How can Americans best defend their democracy from their president?
In my last column, I recounted three lessons from other countries where popular movements have made headway challenging authoritarian rulers. Critics of President Trump have frankly been fairly ineffective — witness his election and the way his approval ratings have risen in some polls lately — but Trump does give us a great deal to work with. He is immensely vulnerable.
Drawing upon these lessons from my last column, here are what I see as the most promising lines of attack for his critics:
Trump is deeply corrupt. All presidents are accused of shady practices: Remember that President Barack Obama was said to have diminished the presidency by wearing a tan suit. But Trump is a felon who is using his office to enrich himself as no president has in history.
The Times reported that more than $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies in just a month, and some of his ventures look alarmingly like opportunities for influence-peddling. How else do we explain his announcement that the biggest investors in his new cryptocurrency memecoin, $TRUMP, would get dinner with him? Some guests flew in from overseas for the dinner, held Thursday, and acknowledged earlier that they hoped to influence Trump and his administration’s policy on financial regulation.
The Trump family started a different cryptocurrency outfit, World Liberty Financial, that received a $2 billion investment from the United Arab Emirates. Don Jr. is also starting a members club in Washington, with a $500,000 charge to join. And Saudi Arabia and Qatar are investing in Trump businesses, putting money in family bank accounts.
Meanwhile, Trump is using the government to help his pal Elon Musk (who even knew that the world’s richest man was needy?). The White House South Lawn was turned into a temporary showroom for Tesla vehicles in March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged people to “buy Tesla” stock, and American embassies reportedly have pushed impoverished countries to grant regulatory approvals for Musk’s Starlink system.
Trump is hurting you in the pocketbook. One reason Trump won the presidency was voter resentment at inflation and economic weakness under Joe Biden. Now it’s Trump who is badly damaging the economy and hitting voters in the wallet.
Trump’s tariffs amount to the largest tax increase for Americans since 1993, with one study suggesting that a typical household may pay an extra $1,400 per year. Trump may already have sent the economy spinning into a recession, and plans for huge increases in American debt are pushing interest rates upward — which for many Americans means putting off any hope of buying a home.
In addition, the Republican House approved a plan that would slash Medicaid, with the Congressional Budget Office estimating that more than seven million Americans would become uninsured — this in a country where life expectancy in Mississippi already appears shorter than in Bangladesh.
The Trump administration is also cutting the number of employees at the Social Security Administration by at least 7,000, even as staffing is already at a 50-year low. The upshot is reports of disruptions and extra-long waits for assistance. As they wait on hold for hours, callers should be encouraged to think about how Trump and Musk have made their lives more difficult.
Trump looks down on you and thinks he can manipulate you. Several studies have found that warning teenagers that smoking may kill them is often not effective. What does work is showing them how tobacco companies are trying to deceive and manipulate them. That outrages them — and in the same way, MAGA voters may shrug at Trump’s defiance of the courts but be offended by evidence that he thinks they are dummies.
“Look at those losers,” Trump once said of the people spending money at his Trump Plaza casino, according to Maggie Haberman’s biography of Trump, “Confidence Man.” Haberman also quoted Trump telling White House aides that his supporters were “[expletive] crazy.”
Moving beyond particular lines of attack, one lesson from other countries is the importance of finding a compelling individual story to make a point. Democrats too often cite large numbers — the 70 million Americans dependent on Medicaid — rather than leaning on storytelling about individual tragedies.
Trump excels at storytelling, and Democrats could learn from his talent. He has a knack for devising withering nicknames for rivals, he can be funny, and he conjures heartbreaking stories (sometimes out of thin air) of brutal crimes committed by immigrants. Democrats need their own anecdotes, and they need to remember that even when the stakes are deadly serious, humor is sometimes the most effective tool.
The best stories probably won’t be about immigrants — Democrats have so little credibility on border issues that priming voters to consider immigration may benefit Trump. But American citizens have been seized off the street and locked up on suspicion that they are undocumented migrants, and hemorrhaging moms like Porsha Ngumezi, 35, appear to have died because of rigid abortion bans. Voters should know their names and see their photos.
Let’s acknowledge one more point: We critics of Trump have made innumerable mistakes.
In his first term, Trump pushed us to the left in areas like immigration and law enforcement. Liberals took steps that they thought of as inclusive — such as endlessly embracing pronouns, land acknowledgments and terms like “pregnant people” — that bewildered many other voters or left them feeling excluded.
Worse, there is a tendency in liberal circles to denounce anyone sympathetic to Trump as a racist, bigot or fascist. It’s always distasteful when educated elites employ invidious stereotypes to dismiss millions of working-class people — plus it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re castigating.
The last task for Democrats is to fix our own blue communities; the blight in West Coast cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland helps Trump hold the Senate by winning votes for Republican candidates in purple states. And how can Democrats ask voters to trust them when the blue state of California accounts for nearly half of the entire nation’s unsheltered homelessness, or when one study finds blue Oregon ranking around the bottom of the country in education after adjusting for demographics?
However appalling Trump’s own behavior may be, his critics have to show that they can not only mock him — but can also govern. If we are to hold Trump accountable, we must also hold ourselves accountable.
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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