Taking Down Trump 2.0 - Rule 10
Trump always brings a clown car full of distractions and incompetence. Focus on the signal, not the noise. Make your case, hit back hard, consistently, and wait for them to make mistakes.
It’s the perfect time to come back to Taking Down Trump 2.0, adapting the successful rules for defeating Donald from Taking Down Trump and applying them to the task of defeating the new administration.
Six weeks into the term, the shock-and-awe phase is now over — and the cracks and infighting and failures and incompetence are becoming more and more visible. So our next rule is especially appropriate:
10 - Be ready for the clown show and focus on your own argument rather than on Trump’s distractions. Focus on the signal, not the noise, and wait for them to make a mistake.
In a completely unsurprising move, Trump’s inner circle cronies seemed to have been chosen mostly for their ability to say aggressively ignorant (or ignorantly aggressive) things on television or social media; indeed, several of them are erstwhile TV personalities or are basically glorified influencers. It does not appear that anyone is actually qualified for the jobs they have.
Trump, meanwhile, is just engaging in a series of publicity stunts — although increasingly, those have been backfiring. Bringing Elon Musk to hold court in the Oval Office while Trump awkwardly sat there and got bullied by Musk’s 4-year-old son? That only made Trump look weak and pathetic. Letting JD Vance attack Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, again in the Oval? That only prompted the rest of the world to rally around Ukraine like it was 2022 all over again.
This all very much fits a pattern. Trump does the exact same thing when he goes to court: he brings in exquisitely unqualified people who are loud attack dogs but little else.
The key is not to get distracted — but instead to stick to your case, your evidence, your arguments. Keep being a steamroller. Keep pressing forward inexorably with a single-minded focus. Let them squawk. Pay them no mind.
What does this mean in the current political context? The important thing about Musk is not him bringing his kid to the Oval, or wearing t-shirts and hats, or why foreign aid is important (although it is) — the important thing is that he’s the world’s richest man, a completely unelected bureaucrat (and, according to Trump’s own DOJ, not even the actual head of the so-called “DOGE”), tearing apart the parts of government he doesn’t like (and that are investigating him) and personally pocketing billions of government contracts for himself.
Musk is a multi-billionaire, looting our country and heritage, for himself — after buying Trump and buying the election. He’s an oligarch, full of corruption and conflicts of interest. That is the message.
Meanwhile, the important thing about Trump and Zelenskyy has nothing to do with JD Vance or Marco Rubio and everything to do with Vladimir Putin, who has managed to manipulate Trump and his administration into betraying a fellow democracy being invaded by the Kremlin and instead aligning with the Kremlin.
Trump is appeasing Putin and serving as his puppet, abandoning America’s ideals and also the GOP’s legacy as the party of Reagan and Eisenhower. That is the message.
And the most important thing about tariffs and Canada and Mexico has nothing to do with Howard Lutnick or Justin Trudeau or the merits of international trade or bogus claims about fentanyl and everything to do with how tariffs are taxes, how Trump is jacking up your taxes and all your costs of living, how tariffs cause inflation, how he’s hurting American companies that export overseas, how he’s causing Americans to lose their jobs, and how he’s causing consumer confidence to plummet.
Trump is driving the American economy into a recession — and making you pay more in taxes and grocery bills. That is the message.
We need to stick to our core messaging, every day, no matter what or who comes out of the clown car. That is how to beat Trump.
Then as an added benefit, the clown show will ultimately be revealed for what it is — a dumpster fire of mistakes and incompetence. The stock markets have been giving Trump regular votes of no confidence, as GDP is now predicted to decline this quarter. The “DOGE” firings eliminated workers who oversaw America’s nuclear program and bird flu response, among other things, and Trump and Musk had to scramble to rehire them. Musk has now so angered the real members of the cabinet, such as Marco Rubio and Sean Duffy, that Trump has had to intervene and clip Musk’s wings, making it clear that the cabinet secretaries control their own departments and personnel, not Musk.
Yet this does not mean that we only sit back and wait for the mistakes, doing nothing in the meantime.
James Carville was partly right in his recent New York Times op-ed: we should not be falling for all the distractions and countering Trump and his crazies on every talking point or publicity stunt. But I would argue that we should be bringing every Trump failure and overreach back to a consistent, constant, concentrated set of arguments.
Or to counter Carville with an homage to Carville: It’s the billionaires, stupid.
To do nothing at all lets them dominate the narrative — and it will only exacerbate the fury and disenchantment on our side, as people feel that the Democratic leadership is not doing enough to fight back.
We should fight back. But with a very deliberate, disciplined, relentlessly methodical approach.
That is how we defeat Trump.
Regarding tariffs….everyone look into the Moot-Hawley Act? Finally on its third year of tariffs, Roosevelt ended it. But it took the next 7 years of Depression, now they call it Recession, to get back to the normalcy. To know also, the wide world also suffered the depression….and it helped Hitler’s cause to have followers towards war. That’s quite simplistic, I know, and learn tariffs only destroy us. Don’t the oligarchs realize they need the majority of people to also survive?
Common sense advise at a time when common sense isn’t so common. Thank you.