There are no magic wands with this
Now that Donald Trump has been declared the winner of the 2024 election, we’re seeing a whole lot of drastic ideas being floated on social media about how to stop him. Many of these ideas are going viral. A lot of folks are even getting upset with people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party for not acting on these ideas. But the cold hard reality is that none of these viral ideas are realistic. Why? It goes back to something I’ve been saying for nearly a decade: there are no magic wands.
If you’ve been around since the 2016 debacle, you saw what happened when we tried the recounts (it didn’t change anything). So there would have been no point in Kamala Harris refusing to concede in 2024 and trying to fight the results. It would have gone nowhere. Running ballots through a machine again is not going to change the results by millions of votes.
We’re also seeing numerous social media posts going viral calling for President Biden to use his “presidential immunity” to just do whatever he wants in his final two months in office. That’s a nice idea, but it’s not based in reality. It’s a mistaken interpretation of what the Supreme Court ruled. The Supreme Court did not rule that Presidents can just do whatever they want. Instead it merely ruled that Presidents can’t be criminally charged for official acts in office. If Biden were to sign an executive order declaring himself King tomorrow, Biden couldn’t get in legal trouble for doing so, but the Supreme Court would obviously just overturn Biden’s order. So let’s not waste time getting frustrated at Biden for refusing to wave this “immunity” magic wand that the internet mistakenly thinks exists.
Nor is there any point in Democratic Party leaders going out and setting themselves on fire in public for attention. The internet really, really, really seems to think that “sounding the alarm” in dramatic fashion is some kind of magic wand that’ll somehow stop Trump in his tracks. But in reality, it would be mere performance art. The job of Democratic Party leaders is to try to figure out how to defeat Trump’s worst initiatives, not to go out and scream about Trump like maniacs.
As I said, some of us have been through this before with Donald Trump. It’s going to be even trickier this time. But if you really want to fight back against Trump and the Republicans effectively, step one is to accept that there are never any magic wands on either side, and that magic wand ideas are good for nothing more than getting a lot of retweets.
Now is a time to learn how politics works. How it really works. There are a lot of complex reasons why a President with a low approval rating has a hard time making any of his agenda happen. But the simple takeaway is that the biggest key to stopping Trump is to immediately drive his approval rating as low as possible. That doesn’t mean going out and yelling “Oh no he’s a dictator, he’s going to get away with whatever he wants.” It means actively mocking him for being weak, stupid, clueless, incompetent, and senile, so that the same dummies in the middle who elected him immediately become so embarrassed about it that they start telling pollsters they no longer approve of him. That’s how you neuter him.
It’s also a good time to try to grasp why some legislation passes and some doesn’t. It’s never a matter of simply having a majority. Why did Obamacare survive Trump’s wrath last time? Because we managed to make the “repeal and replace” nonsense so unpopular with the public, three Republican Senators in swing states decided to cover their own backsides by voting to save it. That’s how politics works.
We don’t know what we’re going to be looking at. We still don’t even know who’s going to have the House majority. But we do know that Donald Trump’s senility is very quickly going to become a problem for him in terms of appearing in public and trying to hang onto any semblance of an approval rating. And we also know that because Trump will pick far more extremist and controversial people for his cabinet and such this time, we’ll immediately be able to use those people against him and drive his approval rating even lower.
While we’re waiting for the next battle with Trump to shape up, the first thing we have to do is let go of any notion that there’s any simplistic magic wand idea that can just fix everything. This kind of thing is always a matter of grinding it out, incremental wins and losses, and taking the battle one day at a time. Magic wand ideas are fantasies for people who don’t want to have to put in the work required to fight political battles. If you want to save this country, roll up your sleeves and let’s put in the work. I’ll be right there with you.
