Don’t make Trump even more powerful than he is
If there’s one narrow silver lining to the nightmare of Donald Trump in power again, it’s that we’ve fought this battle before. We know all the ways he’s going to screw up, and because he’s a narcissist who never learns from his mistakes, we’ll get to use that experience against him. We also have the opportunity to look at some of the mistakes we made trying to fight against him last time, not in order to assign blame, but so we can avoid making those same mistakes again.
One of the big mistakes we made last time was that we unwittingly assigned Trump even more power than he already had. When you’re constantly “sounding the alarm” about how “dangerously powerful” your adversary supposedly is, all you’re telling the people in the middle is that your adversary is going to get his way no mater what. Even if the people in the middle believe you, it’s just going to cause them to think of Trump getting his way as inevitable. And if they don’t believe you, they’ll write you off as chicken little. Either way, you’ll make no headway with the people in the middle, which means you can’t assemble enough of a popular coalition to fight back against what Trump is trying to do.
Trump is already going to be powerful enough as it is. We cannot afford to make him even more powerful than he is by portraying him as being even more powerful than he is. If anything we need to portray him as a joke. A senile, confused, inept joke who can’t even speak. It’s what the other side did to Joe Biden, and even though it wasn’t true, it worked. That’s what we need to be doing to Trump. Make him a punchline, and he’ll hold so little political clout with the public, he won’t be able to govern in the way that he or his puppet masters want him to.
Back when everyone started “sounding the alarm” about Project 2025, I wrote that it wasn’t going to get us anywhere. To the persuadable voters in the middle it just sounded like we were crying chicken little. It didn’t matter that what we were saying was true, it wasn’t going to get us any votes. Sure enough, our side spent the entire rest of the election “sounding the alarm” about Project 2025, and it didn’t get us any damn votes. This kind of messaging simply doesn’t work. It should, but it never does.
So yes, we’ll attack Trump for every extremist thing he tries to do, while he’s trying to do each extremist thing. But the dummies in the middle aren’t going to believe us until Trump actually tries to do these things. That’s when we’ll sound the alarm about each Trump initiative. In the meantime our overall messaging needs to focus on making Trump weaker, by portraying him as weak. For instance, where is he right now? The guy just won the presidency, but he’s nowhere to be found. We should be shouting about this, so the people in the middle will already start to wonder about what might be wrong with this guy. Then once Trump does finally surface and starts talking about sharks and cannibals in his speeches, we point out to the people in the middle that there’s a reason why he took so long to surface, and that it’s because he has far worse dementia than they ever mistakenly thought Biden did.
We also need to stop doing Trump’s marketing for him. After he won last time, a bunch of folks on our side made the bizarre decision to not use his name and instead refer to him as “45.” At the time I argued strongly against this, because all it was doing was giving Trump branding. Sure enough, his supporters started calling him “45” after we popularized it, and it became a marketing opportunity for him. Our side also came up with “MAGA” as if it were some kind of clever put-down of the idiots wearing the hats, and sure enough. But all it did was give them a nice easy acronym for their movement.
We need to stop doing this. We can not afford to make Donald Trump even more powerful by constantly portraying him as being dangerously powerful. We can not afford to do Trump’s marketing for him. We’re not his publicists. We do not need to be coming up with clever names for him and his base so that they can simply hijack those names. We need to be calling them things like Nazis, fascists, monsters, assholes, whatever you like – not sanitized nicknames like “45” and “MAGA.”
So let’s try to get better at this, and smarter, this time around. That goes for you and me alike. For better or worse, I have a lot of experience doing battle with Donald Trump. If nothing else I can tell you what didn’t work last time, and what we shouldn’t waste our time trying this time. Unlike Trump, who never could learn from his mistakes and is now too senile to remember them anyway, we can learn from our past mistakes and get better at fighting him.
