‘Cause sometimes it’s hard to let the future begin!

― Lorraine Hansberry

Many people believe the nation’s current turmoil is traceable to a single fact: that Trump and his 2025 Project strategists now control Washington. 

Although it’s easy to see why folks might think this, it’s not true. Rather, it’s an oversimplification that misreads what’s going on and muddies the waters for individuals and groups who want not merely to restore what we had pre-Trump, but to reconsider what we had and make it stronger. To those interested in upending the government’s current rush toward autocracy, more clarity is needed about all this. About the present crisis. Its etiology, its causes and symptoms.

This clarity must begin by acknowledging that the Democratic Party’s (DP’s) failure to implement a coherent plan of resistance to the current administration’s autocratic aims is integral to the present turmoil. Rather than being a solution to the problem, the DP’s lackluster performance since Trump’s return to office has made the mess in Washington even worse. While the party’s leadership has spent its time making long-winded speeches and skulking around in the shadows trying to figure out how to develop oppositional actions that don’t alienate too many people, MAGA’s charge toward autocracy has been relentless. You can’t claim, as the DP has, that you’re fighting for the soul of democracy, then proceed to tiptoe around, frightened of appearing too daring. 

It’s not merely anti-DP folks who deride the party’s ineptitude, but Democrats also. As a May 2025 AP-NORC (National Opinion Research Center) poll shows, over the last year the percent of Democrats who hold a positive view of the party’s future degraded from fifty-seven percent last July to only thirty-five percent now. 

Like many others in the nation, the DP ranks are angry. I belong to those ranks.

Meanwhile, as the DP leadership stumbles first in one direction, then another, Trump and his coterie are on a tear. They’ve gutted  government agencies like the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration and others that serve crucial population sectors. Additionally, DOGE ransackers have stolen the private data of tens of millions of citizens, and are prepared to access more. They’ve also destroyed programs that aid the disabled, immigrants, minorities. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, MAGA is obliterating our international alliances at lightning speed while destabilizing the nation’s economy because of Trump’s obsession with tariffs and giving the biggest tax breaks in history to the nation’s richest people.  

In response to this onslaught, DP spokespeople act as if they have all the time in the world to unseat him. This is pure self-delusion. The speed of MAGA’s assault on democracy, and on the demographic equities that should be organic to it, reveals its aim: it’s going for the whole enchilada, a totalitarian state, right now. Consequently, if at some point down the road DP leaders were to suddenly awaken and start resisting the MAGA agenda with greater bravado, they’ll be too late. They’ll immediately be carted away by the new police state, then flown to prison in El Salvador or taken by force to Walter Reed Hospital’s famous Ward 54 in the psychiatric unit and lobotomized into obedient followers who do what they’re told. 

So, how did the party get this way? What’s caused its sluggishness? When did it’s ideas become more talk than action? 

To find answers to these questions, we first must accept the fact that the DP’s failure to ignite a resistance to MAGA isn’t an accident. It’s self-imposed. Although many party leaders have spoken about revitalizing the party since Harris’ defeat, they haven’t possessed the will to do what’s most required for such a renewal: the painful work of taking a long hard look in the mirror. 

This failure of self-analysis traces back to Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Dems unwillingness to study the forces behind it objectively. This ineptitude didn’t start of the party’s current problems, but it was a major pivot toward them and laid the groundwork for a serious misreading of  the historical moment.  

I’ll explain. 

As Trump’s first campaign gained momentum, it became clear to many voters that Trump’s candidacy wasn’t ordinary. Instead of spouting the same old same old, he trashed and infuriated traditional Republicans as well as the DP. Giving the finger to political tradition and etiquette, he came on the scene like a wrecking-ball aimed at the whole of Washington. When he declared on the campaign trail that once elected he’d “drain the swamp,” his supporters understood that he planned to attack the entire political system, all its institutions, including both parties. A significant percent of those who voted for him—and not only white supremacists, trans-haters, etc.―saw this goal as a virtue. They felt that somewhere along the line the phrase “land of the free” had come to signify a nation built on their backs but from which they received ever-diminishing returns. In the end, Trump rode the 2016 electorate’s wave of disillusionment and anger to victory. Beaten, DP leaders walked way, shaking their heads in disbelief.

The proper question for the party to have asked at that moment was: Where did Trump’s  supporters’ rage come from? To answer this question, the DP should have analyzed MAGA’s ascent in terms of the historical developments that made such an atypical candidate as Trump seem alluring. But the DP didn’t pose that question. Instead, it focused on Trump’s contradictory personality. This resulted in flashy stories and speeches that satisfied diehard Democrats, but didn’t answer why his bull-in-a-chinashop appeal seemed made for that moment in US istory. 

In not asking such questions, the DP revealed its hesitancy to dig seriously into how its own shortcomings may have contributed to Washington’s dysfunction, including Trump’s win. This in turn exposed another hard truth about the party: its willingness, in order to look good in its own eyes, to discount historical trends that don’t neatly fit the party’s version of its past. 

One such trend was the US electorate’s decades-long loss of trust in government. For sixty-seven years, from 1958 (when records started being kept on this matter) to 2015 (a year before Trump’s first victory), people’s trust in Washington plummeted from seventy-five percent of the electorate believing in the government’s reliability to only eighteen percent. 

This evolution of pubic doubt toward the political system involved too many decades, too many presidencies and crises, to be blamed simply on one or the other of the two major political parties. Both parties were culprits. The two-party system was itself sick and perceived as such by many in the country. 

This message was right there for everyone to see in 2016. But the DP and sympathetic pundits ignored it. For them everything boiled down to a simplistic binary: the “good” DP vs. the “bad” Republicans. No nuances. No shades of gray. Democratic leader had chosen not to be a party of vision and innovation, but of the lesser of two evils. 

Consequently, here we are, nine years after the 2016 election and five months into Trump’s second presidency, and the DP leadership still hasn’t grasped the depth of the electorate’s loathing of how Washington operates. Instead, after Harris lost, they kept repeating (and still keep repeating) iterations of how bad Trump is and how only they can save the nation. But as they pursue this idea, nothing in their recent behavior suggests this is within their reach. 

Look at the DP’s behavior in the weeks and months following Harris’ loss to Trump. During this timeframe they indulged in what many news outlets referred to as the “blame game.” This so-called game consisted of various party members scapegoating specific demographic groups (e.g., Hispanics, black men, Arab Americans, etc) which they criticized for either not voting in sufficient numbers for Harris or for outright abandoning the DP and voting for a third party candidate or Trump.  

For the party to attack members of its own base for withholding their votes from Harris is an example of the DP leadership acting as if they possess the right to those votes, as opposed to earning them through policies and action.  

One example of such scapegoating will suffice for now: the DP’s frustration with Palestinian Americans and other Arab Americans up to and after the election. What angered the DP leadership and supporters was that many within this community, in spite of having voted Democratic in presidential elections since 9/11 and the resulting war on terror, cohered around the idea of not voting for Harris in order to express their indignation at the Biden-Harris administration’s complicity in the mass killing in Gaza―41,000 by the election (over 55,000 now). This complicity took the form of the White House’s refusal to use its power over Israel (the US is Israel’s strongest ally and biggest munitions supplier) to halt Israel’s decimation of Gaza’s population and infrastructure. Instead, the Biden-Harris team kept arming Israel no matter how high the deathtoll rose.  

Interpreting this anti-Harris vote as an unreasonable “abandonment” of the DP, a spectrum of party supporters, including pundits and regular DP voters, chose to deflect their rage over the lost election  onto Palestinian Americans and their allies. This occurred immediately after the election and also later. In early February, for instance, when Trump announced he wanted to remove the Palestinians from Gaza, then raze everything there and turn the location into a giant resort with luxury hotels and upscale entertainments, various DP pundits were inspired to use this idea as an opening for putting Palestinian Americans “in their place” for voting against Harris. 

One such commentator was MSNBC’s Symone Sanders Townsend who reacted to Trump’s Gaza idea by reminding Palestinian Americans and other Arab American voters that if they were foolish enough not to vote for Harris because the Biden-Harris administration enabled Israel’s mass killing of Gaza’s Palestinians, then what they got was what they deserved: more suffering, this time at Trump’s hands. 

I think now it’s very appropriate to reiterate that elections have consequences.

No analysis in this comment or discussion of policy. No attempt to dissect how Republicans and Democrats have placed Palestinian Americans in a lose-lose situation when it comes to voting. And most insulting of all, no empathy for the thousands of Palestinians in the US whose extended family members in Gaza are being murdered and maimed by Washington-supplied munitions. 

No wonder the soft-spoken writer Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian American now living in Oregon, described this attitude toward Palestinians and other immigrants from the Mideast to Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo with a somber realism.

One of the things I’ve seen over and over again . . . is the same person who previously was telling me I had to vote Democrat at all costs . . . that same person . . . now turns around and expresses almost a sense of glee at every act of cruelty now that it’s happening under a Republican administration . . . 

The first thing this tells me is you were never my ally.

For the DP to be scapegoating certain demographics like Palestinian Americans—rather than looking inward at their own policies (in this instance, arming the Gaza slaughter)—only weakens the party’s capacity to see the US body politic, and their role in it, clearly.   

One thing the DP leadership should grasp more clearly is that in the thirty-three years since 1992, the DP has held the presidency for twenty years  or 61 percent of the time. You can’t hold power for such a long period, then claim you’ve had nothing to do with the destruction of safety nets, public disillusionment with the political status quo, Big Money’s ever-increasing control of the government and country, and mounting divisions between population sectors. People simply don’t believe that kind of “innocence” crap anymore. Consequently, if the party leadership wants to participate in resisting MAGA, it must rethink its how it operates  

Of course, individual Democrats, as they have been right along, remain crucial to the Resistance—along with Independents, rebellious Republicans, third party adherents, nonvoters, etc. What we don’t need, however, is the DP leadership acting as if the Resistance “belongs” to them, that the Resistance exists not primarily to replace autocracy with improved government, but rather as an opportunity to groom people to vote for Democrats, simply because the DP’s “the lesser of two evils.” 

Well, “lesser” doesn’t cut it anymore. Not when it comes to organizing a Resistance against (1) Republican dictatorial strategies and policies and (2)  the DP leadership’s inertia and inability to think outside the box.

Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for the DP leadership to wake up for us to fight MAGA. We the people have already started the Resistance! Proof of this is visible across the nation: mobilizations against a failing economy and the wealth gap, demonstrators confronting ICE in LA, townhall protests against arrogant politicians, organized outcries against information control and book-banning, marches that feature folks locking arms across racial lines, Tesla pickets, organized confrontations against cuts to veteran benefits, Hands Off gatherings, etc. 

These actions, however, must be seen for what they are: only the beginning. To keep going and grow stronger, we must understand how we got into the current mess, then develop innovative solutions for disrupting and ultimately halting MAGA’s fight to enthrone Trump as a dictator in charge of a newly militarized government. 

The next installment of these notes will detail a few of the Resistance-related policy issues we must confront. It will also explore how the interdependency of issues must be the foundation of all we do. The ultimate aim is to subvert what’s goin on, then build something even better than what existed pre-Trump.  

Until them, remember— WE THE PEOPLE are the ones for whom our elected government exists. It doesn’t exist only for a small portion of us, not for any high income bracket among us, nor for any gender among us, nor for any racial or ethnic group among us, but only for ALL of us, for WE THE PEOPLE as a whole.

---