It’s been less than two weeks since Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day,” and the president has already literally melted trillions of dollars in American wealth. The majority of the country believes Trump’s tariffs hurt the US economy, while his approval rating with his own voters is cratering. Even members of the president’s billionaire cabal are having second thoughts: Elon Musk recently called Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks,” and Trump donor Ken Griffin admitted the tariffs were a “huge policy mistake.” This is to say that public sentiment is clearly shifting—and quite a bit. That’s why Democrats, from political donors to red-state voters to government employees, need to seize the moment before it’s too late.
“As severe as the decisions individuals and institutions are now facing are, they will only get more difficult going forward,” authoritarianism expert Thomas Zimmer tells me. “The best time to push back against an authoritarian assault on the democratic order is always as soon as possible, as forceful as possible.”
Now, personally, I found the autocracy alone disqualifying. But obviously, a lot of Americans didn’t seem to agree with me until the market tanked last week. Trump has already pumped the brakes on that downward slide with his 90-day tariff pause, which he’s sought to frame as part of a brilliant master plan. But make no mistake: The damage is done. The US economy has gone from being the envy of the world to one where the dollar may no longer remain the international reserve currency. That bitter reality has captured people’s attention all across the class spectrum, meaning that voters are primed for pushback. So Democrats should leap at the opportunity to hammer Trump over his chaotic agenda.
Luckily for the opposition party, that agenda is only getting more chaotic by the day. Just last Friday, Trump suddenly announced carve-outs for technological products like the stuff his friend “Tim Apple” makes. But by Sunday afternoon, he was Truthing that there was “no tariff exception.” That was followed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that the tariffs are coming back in a month or so. “Semiconductors and pharmaceuticals,” he said, “will have a tariff model in order to encourage them to reshore.” So, which is it? Are there carve-outs or not? Of course, it ultimately doesn’t matter much what Trumpworld says on Sunday, because it will absolutely be something completely different on Monday. What all this back-and-forth amounts to is a kind of Schrödinger’s tariffs; they’re both on and off simultaneously. Which is probably not great if you’re, say, a manufacturing firm looking to make business decisions that project years into the future.
Meanwhile, as the economic instability roils the markets, the autocracy bit I mentioned earlier is still in full force. Consider, for instance, how the Trump administration is still giving the middle finger to the judicial branch, as evidenced by their having “no updates” regarding the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant who it wrongfully sent to a draconian El Salvadoran prison due to an administrative “error.” Team Trump simply reiterated over the weekend that a judge, in 2019, baselessly clocked him as a gang member. In sum: Another norm crushed, another red line crossed. But, also, another opening for the opposition party to forcefully push back with the message that Trump is running roughshod over the law.
In his first term, Trump was unable to permanently crush norms and institutions because some Republicans still had spines. People from Liz Cheney to Mike Pence to Alyssa Farah Griffin and Adam Kinzinger actually stood up to the president’s authoritarian tendencies, and tried to build a resistance movement within their party. Democrats and liberals also made a major impact. Cringe as they might have been, the pink hats, the marches, and the slogans helped create a permission structure for pushing back. Even corporate America, generally loath to wade into the public square, occasionally drew a line in the sand.
This time around, people don’t have the same appetite for insurgency. Billionaires, law firms, and university presidents (with some notable exceptions, like Wesleyan’s Michael Roth and Amherst’s Michael A. Elliott) appear largely to be caving to Trump. They’ve apparently made the calculus that protecting democracy just isn’t worth the trouble. Or perhaps they just think that caving to Trump is good for business. Whatever the reason, they’ve decided that they are more scared of Trump than they are of their consumers and the public writ large. But this calculus, I’d argue, is bearing out to be a bad one. Trump’s approval numbers are almost where they were in his first term. He’s gutted the government, spurned the courts, disappeared college students, and caused a near-global economic crisis. The president isn’t even 100 days into his second term, but one could argue that it’s already way more out of control than the entirety of his first.
Donald Trump has no master plan. Perhaps, in this sense, the president’s plan—aside from accumulating as much power as possible—is simply to convince people that there is one. But in recent weeks, it seems that more and more Americans who signed on to Trump 2.0 are seeing through the charade. Those who still believe in democracy need to keep peacefully telegraphing that none of this is okay. Our system of government is far too precious to lose to a reality-television host who somehow got cast as president.
