Democrats are now free from the burden of having to govern as the minority in Congress.
And now that they no longer occupy the White House, Democrats will now no longer have to worry about being shackled with the blame for any economic malaise, foreign policy entanglement, or inability to pass laws. Over the next two years, Democrats have the unfettered ability to be an albatross around the neck of the GOP, and to make sure that what little they do manage to get done due to their paper-thin majorities becomes the reason for their undoing.
While no longer having power is obviously a disadvantage, Democrats are now unburdened from having to explain to voters the finer points of their legislative failures, like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema blocking universal pre-K, child care subsidies, and expanded Medicare benefits. They don’t have to worry anymore about shaking their fists at right-wing federal judges when they invalidate Democratic lawmaking. The antiquated immigration system is now no longer their problem, nor are any of the myriad foreign policy crises like Ukraine, Gaza, and Taiwan.
If and when Trump and the GOP repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats can point out that Republicans just handed a pink slip to the thousands of workers whose good-paying manufacturing jobs will now be eliminated. If Trump follows through on his promise to gut the Affordable Care Act, Democrats can remind the millions of Americans who will be thrown off of their expanded Medicaid plans that Republicans are the reason they now have to pay significantly more for healthcare. If Trump imposes sky-high tariffs on foreign goods, Democrats can be there to remind voters that Republicans are the reason prices are through the roof on everything from groceries to consumer electronics.
And of course, all of this is assuming Republicans will manage to unite the multiple fractious elements of their party enough to actually accomplish anything. The next several years will prove just how awful Republicans are at governing. If Democrats are smart, they’ll allow the GOP to fail so hard that voters will be begging for the grownups to be put back in power in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
Understanding that Trump is a distraction from the real threat
While I’ve written extensively for Occupy.com about the threat Trump poses in his second term, he’s also severely limited in several important ways. Trump is better understood not as an absolute fascist dictator, but as a term-limited, lame-duck president that Republicans are hoping will serve as a shiny object to distract us all from their objectively awful policy agenda.
It’s important to remember that for all of his bluster, Trump ultimately failed to accomplish many of his actual goals during his first administration. He never built his massive proposed new border wall (nor did he make Mexico pay for it). He couldn’t follow through on his first push to buy Greenland, as he first tried to do in 2019. He was regularly ridiculed for his “infrastructure week” declarations which never actually produced any infrastructure projects. He couldn’t even realize his dream of a military parade down the streets of Washington DC after being inspired by one in France.
Where Republicans succeeded during Trump’s first four years was more due to the behind-the-scenes efforts of Republicans like Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who helped ram through hundreds of far-right judges to lifelong appointments on the federal bench. This includes the appointments of Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett in 2017, 2018, and 2020, respectively. McConnell referred to his outright theft of what would have been Barack Obama’s third Supreme Court appointment as the “most consequential” accomplishment of his political career.
McConnell and then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) also ushered Trump’s massive tax cut package — which overwhelmingly benefited big corporations and the richest Americans — through Congress during Trump’s first year in office. That blew a $1.5 trillion hole in the federal budget, significantly exacerbated wealth inequality in the US, and delivered virtually “no change in earnings” for Americans making less than six figures, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Given how his first term played out, Democrats should understand that despite Trump’s very real destructive potential in the executive orders he issues, the Cabinet secretaries he manages to confirm, and in the foreign policy decisions he makes, he’s still largely a distraction. Denmark won’t sell Greenland to the United States (in fact, Greenland may very well become an independent nation in the next four years), the United States isn’t going to annex Canada, and even his cornerstone campaign promises likely won’t come to fruition given the significant structural obstacles in his way.
So-called “border czar” Tom Homan has previously promised to build “the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.” But as the Washington Post reported in December, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be unable to deport roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants for a number of reasons. Some of their home countries refuse to take them, or limit their cooperation with ICE. Others have been granted reprieve by immigration judges for medical reasons or because of persecution threats in their home countries.
Many more migrants’ deportations will likely be held up as the military jets the Trump regime is counting on to use for deportation flights have to be approved by federal regulators, which may turn down the request as it could hurt military readiness. And while Trump is hoping to lean on the military to provide personnel to ICE to round up and detain migrants, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has already come out against that proposal, signifying that Trump may not have enough support even from within his own party to accomplish one of his key goals.
One of Trump’s biggest advantages in the 2024 election cycle was how much more voters trusted him to handle kitchen-table economic issues, like higher grocery prices, than President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. But in his TIME Person of the Year interview, Trump admitted that it would be “very hard” to get grocery prices down. And his proposed 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports will almost certainly result in higher prices for items Americans buy every day. The US imported $128.5 billion of “mineral fuels, oils [and] distillation products” from Canada last year alone. And the US imports tens of billions of dollars’ worth of produce, meat, cereal, flour, starch, milk products, and sugar/confectionary products from Mexico.
Not long after the election, Walmart warned that Trump’s proposed new tariffs would result in price increases for shoppers. And because anywhere from 70% to 80% of Walmart’s inventory comes from China, a 10% tariff on Chinese imports being passed along to consumers means that millions of American shoppers will be in for a nasty surprise at the checkout counter.
This all means that Trump — and Republicans by proxy — will lose a tremendous amount of credibility with voters this year on the two issues that arguably helped put them in power above all others. If Trump’s deportation agenda hits bureaucratic snags and his tariffs significantly drive up prices, Democrats can and should exploit those issues to their advantage to make the case that the GOP is completely incapable of governing even with a trifecta in Washington. And if Trump blows the political capital of his first 100 days on losing efforts, this will give Democrats the momentum they need to then pivot to hamstringing Congressional Republicans between now and the midterms.
The GOP trifecta is a paper tiger
On January 3, it appeared as if House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) wouldn’t have the 218 votes necessary to become speaker, given Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) stalwart opposition to his speakership and two other Republicans casting their votes for Reps. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). After Trump privately cajoled those two GOP holdouts, Johnson barely kept the gavel on the first ballot.
Johnson isn’t out of the woods, though: Republicans kept in place the “motion to vacate” rule that resulted in former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) ouster in 2023. The House GOP also raised the threshold from one single member triggering it to nine members, which gives Johnson slightly more breathing room than his predecessor. However, there are 11 House Republicans who have gone on the record saying their support for Johnson as speaker is conditional, and will depend on whether he adheres to several strict demands.
The speaker won’t be able to keep this faction at bay, given the severity of their demands like banning Congressional stock trading, allowing a 72-hour period to read legislation before it goes up for a vote, and not agreeing to any new federal spending without offsetting budget cuts, among others. And because Johnson was only able to narrowly avoid a federal government shutdown and keep critical agencies funded through March with the help of a significant number of Democrats (34 Republicans voted against his government funding bill in December), his problems are only just beginning. Especially when considering that his already paper-thin majority will be on even thinner ice in Trump’s first 100 days.
Early on in the transition period, Trump nominated Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) as United Nations ambassador and National Security Advisor, respectively. Waltz will join Trump promptly after he’s sworn in, as his position doesn’t require Senate confirmation. But assuming Stefanik is confirmed by the full Senate later this month, Johnson will have just a one-seat majority to work with. This means he can’t lose a single Republican vote on any legislation until those seats are filled via special election, as a tie would result in a bill failing to pass. This makes every swing district Republican extremely vulnerable and more susceptible to public pressure than ever before.
In the Senate, Republicans have a 53-47 majority. This means they have the 51 votes necessary to confirm Cabinet appointees and to pass bills via the budget reconciliation process, but not enough to break the 60-vote threshold for bypassing a filibuster. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told Politico earlier this month that the Senate GOP has limited itself to focusing on “whatever can get through the House.” And while Trump is hoping to get his full legislative wish list into one big budget reconciliation bill, some House Republicans are already indicating uneasiness with giving him everything he wants.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has already said that when forced to choose between whether he would focus on legislation addressing the Southern border versus legislation to extend Trump’s tax cuts, he’s choosing the border. This means Trump’s tax cut package will have to take a back seat for the time being. And one unnamed Republican lobbyist confided to Politico that it’s unlikely Republican leaders will want to “break even more arms” to pass a multi trillion-dollar tax cut package right after a contentious fight over immigration.
Republicans’ hopes of extending the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy through 2035 is estimated to cost roughly $5.5 trillion, according to a Treasury Department analysis. And because a decisive number of Republicans have told Johnson they expect any new federal spending to be offset by spending cuts, the GOP has since revealed a list of proposed budget cuts to pay for a new round of tax breaks for corporations and the super-rich. This includes rolling back the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Affordable Care Act, federal student debt cancellation, funding for food stamps, and steep cuts to Medicaid. Politico reported that Republicans are even targeting a Biden administration rule “requiring minimum staffing levels at nursing homes.”
Democrats can seize on this list of cuts to relentlessly slam the Republican majority for wanting to put health insurance for low-income Americans on the chopping block all for the sake of preserving lower estate tax rates for exceedingly rich families with generations of inherited wealth. They can pummel the GOP for its efforts to take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans in order to give billionaires like Elon Musk a tax cut they don’t need. And all of this can further advance the narrative that the Republicans are puppets of the wealthy elite, whereas the Democrats are the party that speaks for the working class.
If this line of attack – especially when amplified effectively through the media — can scare even one House Republican from a swing district into not supporting a Republican bill, the entire legislation could be dead in the water. Democrats should be consistently speaking to media outlets in the districts of Republicans in battleground districts like Reps. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.), Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), Scott Perry (R-Pa.) David Schweikert (R-Ariz.), and David Valadao (R-Calif.) to continuously hammer them on their support for divisive Republican legislation. Either they break from the pressure and sink the bill, or they’re so heavily damaged in supporting the bill that their Democratic opponents can use that against them in the midterms.
When Trump is sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, Republicans are hoping it will make their opponents despondent and eager to cave. But Democrats should instead view the Republicans’ decision to put all their eggs in the basket of a 78 year-old mercurial bomb-thrower with zero interest in actually governing as an arrow in their quiver. If they want to win, Democrats should view themselves not as the minority — but as the opposition.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
