The Weekly Sift

Democrats can’t resist Trump until he starts doing things.

In a Perry Bacon article I linked to two weeks ago, he cautioned against “turning into an amateur political strategist”. It’s a tough temptation to resist, and I’ve been in several conversations recently that veered into who the Democrats’ 2028 nominee should be, what groups of voters we should be trying to win over, how our message needs to change, and so on.

If you find your mind heading in that direction, all I can say is “Slow down.” The election of 2028 or even 2026 will be fought on a battlefield that doesn’t exist yet.

I think the place for political thinking to start is with one obvious fact: The Trumpists won in 2024. They got the White House and both houses of Congress. They control the Supreme Court to an extent that no partisan faction has in my lifetime. And I draw one major conclusion from those facts: The ball is in their court. We can’t know precisely what they’ll do with it until they start doing things. The things they do and the consequences of those actions will shape the landscape of 2026 and 2028.

Trump has raised many hopes and expectations among the people who voted for him. Specifically:

• The economy is going to be fabulous. Not only will inflation stop, but prices will go back down to what they were the last time Trump was president. The trade deficit will vanish: Americans will get good jobs making the products we no longer import, but other Americans won’t lose their jobs making products for export. Increased oil and gas production will make energy much cheaper, lowering the price of everything. But we won’t have to worry about increased disasters from climate change.
• Trump will wield unchecked power without abusing it. Neither Congress nor the courts nor the states will be able to stand in his way. But he won’t be petty and go after political opponents who broke no laws. He won’t make Americans afraid to criticize him. He won’t govern for his own profit. He won’t alter the rules to make future Democratic victories impossible. And he won’t ignore the Constitution to seek a third term.
• The government is going to get drastically smaller. Spending will go way down without cutting Social Security or Medicare or defense. Regulations will be slashed without unleashing bad behavior from predatory corporations. Taxes will go down, but the budget deficit will vanish. Corruption will disappear. Private companies and the free market will serve Americans’ interests better and more efficiently than big government programs like ObamaCare or Medicare for All.
• American strength will make the world safer. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will end on terms favorable to US interests. Terrorism will stop. Tariffs will be an unanswerable weapon that makes other countries do what we want.
• The immigration problem will be solved. The Army will round up 10-20 million undocumented nonwhite people living here, without terrorizing the rest of us. They will be held in camps until they can be deported to other countries, who will accept them for fear of American tariffs. That roundup and detention power will be wielded without abuse, and only the bad, criminal immigrants will be affected. The good Latinos will stay and the bad ones will get kicked out. American industries (like agriculture) won’t be affected by the sudden departure of their work force.
• Normal (i.e., White, Christian, straight) Americans will matter again. Small towns and rural areas will make a comeback. Working people will get a fair shake and won’t be exploited by giant unregulated corporations, so unions and consumer-protection agencies won’t be needed.

And more. Now, I think the picture I just painted is a fairy tale, because many of those goals are contradictory and most of the rest are unlikely. But just for a moment, let’s imagine Trump fulfills all of it. The people who voted for him look at the results and say, “That’s what I voted for.” The people who didn’t vote for him have to admit (if we are honest) that our fears were groundless. How do the Democrats surge in 2026 and 2028 to regain power?

It’s simple: They don’t. And more than that, they shouldn’t. If the MAGA movement can do all that, it will deserve to stay in power. Gavin Newsom (or whoever you’re picturing) won’t be able to run against it. No “message” you can come up with will win over Hispanics or suburban women or demoralized nonvoters or whichever other group you attribute our 2024 loss to.

What that means in practice is that, while we continue to espouse our own values, and oppose nominees and proposals that look wrong to us, it’s way too soon to start shaping any sort of campaign. A large chunk of the 2026 and 2028 campaigns will necessarily be reactive. Trump will disappoint many of the people who voted for him, either by not doing what he said he would do (“build the wall” from his first administration) or by doing it and having it turn out differently than he said it would. Future Democratic campaigns will center on exploiting that disappointment.

But we can’t design those campaigns until we see who he disappoints and how.

So what does that mean Democrats should be doing now? Laying the groundwork for the Trump-disappointed-you campaign, whatever it turns out to be. We need to constantly call attention to the ways Trump tries to move the goalposts. (Bringing prices down, we now learn from him, is very hard.) We need to highlight those people who are being harmed by his policies, once those policies start to take shape.

The upcoming leadership battle in the House will be the first substantive thing to look at. For the first time in decades, all committee chairs will be White men.

The budget will be a target-rich environment, because Republican math just doesn’t work. Either their cuts won’t total up the way they anticipated, or they will cut things they said they wouldn’t. Probably both. And if there’s a deficit, they own it.

I know that vision is not nearly as inspiring as a ten-point-plan to elect AOC. But this is the reality we have arrived in: The voters have given MAGA a chance to prove itself. We won’t know how to run against them until we see how they fail that test.