The only thing overshadowing the evil of the regime is its incompetence. And the people are only just beginning to realize the power we have.
As I’ve previously written for Occupy.com, the seemingly constant deluge of news from President Donald Trump’s administration is a strategy designed to demoralize and fatigue the opposition. Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has targeted the media as a key source of opposition and said the far right strives to “flood the zone with shit” in order to distract and exhaust journalists. Top Trump confidant Stephen Miller has also embraced that strategy. But the regime’s Achilles heel — its hubris and ineptitude — has still managed to be exposed despite all the noise it’s making.
In March, the world saw in real-time how all of the regime’s top national security officials — including CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and even Vice President JD Vance — communicated highly sensitive information pertaining to a military mission in Yemen on a group text thread using the messaging app Signal while completely unaware that Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was reading the entire conversation in real time after accepting Waltz’s invite to the group.
After Waltz, Trump, and White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt attacked Goldberg and the Atlantic over their journalistic credibility, Goldberg subsequently published the full conversation, which included specific times of strikes, exact locations, weapons systems, and who was being targeted. Apparently the only thing that stopped Trump from firing his top national security advisor after such an embarrassing week was his “no-scalps” policy in which he aimed to deny the media the satisfaction of forcing out one of his top appointees.
Obviously, keeping Waltz on staff is Trump’s call, but it sends the message to both the American public and to our biggest adversaries that even someone who commits glaring errors that expose deep flaws in our national security apparatus is still judged as competent enough for this administration. It could be said that keeping Waltz on is an even bigger public embarrassment for Trump than caving to pressure and replacing him with someone able to follow basic operational security protocol.
While Signal has end-to-end encryption, it’s still open to vulnerabilities. Even before the embarrassing episode, the Pentagon warned Department of Defense staffers that the app was at risk of being compromised by Russian hackers. Normally, discussion of classified information is done through secure federal devices, or done in a Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF). One former White House official told Politico the conversation may as well have happened “over a dating app,” saying it was “just as secure” as Signal.
But the Signal scandal is just a microcosm of the regime’s incompetence and an early sign that there will be far more examples of jaw-dropping stupidity over the next four years. An administration led by a reality TV show host who bankrupted a casino, a tech CEO who made a public company’s stock price drop by almost 80% just over a year after he bought it, and staffed by a bevy of former Fox News personalities and conspiracy theorists is bound to make careless mistakes. And both elected officials in the minority party and the public at large have important roles to play in helping to expedite the public unraveling of the Trump regime.
Democrats have yet to start using all the tools at their disposal
A pot full of populist anger is bubbling over at Congressional town hall meetings across the country. It isn’t just constituents of far-right Republicans angry at their elected officials for granting unelected South African centibillionaire Elon Musk carte blanche to gut the federal workforce, but Democratic constituents furious at their representatives and senators for rolling over and letting the regime run amok without doing much to stand in their way. One unnamed House Democrat told Axios in March that one of their colleagues called them in tears after a tense town hall, lamenting: “They hate us.”
“Democrats are too nice. Nice and civility doesn’t work. Are you prepared for violence?” The lawmaker recalled hearing from one Democratic town hall.
House Democrats have been largely acting as one under Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York), with all but one Democrat — Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) — voting against Republicans’ six-month continuing resolution (CR). Because the lower chamber of Congress is so closely divided, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) can only afford two defections if he hopes to pass any bills assuming full attendance. He’s already barely able to keep his conference united, given the increasingly ornery and cantankerous far-right House Freedom Caucus, which indicated its support of Johnson’s leadership is contingent on him publicly championing unpopular policies.
Johnson’s job will likely get even more difficult in the coming months as Republicans hope to ram through a 10-year extension of Trump’s tax cuts (that overwhelmingly benefited the richest Americans) which are estimated to cost an additional $4.6 trillion over the next decade. One anonymous White House official recently acknowledged to Axios that when it comes to combining a Republican budget package that cuts healthcare for low-income Americans to the tune of $880 billion while simultaneously slashing taxes for billionaires, the optics are grim. House Democrats have a huge opportunity by continuing to highlight this as often as possible, and using it as a wedge against swing-district Republicans to weaken GOP solidarity.
“If we renew tax cuts for the rich paid for by throwing people off Medicaid, we’re gonna get fucking slaughtered,” the unnamed official said.
In the Senate, Democrats have painfully few options as a minority party outside of filibustering legislation. However, Senate rules allow any sole member to singlehandedly gum up the works by denying unanimous consent. As I’ve previously explained for Occupy.com, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) did this for the better part of 2023 by denying unanimous consent to allow the Senate to vote on hundreds of high-level promotions for senior military leadership. The late Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Kentucky) repeatedly denied unanimous consent for a 30-day extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed during the height of the Great Recession. Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) once quipped that the Senate even requires unanimous consent “to turn the lights on before noon.”
The battle over the six-month CR ended with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and nine other Democrats siding with Republicans to keep the government open. Schumer argued that a government shutdown would only further enable Trump and Musk’s pillaging of the commons, and that Trump would “have full authority to deem whole agencies, programs, and personnel nonessential, furloughing staff with no promise that they would ever be rehired.” He added that Republicans could then bring bills to the floor that would “reopen only their favorite departments and agencies, while leaving other vital services that they don’t like to languish.”
Schumer’s decision was met with rage by both Democratic activists and elected officials alike. Even former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) characterized Schumer’s argument as a “false choice” that she deemed as “unacceptable.” Democrats making the case for a government shutdown argued that the political consequences of a shutdown would be squarely on the shoulders of the GOP, as they control the White House and both chambers of Congress. Additionally, they posited that a shutdown would force Republicans back to the negotiating table, and proposed a 30-day stopgap measure that would avert a shutdown but force a vote on a government funding bill that wouldn’t make such steep cuts to federal agencies that the House Republican CR imposed.
Democrats have yet to embrace blatant obstruction as a tactic, and they probably won’t be able to stop Republicans from mustering 51 of 53 votes to pass bills via reconciliation and confirm presidential appointees. However, denying unanimous consent serves a dual purpose of staunching the worst of the bleeding while also giving Republicans a taste of their own medicine, proving that obstructionism is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways and possibly giving them a reason to reform Senate rules to make the body less dysfunctional in the future. And it might even keep their constituents satisfied that they’re putting up enough of a fight to avoid a primary challenge.
The people are only beginning to realize their power
A Democrat recently won a special election for Pennsylvania’s 36th state senate district in rural Lancaster County by just 482 votes, which Trump easily carried last year by a 15-point margin. NBC affiliate WGAL reported that the last time a Democrat represented the district was in 1890, and that he only represented it for a year before he was ousted. While it’s just one legislative seat in one state, Pennsylvania’s 36th senate district may be a harbinger of things to come in the 2026 midterms.
Trump may also be reading the tea leaves and foreseeing huge gains in next year’s congressional elections, given that he withdrew Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-New York) nomination to be United Nations ambassador after months of stalling. In a Truth Social post, Trump openly acknowledged that he was afraid of risking a special election in Stefanik’s typically deep-red district, writing: “I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat.”
And prior to the early April special elections for two heavily gerrymandered, ruby-red Congressional districts in Florida in which Republicans fended off Democratic challengers that vastly overperformed expectations, the GOP was openly nervous about their prospects. Democrats in the 1st and 6th Congressional districts — which were vacated by former Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Mike Waltz (R-Florida) after the former was tapped to be attorney general and the latter was appointed as national security advisor — outraised their Republican opponents by millions of dollars.
Wisconsin’s recent supreme court election, which saw liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford get the edge over conservative Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel, was as much of a referendum on the GOP as it was on Elon Musk’s war on the public sector. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO spent more than $20 million of his own money through donations to the Wisconsin Republican Party and conservative super PACs, for an $80 million race that broke records as the most expensive judicial election in US history.
Musk tweeted (and later deleted) an announcement that he would be cutting two $1 million checks for registered Wisconsin voters, and later said that the checks would be for signers of a petition against “activist judges.” Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul sued to stop Musk from following through on the promise, though the Wisconsin Appeals Court ruled against him. Tuesday’s result could be seen as an argument that the world’s richest man attempting to buy elections is not an asset for the candidates he supports, but a liability.
Aside from elections, the people are also exercising immense power in other ways. The website TeslaTakedown.com, which is spearheaded by actor Alex Winter (who played “Bill” in the Bill & Ted movies) serves as a hub for the decentralized nonviolent protest movement focused on large public demonstrations at Tesla dealerships. On its March 29th national day of action, protests erupted at more than 200 Tesla dealerships across the United States. Protesters aim to highlight Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE (which is not a Congressionally authorized federal agency) and its chainsaw approach to federal agencies and even political third rails like Social Security and Medicare.
“They’re not just able to do whatever they want,” Tesla protest organizer Sara Steffens told CNN. “They can pretend they can like bullies do, but they can’t have power unless we let them.”
The ongoing Tesla protests appear to have had a demonstrable impact on Musk’s net worth, as he’s lost more than $100 billion in net worth over just a handful of months. He recently complained that Minnesota Democratic Governor Tim Walz celebrating the plunge in Tesla’s stock price was “evil” during an interview with Fox News. If anyone has any doubt about the efficacy of protesting and the power the people have by gathering in large numbers, they need only listen to Musk.
“I mean you had Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, right? You know, running around onstage with a Tesla stock price, halving, where the stock price had gone in half, and he was overjoyed. What an evil thing to do. What a creep. What a jerk,” said Musk, who celebrated the firing of thousands of government workers by running around onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference with a chainsaw. “Who derives joy from that?”
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
