Candice Tang/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
At this year’s Women's March near the National Mall in Washington, November 2, 2024
In late 2016, progressives, ordinary citizens, and outraged women began organizing a resistance to President Trump. It began with the epic Women’s Marches of January 2017. Grassroots groups, some of them organized spontaneously through networks like Indivisible and Run for Something, set in motion a process that led to Democrats winning the House in the 2018 midterms, as well as making gains in state and local offices. Democracy was energized. And a Democratic House then served as another restraint on Trump.
This time will be harder. After November 2016, Trump’s victory seemed like a tragic fluke, an anomaly. Now, it’s all too clear that it was not a one-off. Trump and his allies have become the tribunes of widespread discontent that should have been championed by a left party, a process of default that has been incubating for decades as the Democrats became a weird coalition of well-off professionals, woke cultural leftists, and Wall Street billionaires, while the economy deserted working people of all races.
In his first term, Trump also needed some time to figure out the levers of power. For his senior officials, Trump hired corporate and military people who sometimes operated as restraints. This time, he will hire compliant stooges.
For the moment, Democrats and commentators are mired in what is probably a necessary (but hopefully brief) period of recrimination. There is a lot of truly stupid commentary to the effect that Democrats ran too far to the left. This conflates the cultural left with the economic left.
There are hard conversations to be had about how to make Democrats less electorally vulnerable and subject to ridicule on cultural issues, without jettisoning compassion and solidarity. But there is no doubt that on pocketbook issues, Kamala Harris fell way short of anything resembling credible economic populism for workers.
It’s still early, but we need to quickly get past the Kübler-Ross stages of denial and grief, and above all to reject the final stage—acceptance. To contain Trump’s threats to democracy and rebuild credibility with workaday voters looking forward to the 2026 midterms, we need hard thinking and strategic work on two fronts.
Real Populism vs. Fake Populism
Trump made promises to “fix” all that is broken in the economy and to make life better for working people. Harris’s response was intermittently plausible, but too often it was unfocused and uncompelling. But with Trump in the White House, his actual policies are likely to worsen economic life for ordinary Americans.
To the extent that people all over the world are angry at incumbents, Trump will soon be the incumbent. If Republicans end up with majority control of the House as well as the presidency, the Senate, and the courts, the consequences are all on them.
Unhappiness with inflation, fairly or unfairly, hurt Biden-Harris. I’ve written about how several Trump proposals, from tariffs to huge budget deficits to ending containment of monopoly pricing power to deportation of low-wage service and farmworkers, are likely to worsen inflation.
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.
After a year or two of Trump, workaday voters are likely to be in an even more sour mood than they are now.
But that’s not sufficient. We also need a strong and affirmative program. With Democrats divided on the causes of their blowout defeat and a vacuum at the top of the party, that may well need to come from outside.
One idea I’ve been hearing is a Contract With America’s Working Families. It can be used to sharpen contrasts with Trump and embarrass Trump with his own constituencies—how come Trump isn’t offering this?—and to position progressive Democrats with a theme for 2026.
A Contract With Working America could include more secure health coverage, paid family and medical leave, higher minimum-wage protections, regulation of gig work, restoration of family allowance payments, better and more affordable child care—all paid for by a fairer tax system. It could become a framework for other policy ideas, at both the state and national level, reviving the role of Democrats as the party of the working class and the vulnerable middle class. Success on this front will be the best rejoinder to those who counsel that the Democratic Party needs to move to the right.
Last Thursday, MoveOn, Indivisible, the Working Families Party, and 200 other groups organized a livestream planning session. It attracted about 140,000 participants. Here’s Maurice Mitchell on that Zoom.
Mitchell, the Working Families Party director, said in a statement, “It may not seem like it, but today is the beginning of the end for the Trump era and the MAGA movement. Donald Trump has no solutions to address the needs of working-class people in this country. And we know that when he tries to implement his agenda of more tax cuts for billionaires, gutting health care, deporting millions, and supporting war crimes with public dollars, people will rise up.” But as Mitchell made clear, that depends on whether progressives organize around these themes.
Some progressive measures, such as a higher minimum wage, were approved by referenda in red states such as Alaska and Missouri. Voters in those states plus Nebraska also approved paid sick leave. In 2024, there was nothing wrong with core progressive themes; the problem was the messenger. In 2026, the Republicans will have a national personification of their increasingly unpopular policies in Donald Trump, who may be wearing out his welcome, while Democrats will have local faces.
We sometimes hear that the Democratic bench is thin. But below the national level, Democrats didn’t lose a single legislative seat in Pennsylvania, and they gained seats in several legislatures, including Connecticut and Wisconsin, outperforming Harris.
And some of the messengers may have to come from outside the party. In Nebraska, independent Dan Osborn with a working-class narrative ran 14 points ahead of the national ticket.
That network from 2017 can be reactivated, and more. Trump won in part because people doubted that electoral politics or the Democratic Party could change their lives for the better. “Cynicism is the number one tool of the authoritarian playbook,” says Joe Dinkin of Working Families, “to make the people cede their power.”
With no obvious national Democratic leader, it would also be smart for progressives to spotlight and elevate people like the UAW’s Shawn Fain, who can personify and articulate a working-class politics far better than Trump can fake it. I vividly remember watching a lackluster Joe Biden on the UAW picket line beside a powerful and compelling Fain, and thinking: If only Fain were the candidate. We need more national working-class heroes.
Resisting Dictatorship
Of course, the idea that Trump and the MAGA Republicans will be as electorally vulnerable in 2026 as they were in 2018 rests on the premise that we will still be a functioning democracy. Trump has made all sorts of threats to govern as an autocrat. He will carry some of them out. But elections are run mainly at the state level. Despite a lot of worries, Trump and the Republicans gained ground in 2024 not because elections were rigged or voting suppressed but because Democrats failed to deliver a compelling message.
Trump and his MAGA allies will undoubtedly try to fiddle with voting in 2026. But if pro-democracy groups do their jobs, for the most part even Republican judges have been unwilling to collude in crude vote-rigging. (The long-term process of voter suppression is a bigger problem. According to the Brennan Center, if there had not been multiple forms of voter suppression tolerated since the Voting Rights Act was deliberately crippled by the Supreme Court in 2013, about nine million more votes would have been cast in 2020, most of them favoring Democrats.)
Much of the resistance to Trump will be done through the courts. As compromised as the courts are, litigation can slow Trump down. The ACLU struck exactly the right tone in a full-page ad. It said, in part, “Dear President-elect Trump: We are the ACLU, and we’re not moving to Canada. So rest assured that when you target immigrants, dissidents, and your political opponents, we will challenge you—in the courts, at state legislatures, and in the streets. Surely, you remember the landmark lawsuits we won against you on family separation, the U.S. Census, and immigrants’ rights—some of which were decided by judges you appointed.”
A key set of fortresses is government at the state and local level. Democratic attorneys general have been having strategy conversations. Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell put out a statement declaring, “President-elect Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do as President, and that we need to believe him and to be ready for the challenges ahead.” State AGs are organizing to resist Trump’s incursions and instigations, including rule of law, political violence, hate and discrimination, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, and immigrants’ rights.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special session of the legislature to strengthen the state’s legal defenses against the incoming president. During Trump’s first term, Golden State officials filed at least 120 lawsuits challenging the administration’s actions and passed a law limiting local authorities’ cooperation with federal immigration officials. There will be more such laws and executive actions, as the federal government under Trump tries to countermand reproductive rights and other rights protected by states. This concerted action may not succeed in every case, but courts at all levels are still functioning and it will slow Trump down.
A crackdown on immigrants will be especially tricky, both for Trump and for his opposition. Trump has threatened mass deportations; that will produce massive pushback from his Republican business constituents who depend heavily on migrant workers. In practice, Trump may count more heavily on “self-deportation” by frightened migrants, and on greater border controls. Though support groups may be contemplating civil disobedience, too much of this would play into Trump’s hands and give him an excuse for mass arrests.
The most important challenge now is for the opposition to be unified and strategic. Trump will be vulgar, irritating, impulsive, adolescent, narcissistic. The prospect of such a man wielding state power is terrifying. But that’s a distraction from the serious work ahead.
