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It\u2019s been less than two weeks since Donald Trump<\/strong>\u2019s \u201cLiberation Day,\u201d and the president has already literally melted trillions<\/a> of dollars in American wealth. The majority of the country believes<\/a> Trump\u2019s tariffs hurt the US economy, while his approval rating with his own<\/em> voters is cratering<\/a>. Even members of the president\u2019s billionaire cabal are having second thoughts: Elon Musk<\/strong> recently called<\/a> Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro<\/strong> \u201cdumber than a sack of bricks,\u201d and Trump donor Ken Griffin<\/strong> admitted<\/a> the tariffs were a \u201chuge policy mistake.\u201d This is to say that public sentiment is clearly shifting\u2014and quite a bit. That\u2019s why Democrats, from political donors to red-state voters to government employees, need to seize the<\/a> moment before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n \u201cAs severe as the decisions individuals and institutions are now facing are, they will only get more difficult going forward,\u201d authoritarianism expert Thomas Zimmer<\/strong> tells me. \u201cThe best time to push back against an authoritarian assault on the democratic order is always as soon as possible, as forceful as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, personally, I found the autocracy alone<\/em> disqualifying. But obviously, a lot of Americans didn\u2019t 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\u2019s sought to frame as part of a brilliant master plan<\/a>. 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<\/a> the international reserve currency. That bitter reality has captured people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cTim Apple<\/a>\u201d makes. But by Sunday afternoon, he was Truthing<\/a> that there was \u201cno tariff exception.\u201d That was followed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick<\/strong> saying<\/a> that the tariffs are coming back in a month or so. \u201cSemiconductors and pharmaceuticals,\u201d he said, \u201cwill have a tariff model in order to encourage them to reshore.\u201d So, which is it? Are there carve-outs or not? Of course, it ultimately doesn\u2019t 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 Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s tariffs; they\u2019re both on and<\/em> off simultaneously. Which is probably not great if you\u2019re, say, a manufacturing firm looking to make business decisions that project years into the future.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cno updates<\/a>\u201d regarding the Supreme Court\u2019s order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia,<\/strong> an immigrant who it wrongfully sent<\/a> to a draconian El Salvadoran prison due to an administrative \u201cerror.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n In his first term, Trump was unable to permanently crush norms and institutions because some Republicans still had spines. People from Liz Cheney<\/strong> to Mike Pence<\/strong> to Alyssa Farah Griffin<\/strong> and Adam Kinzinger<\/strong> actually stood up to the president\u2019s authoritarian tendencies, and tried to build a resistance movement within their party. Democrats and liberals also made a major impact. Cringe<\/a> 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<\/a> drew a line<\/a> in the sand.<\/p>\n This time around, people don\u2019t have the same appetite for insurgency. Billionaires, law firms, and university presidents (with some notable exceptions, like Wesleyan\u2019s Michael Roth<\/strong><\/a> and Amherst\u2019s Michael A. Elliott<\/strong><\/a>) appear largely to be caving<\/a> to Trump. They\u2019ve apparently made the calculus<\/a> that protecting democracy just isn\u2019t worth the trouble. Or perhaps they just think that caving to Trump is good for business. Whatever the reason, they\u2019ve decided that they are more scared of Trump than they are of their consumers and the public writ large. But this calculus, I\u2019d argue, is bearing out to be a bad one. Trump\u2019s approval numbers are almost where they were in his first term. He\u2019s gutted the government, spurned the courts, disappeared college students, and caused a near-global economic crisis. The president isn\u2019t even 100 days into his second term, but one could argue that it\u2019s already way more out of control than the entirety of his first.<\/p>\n Donald Trump has no master plan. Perhaps, in this sense, the president\u2019s plan\u2014aside from accumulating as much power as possible\u2014is simply to convince people that there is<\/em> 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.<\/em> Our system of government is far too precious to lose to a reality-television host who somehow got cast as president.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n