Readying the Resistance

A Democratic guide to minimizing harm from the coming Trump term

LEFT: U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an election night event. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. RIGHT: Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaks during a news conference. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

We’re all still grieving the electoral loss and feeling queasy about the prospect of Trump returning to the White House in January. But in response to the giddy pronouncements from the GOP and the Trump campaign, some have already begun to think about an effective political resistance to Trump and Trumpism. 

Democrats need to make these plans knowing full well that Trump will be backed by a sycophantic GOP Congress and blank check-writing SCOTUS. And this time around, there won’t be any adults in the room, including White House counsel who during his first term would quietly shelve Trump’s most outrageous requests, or chiefs of staff like John Kelly who would struggle to moderate, educate and soften his most extreme positions.

No, this time around Trump will be surrounded by people even further to the right of him. They will seek to implement the most dangerous and destructive of policies, many drawn from the Project 2025 blueprint. And they will encourage Trump to issue Executive Orders that could reshape American democracy, insert our armed forces deeply into civil affairs, hurtle our economy into an abyss, and upend the lives of millions of minorities.

This is a thought piece, an early stab (and work in progress) about how Democrats (and the lawyers who are aligned with them) can ready themselves to resist Trump. We’re in very new territory here, but the ideas are based on what we’ve learned about Trump from both his first term and the four years he’s been more or less idle when he wasn’t sitting in courtrooms or stumping on the campaign trail. They play into both his ego and the worst aspects of his character and leadership style. I hope you find this early exploration a good starting point for how the next four years could go if Democrats play their cards smartly, even if the strategy seems highly unorthodox.

Note that I won’t be discussing what average citizens might consider doing. This, for now, is the beginning of a political and legal strategy. Others involved in grassroots organizing may have ideas for direct resistance by citizens, but that is for another discussion.

Let him play golf

Remember that Trump is lazy. He doesn’t like to work. And while he was president, he spent an inordinate amount of time playing golf. In fact, by CNN’s count, Trump spent at least 266 days of his first term spending some time at a Trump golf course.

After leaving office, Trump played golf pretty much every day.

Democrats used to criticize him for that, but this time around, I say let him play golf. After all, the less time he spends in the White House, the less time he’ll have to focus on really horrible policies and executive orders. 

In fact, people he really hates, like former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, ought to play along, challenging him to rounds and making his presidency more about whether he can hit under par than whether he can hit Iran with a nuke.

Sure, his advisors will be busy hatching their plots and pushing their agendas, but they will still need Trump’s sign-off, and keeping him on the green half the time instead of in the Oval Office will limit their face time with him.

Let him watch us on Fox

Trump famously loves to watch Fox News. This was so apparent during his first term that those seeking to curry favor with Trump would frequently go on the network to try and impress him. It often worked; that was how Trump wound up endorsing a little-known GOP Congressman named Ron DeSantis, who became a Trump apologist on Fox, for Florida governor in 2018, launching his career as a would-be autocrat in that state.

We should leverage Trump’s addiction to Fox. Democrats should go out of their comfort zone and show up on his favorite shows. Pete Buttigieg already does a good job with this. And Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is comfortable in the lion’s den. Perhaps even Kamala Harris could take a few stabs.

What should they say? On television, starting long before he takes office, they could goad him into errors. For example, they could raise the warning on his planned tariff hikes, saying (correctly) that it would lead to inflation, and that’s why Trump will never do it. He said he was going to do it, but he wouldn’t dare because it would collapse the economy.

This is a win/win. If Trump doesn’t follow through, he’s chicken, soft on China and the Democrats were right. If he does follow through, as he was likely to do anyway, then Democrats can point to the economic disaster that follows and say they tried to stop him but he wouldn’t listen.

This is the way to prevent Trump from once again enjoying the tailwinds from a great Democratic economy. Trump’s policies will mess everything up, and so we should say that emphatically now, in front of MAGA audiences on Fox, then see if Trump takes the bait.

Let him spend time making money and hobnobbing

This is hard to swallow, but may be the best thing for our national interest: Let Trump wheel and deal from office. Like his penchant for golfing, Trump is always focused on making money, and he will try to turn the White House into a profit center, just as he did before.

Distasteful as this is, I’d far rather Trump spend his time lining his pockets and bilking his followers than on policies that will harm huge swathes of citizens (more on that below). 

Trump also loves to surround himself with very wealthy people and celebrities. It makes him feel important and it satisfies his ego. So invite him to glitzy events and let him hold more “policy” meetings with the Kim Kardashians of the world. In fact, A-list celebrities should stop avoiding Trump and ask instead for an audience with him to help their pet non-partisan cause. Make him act more like a ceremonial king than a president, and he’ll have less bandwidth for other things.

And who knows, maybe these celebrity visits could even bring some attention to some just causes, as he did with prison reform.

Hit ‘em with lawfare

One of the most effective weapons against Trump’s policies during his first term was the slew of lawsuits that his executive orders met when they were first announced. Remember the Muslim ban? That bounced up and down the courts for years before it could finally go into effect in a watered-down form. 

Lawyers from every non-profit walk of life should be readying civil complaints today, just as people like Russ Vought are already preparing horrific executive orders for Trump to sign. The minute Trump announces his Day One policy to deport millions of undocumented migrants, for example, lawyers everywhere should file suit. It shouldn’t just be one suit; it should be several. Tie up the White House lawyers and the Trump Justice Department with as many cognizable claims as they can think of.

More than the sheer number, they should file these cases before judges in jurisdictions where the appellate courts will be more friendly, such as in the Ninth Circuit. This is the inverse of what MAGA and Christian Nationalist legal counsel have been doing now for years by picking a single court near Amarillo, Texas to ensure their cases are heard before radical judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.

Once those cases are filed, judges (and their clerks) should slow-walk them. Act like the nun in The Sound Of Music, opening the gate as slowly as she can so the Nazis are delayed. Then, after issuing temporary restraining orders, set the hearings out as far as possible. Have the lawyers demand extensions. File motions that could receive interlocutory appeals, to further gum things up. In short, drag things out as long as possible to prevent his policies from going into effect.

Governors in blue border states could also get involved. California and Arizona both have Democratic governors, after all. And they also have Democratic state attorneys general. These states could move to intervene in suits or file them on their own, just as the red states have done to block Biden’s policies like student debt relief. Sure, this will eventually get up to the Supreme Court and get overturned, but the point is delay. Run out the clock, run out the clock, run out the clock. Trump only gets four years, two before the midterms.

(Fun name-drop moment: Rob Bonta, the current California AG, had an office next to mine when I worked at Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco. On the other side of me was Izzy Ramsey, the current U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, and down the hall from me was Cecillia Wang, who is now the National Legal Director of the ACLU. Perhaps I should get us together for a chat.)

Make common cause with centrist Republicans

How do you stop the worst Trump policies from taking effect, when he’s got both a Republican House and a Republican Senate? Isn’t this game over for the Democrats?

Think back to 2017. Trump tried multiple times to get rid of Obamacare. They even advanced a “skinny repeal” to try to jam it through as part of “budget reconciliation” (meaning it could not be filibustered in the Senate).

The reason they failed is because three GOP senators blocked it. Two of those senators are still in the Senate: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME). The late Sen. John McCain’s famous thumbs down ultimately killed that effort.

With the Senate in the hands of the GOP by only three or four votes, it will be possible to form another coalition with the centrists to try and prevent the GOP from destroying the ACA once more, or from crippling Social Security or Medicaid. The same senators could work with Democrats to block the most unqualified or dangerous of Trump’s proposed appointments.

Over in the House, the same strategy could be deployed. We are likely looking again at a slim GOP majority in the House, meaning there will be at least some Republicans from districts with many purple or blue voters. These swing district Republicans could be enlisted to vote against the most drastic of GOP proposals, including undoing the CHIPS and Science Act, getting rid of price protections on insulin for seniors, gutting investments into clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act, or lifting the cap on prescription drug prices.

Grind Senate confirmations to a halt

Trump will follow the Project 2025 playbook and seek to gut the civil service and install loyalists at all levels. But for hundreds of the most important positions, he will still need Senate approval. That’s where we can take a page straight out of Tommy Tuberville’s, Rand Paul’s, and Ted Cruz’s book.

Those GOP senators held up critical appointments in order to play political games. They refused to allow things to proceed by unanimous consent by raising single member objections. That forced Democrats into a bind: Either the positions would go unfilled, or they would have to spend all their time on lower-level appointments and promotions.

Democrats should return the favor. Only this time, the targets of the objections really are disgraceful and unqualified. It isn’t just about punishing innocent civil servants caught up in political games. It’s about slow-walking the worst appointments so that they can’t come in like a wrecking crew.

Democrats could also throw sand in any legislative gears by refusing to grant unanimous consent on GOP bills, just as the GOP did to block Democratic proposals to protect IVF and to ban bump stock sales.

This tactic may not ultimately halt everything, but again it could slow things down. And there is a bit of poetic justice to it. Let the GOP worry that it can’t confirm enough federal judges because Senate business is so backed up.

These are but a few broad-stroke ideas, but it’s time everyone who will be part of the resistance start thinking about how they can play a vital part in pushing back. Some of these tactics are admittedly unorthodox, others quite petty. Still others are variations on what has worked well before. Together, they could bog down or distract Trump and the White House just long enough for the midterms to give Democrats a chance to regain control of one or both chambers and really turn up the heat.

It may make many quite uncomfortable to consider deploying these kinds of strategies. They make Democrats into obstructionists, even political saboteurs, much as the GOP has been for the few cycles when Democrats have been in charge. 

But here there is a difference, though it’s one MAGA Republicans will never acknowledge: When actual fascists have taken control of the government and are trying to destroy democracy, patriotic opponents must use every peaceful means at their disposal to prevent them. Indeed, it is a moral imperative, because millions of lives are on the line. We cannot act as if the world has not changed, and Democrats must grow far more accustomed to acting outside the box and getting creative in their approaches.

The times, and the threats, demand this from us all.