James Carville, the former Democratic political consultant and current blowhard, is ready to give up. Surveying the current political landscape for The New York Times last week, he saw little his party could do to stop any of the destruction and chaos that President Donald Trump is wreaking. With minorities in both chambers of Congress, just three liberal justices on the Supreme Court, and a paucity of national leaders, there is little Democrats can do; for Carville, there’s also little they should do.
“With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government,” he wrote, “it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead.” Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Elon Musk will quickly overstep, screw things up, and piss everybody off. Forget about all that #Resistance stuff; in Carville’s view, it’s best for Democrats to just sit back and let it happen—then swoop in and retake power.
Carville often acts like he’s speaking forbidden truths. But his cartoonish mannerisms, deep Cajun accent, and penchant for colorful language can obscure his real talent: articulating conventional wisdom already held by Democratic leaders. Indeed, it’s been clear for quite some time that Democratic leaders very much agree with Carville’s strategy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have hardly been manning the barricades. There’s little effort to stoke the growing resistance to the Trump administration’s assault on the federal government, even as Republican town hall meetings have grown so tense that party leaders have advised their elected members to stop holding them altogether.
So Democratic politicians are already following Carville’s advice, and it may well work. Trump’s poll numbers—which were high only by his standards at the start of his term—have already begun to fall precipitously. Many of Trump’s own voters have been caught up in the mass firings of federal workers that have defined the first six weeks of his term. Consumer confidence is waning, and there are signs that Trump’s reckless economic program could tip the country into recession.
Trump will mess this all up—indeed, he already is—because that’s what he does. Once that happens, Democrats will undoubtedly benefit, just as they did in 2020. But Carville and other party leaders are wrong when they think that is enough. The Democratic base needs something more: a plausible vision for how this all ends. That existed during Trump’s first term, but not now.
It’s easy to forget that Democrats have been here before. Eight years ago, when Trump first took power, the party was shell-shocked, unsure both about its own message—it was still torn between Bernie Sanders’s populism and Hillary Clinton’s triangulation—and the best way to defeat Trump. As is true today, party leaders had no legislative or judicial power. Unsure of what to do, they largely sat back and let the country recoil from the day-to-day chaos of Trump’s first term.
They were aided by two factors that don’t exist now, however. The first was the mass mobilization that began even before Trump took power, and only spread as he issued orders such as the so-called Muslim travel ban. The death of that #Resistance has been overstated—which is ironic, given that Trump’s horrific second term thus far is what people thought his first would be—but it’s undoubtedly less powerful today than it was at any point during Trump’s first term. The second factor was the cloud that was already hanging over Trump when he entered the White House: Russia had clearly interfered in the 2016 election with Trump’s encouragement. By the time special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed in mid-May 2017, Democrats had a plausible endgame that required no political capital. The special counsel’s investigation would find wrongdoing that would ultimately bring about the end of Trump’s presidency.
Alas. The report Mueller ultimately delivered two years later was a subtle recommendation for impeachment that was damning but ultimately never produced a silver bullet. It was clear that Trump and his cronies had cheered on Russian meddling, but there was no evidence of a quid pro quo or, for that matter, an elaborate conspiracy. It didn’t matter, though. By the time that report was released, the Democrats had retaken the House of Representatives, were actively investigating the Trump administration on several fronts, and were gearing up for a presidential primary. The Mueller investigation sated the base for the first two years of the Trump presidency because it offered what Democrats couldn’t: a clear end to this mess.
Today, Democrats have nothing like it. Trump retook the White House saddled with many scandals, criminal convictions, and pending trials but without the same kind of baggage he carried in 2017. And anyway, he certainly never would allow a special counsel to investigate him for anything while he’s president. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s decision to sit back and wait for him to fail has created a vacuum. Voters are desperate for a path out of the daily horrors of this administration. Thus far, no one is giving them one. That only exacerbates the contrast that has defined the last six weeks. Trump and his allies are moving with astonishing speed to destroy everything they can. Democrats, meanwhile, are turgid at best; even the courts are moving faster than they are.
The Democrats might be out of power, but they’re not empty-handed. Trump’s love affair with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is more open than ever; America’s abandonment of Ukraine and its European allies is shameful and deserving of investigation (once Democrats retake one chamber of Congress). The economy is teetering, prices remain stubbornly high, and every action the Trump administration has taken for the first six weeks seems designed to engineer a recession. Musk’s band of teenage groypers is wreaking havoc across the federal government. Musk and Trump have already engaged in multiple acts of brazen corruption and self-enrichment. These are all scandals—the kinds of things that can bring down governments, and have done so in the past. And they’re out there in the open, for all to see. The Democrats can sit back and wait for these things to get worse, because they will get worse. But eventually they will need to show Americans what a better future looks like. Unfortunately, as we know from very recent history, “we won’t screw things up” is not a lasting political message.
