Democrats don't have the direct power or votes to do a lot to stop President Donald Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress from enacting large parts of their agenda, as the nomination battles have shown — but they don't really need to block Trump to defeat him, veteran Democratic strategist James Carville argued in an op-ed for The New York Times.
There may well be cases in which Democrats will gain actual leverage in Congress, as other experts have noted — chiefly an upcoming shutdown fight in which the GOP is unlikely to have the votes to keep the government open on its own.
But for other issues, like Trump's attempts to dismantle the civil service by executive fiat, they have a more subtle and simple tool at their disposal to play the long game, wrote Carville.
The simple reality, he wrote, is that, "The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing. Even Tucker Carlson agrees with this. For all the huffing and puffing on the campaign trail in 2016, the first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral. George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy."
Trump is already falling into the same pattern, Carville argued, abandoning his campaign promises to increase public safety and simply firing droves of key federal workers as a power play, all while assembling "the most incompetent cabinet in modern history."
How do Democrats fight this? Well, Carville said, they don't.
"With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead," he wrote. "Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight, and make the American people miss us.
"Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat."
This stands in contrast to Dems' approach in Trump's first term in which, Carville argued, "we spun ourselves up into a tizzy" over every issue and were too unfocused for voters to pay attention.
Democrats have arguably engaged in this kind of strategy already, and while it has drawn criticism from some observers, it already appears to be paying dividends, with GOP lawmakers facing a grassroots surge of anger at their town halls.
"It won’t take long: public support for this administration will fall through the floorboard," wrote Carville. "It’s already happening: Just over a month in, the president’s approval has already sunk underwater in two new polls. The people did not vote for the Department of Education to be obliterated — they voted for lower prices for eggs and milk. Democrats, let the Republicans’ own undertow drag them away."
Carville concluded by arguing Democrats should fight like boxing champion Muhammad Ali, the master of the "strategic retreat." "Facing George Foreman who was rolling off 37 knockouts and 40 wins, Ali deployed the famous 'rope-a-dope' strategy, retreating to the ropes of the ring, evading punches right and left, absorbing small jabs, until Foreman’s battery was depleted — and in the eighth round deployed a decisive knockout blow. It’s Round 1. Let’s rope-a-dope, Dems."
