On Tuesday morning, The Bulwark’s Sam Stein reported on BlueSky that Democrats were planning to do a press conference on Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6ers—which occurred a full week prior—even as the effects of the Trump administration’s funding freeze were making headlines. The Democrats’ approach raises serious questions about their pathological inability to participate in the modern news cycle. Moreover, the pardoning of the January 6ers became a fait accompli the moment Trump won the election. The time to start raising a hue and cry over those pardons was thus November.
Stein noted this lag: "Two parties running at different speeds.… Unclear if there is a presser today to go after the OMB’s power play to take over all federal grant money." Democrats actually did manage to work the breaking news story into their brief in a rare display of nimbleness. But despite the hasty agenda change, Democrats seemed as if they’d not been following the political news for a staggeringly long amount of time. "Last night," Chuck Schumer said of Trump’s attacks on the civil service, "President Trump plunged the country into chaos without a shred of warning."
Trump’s actions were of course preceded by copious warnings, most notably in the form of Trump repeatedly saying that he planned to tear down the civil service and replace it with loyalists willing to use the federal government as his own instrument of plunder and revenge. In addition to these warnings, many stories generated well ahead of time elucidated Trump’s purge plans—a tightly reported piece from Jonathan Swan in Axios and two well-trafficked features from The New York Times and Vanity Fair among the biggest stories detailing Trump’s shock-and-awe schemes for the civil service.
Readers of this very newsletter know that I wrote about Trump’s plot back in September 2022, using my patented journalism technique of listening to what Republicans say they are going to do and then writing it down and publishing it to the internet. All of these stories, based on nothing more than the public statements and documented plans of Donald Trump and his cronies, are what we in the biz would call a "warning."
There’s a long list of bad habits that Democrats need to break at this point, but we’ll add this to the list: Be ready to respond to the things that Republicans plan to do when they’ve given you several months of head start. If there is a takeaway for Democrats after Trump’s first 10 days in office, it’s that procrastination and lollygagging really kills. Fortunately, there’s still an easy way for them to get two steps ahead of the curve.
For instance, it’s never been a mystery that Project 2025 has essentially been the punch list for Trump’s second term—the White House is already very dutifully ticking items off. Any uncertainty about this ended this week when it was discovered that metadata in the Trump administration’s OPM memos indicated that they shared authors with the Project 2025 manifesto. Once that was publicly disclosed, the administration rather clumsily attempted to scrub that metadata from those memos.
Based upon all of this, it seems pretty clear that this administration is just going to keep making its way through Project 2025’s pages. Democrats could probably finagle a copy of that document, given that it is publicly available, and maybe even start messaging against it.
Another thing I recommend Democrats get ahead of is the Trump administration’s plans to enact a national abortion ban. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Republicans can be pretty cagey and evasive when confronted on this matter. Here’s a fun fact: Several Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices even told Democrats during their confirmation hearing that Roe was "settled law" before they actually went and unsettled it. Chances are good, folks, that Republicans are actually doing this thing colloquially known as "lying."
Yes, I know that Trump has repeatedly said that he would not sign a national abortion ban that comes across his desk into law. In the first place, yes, he absolutely would (see above: "lying"), but more importantly, he does not need a bill to arrive on his desk to enact a ban. As we have rather relentlessly reported here at The New Republic, Trump’s Department of Justice will enforce a law that’s already on the books known as the Comstock Act to ban abortion, something that Vice President JD Vance asked Merrick Garland’s DOJ to do when he was still an Ohio senator.
There is no reason Democrats can’t simply count the contents of Project 2025 and a national abortion ban as done deals, things the GOP is going to roll out sooner or later, and start publicly sparring about them, along with the GOP’s other antisocial and unpopular plans. Republicans will complain, and there’s definitely a strain of pundits who will disapprove, but remember: Those people suck, and being on their bad side is evidence of good politics. Besides, with no legislative majority and thus no prospect of enacting legislation, Democrats may as well spend their time fighting the GOP, complaining about their ideas, and working the refs.
Democrats have some reason to feel a little gun-shy about ramping up these kinds of attacks. The media, too often, reported on Trump’s denials of Project 2025 and his assertions about signing a national abortion ban way too credulously. But that’s a reason to start naming and shaming the media personages who got it so badly wrong. More to the point, Democrats need to spur, if not entirely resuscitate, a popular opposition to Trump and start planning an electoral referendum of what will be another round of failure and misrule. That begins with something that resembles energy and action, no matter how constrained you may be in parliamentary terms.
You look stupid when you’re a week late to a news story, and pathetic when saying you weren’t warned about the stuff that Trump publicly and repeatedly said he’s going to do. This administration wants to burn it all down, and measured responses won’t work as a counter; you can’t wait for your lawyers to go over the text of Trump’s executive orders and for your pollsters to focus-group the optimal response. Besides, you shouldn’t need to when you can just say, "Trump is fucking up the country and plundering the federal government." Hopefully this week will prove to be a teachable moment heralding a quick course correction, because there’s one thing that Democrats can never say about Trump’s plans: that they weren’t told.
