The Weekly Sift

The scenario where American democracy survives Trump got a little more credible this week.

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Consider the events of this week, all of which will be described in more detail in the weekly summary I’ll post later this morning:

• Monday, Cory Booker began his record-setting 25-hour speech in the Senate, making the case that “the country is in crisis”. At its peak, the livestream of this speech was being watched to 300,000 viewers.
• Tuesday, voters in Wisconsin (a swing state Trump carried just five months ago) resoundingly rejected a Trump-supported candidate for the state supreme court. Elon Musk spent $21 million on the campaign and led a rally himself, but liberal Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford won the race 55%-45%.
• Wednesday evening Trump announced his tariff plan. Later that day, four Republicans joined Democrats to pass a Senate resolution rescinding the tariffs on Canada. The resolution is not expected to take effect because Speaker Mike Johnson will not let the House vote on it. But it is the first clear rebuke either house of Congress has offered Trump.
• Thursday and Friday, investors around the world reacted to Trump’s tariffs by selling their stocks. The S&P 500 lost 10% of its value in just two days. By Friday evening it was 17% below its February high. The panic is continuing this morning.
• Saturday, “Hands Off” protest rallies happened in 1400 locations across the country. 800K people had signed up for the protests, making credible the organizers’ claim that millions participated.

It’s tricky to evaluate the significance of all this. If you look at it all pessimistically, Booker’s speech was a stunt that produced no direct congressional action, off-year elections are notoriously bad predictors of subsequent elections, Trump has announced and withdrawn tariff plans before that whipsawed the markets, and massive protests in his first term seemed to have little consequence. A month or two from now, none of this may look all that important.

But.

Six weeks ago, I posted “How Things Stand“, a summary of how Trump was threatening American democracy and where things might go from there.

So now we’ve seen Trump’s opening moves: a blizzard of executive orders claiming unprecedented powers that can be found nowhere in the Constitution. That was all predictable.

What wasn’t predictable, and is still unknown, is how the other American power centers would respond. I’m talking about Congress, the courts, the state governments, and the People. That’s all still very hard to predict, because each of those power centers will influence the behavior of the others.

It’s important for us to be neither complacent about all this nor resigned to our fate.

I projected a scenario that avoided the establishment of a lasting Trump autocracy, emphasizing that it was just a scenario, not a prediction. My point was that a way out of this was still possible. The first steps were:

• Trump continues losing popularity. He never had much, but his brand becomes politically toxic.
• That lack of voter support makes support from congressional Republicans waver. They may not openly defy Trump, but the slim Republican majorities (especially in the House) lose their cohesion, making it impossible to pass legislation without at least some Democratic support.

I had hoped that the looming government shutdown of March 14 would be the time when congressional support would waver, and that Republicans wouldn’t be able to pass a continuing resolution without negotiating a deal with the Democrats. That didn’t happen. Mike Johnson was able to hold his small majority together to pass the CR on a nearly party-line vote. Then Chuck Schumer folded in the Senate (for reasons I found plausible but not necessarily convincing), ending the threat of a Democratic filibuster. So the government is funded through September.

However, the events of this week show that we’re still on the path I laid out. Again, I’m not saying that success is certain, just that there is still a way out of this through political processes, without widespread riots or civil war.

There is no legal or political mechanism that directly links public opinion, market crashes, or elections for relatively minor offices to the kinds of legal or congressional action that will halt the Trump/Musk coup or lead to the restoration of American democracy. However, autocratic movements rely on a sense of inevitability and self-confidence, with each usurpation of power emboldening its leaders and foot-soldiers to dare the next one. Autocrats depend on a sense of public helplessness that demoralizes opposition and makes each successive victim feel alone and unsupported.

The narrative of Trump’s inevitability and his opposition’s powerlessness ran aground this week. He remains in office and retains his grip on the levers of executive power. But his true supporters have never been more than about 1/3 of the American public, and many in Congress, the courts, the media, the business community, and elsewhere have lined up behind him more from intimidation or a lack of attractive alternatives than real conviction.

The momentum that has swept Trump forward can turn, with each act of opposition emboldening the next. All along, there has been a scenario in which his seizure of unconstitutional power fails. That scenario is still intact, and is more credible today than it was a week ago.