The Trump Resistance Is Here—Whether Democrats Want It or Not

As President Trump addressed the 2024 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers at the White House on Monday, he broke from his prepared remarks to single out the baseball team’s star shortstop. “Mookie Betts, aww is he good,” Trump said after shaking his hand. “That guy can play, can’t he? Unbelievable.”

The Daily Mail labeled the interaction “awkward.” Betts, you see, was one of several members of the 2018 World Series champion Boston Red Sox—all either Black or Latino—who declined the invitation to meet Trump. The team’s manager, Alex Cora, made it clear he was skipping the event in protest of the president’s treatment of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Betts never said why he didn’t visit, though it’s easy to assume why: Many championship athletes, even entire teams, decided not to attend ceremonial White House visits during Trump’s first term, usually in protest of his handling of race. But there was nothing particularly awkward or odd about Betts’s interaction with the president on Monday. Sure, there were some Trumpian flourishes—he refused, for instance, to introduce California’s senators to the team, because both are Democrats—but the meeting with the Dodgers was largely business as usual.

Little else was. On Monday, markets lurched as the White House sent mixed signals on what it really wanted from the gargantuan tariffs it had levied on most of the world. The stock market was in the midst of a sell-off that would wipe out nearly $10 trillion, making a recession—or worse—look increasingly inevitable. The Supreme Court would later rule that the administration could continue to use an arcane eighteenth-century law to deport Venezuelan migrants, even as multiple investigations continued to find that the vast majority of Venezuelan migrants it had deported to violent Salvadoran prisons had no criminal record to speak of.

That was just on Monday. The list of chaos, abuses, and plain craziness from recent weeks—like the fact that the president is indeed seriously considering how to steal a third term in office—could continue like this for thousands of words. And yet, Trump himself is largely unbothered. It’s hard to blame him. Six years ago, when Betts skipped out on visiting the White House, it was because there were penalties for being seen yucking it up with Trump. There was organized opposition. Now Trump is acting the way he’s always wanted: like a king to whom everyone feels they must bend the knee.

Another way of looking at this is that many are treating Trump as a normal president at the worst possible time. The Democratic response to the tariffs and the deportations has been abject at best. On Friday, as the markets were reeling for the second consecutive day, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar—herself a stalwart of the resistance to Trump’s first term—delivered a well-rehearsed line to MSNBC’s Katy Tur. Trump, she said, was “messing around with people’s lives while he’s out golfing.”

She wasn’t wrong: Trump was golfing on Friday as investors panicked, and he was golfing for much of the weekend while millions protested him across the country. But her attack line was too cute by half. For one thing, it’s the kind of thing that opposition parties have been saying about sitting presidents since forever; it was said plenty about George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It also undersold the problem at hand. The issue wasn’t that Trump was golfing while the economy was cratering. It wasn’t even that he wasn’t doing what presidents are supposed to do when the economy was cratering. The problem is that he’s the one who is cratering the economy: He has intentionally set the country on a course to what can only be described as economic suicide, and without a clear plan for how it ends.

This is the clear, simple, and obvious message Democrats should be sending: The president is going to put you out of work for no good reason. But Democrats are largely shying away from delivering it, or instead seem to be overthinking it.

On Friday, the House Democrats released a video from Representative Chris Deluzio, who represents western Pennsylvania, in which he argues that the Democrats have a better plan for trade. “Tariffs are a powerful tool,” he said. “They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.” Trump is misusing that powerful tool, and the Democrats have a plan to wield it effectively—that’s a fine enough message for Democrats to deploy to win back voters in districts like Deluzio’s. But is that the message Americans need to hear when the markets are collapsing and companies in the U.S. are suddenly laying off thousands of workers?

Trump’s shocking political comeback has led Democrats to put away the playbook they used successfully in his first term. Then, it was apparent that normalizing Trump in any capacity, whether rhetorically, politically, or—to bring it back to the Dodgers visit—culturally was untenable. Trump and his entire political project had to be rejected completely. But the resilience of MAGA has caused the party to avoid those frontal assaults in favor of … well, doing nothing. Embracing a strategy articulated by has-been campaign strategist James Carville, they have decided to sit back, do nothing, and let Trump destroy the country—then, once that’s done, they’ll simply cruise back to power.

The problem with that strategy should be obvious: Trump is destroying the country with minimal resistance. It’s especially frustrating considering the widespread protests over the weekend. Millions of Americans understand the stakes. They understand that the situation is worse and more abnormal than it was when Trump was last in power. The people who poured into the streets on Saturday were a reminder not only of what a mass resistance to Trump once looked like but also of what it can look like again. It certainly doesn’t depend on whether a few championship athletes skip a White House visit.