This is an adapted excerpt from the March 6 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Every single day we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on our democratic order by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. They are backed up by a Republican majority in pursuit of an agenda that is not only likely unconstitutional but anti-constitutional.
Congressional Republicans spent most of Wednesday in meetings with Musk, practically begging the unelected billionaire to return some of their constitutionally mandated power of the purse. Meanwhile, Trump, acting like a mad king, is off starting trade wars and threatening to divert any money made from tariffs into what he is calling a “sovereign wealth fund.” Funds that critics worry could be paid out to his buddies in big business.
Democrats are working backward trying to fight the last war instead of pivoting to the political reality of the here and now.
This isn’t even a fraction of the possible corruption we are seeing on display every day. So it’s no surprise that people look around and ask: “Where are the Democrats? What are they doing as the opposition party?” The answer is: not much.
Part of the problem is that Democrats don’t have much power. They are shut out of both chambers of Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court. But it is also true that many elected Democrats are not exactly seizing the moment. A lot of them seem to have learned a very weird set of lessons from the defeat in 2024. They are working backward trying to fight the last war instead of pivoting to the political reality of the here and now.
We are dealing with Trump’s assault on the Constitution, so it is ridiculous to think that this strategy of playing it safe is the solution to that assault. Not every act of defiance against Trump’s anti-constitutional power grab needs to take into account what a swing voter in Wisconsin is going to think on Election Day in 2026 or 2028. Leave that to the political consultants and the front-line House members a year from now.
A lot of this renewed frustration stems from the Democrats’ response to Trump’s joint address on Tuesday. About four minutes into the speech, Rep. Al Green of Texas stood up from his seat to protest potential Medicaid cuts. Green was ultimately forcibly removed from the chamber by the House sergeant-at-arms.
He was the only Democrat who put up that kind of fight, and in response, one anonymous Democrat, whom Axios described as a centrist, told the outlet: “What [Green] did was inappropriate — and he became the story, not the price of eggs.”
That is just completely misreading the moment. This fight, right now, is not about the price of eggs. Maybe what Green did was the right thing; maybe it was the wrong thing. Either way, he is facing the consequences of his actions like an adult.
On Thursday, he was censured by his colleagues, including a handful of Democrats, for his protest. Green stood in the well of the House chamber to have the resolution read to him surrounded by dozens of his Democratic colleagues, who sang “We Shall Overcome” in solidarity.
But at least Green tried something. Now is the time for trying things. Everyone has an obligation as a citizen to defend the country’s democracy, this shared project that we all undertake together by any peaceful democratic means necessary.
Trump and the MAGA movement are organized. Their intentions are very clear. The world’s richest man appears to have control of the purse strings of the federal government. Trump is referring to himself as America’s “king.” Six weeks in, he is already going after his political enemies. They have a clear vision of a presidential dictatorship, and it’s everyone’s job to resist.
What we are seeing now is an attempt to rewrite the history of the first Trump administration that the so-called resistance from back then was a failure. It wasn’t. There were a million people marching in the streets the day after Trump was inaugurated the first time. Democrats were able to organize and beat back a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The resistance helped flip the House to the Democrats in 2018. And it fed into the largest popular uprising we have seen in a generation in 2020, during an election year. Democrats also flipped the Senate and unseated an incumbent Republican president for the first time in nearly 30 years. All of that has been rewritten as a failure, which in turn, has convinced folks that they just need to keep their heads down and hope they can run on egg prices in two years. Not only is that strategy morally wrong, in my view, but it is strategically wrong. Resistance was the right course of action in 2017, and it’s the right course of action now. Folks at the grassroots level understand that. We saw it when people staged their own protests outside Tesla dealerships. Or when so many folks show up to yell at their Republican representatives, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee had to tell them to stop holding town halls. Or when a tiny government agency, the U.S. African Development Foundation, refused to let employees of Musk’s so-called efficiency project enter their office space. Or when, as Alex Wagner has reported, regular folks show up to meetings with state attorneys general to strategize on how they can best push back against Musk’s dismantling of the government. Resistance was the right course of action in 2017, and it’s the right course of action now. “I think the attorneys general believe that a big part of stopping this insanity is enlisting the American people,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told Wagner. “This is going to be a people-powered movement, along with the AGs filing these lawsuits.” “So obviously, we will continue to file these lawsuits, continue to protect America from this out-of-control billionaire and president. But ultimately, we also have to make sure that these stories — that are American stories, and stories of people who are being devastated by these cuts — are told, so that everybody knows what’s happening.” Resistance requires people to activate, coordinate and organize — to work together. The struggle to preserve American democracy is on all of us. It would be great if Democrats got on board, but they won’t be the ones leading the charge. The American people will.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
Latest Post
Recommended
