The best way to oppose Trump is repair, not resist

Clive Crook, Tribune News Service

President Donald Trump’s opening torrent of executive orders suggests that, second time around, he could pose a bigger threat to American order and prosperity than before. He seems newly energized and much better prepared — and his plans are much bolder. Given this prospect, the absence of political opposition at the start of Trump 2.0 is ominous. This is not a call for #Resist. That approach was dumb from the outset, and the election blew it up in resisters’ faces. Intelligent, effective opposition turns not on regarding every move Trump makes as evil and autocratic, meaning that he must be stopped by any means necessary, but on sorting out which of his goals are popular and make sense, and which need to be modified, deflected or blocked. You know, normal politics.

The chances of this happening aren’t good. Republicans in Congress are mostly signed up as followers of the Trump cult and Democrats are leaderless, seemingly stunned into silence. Well-functioning democracies aren’t dedicated to transformative visions of national greatness, social justice or any other all-encompassing project: Their purpose is to mediate disagreements over ends and means while moderating excesses of power and ambition. Trump’s first days are the archetype of excess: intervention after intervention that break norms and wield power as though no other branch of government matters. And at their worst — such as the vague, sweeping and subsequently rescinded directive to pause billions of dollars of authorized federal spending — they serve no coherent purpose.

Meantime a Congress paralyzed by mutual loathing, divided between feckless Republicans and clueless Democrats, looks on. The Constitution is a necessary safeguard but insufficient. It empowers Congress to make laws and keep executive power in check, but it can’t force Congress to act if lawmakers choose to stand aside. In many areas — most notably in trade policy, where Trump threatens to inflict a lasting injury on the global economy — the legislature abdicated years ago. What about the courts? They’re a way to block executive actions that are unconstitutional, but they’re an imperfect defense even against clear-cut violations.

Trump’s order on birthright citizenship, for example, has already been blocked by a judge who called it “blatantly unconstitutional” — but that doesn’t end the matter. Protracted litigation can impose months or years of delay and disruption, and further erosion of respect for the law. Disruption is one of Trump’s main purposes. Merely creating uncertainty over the future of birthright citizenship advances his agenda. In such cases, the process is the policy.

More broadly, using “lawfare” to contain an over-reaching president is a proven failure that causes collateral damage. Democratic politicians and prosecutors threw the book at Trump only to be roundly repudiated by voters. Democrats helped bury the norm of a politically neutral justice system, first by stretching constitutional and other legal norms as they deemed necessary in pursuit of their own purposes, then by tearing their hair over the existential threat to democracy posed by Trump’s eagerness to do the same. Thanks partly to Democrats’ hyperbole and hypocrisy, the country lost twice over: Voters affirmed their loss of trust in the law and re-elected a patently ill-suited candidate intent on further testing the limits.

Bear in mind that, in most cases, Trump is plausibly within his constitutional rights to exert himself as he evidently intends. He’s being criticized for trying to bend the executive branch to his will by staffing it with loyalists — but the idea that an independent executive is needed to restrain the president is constitutionally questionable, to put it mildly.

The president is chief executive. If he wants to shut the federal government’s DEI offices, shift personnel around at the Department of Justice, fire a bunch of departmental Inspectors General, draw power away from Congress (with its blessing) by declaring assorted national emergencies — on trade, the border, energy, whatever — he isn’t tearing up the Constitution. His most outrageous choice in an eventful first week was to pardon virtually all of the Jan. 6 protestors. True, many of them were overcharged and punished too severely, and this strategy of over-zealous prosecution further eroded the perceived neutrality of the justice system.

Nonetheless, in granting pardons, Trump’s failure to distinguish between violent and non-violent offenders is indefensible. (Even loyalists such as Vice President J.D. Vance and Pam Bondi, his nominee for attorney general, appeared to have been wrong-footed over this.) But again, the president has the power to pardon. Trump abused it on a larger scale than former President Joe Biden abused it, which is saying something, but presidents have wide latitude in stretching their powers under the Constitution. In short, don’t expect too much of the law. In a better world, elections would be the remedy for lawful overreach and/or brazen incompetence, but it’s two years until the mid-terms and four until Trump (one hopes) leaves the White House. That might not be long enough for befuddled Democrats to make sense of what just happened.

In the meantime, the buck stops with Congress. The best grounds for optimism — I’m straining here — is that both chambers are closely divided. As a result, quite small groups of bipartisan moderates could unite and exercise disproportionate influence. They’d have to put country over party and political ambition. Most think this is asking too much. But if they were willing, they could organize their efforts around good government, as opposed to defeating their political enemies. Their proximate goal would be better policy, not saving democracy. Better policy, in turn, would strengthen democracy.

On the Republican side, the necessary pushback is not entirely impossible. Republicans blocked the nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General — a bizarre choice even by Trumpian standards. And three Republican senators — Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitch McConnell — voted against the audaciously unqualified Pete Hegseth for defense secretary (obliging Vance to break the resulting tie). Disgraceful that it was only three. On the Democratic side, there’s a whiff of progress. For instance, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly has gathered a dozen Democrats in the upper house to propose a bipartisan initiative on immigration — “to improve border security, protect Dreamers and farmworkers, and fix our immigration system to better reflect the needs of our country and our modern economy.” Any such compromise would be popular, but Kelly will need some Republican allies. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman has ruffled Democrats’ feathers by meeting with Trump and saying their talk was “a positive experience.” He should be applauded.

On issue after issue — immigration, taxes, government spending, tariffs, DEI — Trump’s plans reflect genuine popular concerns but propose seriously misguided answers. His agenda cries out for a stiff dose of restraint and common sense. A relatively small number of like-minded bipartisan centrists could administer it. Republicans contemplating compromise fear Trump’s wrath. They should remember that he probably doesn’t care too much about the outcome, so long as he can call it a great deal and take the credit. Democrats, for their part, detest the idea of allowing him any such wins. But they tried the alternative of seeking his unconditional defeat, and boy did they screw it up. Put the country first. It’s time to forget #Resist and focus on #Repair.