Photo: Saul Martinez/Bloomberg
It gets harder every day to track the chaos emanating from Donald Trump’s America. The stock market has gyrated wildly, and we are now locked in an unprecedented trade war with China, facing 125 percent tariffs from Beijing that are sparking a whole lot of panic-buying of iPhones. Trump is living his 40-year dream of threatening enormous tariffs on everyone — and Americans can do little more than nervously look on and hope their 401(k)s don’t evaporate.
In the meantime, the Democratic Party has struggled over how to respond. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a potential 2028 candidate, was lambasted by liberals for offering praise for some tariffs in a recent Washington speech and then ending up, awkwardly, in the Oval Office as Trump signed executive orders. The tariff fight, at first glance, seemed prototypical for a party in disarray: There was no leader to settle on a message, and the Democrats’ college-educated base, reflexively anti-Trump, decided that backing any kind of tariff at all was tantamount to donning a MAGA hat, never mind that Joe Biden kept many of Trump’s first-term China tariffs in place. Whitmer, who had been in Washington to discuss federal business with Trump but never intended to be part of a photo-op, was emblematic of it all: a rising star perhaps rising no more, walking away with less political capital than whatever she had possessed a day earlier.
But beyond these headlines, there’s good news for Democrats. Trump is steadily growing more unpopular, and Americans judge him harshly for his stewardship of the economy. That was always, over the past decade, his ace in the hole. No matter how unhinged he seemed, Americans could always say that, under Trump, the stock market was up and their grocery bills were affordable. No more. The resistance to Trump today still looks little like it did eight years ago, in terms of scale and cultural penetration, but it might end up more effective.
It is, at the very minimum, far more focused on tangible governing and economic matters.
Trump dominates the news cycle, but he does not enjoy the same psychic and cultural permeation he had during his first four years in office, when his antics were still novel and every person on the left felt compelled to respond to each provocation. This was the great flaw of the 2010s resistance: It never focused on any particular cause for too long a period of time, and it didn’t always know what would resonate most with the public. Some of the resistance was well-meaning; some of it was self-serving. And some of it, like literally praying for Robert Mueller to indict Trump and drag him from office, was delusional. The votive candles were real, and they were objectively insane.
As we exit the era of hyperpolitics, we find a healthier environment for resistance and protest. If the protests are not as large as the collective uprisings of the past decade, they are based in a reality with clear electoral implications. The focus on Elon Musk is wise. He is deeply unpopular, and he is the reason at least 100,000 federal employees have lost their jobs. He is the reason Americans are going to have a much harder time trying to talk to a person from the Department of Veterans Affairs or the Social Security Administration. Republicans may gut Medicaid as Trump cheers them on. Even the market gyrations will be fodder for this new resistance, making the Democrats the party of sensible economics. Running on saving someone’s 401(k) isn’t the worst idea in the world.
Trump can be thanked for tugging liberals away from their baser impulses, and he is doing far more direct damage in his second term. In the first term, he largely left the economy and the federal bureaucracy alone, preferring to focus on corporate tax cuts and a limited tariff regime that was not especially disruptive. Trump 2.0 has optimized the resistance to his White House: No need to fall too deeply into the trap of faculty-lounge liberalism or even bray about fascism when the threats are far more obvious. Mass layoffs, deportations of green-card holders, and cuts to health care are plenty to be outraged about. And all of them play into the hands of Democrats who will have much to campaign on in the midterms next year.
If Trump posed a threat to democracy and the functioning of government in his first term, the backlash to his policies always carried the whiff of the hypothetical. A lot of resistance was about what Trump might do. Until the pandemic, the daily reality of American life didn’t change all that radically under Trump the first time round. With DOGE and trade wars, we are in a very different era, and liberals have far better arguments now. Even if activism never reaches its old peaks, there will be enough organic outrage to harness and enough persuasion to be done for the voters who gave Trump another shot in 2024 and are now rethinking their choice. As woeful as the Democrats may seem, there’s a decent chance that if a presidential election, by magic, were held tomorrow, their generic nominee would beat Trump. The MAGA honeymoon is long over, and it’s not coming back.
