A Plan to Fight Back Against Trump

Some early thoughts on how Democrats can begin to make a case to the voters that left us for Trump

The road ahead for Democrats — and the country — is long and treacherous. As I wrote last week, Democrats have a lot of work to do to rebuild a coalition that can compete in national elections. There are no silver bullets, no shortcuts, just the hard work of thinking about how we campaign, communicate and govern. It’s going to take time.

Regrettably, we must carry out that work while also pushing back against Trump. The former and future president is moving to implement his radically dangerous agenda. He is staffing his administration with hard-Right MAGA acolytes like Elise Stefanik, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan. According to the New York Times, Trump’s transition team already:

Prepared a slate of executive orders and presidential proclamations on climate and energy. They include withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands.

Trump and his allies are moving so quickly in part because they know the opposition is too divided and distraught to mount an aggressive counter-case. Democrats are operating on two tracks — forwarding our party’s message and agenda and fighting back against Trump with the very limited tools at our disposal.

While I certainly don’t have all the answers, I do want to offer a framework for how Democrats can mount our opposition to Trump in the coming months. That way, we might avoid some of our recent mistakes.

Our goal is to break up Trump’s winning coalition. We need a concerted, strategic effort to undermine the rationale for his win with the voters who reluctantly voted for him.

Trump’s Fragile Coalition

Yes, Trump won a stunningly large victory. Yes, he made gains almost everywhere in the country and with nearly every group of voters. Yes, his coalition could dominate presidential politics for years.

Despite these truths, Trump’s hold on his coalition is quite fragile. According to the exit polls, Trump outperformed his favorable rating by about five points. In other words, there is a segment of voters who don’t like Trump but voted for him anyway. Trump won the 8% of voters who disliked both candidates by 26 points.

The voters who moved to Trump since 2020 also don’t agree with him on several key issues. Two-thirds of 2024 voters believe that abortion should be legal. Although he played an essential role in overturning Roe v. Wade, 29% of the voters who believe abortion should be legal voted for Trump anyway. We know from previous polling that most voters disagree with Trump’s positions on taxes, health care, and climate change.

A decisive segment of voters were willing to hold their nose and vote for Trump because they trusted him more than Kamala Harris to lower costs and control the border. Most of these voters are either unaware of Trump’s agenda or don’t believe he will actually implement it.

If Trump doesn’t fulfill those specific promises or spends his time and political capital on things other than what he promised, he risks overreach. The voters did not give him a mandate to implement a MAGA agenda. Democrats must hold Trump accountable in a disciplined fashion that focuses on what voters expect him to do.

There are some opportunities in the near future to make that case.

Trump’s Tax Giveaway Could Reset the Debate

Anger and frustration at high prices was the driving force behind Trump’s win. More than three-fourths of voters said inflation caused their family hardship over the last year. Trump won the 24% of voters who said inflation caused severe hardship by 50 points.

Trump was elected to address high prices. The voters who swung the election to him expect Trump to come into office and focus on fighting inflation and lowering costs for middle and working class Americans. But that’s not Trump’s plan. In fact, he has no plans or proposals to lower costs. The top priority of Trump and the Republican Party is to renew and expand the 2017 Trump tax giveaway that largely benefited the wealthy and corporations.

I cannot overstate the unpopularity of this proposal. It is the exact opposite of what voters want. A Navigator Research poll of 2024 battleground district voters found majority opposition to making the cuts permanent as Trump and other Republicans have proposed.

Blueprint polling from this past spring found that Trump’s tax policies were his Achilles heel. As demonstrated in the chart below, concerns are highest among the groups that Trump made gains with during the election.

The Republicans will almost certainly control the House and the Senate, and the GOP will use the budget reconciliation process to prevent Senate Democrats from using the filibuster to block the tax plan. However, because of the likely GOP House majority, Democrats do have some limited leverage and the ability to make this process as extended and painful as possible. Democrats have to pick a big, loud fight. Trump cannot do this quickly and under the cover of darkness. Every voter — particularly those who took a chance on Trump need to know that he picked tax cuts for his rich friends over help for the people struggling with higher gas and grocery bills.

Trump’s Immigration Overreach

If inflation was the biggest reason for Trump’s victory, immigration was the second biggest. While more voters cited abortion than immigration as their top issue (14% to 11%), immigration — and border security in particular — was a big factor with many of the voters who went from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024.

Yes, the country has moved to the Right on immigration, mainly spurred by the flood of migrants coming to this country in recent years. But the country doesn’t actually support Trump’s draconian immigration policies. They want the border secure, but they do not support the sort of mass deportation efforts that the Trump team is planning to implement. As Democratic strategist Carlos Odio pointed out in my conversation with him on Pod Save America, many voters think Trump is focused on the migrants who recently arrived in the country. But that’s not the plan — Trump and his lieutenants like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan want to deport undocumented people who have lived in this country their whole lives — dreamers, people married to U.S. citizens, parents of American-born children. Trump will split up families and uproot key members of American communities. He wants to send people back to countries they left when they were children. The MAGA base may want this, but the voters who delivered the election to Trump certainly don’t.

According to the exits, 56% of 2024 voters think most undocumented immigrants should be offered a chance at legal status — 22% of those folks voted for Trump.

Trump has a mandate to secure the border; he doesn't have a mandate for mass deportation. Democrats must call him on it at every turn. We must highlight our desire to secure the border and fix the system fairly and humanely. This isn’t that complicated. It simply requires us to return to the immigration messaging that Democrats used successfully before the Biden presidency.

Avoiding the Mistakes of the Past

If the past is prologue, Trump will give us daily — if not hourly — outrages to which we will feel compelled to react. There will be massive amounts of corruption, rank and dangerous corruption, and violations of countless norms. There will be a temptation to swing at every pitch. To find the nearest mountaintop and scream as loud as possible about each and every one of them. Here are a few thoughts on how we can communicate more effectively this time around:

• Be Disciplined: Democrats are operating with a much smaller megaphone. Therefore, we have to pick and choose our battles and then relentlessly hammer the ones we choose. We must be laser-focused on Trump’s failures to meet the core promises of his campaign — lowering costs and securing the border. We can fit lots of things under that messaging framework (i.e. further restricting abortion access, repealing Obamacare, targeting LGBTQ+ people), but we need a consistent framework.

• Focus on the Voters We Need: Every decision must focus on the voters we lost in 2024. We must work backward from what they care about and why they left our party. This doesn’t mean abandoning our principles, adopting mushy centrism, punching Left, or abandoning the trans community. The voters who left us span the ideological spectrum and are mostly economic-focused. We win them back by convincing them that we are more likely to help their families AND that Trump has abandoned them.

If we can undermine the central premise of Trump’s campaign, his coalition could crumble quickly. In 2004, George W. Bush won on the simple premise that he could better protect the country. His first act was to try to privatize Social Security — something he never talked about during the campaign. Then Katrina hit, destroying his facade of strength and competence. Bush’s presidency was functionally over within two years of his reelection.

That should be our model for the next two years. It can be done — but it won’t be easy.