In his first week in office, President Donald Trump made clear that he is going to try to fulfill his campaign promises, for better and mostly worse.
But this blitz of executive orders, tariff threats and rhetorical attacks will also provide his opponents with many opportunities to make him less popular.
To take one example, a spending freeze at the National Institutes of Health has essentially halted work at the National Cancer Institute, including travel and registrations for upcoming conferences, buying new equipment, submitting research to medical journals and hiring new scientists, according to a report in Splinter that cites unnamed sources and staff emails.
This amounts to Trump taking cancer’s side in the long-standing, bipartisan war on cancer.
If I were a Democratic congressional leader, I would shout this from the rooftops. I would book cable TV appearances, coordinate social media posts and meet with cancer victims and advocates for more research. If I had to, I would stand outside the National Cancer Institute with a protest sign.
There's no downside to this. Nobody likes cancer.
There's no downside to this. Nobody likes cancer. And polls show that a supermajority of Americans think taxpayer money should be spent on cancer research.
Over the past week, Trump has also threatened a trade war with Colombia that would have spiked the price of a cup of coffee, pardoned people convicted of a violent attack on the Capitol, fired government watchdogs who look for wasteful spending, floated the overhaul or elimination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and reopened Alaskan wilderness for oil and gas drilling, among other things. Then, on Monday night, he announced a broad and legally dubious spending freeze that could hurt everyone from Medicaid recipients to kids on school lunch programs.
None of this is popular, and all of it is relatively easy to explain to voters. Some of it, he didn't even campaign on.
One thing he did campaign on was the rising cost of groceries, saying he would bring down prices "immediately." After winning, he quickly backtracked, saying it's "very hard" to bring prices down. Since taking office, he's done almost nothing on the issue. Meantime, the price of eggs has skyrocketed, thanks in large part to the threat of bird flu hitting the industry hard. The crisis has worsened because the agency that would typically be organizing a government response has seen its actions put on hold by Trump for the foreseeable future.
Trump showed it's easy to campaign on the price of eggs. All Democrats have to do is use that same playbook on him.
All of these actions have been done in almost comically inept ways. In a historic attack on the rights of trans people to carry an accurate passport and travel safely internationally, Trump signed an executive order that inaccurately stated that gender begins at conception. Since zygotes are technically all female until later in development, Rep. Sarah McBride joked that Trump "just declared everyone a woman."
A president’s earliest days tend to set the political tone for the rest of their first term. During the first Trump term in 2016, sizable spontaneous protests at airports following his attempted Muslim ban gave congressional Democrats the courage to act like a genuine opposition party, tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of the liberal “resistance” movement. This time around, Trump and his cronies have had practice and years of building an effective message, and the liberal resistance this time around just isn’t materializing like it did eight years ago.
That means it’s up to Democrats to form a compelling counter message. If no one is around to explain what is going wrong with Trump’s policy agenda, then the public won’t have a chance to learn what’s happening. I know the natural state of an American Democrat is to carefully triangulate a poll-led, consultant-crafted message to try to play a given political position perfectly, but this time around they need a political sledgehammer against the Trump policy wall.
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