Now: Inside a normal White House, they’d read these tea leaves and say, “Geez, we’d better cool it.” But this president will of course double down. Triple or quadruple down. You think it’s in Stephen Miller’s nature to moderate? You think it’s in Trump’s? Of course not—they’ll just get more extreme. Remember: All that ICE spending that was in the big, ugly bill is just getting started, and the masked agents are still arresting only around 1,200 people a day—nowhere near Miller’s goal of 3,000. On this and many other matters, as the clock ticks on them to check every Project 2025 box they can, they will get more extreme.
And they will also work overtime to rig next year’s midterms. This is something to keep your eye on—bills that will be proposed in state legislatures next year where there are important races. We don’t know yet what they’ll propose, but we can anticipate the general thrust: When fascists see an unfriendly election result, they never look in the mirror and ask themselves what they could do differently. They look at the people who voted against them and figure out ways to prevent them from voting.
Where does this leave the Democrats? Keep pressing on the gas pedal. This debate about whether the Democrats should focus on economics or threats to democracy is silly. I can do two things at once. So can you. And so should the Democrats. Americans are mad about it all—so talk about it all. Aggressively and with passion. They don’t have to agree yet on a specific agenda for the country. That gets sorted out in the presidential primary. For the midterms, they just need to agree in broad terms that they’re trying to help make working people’s lives easier, and that Trump is (a) failing utterly at that and (b) posing a daily threat to our democracy.
