Advice From The Establishment
Yesterday, Peggy Noonan posited that no president other than Trump has achieved the overwhelming level of complete cultural saturation that he has and that that “gives him power in this ill-educated, broken-up, low-attention-span country.” To understand the moment we’re in you can’t forget the level of historical illiteracy permeating the country. Trump, however, “has broken through as an instantly recognizable, memeable, cartoonable figure— the hair, the red tie, the mouth— but he also provides, deliberately and not, iconic moments that connect to other iconic moments.”
Republican lawmakers, including those most supportive of the president, are beside themselves with anxiety. When you speak to them— off the record, between friendly acquaintances— and ask how it’s going, they shift, look off, shrug: You know how it’s going. A GOP senator who supports the president had a blanched look. “He doesn’t do anything to make it easy,” he shrugged.
What is the meaning of the averted eyes and anxious faces? It means Trump 2.0 isn’t better. It means for all the talk of the new professionalism in the Trump operation, they have to get used to the chaos again and ride it, tempting the gods of order and steadiness. After one week they concluded the first administration wasn’t a nervous breakdown and the second isn’t a recovery; instead, again they’re on a ship with a captain in an extended manic phase who never settles into soothing depression.
…The second rise of Donald Trump is a total break with the past— that stable order, healthy expectations, a certain moderation, and a strict adherence to the law aren’t being “traduced”; they are ending. That something new has begun. People aren’t sure they’re right about this and no one has a name for the big break, but they know we have entered something different— something more emotional, more tribal and visceral.
There is the strong man, and the cult of personality, and the leg-breakers back home who keep the congressional troops in line. In 2017, a lot of people who watch closely and think deeply, thought: We’re having an odd moment, but we’ll snap back into place.” Now they are thinking something new has begun. American politics was a broad avenue with opposing lanes for a very long time, at least a century, and now we have turned and are on a different avenue, on a different slope, with different shadows.
There’s a sense we’re living through times we’ll understand only in retrospect. But the collapse of the old international order and the break in America’s old domestic order are shaping this young century.
So far Trump is governing by executive order. This contributes to the uneasiness. Such orders are legitimate, sometimes necessary. Barack Obama used them heavily— “I’ve got a pen.” Trump increased their use, Joe Biden more so, and Trump is turbocharging their use. The heavy use of executive orders makes all politics personal, having to do with the man who orders and signs with a flourish. Making it personal distorts our understanding of what a leader can and should do. Executive orders ignore the branch of government called Congress and work against its authority, its role in the republican drama. They give the impression we are a government of one branch. Doing all this habituates the public to the idea of authoritarianism, of rule by the strongman. We will pick a new caudillo and he will save us with his pen! When you do away with branches and balances you cause trouble.
Has it hurt his popularity? No. People back boldness when they think a lot has gone wrong and needs righting. They’d expect a certain amount of mayhem. And with Trump, chaos is baked in.
A word to Democrats trying to figure out how to save their party. The most eloquent of them, of course, think the answer is finding the right words. We need to talk more like working people, we need Trump’s touch with popular phrasing.
The answer isn’t to talk but do. Be supple. The Trumpian policies you honestly support— endorse them, join in the credit. If you think violent illegal immigrants should be removed, then back current efforts while standing— firmly, publicly— on the side of peaceful, hardworking families doing no harm and in fact contributing. Admit what your party’s gotten wrong the past 15 years. Don’t be defensive, be humble.
Most of all, make something work. You run nearly every great city in the nation. Make one work— clean it up, control crime, smash corruption, educate the kids.
You want everyone in the country to know who you are? Save a city.
A former Reagan speech-writer, she’s an old line conservative Republican. Paul Krugman isn’t and he has a very different perspective: Oppose, Oppose, Oppose— and Do It Loudly. “Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail. It's true that many MAGA opponents were demoralized by Trump’s victory, and initially withdrew emotionally from politics. Hey, I’m human too; for a while I watched a lot of musical performances and reread beloved novels. But it’s time to move on and not be intimidated.”
The idea that Trump won a mandate is pure poppycock. [I]n 2008 Barack Obama won the popular vote by 7.2 percentage points, yet Republicans opposed his agenda every step of the way. In January 2009, when the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month, not a single House Republican voted for Obama’s rescue plan… Biden won by 4.5 percent in 2020, yet received no Republican support for anything he did. Did Republicans pay a price for opposing and obstructing Obama and Biden? Hardly. They won big in the 2010 midterms and, of course, took Congress and the White House last November. So Democrats are supposed to show deference to Donald Trump, who won by 1.5 percent— and didn’t even win a majority of the overall vote?”
Now, I have a hypothesis about the belief that Democrats should defer to Trump in a way that Republicans never have to Democratic presidents. It is, I suspect, in part a perverse response to Trump’s utter lack of the moral and intellectual qualities we used to expect in a president. I’ve never seen anyone say this explicitly, but as I read it the implicit reasoning goes like this: the fact that Trump won despite his obvious awfulness means that his issues must have resonated powerfully with voters.
But was Trump’s awfulness actually obvious to voters? Not to the low-information voters who provided his margin of victory. And was it even that obvious to voters who followed the news, but only somewhat superficially? The mainstream media heavily sanewashed Trump throughout the campaign.
So why did Trump win? I’ve seen many analyses, some quite elaborate, but to some extent you need to bear in mind that at least some of the people pushing these analyses are in effect talking their own book— making the case that Democrats would have won, or will win in the future, if only they were taking the analyst’s advice. I still haven’t seen anything convincing me that the basic story wasn’t simple, and the same as the story that explains incumbent party defeats around the world.
It's a well-established result that when prices and wages both rise— as they did almost everywhere as economies recovered from Covid, stressing supply chains— workers tend to attribute higher wages to their own efforts, while blaming higher prices on external forces, especially politicians:
This logic is what made 2024… a “graveyard of incumbents.” But it didn’t give Trump a mandate to rename the Gulf of Mexico, invade Greenland, shut down the National Institutes of Health, fire DEI administrators or really to do anything besides reduce prices and control illegal immigration (which was already way down.)
Many voters believed that he could do just that; the most recent surveys show Republican voters on average believing that Trump can magically reduce inflation to zero over the next year— and since that’s an average, many of them apparently think he can actually reduce prices, which he indeed promised to do during the campaign:
He can’t, of course, and has no plan to fight inflation, let alone reduce prices. His most recent blast on the subject is almost pathetic in its lack of ideas, other than the proposition that DEI is somehow responsible for everything bad:
But Democrats can’t just sit around waiting for Trump’s promises to fail. They need to constantly challenge him on the issue, keep reminding voters that he lied about it all through the campaign, and hang rising prices around his neck every step of the way.
Nor, as I see it, should they narrowly focus on kitchen-table issues. One reason low-information voters may have believed Trump’s nonsense claims about being able to reduce prices is that some of them really thought he was the brilliant manager he played on TV. The reality, however, is that the Trump administration has made a complete shambles of its first 10 days, especially with their it’s on, no it isn’t, yes it is spending freeze that is both destructive and clearly illegal, and has itself been frozen by the courts. It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to make an issue of Trump’s raging incompetence.
I also think and certainly hope that the ugliness of Trump’s character will quickly become a political liability. We all know and dislike people who are always looking for someone else to blame when bad things happen. I can’t imagine that Trump’s reaction to the DC plane crash— blaming it on DEI, that is, asserting without evidence that someone nonwhite, female, or both must have been responsible— will play well with most Americans. And Democrats shouldn’t hold off on pointing out how despicably he’s behaving because political consultants have told them to focus on the price of eggs.
So Democrats and MAGA opponents shouldn’t hold their tongues and try to make nice with Trump in the belief that he represents the will of the people. Americans are just starting to find out that they guy they elected and his policies aren’t at all what they thought they were voting for. And we should do everything we can to accelerate their awful journey of discovery.
Senor T’s default response to every setback— whining, finger-pointing, lashing out— won’t wear thin with his supporters. The illusion of Trump as a strongman rests on the premise that he is in control, that he alone can fix things. But when the reality of his governing chaos collides with those expectations, there’s an actual opportunity for Democrats to expose the fraud at the heart of his appeal. This isn’t a time for deference or for waiting out the storm. Noonan, ever the institutionalist, frets about the collapse of the old order. Krugman, more a pragmatist, warns against letting Trump define the terms of engagement. But there’s something deeper at play: the battle isn’t just over policies, but over reality itself. Trump thrives on spectacle, on shaping the narrative through repetition and sheer force of will. The antidote to that isn’t technocratic tinkering or chasing after his voters with diluted versions of his own rhetoric. It’s relentless opposition, exposure, and mobilization.
The lesson of the past isn’t that the old order is collapsing— it’s that the old order was never enough. Trump’s rise was made possible by decades of systemic failure: economic inequality, racial resentment, the GOP-engineered collapse of robust public education, the erosion of democratic norms… The answer isn’t nostalgia for a more stable time, but the fight to build something better. Not just resisting Trump, but articulating a vision that makes his politics of grievance and revenge obsolete. Because if there’s one thing history teaches us, it’s that the void left by a collapsing order doesn’t stay empty for long. What comes next depends on what people are willing to fight for. It’s why Democrats should have tossed Pelosi overboard the moment she engineered an AOC defeat in favor of an old empty husk as chair of the House Oversight Committee.
Yes Pelosi and Schumer and a bunch of other Dems are way past their due date. They are too weak emotionally and mentally to fight what’s happening now and their mindset is of an old order that no longer exists - depending on honor and reason are long gone. Young, charismatic, eloquent leaders with progressive ideas and fire in their bellies must take over if we are to defeat MAGA. Too bad Bernie is too old.
Trump is a lunatic. He is not competent and he is not sane. The American people should have listened to the people who worked directly with him the first time (Pence, Hutchinson, Tillerson, et al) the man is incompetent as well as being mentally ill, at least with malignant narcissism. To put this man in the White House in his state of cognitive decline is like handing a toddler a loaded pistol and hoping for the best! God help us all until this reptile strokes out or justice is served up.
It's hard to oppose something on principle when, basically you have no principles except that you deserve to do well. That is the only principle they defend against all comers, and until Trump poses a threat akin to a progressive primary challenger, i.e., to their business model, expect whatever is most convenient.