and begins the process of restoring what we had. If Trump's people win, it won't matter whether you chose this battle or that battle or a whole series of battles -- you'll be marked as a traitor. But if the good guys win, what people will remember is that you fought -- wherever and however you fought.

This is the central battle of our times. One way or the other, the first sentence of every prominent political figure's obituary will tell what that person did or didn't do in either the glorious Trump Revolution or the traitorous Trump Rebellion. So, yes, defend USAID. People won't look back on this and think, "Eeeuww, Democrats defended foreign aid!" They'll think: Trump seized absolute across-the-board power, and these Democrats put up a fight. If Trump wins, they'll see that as treason. If he loses, they'll see it as heroism.

Do you get the feeling that Trump might be overreaching a wee bit?

President Donald Trump on Tuesday proposed that the United States take a “long-term ownership position” over Gaza, moving its residents to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” in another country and developing the war-torn territory under U.S. control, offering a vision of mass displacement likely to inflame sentiments in the Arab world.

Trump’s proposal, which he offered as he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, was likely to provoke a furious reaction from many Palestinians as well as their Arab allies in the region, since it suggested permanently removing Gaza’s 2.2 million residents from Palestinian territory and settling them outside of their land. It would also pull the United States even more deeply into the conflict by taking over territory that belongs to Palestinians.

Did even MAGA voters want this? Did anyone want this, apart from a certain member of Trump's family?

AP Breaking News banner over a March 19, 2024 AP story.

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— Jesse Lee (@jessecharleslee.bsky.social) February 4, 2025 at 7:14 PM

Mere months after he won a large portion of the young male vote, in part by arguing that Democrats were likely to get us into World War III, Trump seems to be calling for U.S. military involvement all over the world. The freshman senator from Arizona is angry:

Trump wants to invade Panama, Greenland and now Gaza. Trump is a warmonger.

— Ruben Gallego (@RubenGallego) February 5, 2025

But look at Gallego's voting record:

The Senate has taken 20 votes so far. Most votes AGAINST Trump: Hirono, Sanders, and Warren (18) Most votes WITH Trump: Slotkin (14), Shaheen (14), Hassan (13), Peters (13), Fetterman (12), Gallego (12), Warner (11) docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

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— Jonathan Cohn (@jonathancohn.bsky.social) January 27, 2025 at 10:54 PM

Why are so many Democrats -- including some, like Gallego, who joined the protests this week -- continuing to try to meet Trump halfway, or much more than halfway? Look, I understand that if you're from Arizona, a purple border state that went for Trump in 2024, you might want to stay to the right of the average Democrat on immigration. But what are you getting out of voting for Trump's pick to be secretary of veterans affairs? Do you seriously believe that will appease Trump if you criticize him at at other times? Do you think it will make death-before-compromise Republicans in the Senate more willing to work with you? Do you think swing voters will remember this vote six years from now when you're up for reelection (assuming we still have elections)?

Everyone in the Democratic Party needs to see the big picture: that Trump is laying waste to every institution in our political order, that he won't stop when he's consolidated his gains because he's addicted to the process of generating headlines and owning the libs, and that he's not doing this with any understanding of when he might have threatened his own standing with his recklessness. At the end of all this, he'll either preside triumphantly over a diminished pariah nation or he'll be defeated through irregular means -- popular unrest, lawsuits, or something more violent -- not through committee hearings or legislative horse trading. Democrats have to act with the big picture in mind. There's no possibility now that Democrats can win one battle or one lawsuit and restore normality.

Even though this can't be solved in Congress alone, given Republicans' lockstep support for Trump, it's worthwhile for Democrats to send a signal that business can't proceed as usual in Congress. I like Norm Ornstein's recommendations for what Democrats should do to throw sand in the gears of the Senate and send a signal of absolute non-cooperation. Some of these ideas may be familiar to you, but a few were new to me:

1. Insist that the Journal of the Senate be read at the onset of every day’s business, soaking up time otherwise spent on legislating.

2. Deny unanimous consent to every action. The Senate operates by unanimous consent, and getting around it is time-consuming and uncomfortable.

3. Refuse to allow committees to meet when the Senate is doing business on the floor.

4. This is the relevant portion of Senate Rule 26: A committee may not meet (or continue a meeting in progress) on any day (1) after the Senate has been in session for two hours, or (2) after 2:00 p.m. when the Senate is in session. The Senate routinely waives this rule via unanimous consent. Deny it.

5. In Rule 14, there is a requirement that every bill is to be read in full three times before passage. That is routinely waived to include only reading a summary. Require the full reading, especially with omnibus bills.

6. Use the filibuster on every bill and confirmation. Draw a page from the Mitch McConnell playbook; raise the bar to 60 on legislation and use all the delays that can come with filibusters on confirmations. It is a regular misconception that filibusters have been taken away from confirmations. In fact, the cloture barrier has been moved from 60 to a simple majority. But even if these confirmations can pass ultimately, they can be delayed significantly by exploiting the rules.

7. Use the hold to block many if not most confirmations. A hold is simply a senator indicating he or she will deny unanimous consent to move forward on a confirmation, but it has been respected for many decades as a norm blocking action. Holds are no longer anonymous, but that is not a barrier. This something applied more than once by Senate Republicans during the Biden presidency; it was not just Tommy Tuberville and military promotions. Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, among others, used blanket holds to protest Biden policies or just to gum up the works. Kudos to Hawaii’s Brian Schatz for showing how it is done, with today’s blanket hold on State Department nominees over the hostile takeover of AID. It should be done by others for Treasury, Justice, Defense, Education, and other departments.

But even all this won't be close to enough. It's not partisan politics as usual. This is Civil War II, and it will need to fought on many fronts.