Donald Trump was lustily booed at the U.S. Open in New York, and his excursion to one of D.C.’s despots’ club restaurants was interrupted by chanting protesters. But the opposition to the president extends well beyond the Acela corridor. As CNN’s Harry Enten noted this week, Trump’s approval rating is plummeting and he’s now “underwater on every issue”—including on crime and immigration, his supposed strengths. Across the board, Trump continues to have a “consent of the governed” problem, and it’s gotten so pronounced that former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is wondering whether “a despised autocrat can consolidate power.”
It’s a question that Krugman ultimately leaves unresolved. “I guess we’re going to find out,” he concludes. But there’s a hint of passivity here, as though the outcome is beyond our control—which could not be further from the truth. There’s a large and growing anti-Trump movement across the United States that is just waiting for powerful allies to join them, and it just so happens that there’s a minority party in Washington that is desperate for ways to exert its power that don’t require controlling the levers of government. It’s a no-brainer for the Democrats, who can keep the public animus toward the president well stoked by turning Trump’s elite enablers and supplicants—not just in the capital but across society, from Silicon Valley to academia—into objects of opprobrium.
We’ve been over this before, but the most important thing to remember about Trumpism is that it doesn’t work as a matter of policy. He doesn’t know how to run the economy anywhere other than into the ground, and with each passing day come fresh harbingers of shocks to those mythical kitchen tables. (According to recent reports, agricultural economists believe prices for a slew of grocery staples could be set to double this winter.)
As Krugman notes, Trump is running the inverse play from the Dictators’ Guide to Consolidating Power: Instead of using his power to shore up a weak economy, Trump is taking a roaring economy and wrecking it. And it hasn’t gone unnoticed: TNR’s Greg Sargent reported on a recent poll that found that “48 percent of overall likely 2026 voters say Trump’s tariffs are hurting their own economic situation, versus only 29 percent who say they’re not having any effect and an abysmal 8 percent who say the tariffs are helping their economic prospects.”
Still, as Krugman writes, Trump is governing like he has “an overwhelming mandate to do whatever he wants,” which raises the question: How is he getting away with it? Part of the answer is that denial has become his administration’s stock-in-trade—like the hilarious claim that the president’s signature does not appear in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday sex-crime book. But another part of the answer, Krugman continues, “is anticipatory compliance on the part of members of the elite, from corporate CEOs to university presidents to law partners.”
Let’s linger on this a moment: Krugman is correct to note that one of the key forces enabling Trumpism is this grotesque collection of oligarchic weirdos that everybody hates: Big Law goons, Ivy League ivory tower types, corporate predators, and the tech-bro billionaire set. While some of these supplicants are more willing than others, they’re also the only ones receiving—or hoping to receive—some tangible benefit from Trump. Whether it’s Trump’s Silicon Valley dinner party guests or the university president who tried to cut a deal, all of these elites are operating from the same premise: “Maybe if I’m nice enough to Trump, he’ll let me keep the money.”
But the salient point is this: In the not-so-recent past, it would be the GOP endeavoring to paint Democrats as the captive party of America’s economic and cultural nobility. Now Trump has embraced all of these political albatrosses as his boosters. And as fortunes decline for you and me, it’s these already uber-privileged members of society who are staying whole—or getting ahead. The only people for whom Trumpism works, in other words, are the same sort of people who rigged the system in their favor in the first place. The only thing that’s changed is that the new mob boss is demanding a bigger cut.
It may be that the same forces that are enabling Trumpism could enable the opposition to Trumpism, provided that Democrats lose their risk-averse ways and demonize the elites that are now at Trump’s beck and call. And while it’s true that some have bent the knee more readily than others, we must have the stomach to castigate Trump’s allies no matter how willingly they came to his side. For my part, it’s OK with me if Democratic messaging included the line, “While Trump’s Harvard cronies were cutting deals, the cost of your groceries has doubled.”
There are no allies for Democrats to be found in Trump’s teeming hive of enablers. Anyone who might serve the ends of democracy and the rule of law has, by now, explicitly announced themselves as having taken that side. As Jonathan V. Last notes, “Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump.” One day, we might need to have a conversation about whether some of these people or institutions should receive a path back to respectability after violating the social compact on behalf of a wannabe fascist strongman. But that’s not the pressing business of the day.
For now, brave Democrats can and should implicate and vilify those who have abetted Trumpian misrule and have, by extension, reaped the fruits of its poisonous economic tree. It may be that one of the keys to denying Trump long-term power is to foment the public’s ire at the company he keeps, paint the whole lot as crooks and brigands who are looting the proceeds of the public trust. The burgeoning anti-Trump movement in the streets will be cheered to hear from some political allies who are promising to name the villains of the Trump era and to crush them in whatever era comes next.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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