The Daily Populous Saturday January 18th, 2025 evening edition
Authored by newrepublic.com and submitted by UgliestDisability

But these failures are not the biggest problem Democrats face. The real crisis is that all the roads ahead are fraught with peril. The country has clearly tacked to the right in substantial ways. It’s going to make sense to a lot of Democrats to keep chasing the electorate in that direction. But a party that, in 2024, was only really defending a narrow portfolio of traditionally Democratic principles ceases to be the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense if they abandon those few battlements which they’ve retained the courage to defend. Tacking right might be a path to power, but we should dispense with the delusion that a Democratic Party choosing this path would continue to be a liberal party. Rather, it would come to reside in the same ideological province of the pre-Trump Republican Party—and remember, that’s a movement that Trumpism dispatched far more rapidly and soundly than the Democrats.

At the same time, organizing the party around a bolder, leftward direction is difficult to fathom. A more leftist set of domestic policy prescriptions requires its proponents to run the sort of piping-hot, high-spending economy that Biden attempted—and probably to a greater extent than Biden was willing to go. The failure of Bidenomics to impress the very voters it strove so mightily to help will make politicians extremely skittish about taking that approach again anytime soon. But even if Democrats were brave enough to let it rip, bolder policies also require a functioning administrative state to administer them. Right now, the Supreme Court is not committed to the administrative state’s survival and is more likely to keep dismantling it. So a Democratic Party that shifts in this direction is destined to make a ton of near-term promises that it can’t fulfill and risk making voters more cynical about government, which helps strongmen like Trump stay in power.

All that said, Trump might very well run up against the problem of unfulfillable promises a lot sooner than the Democrats. Trumpism has always been a slow march into the thickets of its own policy paradoxes, and this will only grow more pronounced as all the reins and fetters that impeded Trump’s first-term ambitions come off in the second. Here, the laws of gravity snap back with a vengeance. Trump cannot deport millions of people without sending the economy into a doom spiral. He can’t create a more efficient government by asking a noodlehead failure like Elon Musk to manage it. He can’t put a quack like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health without people getting a lot sicker. You can’t make America great again while destroying the regulatory regime that keeps a staggering range of everyday harms at bay: coal ash spills and E. coli and shoddy building construction and, lest we forget, pandemics. And, no, you can’t arrest climate change by pretending it’s not happening.

scarr3g on January 18th, 2025 at 14:49 UTC »

The big thing is: make him work.

The last time he spent lost of his time having the title of president, and benefits, but very little time doing the job.

Hound him, relentlessly, when he is golfing, taking "executive time" to watch TV, tweeting about hating half of Americans, etc.

ProgDogg on January 18th, 2025 at 14:05 UTC »

Trump will never do any of things he said he would do...and none of his supporters will care. All he has to do is tell them some lies, and they'll blindly believe him.

sonofabutch on January 18th, 2025 at 13:57 UTC »

TL;DR Democrats should treat Trump the way Republicans treated Biden and Obama, and blame Trump for every bad thing that happens in the world, whether or not he’s actually responsible for it.

Why this won’t work: Democrats don’t have a self-contained reality-proof media ecosystem like Republicans do.