Several years ago, on a family vacation in the Galapagos Islands, we met members of a local soccer team, who invited us to their big game the next evening against a team from a neighboring island. Excited to cheer on the hometown squad, we turned out for what proved to be not much of a match. The opposition team didn’t even show up.
I kept thinking about that this week, watching the roll-out of Week Two of Trump Two. Again, it was like there was only one team on the field. Team Trump certainly showed up, flooding the zone with multiple executive orders every day. But where was the resistance? With one exception, the Democratic team was missing in action.
That one exception was an order from the Trump White House to freeze all federal grants across the board. It was obviously issued without any idea of how many worthwhile programs, domestic and global (think Meals on Wheels or cancer treatments at Walter Reed Hospital) would be impacted or how much human suffering would result. The result was chaos. And it backfired big time.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), in a news conference and speeches on the floor, immediately rallied Senate Democrats and outside groups in protest. Each of these programs, they pointed out, had been approved and funded by Congress. And, under the Constitution, Congress controls the purse strings. The president has no authority under the law to undo what Congress has done. Within hours, the White House had backed down and rescinded the freeze memo.
That quick response showed how important it is for Democrats not just to mildly criticize Trump’s imperial executive orders but to challenge and condemn every one of them immediately — and how successful such outright opposition can be. Unfortunately, that’s been the exception rather than the rule.
Almost all other Trump orders have gone basically unchallenged, including: firing 17 inspectors general in violation of federal law; ending birthright citizenship in violation of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution; pardoning 1,500 of the Jan. 6 rioters, many convicted of assaulting police officers; asking 2.3 million federal employees to consider resigning by Sept. 30 in violation of Civil Service regulations; banning transgender Americans from serving in the military; and launching an unprovoked trade war against our three leading trading partners.
What’s been the Democrats’ response to these and other Trump initiatives right out of the pages of Project 2025? Crickets. Why? Because Democrats are suffering from an identity crisis. They’re split. Divided between those who want to challenge every outrageous Trump action and those, led by Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who want to pick their battles.
“We’re not going to go after every single issue,” says Schumer. “We can’t swing at every pitch,” echoes Jeffries. But, counters Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), “Right now, you have to swing at every pitch. If you let some of these egregious acts of his early days on pass without real protest, it normalizes the behavior. It ends up less likely that you convince anyone to get off the mat later on.”
Murphy’s right. Democrats should have learned a long time ago that sitting back, playing nice and waiting for a better time to strike is a losing strategy. Look at 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Kerry waited 22 days before responding to the first “Swift Boat” smears, while Clinton didn’t immediately condemn then-FBI Director James Comey for reopening an investigation of her emails just days before the election.
There’s no time to wait. Democrats must pounce now. If Trump is flooding the zone every day, Democrats must do the same thing. They’ve got the megaphone. Democrats must use it — every day, on every outrage and every issue. Don’t delay. Raise hell.
BillPress is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.” Follow him on BlueSky @BillPress.bsky.social.
