How we will fight back, Part 2

Continuing our initial look at the strategy for countering Trump, with a focus on how to win with elected officials and a new media ecosystem

How do we fight back? This is Part 2 of the overview and the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a series of pieces on this topic in the weeks, months, and likely years to come. (Read Part 1 here if you haven’t already.)

2 - Pressurization: use other elected officials’ self-preservation instincts in our favor; if they worry they’ll be more likely to lose re-election by supporting Trump, they will withhold that support. No politician is monolithic. Even in an era of intense partisan polarization, there are few and perhaps zero politicians who cannot be swayed if they feel the winds blowing differently in their districts, even if they are otherwise sworn to follow a certain leader. They follow that leader because it benefits their chances of re-election. If something else benefits their chances of re-election more, they will follow whatever that is. If Trump is one (very heavy) weight on their scale, we must provide a greater counterweight.

Think you don’t have a role to play if you’re in a red state or district? Think again.

We can be that counterweight. And we have been already; for one thing, it is the core principle of the Indivisible playbook. How else do we know this? Look no further than the successful efforts to defend the Affordable Care Act (ACA) over the past decade (ones that we will need to continue in the years to come). As hellbent as right-wingers were and are on killing the ACA, they have been unable to get their own fellow Republicans to all join in. There were — and are — always certain Republicans who represented more moderate constituencies whom they believed would punish them if they voted to kill the ACA. This also helps explain how Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson were able to accomplish so little as Speaker the last two years: the tiny GOP majority could not be unified, as moderates will refuse to support any far-right bills, and the far-right will launch a mutiny if it does not get its way.

For every extreme action Trump and his cronies want to take, we need to apply extreme pressure to every Republican from an even remotely purple seat, and especially to those Republicans clinging to otherwise blue seats.¹ This has worked even when the GOP had larger majorities. It should work even more effectively now, as Johnson will likely have the smallest House majority in over 75 years. And even in the Senate, we only need a handful of Republicans to cross the aisle or to abstain from a vote, and we can stop legislation or confirmations — maybe not every time, but at least some of the time.²

Plus, this same strategy is also applicable to Republican governors and other state and local officials. Any of them with a more purple district or state will need to heed public opinion — and almost all of them will care if a motivated, upset group of constituents results in negative press stories arising from a town hall or other public appearance. Impact the narrative in your city, state, or town, and you will impact the incentive structure for that elected official, as they will take action to stop bad publicity.

3 - Communication: it is long past time for the pro-democracy coalition to build its own communication ecosystem, completely independent of legacy media brands. This is not a unique thought, but it is one that some of us have been howling about for years. We now hope that more people are listening.

If Fox News died tomorrow, the far right would shrug. They have built at least 5 other streaming networks, multiple large podcast and influencer networks, a circuit of conferences and other events, an entire universe of right-wing commentators, content creators, activists, and donors. Right-wing megadonors have spent well over a billion dollars on this, starting in 2013 if not earlier — first in the wake of Obama’s 2012 re-election triumph over Mitt Romney, and then accelerating even further after the 2016 primaries as they realized that Rupert Murdoch may not always be on their side.

If MSNBC died tomorrow, pro-democracy forces would instantly our most prominent media outlet, with no replacement waiting in the wings. Other legacy outlets have been co-opted or at least compromised by the revenue Donald Trump brings, or by their plutocratic owners who feel compelled to maintain good relations with Dear Leader. And we find ourselves relatively powerless to drive an unapologetically pro-democracy narrative — without triangulation, without any high-minded but anachronistic centrism, without access journalism, without horse race analysis, and without sanewashing.

There is hope, but it is a flickering one: the Resistance community online has remained strong, even in the face of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, and it has now spawned a growing number of podcasts and Substacks, including this one. Plus it is has resulted in a sudden boomtown of democracy on Bluesky in the past two weeks.

But there is much, much, more work to be done on this — and I’ll elaborate much more on this topic, including with a very exciting new project a number of us are launching. More on that soon.

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Also: there is a new episode of the podcast, with Anthony Scaramucci joining me, plus make sure to listen to last week’s episode with Maya Wiley. Both of those episodes are full of thoughts on how we fight back and what to do next.

1. This of course also applies to any potentially wayward Democrats, although the Democratic caucus is now far more unified than the Republican one, thankfully, and the two most infuriating senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are now leaving office. A unified minority can often outmaneuver a disparate majority.

2. I also believe that we should not underestimate the potential force of a politician whose fiefdom and privileges and prerogatives are under threat. For example, senators who’ve achieved seniority through years of hard work and now have made it to chair important committees or to be in the leadership may not take kindly to having their power effectively stripped from them by a president (even of their own party) who seems keen on circumventing the Senate’s constitutional authority. I am not inclined to overestimate the goodness of Republicans until they truly break with Donald Trump in a permanent way, but I believe there could be some potential allies of convenience lurking here. More on this soon.