America is Certainly Divided Does This Mean America Will Fall?
For Now, the Threats are the Point, Whether the MAGA GOP has the Power, Talent or Time to Achieve Their Ambitions is Uncertain
How bad was the 2024 election loss for the Democrats? How bad will things get in a second Trump term? Why did the Democrats lose? What should the Democrats change? What should we all (citizens, progressives, moderates, immigrants, etc.) do to survive the challenges and preserve the values we hold dear? These are the questions we will be trying to answer in a series of posts applying the lessons of our book Divided We Fall, Why Consensus Matters by Alice Rivlin, Sheri Rivlin, and Allan Rivlin (Brookings 2022) to the present predicaments.
We can’t answer all of these questions at once so we will start with the question in the headline: Has America lost its democracy?
The answer, somewhat terrifyingly, is: Not yet.
President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats across the nation campaigned in 2024 largely on a warning that re-electing Donald Trump would threaten American democracy. The warning was based on a mountain of evidence collected by authors, journalists, and investigative journalists, as well as testimony taken by special counsels Robert Meuller and Jack Smith, and the January 6th select committee. The Harris campaign also quoted extensively from Project 2025, a broad set of plans for a second Trump administration to take control of the executive branch of the federal government prepared by former Trump administration officials, and scholars at the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks. The warnings also included quotes from Republicans, former Trump staffers, and the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high ranking military leaders that they observed the former president trying to govern as an autocrat with fascistic tendencies.
A narrow majority of American voters elected Donald Trump as President despite these warnings raising the question, has America lost its democracy? The answer is that we know Trump and the MAGA movement would like to take power quickly and hold onto it permanently and they are working to do so at full speed. But Trump is likely to be frustrated in his ambition to become an autocratic leader for the same reasons he failed during his first term. Trump’s MAGA GOP may not have the political power, legislative talent, or enough time to achieve their goals. The resistance is already taking many forms, and there are ways all of us can help defend our democracy and ensure that there are fair elections in 2025 and 2026 when voters can choose a new congress, and 2028 when voters can choose a new president.
A fire hose of threats
For now, the threats are the point. Since winning the election in November, the Trump strategy has been to rearm his fire hose of lies as a fire hose of lies and threats. Many of the cabinet and subcabinet nominations are explicit threats to seize control of law enforcement and the military (the people with the guns) and use them to exonerate Trump’s allies and punish people on his enemies list. Trump is threatening investigations, lawsuits, and mass deportations. He is threatening the planet with “drill-baby-drill” policies to remove restrictions on the oil and gas industries. Trump is threatening the national economy with legislation that will balloon the deficit, and lead to dramatically higher inflation and interest rates. Trump is threatening the global economy with massive tariffs, and Trump is threatening Mexico, Canada, Panama, Greenland, and Denmark with gunboat diplomacy and dreams of territorial expansion.
The fire hose of threats is serving many purposes for Trump. It keeps him in the news as his supporters share glee that he is “owning the libs” and his opponents in congress and the liberal media try to sort out which threats are the most dire. The stream of threats is working to unnerve Democratic voters who have been tuning out news since the election. The most visible threats also serve to distract attention from other less noticeable threats that may be more serious. The threats are also working to bring other power brokers (heads of state, top business executives, Republican lawmakers) into negotiations on Trump’s terms.
Donald Trump is a bully so for him making threats is the easy part; governing is harder, and there is considerable doubt about whether these threats will be realized. The entire goal of Project 2025 is to succeed where the first Trump administration failed. To use the words Trump and his advisors’ unitary executive theory, they seek to wrest full presidential control over the government from the “deep state” that frustrated their efforts in the first term. What we are seeing now is the assertion of power to gain power. Republican senators are threatened with enemies lists, attack ads, and primary threats to stay in line and back extreme loyalists nominated to sensitive cabinet posts in an expansion of Trump’s tactics of using big lies as congressional loyalty tests.
Then came the disaster of Trump’s and Elon Musk’s sabotage of productive bipartisan budget negotiations nearly leading to a government shutdown in December, and what many of us suspected became obvious to most observers. Trump’s MAGA GOP may not have the political power, legislative talent, or enough time to achieve his goals and follow through on all of the threats. Despite all of the big talk of major cuts in government spending Trump tried to raise the government’s borrowing limit and 47 House Republicans refused to go along (38 no votes plus 9 abstentions). This bold assertion of congressional Republican independence was revealing on many levels.
First of all, it just was not supposed to happen. After winning reelection by what Trump claimed was a landslide, and after running ads in Iowa to silence Senator Joni Ernst’s opposition to Pete Hegseth nomination to be Secretary of Defense, the revolt coming from the Freedom Caucus fiscal conservatives showed the limits of the GOP’s dictatorial ambitions. Trump may desire to be an autocrat, but that requires complete control of the political party, and complete control of legislative chambers. The rejection of Trump’s demand that the debt ceiling be raised or eliminated during President Biden’s term proved that, despite the election trifecta, Trump currently has neither.
The vote also revealed deep contradictions within GOP budget theory. In her final book, Alice Rivlin details all of the budget fights, budget standoffs, and budget deals going back to the Reagan Administration and the tensions within the GOP are always the same. In a future post we will go into the details of the similarities of the coming 2025 budget battles to earlier standoffs in the Reagan, Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations, but to quote Mary Poppins’s narrator Bert, we fear “what’s to happen has all happened before.”
Republicans will need near unanimity to pass any legislation without relying on Democratic votes, and there are big disagreements on basic questions of how many billions they will add to the national debt, whether Social Security and Medicare are on the chopping block, and we are likely to find many more fissures on budget details. As Republicans are meeting to plot legislative strategy and decide whether to attempt to pass the Trump agenda through multiple bills or “one big, beautiful bill,” there is a non-zero chance that Republicans will prove unable to pass any legislation at all without some Democratic votes, as has basically been the case for the past two years.
Time is on democracy’s side
Trump can do a lot of damage to democracy even if it proves difficult to pass legislation but he will face resistance in the courts for any actions that cross a legal line. Trump is famous for the words, “You’re fired” but there are laws that govern a president’s ability to replace non-partisan civil servants with political patrons. Congress has been writing laws to constrain presidents’ abilities to corrupt the executive branch ever since the Teapot Dome scandal rocked the Warren G. Harding Administration in the 1920s. The Project 2025 political takeover of the executive branch of government would violate civil service laws and agreements with government employee labor unions and is certain to end up in the courts.
There are many groups in Washington that raise money from members to employ lawyers to defend our legal rights and they have been preparing for this moment. Trump is planning to issue a large number of executive orders but if they threaten to violate Americans’ civil liberties, reproductive rights, environmental laws, or election laws they will be challenged by lawyers working for the ACLU, Reproductive Freedom for All, NRDC, Democracy Docket, CREW, and many other organizations. One of the best ways to defend democracy is to join one or several of these organizations to add to their member numbers and help support their work to defend democracy in court.
There have been a lot of court battles involving Donald Trump over the past few years, and those hoping to hold the former president accountable for his many misbehaviors have generally been frustrated with the results, but here we are talking about something that will be quite different. These will not be criminal charges against Trump personally, but instead will be civil court challenges to his executive orders, just as Biden was blocked by the courts on the issue of student loan forgiveness.
The biggest difference will be that time was on Trump’s side in 2024, but time will be on democracy’s side in 2025. Trump’s lawyers used every opportunity to delay proceedings and they were successful in bogging down the criminal cases through the election. Talented lawyers have the upper hand in the courts when seeking to slow things down and are in a weak position when seeking to speed things up. Now, it will be Trump’s lawyers trying to speed up the MAGA agenda before Trump starts losing power when polls, markets, and the economy deliver unwelcome news, and voters go to the polls in special elections and gubernatorial elections in Kentucky and Virginia in November 2025, and congressional elections in 2026. Trump’s lawyers will argue that the Supreme Court has given him a free pass to do anything he wants, but they will be making that argument in civil court, and if the decision goes the wrong way, arguing in the appeals court — all while the clock keeps ticking.
Democracy defending groups like the examples listed above also perform an important watchdog function, monitoring the MAGA activities and reporting the threats to their members and the public, and this is especially important as the traditional media is now itself facing an unprecedented threat. Trump in the White House may be a lessor threat to American democracy than the Mar-a-Lago meetings with oligarchs of on-line media and we are seeing the ominous results of a sustained effort to gain control of news and information. With Elon Musk buying Twitter (and now perhaps TikTok), Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post, and Mark Zuckerberg changing policy at Facebook and Instagram, the truth is becoming less available and MAGA disinformation is becoming more available. As George Orwell understood so well, autocrats seek complete control of information and this part of the MAGA plan seems to be moving as effectively as any of the many threats to democracy.
Again, there are ways each of us can help defend ourselves and democracy, by not tuning out, and by supporting truth-based journalism. Find trusted sources of information and hit that “subscribe” button. A free press is not free. Each of us must protect our own mental health from the Trump insanity so an occasional media cleanse is often necessary, and it is not necessary for all of us to be democracy heroes dialed up to eleven monitoring every threat, but democracy requires an informed citizenry so we must all work to stay involved and active in the battles ahead.