Resisting Trump and His MAGA Gang

No Easy Answers, But A Few Suggestions

Jan 28, 2025

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I had thought of listing a wide range of commentaries on resisting Trump, but the list grew far too long. Instead I am including only two articles that I thought particularly well-written, as well as a selection of music that I find helpful to keep up my spirits. The music is also available in a YouTube playlist, in case you prefer to skip the analysis for now.

If you haven´t already read the post On Inauguration Eve by Cathy Sunshine that I reposted earlier this month, check it out. The articles below are “Institutional Resistance is Futile” by Elie Mystal in The Nation and by “It´s Time for Democrats to Go Low,” by Peter Rothpletz in The Guardian.

I also included links to the blogs and columns that I follow and find most useful.

Institutional Resistance Is Futile

It’s time for the Democratic Party to abandon its staid, rules-based resistance to Trumpism and wage a fierce, moral response.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-should-abandon-institution-based-resistance/

by Elie Mystal

No more deals. No more games. No more parliamentarian parlor tricks designed to dull the roughest edges of Donald Trump’s unconscionable policies. My greatest holiday wish for the shambolic political party known as the Democrats is that they abandon the cloying institutional response to Trump that they have deployed to such little effect …

Democrats, having abandoned any attempt at an institutional response, must instead meet the moral outrage of the moment with tactics that don’t rely on Trump’s courts, executive agencies, or Susan Collins. Nobody will care if the Democrats try to use the Senate parliamentarian to gum up some cockamamie plan Trump has cooked up. But people will care if they see Democrats out on the streets, joining picket lines, and putting their physical bodies between Trump’s forces and the regular people Trump is trying to hurt.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting that the Democrats should help Trump; I’m not recommending that they join in the evil he is about to unleash on the country and the world. But they should not spend another four years humping guardrails and holding a “center” that has already shifted so far to the right that it makes George W. Bush look like a benign moderate.

We’ve already seen how little that approach achieves. Since 2016, the Democrats have deployed institutional responses—lawsuits, hearings, impeachment efforts, and unreliable Republican allies—to try to stop Trump, while Trump has used raw political power, billionaire buddies, and anti-establishment rhetoric amplified by a cowed and captured media to bend the political universe to his will. Even when the Democrats have “won,” they’ve looked weak and ineffectual. Think about it this way: The single greatest institutional victory for the Democrats during Trump’s first term was not delivered by a Democrat but by a Republican, John McCain, when he gave the thumbs down on a vote to repeal Obamacare.

Fast-forward six years from that iconic moment: As Americans from both parties cheer the cold-blooded murder of a healthcare CEO in the streets, Democrats continue to try to convince people that a program designed to help people buy the insurance the dead guy sold is the best we can do, while Trump has offered no healthcare plan whatsoever—but his people are convinced that if he did it would be “great.” It’s frankly amazing that Democrats didn’t lose by more.

And it gets worse: If you listen closely, you can hear Democrats express more sympathy for insurance company executives than they do for almost any group of people placed under threat by the Trump administration. That is the most maddening failure of the Democrats’ institutional responses: They spend their emotional and moral energy on defending the institutions Trump attacks instead of the human people he threatens. Trump demonizes immigrants and uses executive orders to harm them, but instead of defending immigrants and their humanity, Democrats defend… the “separation of powers” and the “rule of law.” He inspires his people to attack the LGBTQ community and, especially at the moment, the transgender community, and Democrats defend… Supreme Court precedent. The entire white wing of the country now uses “DEI” as a synonym for the n-word, and Democrats defend the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Trump wants to tear down the system in order to hurt people, but Democrats are more likely to defend the system than the people Trump is trying to hurt.

This insane cycle has to stop. We cannot defeat Trump or, more importantly, his racist, misogynist, know-nothing movement by propping up institutions and systems that so many millions of people—including those who are not racist or sexist and still reluctantly vote for the Democrats—have come to despise. When Trump moves to destroy an institution, the Democrats should do nothing. But when he moves to destroy people, the Democrats should do everything under the sun, including taking the “resistance” directly to the streets in the form of extrajudicial maneuvers and civil disobedience.

The first step toward doing nothing is, of course, not voting for Trump’s policies. I can’t believe I have to write this (but people familiar with the feckless Democratic Party know I do), but the Democrats should not vote for Trump’s initiatives. Not his legislation, not his cabinet picks, not one single thing. Keeping its head out of its ass long enough to simply not vote for Trump’s plans for two consecutive years would be the most anti-institutional thing the Democratic Party could do right now.

The best possible political outcome of this approach would be for the Republicans to own everything Trump does. The government is not divided. Republicans have won one-party rule. So force them to rule. Trump shouldn’t be able to get a single cabinet appointment with the help of Democratic votes. He shouldn’t be able to pass a single piece of legislation with their support. He shouldn’t be able to pass a budget with their help. The Republicans should be on their own. And if they have to get rid of the filibuster to move their agenda, so be it. Make them do it. Do nothing, and make Republicans do it all.

The results will not be pretty. Which is why Democrats, having abandoned any attempt at an institutional response, must instead meet the moral outrage of the moment with tactics that don’t rely on Trump’s courts, executive agencies, or Susan Collins. Nobody will care if the Democrats try to use the Senate parliamentarian to gum up some cockamamie plan Trump has cooked up. But people will care if they see Democrats out on the streets, joining picket lines, and putting their physical bodies between Trump’s forces and the regular people Trump is trying to hurt.

Top Blogs to Follow on U.S. Politics & Other Key Issues

Anand Giridharadas, Substack
Robert Reich, Substack
Qasim Rachid, Substack
Perry Bacon, Jr., Washington Post
Jamelle Bouie, New York Times
Michelle Goldberg, New York Times
Peter Beinart, Substack (on Israel and Palestine)
David Bacon, Blogspot (photos/analysis; immigration, labor, US-Mexico)

It’s time for Democrats to go low

by Peter Rothpletz, The Guardian 17 Jan 2025

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/17/fighting-back-newsletter-democrats

What the 2024 election results made clear is that the Obama coalition is dead. If Democrats are to have any shot at reclaiming power, so too must be the niceties and mores of the Obama era.

Yes, Democrats must get mean – ruthlessly, bitterly mean. This is not to say, however, that they need merely to cast aside the former first lady’s once-famous, now-infamous messaging mantra. No, what I prescribe is not just a new approach to political discourse but a new theory of opposition party politics.

Trumpism has corrupted America in many ways, but one of the most obvious is how voters now expect lawmakers and surrogates to be truly vicious cultural warriors for them. One can see manifestations of this in the congresswoman Nancy Mace’s deranged bullying of the congresswoman-elect Sarah McBride, the endless and deliberate mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name, and the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the top fundraisers in the House of Representatives.

This phenomenon also exists on the left. The coffers poured open for Jasmine Crockett following a tête-à-tête with the aforementioned Taylor Greene, during which Crockett mocked her colleague’s “bleach-blonde bad-built butch-body”. And one could argue the strongest period of the Harris-Walz campaign – at least in terms of Democratic enthusiasm – was during the “weird” and “couch” sagas of Brat summer.

As the commentator SE Cupp recently observed, “it doesn’t get said enough, but Trump’s enduring legacy will be convincing BOTH parties to lower the bar, and that possessing moral authority on anything is no longer a currency that matters”. Democrats can either bemoan the fact the fundamental rules of politics and discourse have changed or they can adapt to it. In the four years to come, emboldened voices on the right will work to expand the Overton window. Democrats’ reaction to this effort must not materialize as feigned – or earnest – injury and horror. Take the punch and return the favor.

This new, more muscular messaging strategy must be combined with a far more aggressive war footing in the halls of Congress.

The Democrat Adam Gray’s unseating of the Republican congressman John Duarte in California’s 13th congressional district cemented a nigh-historically tenuous situation for the House Republican party. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, will have only a 220-seat majority. However, Republicans are poised to lose three seats (if not more) as members resign to join the Trump administration. That will leave them with a majority of 217-seats, meaning Johnson can only afford to lose one member on major – and minor – votes.

The Republicans’ legislative to-do list is nothing to scoff at. In addition to renewing Trump’s first term tax cuts and possibly imposing hyper-controversial tariffs on various imports, Johnson will need to pass a bill to fund the government. Democrats must not help him.

Time and again congressional Democrats have swept in to save Republican leaders – and Republican voters – from their own lawmakers. This generosity must end. The Dems must bleed the Republican party of its political capital at every opportunity, even if it means the American people experience some pain. On a Bulwark podcast this week, the writer Jonathan V Last channeled Alan Moore’s iconic comic book anti-hero Rorschach to describe the mentality Democrats should adopt: “The politicians will look up and shout ‘save us,’ and I’ll look down, and whisper ‘no.’”

Yes, Democrats should make the next four years of Republican governance as grueling and painful as possible. Do not help them pass a budget (if Johnson, as Last playfully notes, offers up DC statehood as an incentive for cooperation, we can have another conversation). Do not vote for a single cabinet nominee – even those who qualify as “adults in the room” (sorry, Marco Rubio). Relatedly, do not hold back from highlighting all the darkest aspects of said nominees’ backgrounds – from former Fox host Pete Hegseth’s alleged sexual assault to Robert F Kennedy’s purported role in the deaths of dozens during a 2019 measles outbreak in American Samoa.

While on the Hill, casual comity is fine. Lawmakers should continue to break bread and imbibe brandy with one another. That is all to the good. But Democrats’ outdated impulse to prioritize good relationships with their conservative colleagues at all costs must end. Recall, many of these men and women have spent years valorizing a violent mob that sought to kill them. Comity for the sake of comity is, well, utter comedy.

On that note, there is no world in which Joe Biden and Harris attending the inauguration makes basic strategic sense. Such a move would only serve to undermine trust in a Democratic party brand that’s already on life support. Either Donald Trump is a fascist or he isn’t. There is no such thing as Schrödinger’s autocrat.

Liberals made the decision to compare the former and future commander-in-chief to Hitler. Rhetoric like that can’t be memory-holed. Thus, symbolically lauding the man’s re-ascension to power will not preserve the Democrats’ reputation as the “party of norms”. On the contrary, it will cement the growing sense – particularly after the pardon of Hunter Biden – that Dems traffic in lies and deceit with the same shamelessness as Republicans.

These strategic shifts – in messaging, in oppositional governance, and in observation of norms – will be difficult for some to swallow. After all, as Robert Frost often liked to observe, “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel”. Democrats must get over themselves; far too much is at stake.

What gives me hope now

To the limited extent I’m optimistic about the next four years, my resolve is rooted in the fact that Trump’s incoming administration – and his Republican coalition more broadly – will probably prove to be more fractious and wracked with infighting than it was during his first term. As we saw following the “Doge” chief Vivek Ramaswamy’s deranged, 90’s sitcom-addled tirade about H-1B visas and the “mediocrity” of American culture, deep policy disagreements plague the current marriage of OG Maga and the Silicon Valley tech bro billionaire class.

Steve Bannon, even more recently, vowed to “take down” the “truly evil” Elon Musk and excise him like a cancer from Trump’s orbit. Throughout the president-elect’s last stay in the White House, intra-party conflict was largely drawn along old guard versus new guard lines. Trump has since turned the Republican into a cult of personality. As such, slavish loyalty to the king is the only coin of the realm – and there are now major competing policy interests among his yes-men. Couple this with the reality that Trump is a lame duck and party elites will constantly be jockeying to be viewed as the heir apparent, and his den of vipers may just consume itself.