Democrats Draw Up an Entirely New Anti-Trump Battle Plan
The party’s early preparations to oppose the next Trump administration are heavily focused on legal fights and consolidating state power, rather than marching in the streets.
Locked out of power next year, Democrats are hatching plans to oppose President-elect Donald J. Trump that look nothing like the liberal “resistance” of 2017.
Gone are the pink knit caps and homemade signs from the huge protest that convulsed blue America that year, as exhausted liberals seem more inclined to tune out Mr. Trump than fight.
Washington is far different, too. The Republicans who stymied some of Mr. Trump’s first-term agenda are now dead, retired or Democrats. And the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by the former president, has proved how far it will go in bending to his will.
As they face this tough political landscape, Democratic officials, activists and ambitious politicians are seeking to build their second wave of opposition to Mr. Trump from the places that they still control: deep-blue states.
Democrats envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws — and to push forward their vision of governance by passing state laws enshrining abortion rights, funding paid leave and putting in place a laundry list of other party priorities.
Some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Mr. Trump won, according to multiple Democrats involved in different efforts. The preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election.
“States in our system have a lot of power — we’re entrusted with protecting people, and we’re going to do it,” said Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, who said his office had been preparing for Mr. Trump’s potential return to power for more than a year. “They can expect that we’re going to show up every single time when they try to run over the American people.”
By Reid J. Epstein and Lisa Lerer
Read Full Article on NYTimes.com
Stopping TRUMP’s MAGA Agenda: The Enemy Exposed
Full Transcript:
Natalie Winters: While the New Yorker may say that I’m a sunny blond, but let’s be clear, I’m dark MAGA to my core.
But it’s important to, I think, drill down on this resistance. It’s sort of a nebulous term, but make no mistake, their plans for action are very concrete and it really should be viewed, I would argue, is just a continuation of the lawfare legacy that we’ve seen over these past four years, really a testament to the evolution of not just the asymmetric but really advanced forms of information and psychological and legal warfare that the Democrats have really been waging on the American people. Right.
The enemy has evolved. And I think you see their sort of battle plans quite clearly. And Rachel Maddow show last night, right.
She bifurcated her show into two distinct segments, really creating what I think is sort of the three part stool of the resistance.
The first leg being what you’ve been hammering, what we’ve been saying for a while now, being the judges.
The second is basically the idea of these NGO type activist groups, right. Those are the ACLU‘s.
And then the third being the states rights, Democrat Governors Alliance.
And there’s been a lot of reporting over the last few days. So I want to sort of start with the NGO activist wing of the Democratic Party.
There is a brilliant piece in The New York Times running through sort of the New Resistance 2.0, their strategies, and you were just talking about the financing of so much of this.
Well, one of the groups that has emerged is sort of the financial railhead. The nexus point for all this is something called Democracy Alliance, which people are very familiar with. It’s funded by basically all the prominent left wing billionaire types, of course, George Soros, Tom Steyer, but they currently are having their DC based meeting to sort of plot essentially the financing of this next resistance movement.
And I was able to get some of the information about what their panels are, what they’re discussing, and I’ll read it for the audience, because I think it’s important to understand the contours of what we’re up against. Some of the panels include making meaning and meeting the moment resistance and reorient. It’s time to resist the fight against project 2025, and per the New York Times, they had, quote, more focused discussions about abortion rights, immigration, racial justice, taxes, countering disinformation and other issues, according to a draft agenda.
Buried lead, one of the presenters at this conference, is none other than Alex Soros. But to really, I think, speak to how calculated and advanced this war for operation is going to be. They’re also talking about creating new, basically liberal dark money organizations. In this case, the one that the New York Times highlighted. They were pitching donors where the opening bid, the minimum investment, was $1 million.
They were looking for an annual budget of around 10 to 15 million for just this one group, to what they say, target the hidden sources of disinformation and expose them for what they are, shopping around dossiers on Elon Musk and the Murdoch family. And of course, Rick Wilson of Lincoln Project fame is back being a senior advisor. They’re kind of shopping around all these opposition research firms.
Now, the corollary to that, you have a group called Democracy Forward, which is sort of the legal side of this NGO apparatus. They’ve already built, amassed a multimillion dollar war chest. They have over 800 lawyers basically waiting just to hit print on a bunch of lawsuits that they’re going to file against the Trump administration come day one. I think another buried lead in this New York Times piece is that they admit that they were always sort of cagey about Kamala Harris winning, and that the preparations and planning began all the way back in 2023.
Also, I think something that’s worth noting, the DNC, is already working on sort of what they call a war room operation to pull up dirt and smear, of course, any Trump nominees, Trump appointees. And in the case of RFK Jr, a group called Protect Our Care, basically, just big pharma puppets, have set up what they call a stop RFK War Room to really oppose his nomination.
So, I think it’s just important to sort of conceptualize and internalize, right, the rape allegations, the sexual assault allegations against Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth, and I’m sure whoever is going to step up, right, they’re going to get smeared, as you know, the next worst thing in America. These aren’t actual credible allegations, right. It’s Kavanaugh 2.0. It’s really just more examples of lawfare.
And I think the most dangerous form of lawfare that we’re seeing right now, where when you use the term enemy within, which I hope becomes the enemy exposed, I’m, of course, looking at the ACLU, they’re actively suing preemptively suing, right now, the Trump administration to try to get ICE, particularly, particularly their air and airplane operations, to try to get the idea of how they’re going to be able to carry out these mass deportations.
And I think the legal activism, and the immigrants rights, you know, cry me a river aside, they’re actively suing to try to what give convicted criminals here in the United States advanced notice about how to avoid deportation. I mean, if you want to talk about treason and being a traitor to your country, I think the ACLU should receive a medal for that with the actions that they’re doing this year.
And just for the last point on all this, I was also able to get my hands on this group that I think this audience needs to become very familiar with. It’s called Indivisible, and it was really the railhead of the 2016 iteration of resistance. But their playbook, and I’ll just read one quote, we will play hardball wherever we’ve got Democrats and local, city, or state office pushing them to block, delay and challenge MAGA’s attacks.
It’s a long winded, you know, 20, 30 page document about all the ways, down to what they want their constituents and their supporters calling their congressmen and senators, to push for. So this is very well organized and well calculated.
