What Will Democrats Do Now?
They’ll use the institutions to come after Trump. Here’s how they’re already starting.
Watching post-election Democrats plan their resistance these past four weeks has been like decoding a sand pattern in a windstorm. The windstorm is Donald Trump’s victory; the sand pattern is Democrats’ political strategy, which, even without Trump, is normally written in sand. Devised by operators in institutions who see politics as “messaging,” the strategy combines fuzzy expert indoctrinating with targeted activist politicking which can be “wiped out,” or “plausibly denied,” later.
But Democrats’ execution of their strategy will be much more comprehensive now than after Trump’s election in 2016, because they have had eight years to perfect their moves across media, academic, nonprofit, legal, and security institutions. Worse, it will be hard to find a smoking gun proving “collusion.” Liberals and Leftists will simply write and talk to each other through their normal academic and media channels and then call that strategizing “expert analysis.”
Usefully for conservatives, though, that “expert analysis” is already getting floated across the Democratic ecosystem. Examining it gives a clear and comprehensive picture of the strategy Democrats are beginning to draw.
“Trump-Proofing” the Media: Call Voters Fascist Dupes
The first hint of the expert class’s in-depth response to the election came in an essay by British transplant Zadie Smith, considered by institutional critics America’s preeminent fiction writer, in the New York Review of Books, America’s preeminent intellectual magazine. The essay led off like a harmless academic parody: an analysis of an analysis of dreams Germans had during the Third Reich. But it quickly turned political, as Smith compared the Nazi Reich to Trump’s America, arguing that the “right-wing propaganda” that had supposedly elected Trump would soon invade Americans’ dreams via the internet, necessitating censorship: “Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is ‘subject to no legal or moral restraints.’ Maybe it’s time that it is?”
If this sounds like a bad joke, it’s not, because Nathan Heller of the New Yorker, arguably Democrats’ most prestigious media vehicle since it created the scandal of the Kavanaugh hearings, soon echoed it. According to Heller, Trump was elected because of “the ambience of information.” Basically this meant Trump talked a lot and people listened, which might sound like how democracy is supposed to work. But the problem for Heller, like for Smith, was the vehicle through which Trump communicated to people, the internet:
Many of us scroll through social networks…and struggle to recall…how we assembled the broad conceptions that we hold… a lot of what [America’s public] thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America.
This argument was echoed soon after by John Avlon, a failed 2024 Democratic congressional candidate and former CNN anchor who supported intelligence operators’ false claims of Russian disinformation in 2020. Writing for the NeverTrump neoconservative site the Bulwark, Avlon acknowledged that voters turned to Trump based on issues of immigration and crime but argued that these issues had been manipulated by “the relentlessness of the right-wing media ecosystem.” A week after Avlon’s piece, Joel Grey, the star of Kander and Ebb’s famous musical Cabaret set in Berlin before the Nazi takeover, upped the ante. He wrote a Times op-ed warning of this “right-wing media ecosystem” spreading anti-Semitism like the Nazis. (And yet he didn’t mention the fact that Trump is supported by a growing minority of American Jews.)
Underneath their careful language and eloquent provocations, the essays from Smith, Heller, Avlon, and Grey make a definite case: that Trump’s election doesn’t represent the will of the people because the people can’t be trusted to vote for themselves. Rather, the people are fascist dupes who have been misled by what Heller, citing an “expert,” called their “believing brains.” But how will Democrats and their supporters disseminate this case against popular politics and for expert governance? Their immediate strategies will run through the institutions where they’re strong.
Preaching to the Students
Not long after the election, Yale University’s David Blight, considered one of America’s preeminent historians, signaled that universities’ role is top of liberals’ minds when it comes to resisting Trump. Writing in the New York Times, he argued that “liberal intellectuals will have to take the offensive in these wars on the fronts worth fighting for.” The route to this offensive, he emphasized, runs through private and public universities, which “do not design our research or our curriculum from public opinion” but which can mount “an aggressive, positive assertion of the values and faiths that…education represents” against the “dire threat” of “Trumpism.”
It won’t be hard for academics to mobilize. The New York Review of Books, where Zadie Smith, a professor at NYU, wrote her essay, is read by academics around the country. The New Yorker, the premiere popular literary magazine in the country where Nathan Heller wrote his article, has the same status. These publications, as well as the New York Times and PBS, are where run-of-the-mill American academics take their ideas. When they want political “diversity,” they go to anti-Trump conservative websites like the Bulwark, where John Avlon published his piece.
What could be easier for professors to do than assign a selection of pieces from these select publications for an in-class “discussion,” making the case to impressionable students? (The New York Review of Books alone has 9 anti-Trump pieces to choose from published this past month.) This “teaching” will go under the heading of academic freedom. Any attempt to balance it from outside will be labeled a “McCarthyite” assault on open discussion, despite the fact that the discussion’s terms are being set by people with a uniform agenda.
Lawfare Forever
But academics and journalists aren’t the only “experts” mobilizing to use their status to stop Trump. Another way to stop Trumpism from influencing “believing brains” is using nonprofits to mount legal challenges to the new Administration in front of receptive federal judges. Like they do with professors and journalists, Democrats portray federal judges as having “objective” expert authority, in this case to interpret the Constitution, even if their interpretations conflict with voters’ will. Thanks to Biden appointments, Democrats have almost 200 new federal district judges who are already exercising this authority by striking down social legislation from the states.
Before the 2024 election, Democrats bragged of having the best legal elections teams in America; now they’ll use those teams to attack the Administration in the courts. There are multiple players ready to push anti-Trump cases on these courts; among them are Democratic states attorneys general and nonprofits like Democracy Forward, the ACLU, and Democracy Alliance. Because Democrats lack national power, they will portray themselves as foes of Washington overreach. But at the end of the day they’ll be doing what Democrats have done since the 1950s: Turning to the federal courts to invalidate state and national actions that reflect public opinion.
Some of their cases may challenge Trump’s coming orders on deportation and ensuring freedom of information across big tech platforms. Others will challenge executive orders across a range of issues and agencies. Still others might mount creative ways to prosecute the Trump Administration for “corruption.”
This latter idea is being quietly pushed by Democratic “ideas” handlers like the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman, as well as the New Yorker’s Antonia Hitchens, who covers Trump for the magazine. It amounts to the argument that Trump’s ties to big money players and his interest in listening to outside voices will make his administration a paradise of crony capitalists and self-serving grifters. This is a comforting story for establishment Democrats who support “expert” regulators and for progressives who are suspicious of capitalism—so it’s likely that journalists will push it until a legal angle emerges to justify their attention.
The Pentagon Signals Its Revolt
The other “expert” authority Democrats will call forward will come from the upper level echelons of national security. Already, CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, whom John Brennan used to leak the 2020 letter falsely warning that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian “disinformation,” is reporting on plans to resist Trump from inside the Pentagon. According to Bertrand, writing three days after the election, “Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers.”
“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” was their emphasis to Bertrand. They also floated the possibility of “resignations from senior military leaders”—never mind that the Constitution mandates that presidentially appointed Supreme Court justices, not “military leaders,” are the final word on what is and isn’t legal.
But the Constitution isn’t stopping Pentagon officials and the journalists they leak to from playing the legality card over national security concerns. Already, insinuations of legal impropriety related to foreign affairs are being pushed by The New York Times with regard to Tulsi Gabbard’s purported “ties” to Syria and Russia and Elon Musk’s participation in communications with representatives of Ukraine and Iran.
And Bertrand’s CNN article suggests that anti-Trump operators are looking to merge deportation politics with national security as well. Indeed, according to Bertrand, one special concern of Pentagon leaders is that “Trump has suggested he would be open to using active-duty forces for domestic law enforcement,” specifically deportation of illegal migrants. This suggests that, if Trump authorizes deportations, there may be talk by Pentagon officials of purported military resistance against a “fascist” state.
Resistance 2.0 and the “Wisdom” of Crowds
What of Democratic activism as we’ve known it since 2017, the extremely public kind that’s turned politics into spectacle? This wave began with the Women’s Marches of 2017, was followed by protests against Trump’s “Muslim ban” that same year; it continued through the Kavanaugh protests in 2018, Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Biden’s Climate change legislation in 2021 and the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in 2022. Throughout, the Democratic strategy has been the same: a bait-and-switch. Young nonprofit activists, often screaming and sometimes violent, half-supplicating and half-threatening, accost politicians in the name of the people. They’re then given cover by supportive establishment players in the Pentagon, the media, academia, and the Democratic Party.
It's perfectly possible to imagine this model applied to 2025 protests, for example against deportations. In this model for Resistance 2.0, Democrats and nonprofits will provide the “bodies” for the protest. Those players will include blue state mayors, governors, legal groups like Democracy Forward, and activist nonprofits like Soros-funded Democracy Alliance, as well as an academic community which energizes its students to join. Arrests will occur; human rights abuses will be cited by activists and their lawyers. Pentagon leakers will chime in about Trump assuming dangerous powers, adding “national security” heft to the protests. Federal judges will issue injunctions giving the protests legal weight. CNN, the New York Times, and other outlets will emphasize, as they already are emphasizing, the narrowness of Trump’s popular vote victory to argue that his mandate for deportation is limited.
This perfect storm may not occur: according to the New York Times, reporting eleven days after the election, Democrats are shying away from public protests in favor of legal maneuvers. And according to former Open Society Foundations director and current director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund Patrick Gaspard, writing in the influential journal Democracy, building nonprofit power at the state level is the Democrats’ best strategy going forward.
But the media establishment also seems to be seeding the ground for justifying protests. On November 18, the widely respected “moderate liberal” New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik wrote a lengthy piece, flush with expert citations, arguing that “violent seditionists instigated by a demagogue” are now in control of the country. He went on to write that, in response, “crowd” protests are justifiable, especially if they “turn a crowd into a community.” On November 30, Kati Marton, the widow of Democratic “wise man” Richard Holbrooke, wrote a Times op-ed comparing President Trump’s America to communist and fascist regimes and hearkening back to the inspiration of the crowd protests that toppled communism in 1989. It’s imaginable, considering this push, that journalists, academics, and eventually politicians will start labeling Democratic protests that might look like violent disruptions “community actions.”
Democrats’ Real Opinions—and How Far They’ll Push Them
Democrats and their allies are not just talking “resistance,” of course. They are also making policy arguments: using rising housing and rental costs, labor issues, and the short-term effects of tariffs on prices to put the Trump White House on the defensive. But mostly their talk isn’t policy. Indeed, the clearest indication of Democrats’ overall attitude comes from their most powerful political celebrity, Jon Stewart. In his monologue two weeks after the election, in the now familiar Democratic blend of high emotionalism and miniscule detail, Stewart portrayed Trump as a dictatorial bully who had hopelessly corrupted our system of government:
Republicans are playing chess and Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they glued their b-lls to their thigh . . . Government is theoretically a constitutional system of checks and balances . . . but what government actually is is an overly complicated bureaucratic maze of rules [and] loopholes to those rules . . . Democrats are going to have to forcefully play the loopholes . . . .
Stewart went on to urge Democrats to be the “loophole guys” and play any angle to stop Trump. In other words: given the fascist threat, everything is on the table. How far Democrats will heed the advice isn’t clear. Elizabeth Warren is all in on it, urging “mass mobilization” and no legislative compromise in Time Magazine. But Democrats could take a different course.
Still, what is clear is that the people who run the Democratic Party don’t truly respect the will of the voters. Journalists blame the election results on misinformation. Academics mobilize in the classroom to “educate” people away from their beliefs. Nonprofits and legal outfits combine to use federal courts to stop the policies of an elected president. The Pentagon uses the even less democratic vehicle of civil servants to undermine the President. And activists work to find a hot-button issue, most likely immigration, to paralyze politics—backed up by lawyers and intelligence officials and media players.
All of this shows that, though Democrats may speak the language of democracy, theirs is the opposite of democratic politics. It doesn’t turn on persuasion but on insinuation; not on associations but on institutions; not on representation but on agitation. The clearer Republicans can make this case—that Democrats are minority players hiding behind institutions Trump wants to constrain—the more they can stave off the coordinated attacks that will come their way.