There Is No Winning Here. Only Waiting.
When checks and balances prove ineffective, we are left to bear witness and bide time.
As he was campaigning for his Senate seat in 2021, J.D. Vance made a podcast appearance where he dropped some prophetic advice on what governance should look like in a second Trump term:
“I think that what Trump should, like, if I was giving him one piece of advice, [is] fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Andrew Jackson did not actually say this, but he may as well have given the context of what Vance is talking about here. In 1832 the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that states did not have the right to impose regulations on Native American land. Jackson and the state of Georgia refused to enforce the ruling, and over the course of the next 6 years, Cherokee natives were kicked off their land, culminating in the Trail of Tears. To invoke the rhetoric of Andrew Jackson at all is certainly a choice in its own right, but to reference the open defiance of our country’s checks and balances in this way is perfectly analogous to what is happening in this moment.
One of the first things Trump did upon entering office was fire inspector generals across 17 different agencies. He has since signed multiple executive orders that fire certain federal employees outright, and has offered others severance packages in exchange for their resignations. Most recently, Trump fired the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is now overseen by billionaire Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought. This past week, Vought issued a series of directives that essentially froze all bureau activity, marking the start of what the administration hopes will become the bureau’s total abolition. All of this, in conjunction with the DOGE raid of the Treasury Department, is not a matter of administrative change. It is happening according to plan.
To say Democrats are asleep at the wheel here is an understatement. They are effectively fighting fire with tissue paper in the hopes that the fallout from this administration’s actions will be repercussive enough to change voters’ minds all on its own. Sam Seder of The Majority Report has been talking recently about how movies utilize reaction shots as a way of messaging to the audience how they should feel, and that Democrats are transcendently awful at this as a media tactic. Recent imagery like Chuck Schumer leading half-spirited chants, or Democrats letting a single inane man with zero authority keep them from entering the Department of Education, the reaction shots of Democratic leaders have been uninspiring to say the least.
Let’s assume that the Democratic strategy of wait and see plays out all the way through the midterms and into the next general election. Maybe one of Elon’s groyper goons screws up a line of code and locks people out of Medicare or Social Security payments, or Trump fully implements his tariffs and tanks the economy. What leads them to believe that voters will act in a retaliatory manner? We just watched an election take place in which a man who incited a coup and openly tried to overturn the results of an election still won. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and Republicans still won.
I fully understand that Trump is an institution all his own and that his popularity does not extend to the party beyond him, but the Republican media apparatus has been incredibly efficacious in their manipulation of narratives. In this same election, we watched Democrats capitulate to almost every Republican talking point and offer virtually no pushback. This isn’t to say Democrats will never fight on anything. They have leverage to threaten a shutdown in March and may pick other battles along the way, but it’s hard to put any faith into a party so consistently inept. Despite this lack of aggressiveness, there have also been a few court rulings that serve to stem the bleeding of the administrative state in the meantime.
This is where the last bit of Vance’s statement comes into play, though. The collapse of any sort of serious resistance in Washington puts the primary oppositional force in the hands of systems and institutions that the Trump administration has deliberately set out to destroy. How the United States spends its money is decided by Congress, and yet an unelected, de facto government official in Elon Musk has taken that course of action into his own hands. Several of Trump’s executive orders are blatantly unconstitutional. The mass layoffs of federal workers on partisan grounds are also illegal. Trump, Musk, and even J.D. Vance understand that it is easier to just run fast, break shit, and ask questions later because our existing accountability measures have never been all that strong in the first place.
Whether it’s the Iraq War, Watergate, or Iran-Contra, you will be hard-pressed to find examples of American leaders being held accountable for egregious corruption and overreach. Really, you don’t even have to go back any further than January 6th, 2021. The courts may not hand Trump and Musk a win in every case—reversing birthright citizenship comes to mind—but they will absolutely allow this administration to undercut the federal government in ways that will be difficult to fix in the future.
While those government cover-ups serve as parallels for this administration’s lack of accountability, none of them apply to what Trump and Musk are actually doing in quite the right way because there is no cover-up here. The transparency in all of this is part of the process. We are watching the destruction of federal agencies happen in broad daylight as Musk tweets and Trump posts on Truth Social in real time. The most apt comparison to what’s currently going on in the federal government is, coincidentally, what Musk did when he bought Twitter: gut the workforce, ditch content moderation, and publicly document the process via social media. Twitter has lost nearly 80% of its value since Musk’s purchase and now exists solely as a vehicle for Musk to create an American version of WeChat, China’s everything app. DOGE is a means to an end for Elon constructed under the guise of government amelioration.
Even if we get a court ruling where DOGE is forced to halt its operations in the Treasury Department, or wherever else, and must relinquish any and all spending decisions to Congress where they’re supposed to be, of all the people on planet Earth, why would Elon Musk or Donald Trump agree to do so? Who is going to enforce that? As I was writing this, the New York Times broke news of a federal judge in Rhode Island that ruled the Trump administration has acted in direct defiance of his previous ruling by not unfreezing federal grants. Trump has no reason to react to this in any other manner than, “So what?” And on a more personal level, for two of the most public-facing narcissists alive today, letting the courts tell them what to do is in direct contrast with the self-regulating image they like to portray. Don’t take my word for it; just ask J.D. Vance.
I want to be clear that I’m not trying to doom too hard here. Yes, this administration will do, and has already done, damage, but it will come to an end. I don’t buy into the waiting game as an electoral strategy, but I do buy into it as the reality in which we all get through this. Waiting for this term to end doesn’t have to mean an absence of proactivity either. Just the opposite. This election was not the national mandate Republicans claim it was, and that leaves the door wide open for winning when it matters most. Democrats are struggling to fight back because they are still grounded in institutional norms and processes. Unfortunately, fighting back through the legal system can only get you so far when its recourse is upheld with the same legitimacy as a pinky promise. If we’re going to be waiting around, we may as well create some reaction shots of our own.
I don't think this is dooming at all. I think it's an apt account of many of the realities we are currently facing.