It's been a week since the election of Donald Trump and the shock is just now beginning to wear off. The ritual Democratic self-flagellation is calming down a bit as most people finally take a breath and recognize that while the result was a terrible disappointment it was anything but a landslide for Donald Trump, nor was it a crushing rebuke of the Democrats.
As Philip Bump of the Washington Post points out in this preliminary analysis:
Trump’s popular-vote victory will likely end up as the smallest since 2000. It is due, in part, to fewer people voting. Exit polls are imperfect, but they suggest where each party gained and lost votes since 2020. ... What we can say, though, is that this was not an electoral landslide, but a narrowly contested race in which Trump is likely to have benefited as much from who didn’t turn out to vote for his candidacy than who did turn out to vote for him.
Right now, the first order of business is to shake off the defeat and confront the challenge of Donald Trump's ghastly agenda. As we have seen in the last few days it's shaping up to be both more chaotic and more extreme than even in 2016.
Last time around, Trump at least had a transition team put together by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, even if he threw most of their plans out almost immediately. They held meetings in Trump Tower in New York to vet candidates and policies in a more or less formal atmosphere. Now they're meeting at Mar-a-Lago in free-wheeling gab sessions around the golf course and the dining-room tables. Apparently, Elon Musk is a fixture, "weighing in on staffing decisions, making clear his preference for certain roles,"
As you've no doubt heard by now, Trump has wasted no time in naming Cabinet members and other staff. Musk himself was named, along with former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (also in attendance in transition meetings) to head an outside advisory board they're calling the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Musk and Ramaswamy think that acronym is adorable, since it refers to a beloved internet meme as well as a cryptocurrency in which Musk is heavily invested. The techno boys are having a rousing good time. By the look of that lunch table above, Trump is spending most of his time playing golf and tweeting, as usual.
The other Cabinet officials chosen so far have been typical Trump toadies and henchmen: Former congressman John Ratcliffe, who was acting director of national intelligence under Trump, will lead the CIA; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem will take over DHS; and former Rep. Lee Zeldin will be EPA chief. Team Trump caused a stir on Tuesday by naming Fox News personality (and former Guantánamo Bay officer) Pete Hegseth as defense secretary. His main qualification for the job appears to be pushing Trump to pardon war criminals. There's no telling who this braintrust is going to choose for attorney general or secretary of state — some semi-respectable names have been floated but there are also Hegseth-level choices out there as well.
This likely explains why Trump is demanding that the new Senate majority leader, whoever that runs out to be — Mitch McConnell is retiring from GOP leadership, at long last — will ensure that his nominations are handled by recess appointments rather than the usual constitutionally required confirmation process. It's entirely possible that even with a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans couldn't get some of these unqualified extremists passed.
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One thing is clear: Trump's team plans to hit the ground running with the mass deportation agenda. Trump has already officially named his "border czar," an unofficial position he apparently plans on imbuing with immense power. That will be former ICE acting director Tom Homan, who is best known for fashioning Trump's family separation policy. He has been all over TV assuring America that he plans to deport every undocumented immigrant and will use whatever force it takes to do it, including the military.
At this point, it's hard to know whether Democrats in Washington can do much to push back on any of this. The Senate will be in Republican hands, so the confirmation of Trump's Cabinet officials and judges is pretty much a done deal. It's still just barely within the realm of possibility that Democrats can win control of the House, which would add a necessary check on budgeting and appropriations. But that's not likely, which means a GOP candy store.
As for the judicial branch, we don't know for sure what the Supreme Court would do with cases aimed at stopping Trump's appalling agenda from coming to fruition. But we do know that the court's right-wing majority believes that virtually nothing he does could possibly be criminal, so he's pretty much got a free hand. In America's federalist system, however, there is another institutional check on his power and that's the states. And in many of the larger states run by Democrats we are already seeing a strong pushback, which they have been planning for months in case Trump managed to do the previously unthinkable and win again.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California immediately called a special legislative session to shore up the state’s legal defenses to challenge Trump's plans around the environment, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights and immigration. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker held a news conference two days after the election and put the president-elect on notice, saying, “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me."
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James have pledged to “protect New Yorkers’ fundamental freedoms from any potential threats.” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, who made her name as state attorney general by filing lawsuits against the first Trump administration, said she would defend the freedoms of her people "in the face of any attempted federal overreach."
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Democratic states have passed laws protecting reproductive health care, have stockpiled abortion pills and pushed as many protections for threatened constituencies as they could onto the November ballots. These liberal state governors are reportedly talking among themselves about how to get promised federal funding for state projects into their treasuries before Trump takes over. He has, after all, explicitly threatened to withhold aid from any governor who tries to resist his plans.
He's not happy about this. He called out Newsom in a largely nonsensical Truth Social post:
For the moment, the pushback from state officials will largely come from lawsuits. But you have to wonder what "border czar" Homan, who claims he will have the military at his disposal, means when he says that governors of sanctuary states have to "get the hell out of the way," and that if they don't, "we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City." Is he planning on an armed standoff with state police?
Whether the "big blue" states have enough power to push back Trump's larger agenda is unknowable, but unlikely. Unless the courts are amenable, which is a crap shoot these days, Trump will get away with much of it if he can summon up the resources and wherewithal to actually get it done. But it's hard to imagine that even his loony crew will allow Homan to send the military into New York and Los Angeles to roust immigrants from their homes in defiance of state and local authorities. There is a decent chance that these governors can "Trump-proof" their states, at least when it comes to the major population centers. We'd better hope so.
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