So far there have been no surprises to the Trump presidency. What you see is what he promised you would get, government by an arrogant, impulsive, self-obsessed, rich bully pretending to be for the little guy.
So he’s signed a lot of unenforceable and/or illegal executive orders or issued non-binding claims that two regulations will be eliminated for every one, Muslims will be banned, healthcare will be available to all for less money and so on.
Less advertised, he has begun to feather the nests of people like himself and his billionaire cabinet. He has proposed a tax reform that would save him $20 million a year, plans to roll back Dodd-Frank provisions designed to protect banking customers from predatory banks, and has cancelled a fiduciary rule for money managers of retirement accounts that would have stopped them from cheating old people. This hardly seems like the wish list of a populist.
He has also thrown his weight around internationally by slapping new sanctions on Iran, getting into a fight with the Prime Minister of Australia, wading into the murky waters of Israeli politics, insulting the Germans, threatening NATO and continuing to coddle Russia.
The ACLU which promised to see him in court if he violated the law didn’t have to wait long. Judges in four jurisdictions have now called a halt to his hair-trigger visa revocation plan. Leakers in his own administration have already begun to alert the citizenry to the internecine warfare in the West Wing and the maladministration being practiced there.
Appalled Republicans have largely gone along out of either fear of being targeted by the tweeter-in-chief or crass expediency. He may be a danger to the Republic, but he’s their danger and has already delivered a far-right Supreme Court nominee. However, there appears to be some uneasiness among those who have lain down with this dog about how badly the fleas are going to bite them.
For their part, the Democrats are in disarray. They risk looking like mere obstructionists on the Mitch McConnell model if they simply assume the 60 percent of the people who don’t care for Trump’s hyperkinetic, PR stunts will naturally embrace them. If the last election proved anything, it was that a large fraction of the country doesn’t really like either party or what it’s selling.
Grassroots opposition to Trump has been astonishingly robust with a Women’s March that was peaceful and worldwide, but whether the moral distaste it represented can be turned into political action remains to be seen. The self-congratulatory far left is unlikely to be able to expand to a majority party since it is as uncompromising as the far right.
The swift appearance of crowds at airports objecting to the clumsy, inflammatory, visa restrictions was an admirable display of resistance to the extreme impulses of Trump and his alt right whisperer Steve Bannon, but resistance doesn’t necessarily translate into a coherent movement.
Even more counterproductive was anarchic violence aimed at conservative speakers on college campuses. That is both a shameful betrayal of the values of free speech and liberal education, strategically idiotic, and criminal.
The antiwar and civil rights protests of the Nixon era are a cautionary tale. They only served to discredit even moderates opposed to Nixon’s policies. The street theater and violence allowed Nixon to double down on his specious claim that he spoke for the silent majority and that his foes were unAmerican enemies of the average man.
To fight a bully by becoming a bully is doomed to failure. As the Nixon era song reminds us, in the eyes of ordinary people “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.” To denounce a misguided program without offering a better alternative persuades no one who is not already persuaded. You are just a bunch of oddballs “singing songs and carrying signs, mostly saying hurrah for our side.”
The way to beat Trump is by winning one electoral fight after another in precinct after precinct, county after county, state after state. This long hard slog is what Republicans have done over the last decade, often more by distorting and vilifying their supine opponents than by offering superior ideas. But without vigorous refutation of their mythical claims and a robust alternative in their place, they won.
Opposition to Trump’s backward-looking, self-contradictory, and unworkable promises will profit mightily by an opponent who is his own worst enemy. His personal behavior is erratic and his ideas if enacted would be bad for the country and the people he pretends to champion.
The sudden need to replace Democratic programs like Obamacare has already begun to show the Republicans have nothing to offer that will win enough support to achieve passage or, if passed, perform as promised. When Trump’s fantasy solutions are revealed to be faulty, his already historically low approval ratings may erode below their present 37% level.
Trump didn’t lose the popular vote and win a narrow electoral college victory because of his ineffable charm, but because he promised some disadvantaged Americans a better life and scapegoated others. When he can’t deliver, the loyal opposition had better have something more to offer than snarky contempt for him and his voters.
If Democrats hope to become resurgent, every time Trump proposes they must do more than oppose. In every precinct in America they must be present and offering a vision of a better way forward that would improve the lives of the middle and working class voters he won. They must show them that, despite Trump’s populist rhetoric, it is not his party that is on their side but the party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton and Obama that has always had their backs, not the ruling class party of Trump, with its outsourcing, tax cuts and loopholes for his fellow billionaire. If they can’t make that case, because they no longer represent workers anymore than Republicans do, they deserve permanent minority party status.