Oppose, Oppose, Oppose — and Do It Loudly

Opponents of MAGA: Don’t despair and don’t appease

My political views aren’t a secret, and there’s obviously a political aspect to much of what I write. In general, however, I avoid offering political advice. After all, I’m neither a strategist nor a political scientist (although I read political scientists — unlike the people running things now, I respect expertise.)

Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. 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.

Let me start with the notion that Trump has a popular mandate that Democrats oppose at their peril. As I said, I am not a political scientist. But I do know that political scientists consider the whole notion of presidential mandates more or less a myth.

Also, I haven’t slept through the past 20 years. I know that in 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.

I also know that Joe 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:

Source: BLS

This logic is what made 2024, as John Burn-Murdoch put it, 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:

Source: Briefing Book

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.

MUSICAL CODA

To live in fear isn’t to live at all