Maybe Democrats should not try to block Trump's agenda

One strategy might be to let Trump make such a mess that voters will be purged of Trumpism. Democrats won't get any credit for making things "less bad." It would be "detachment with love."

I want to challenge you with a proposal for a strategy to purge the United States of Trumpism in 2028 and even claw back some agency with Congress in 2026. But it would have its own pain points. It’s a strategy that I cribbed from, of all places, Al-Anon, formerly Alcoholics Anonymous. They call it “detachment with love.” As currently applied, detachment with love means caring enough about others to allow them to learn from their mistakes.

To stretch the addiction analogy to its limit, I could say that a sizeable proportion of the population is addicted to Trumpism. They know it’s bad but can’t shake its pull. They want to believe that Trump can, indeed, remedy whatever insecurity or unease they feel.

In addiction treatment, refusing to take responsibility for other people's alcohol or drug use allows them to face the natural consequences of their behavior. It may be that to pull the cloud from the eyes of many voters, they need to see, personally, what it means to deport millions, engage in a trade war with the world, ghost our allies, and bring back measles. Could we tolerate standing by and doing little to prevent this for now with the aim of restoring sanity and good health to the body politic?

Strap in.

There is a play in football called a ”screen pass.” On most plays, the offensive line tries to hold back the defense players charging at the quarterback before he can pass or to stop a running back before he gets many yards. But on a screen pass or a draw play, the offensive line makes a show of blocking the defense but actually wants to allow the defense to get by and chase the backpedaling quarterback. A receiver runs behind those charging defensemen to get a short pass and then hopefully make more yardage by running.

The knee-jerk response of team Democrats, playing defense to the favored Republican offense with their star quarterback and linemen in Congress, will be to do whatever they can to thwart the administration's expected extreme policies, charging ferociously toward quarterback Trump. Democrat governors talk of a range of noncooperation to erecting roadblocks for immigrant roundups. Democracy Forward, a consortium of 800 lawyers, is readying efforts to challenge Trump’s executive orders in court.

Trump Resistance 2.0

However, there’s another school of thought that is Pancakeable. Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark explores a contrary strategy: Let Trump be Trump. In brief:

“Do not expend political capital trying to protect voters from Trump.”

Americans listened to everything Trump said over the last two years. They heard him talk about abandoning Ukraine, imposing massive tariffs, putting RFK Jr. in charge of healthcare policy, and rounding up millions of immigrants and either deporting them or putting them into camps.

A majority of voters affirmatively chose those policies.

Last reaches for an example of how voters seem to reward pain over good works. Let’s start with the latter.

How the Democrats bailed out the GOP in Arizona

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, in Arizona the default law was one dating to 1864, which criminalized virtually all abortions. This was what the Republicans had sought for decades but was thwarted by Roe until Dobbs. However, the 1864 total ban was wildly unpopular. This left the Republican-controlled legislature in a pickle. The public wanted the 1864 law repealed, but few Republicans wanted to take a vote that would put them at odds with their pro-life base.

So Democrats in the legislature and the Democratic governor, Katie Hobs, stepped in. They provided the votes to repeal the law that Republicans had pushed for—thus saving their constituents—but also saving Republicans from the political consequences of their actions.

Democrats fixed the problem the GOP majority had made, instead of letting the unpopular law hang there, like a millstone around the necks of Republican candidates.

Contrast with the Lankford Bill and immigration

By the middle of the Biden era, the Democrats, contrary to the Republican talking points, understood that the Southern border immigration problem needed action. They worked with conservative Republican Sen. James Lankford and agreed to a bill that was a ”border hawk’s dream.” It was easily the toughest immigration law in generations—just about everything the Republicans said they wanted.

And then, at the insistence of Trump, they abandoned the bill because he recognized that solving the border problem would have undercut a key issue he needed for his presidential campaign. And it worked. The Democrats were not rewarded for their willingness to fix the border.

Compared to Harris, Trump was unrestrained in a long agenda of specific goals: the deportation of illegal (and some legal) immigrants, ending the Ukraine war (likely on Russia’s terms), massive tariffs, widespread tax cuts, exponential government cost-cutting, and drill baby drill and more.

So, what could go wrong?

On the economy

If Trump accomplishes anything close to what he has pledged, many economists expect higher prices on goods and services and possibly lower employment rates for American workers.

That gargantuan shock will cost trillions of dollars in economic growth, eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs held by U.S. natives,” said Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who focuses on migration. “It will quickly raise inflation, by reducing the capacity of U.S. firms to supply goods and services faster than it reduces demand.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics, a leading think tank, has estimated that Trump’s proposal would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by between 5% and 23% by 2028. Meanwhile, the proposed tariffs and possible labor shortages if significant numbers of working immigrants are deported could drive prices sharply higher within two years. Inflation, which Peterson projects would otherwise fall to 1.9% in 2026, would instead jump to between 6.0% and 9.3%.

Jonathan Last’s thought: The Democrats should not attempt to stop the imposition of the tariffs themselves.

On deportation

Like building the border wall and having Mexico pay for it, Trump may not really try to deport 15 million immigrants. But he may arrest hundreds of thousands to deport or put in camps.

I can see videos of kids who were born here as citizens screaming as parents are pulled away and men plucked out of poultry factories and caged in ICE vans.

Says Last: Democrats should not try to stop him.¹

Because one of two things is possible. Either:

1. Trump has no intention of following through on his promise—in which case he should not be given an excuse that Democrats somehow prevented him from doing it; or . . .

2. Trump really will try to arrest 15 million people. In which case it will be a logistical, legal, moral, and economic catastrophe.

On Musk's “efficiencies”

Robert Kuttner, the co-founder of the progressive-leaning The American Prospect, lays out in its pages some of the implications of the promises his voters expect him to implement:

If Trump follows through on anything like the scale of budget cuts that he and Elon Musk proposed, working people will experience them as increased out-of-pocket expenses for health care, child care, home care, and more. If Trump tries to repeal or slow outlays under various Biden infrastructure programs, that will sandbag regional economies. A lot of COVID-related federal aid to states and localities will expire this year, leading to service cuts or tax increases, even without additional cuts.

After a year or two of Trump, workaday voters are likely to be in an even more sour mood than they are now. Progressives and Democrats need to keep precise track of all of this and hang it around Trump’s neck. We need to drive wedges in the Trump coalition.

Ends and Means

The past few weeks² I’ve found myself cavorting with moral uncertainty. The goal of a let Trump be Trump approach, then, is the expectation that it will make him radically less popular. That could open the door to first electing a Democrat-led Congress and, in 2028, a more normal president from either party.

With this hands-off strategy, in the short term letting Trump have his way without trying to dull the impact of his policies will likely result in greater harm to individuals and America generally than taking some steps to mitigate the worst outcomes. Temporary hardship vs. permanent improvement.

However, that’s one side of the pancake. On the other hand, in the next two years, could a forceful resistance dull a number of harms, even if voters like those in Arizona will never give the Democrats credit? Maybe a court fight will keep the Dreamers from being expelled. Perhaps the resistance could apply enough pressure to moderate tariffs and thus the high end of projected inflation. This could be another example of the dog that didn’t bark: would voters understand that things could have been worse if the Democrats hadn’t intervened?

Just to be clear, this is not a suggestion to be submissive. There will be some battles worth fighting, starting with hopefully some Senate nonconfirmations. However, we should pick those spots strategically rather than—going back to my screen pass analogy— mindlessly focused on just getting the quarterback. Analyze the entire playing field in real-time.

Is the short-term harm a net plus or minus? It must be balanced with the long game of opening the eyes of those many Trump voters who understood how bad he was but were too consumed by the price of eggs to view Harris as anything but Biden 2.0 and come to realize that Trumpism was a mistake. Another moral dilemma to ponder.

1. There is substantial evidence that, though in the abstract, immigration problems seemed to resonate with many Americans when asked specific questions, we generally support many classes of immigrants. Only a minority support building the wall with Mexico. According to a poll conducted by the University of Massachusetts and Boston television station WCVB in January, almost two-thirds strongly or somewhat support allowing “Dreamers” to have a path to citizenship.

2. For example, Pete Rose vs. Hall of Fame or Intolerance vs. free speech