Eight years ago today, as Donald Trump declared that “American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” many Democrats were shell-shocked. It had been two and a half months since his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, and he had just been sworn into office by Chief Justice John Roberts, but “President Trump” was still hard to fathom. In fact, many Democrats simply refused to believe it: They considered Trump an illegitimate president who should be rejected outright.
It helped that they had a case: There were legitimate questions about Russia’s influence in the 2016 election—not to mention Russia’s influence over Trump himself—that would soon blossom into a multiyear scandal that eventually culminated in his becoming the second president ever to be impeached. But there were myriad other motivations behind the anti-Trump movement that quickly emerged in 2017, such as his rampant misogyny (roughly a half-million people joined the Women’s March in D.C. the day after his inauguration) and extreme immigration policies (protests against the Muslim ban erupted at airports across the country).
The so-called Resistance was right: Trump really was an authoritarian. (His presidency would end with a failed coup attempt, after all.) The Resistance was also remarkably successful. Trump’s first term was largely stymied by opponents both in public and within the government, and it persisted even after he left office. Reentering private life, Trump was charged with several crimes: fraud, the illegal retention of classified documents, and several charges related to his effort to overturn the 2020 election, among others. Some of it even stuck.
And yet, here we are again. But there’s no sign of a repeat movement against a Trump presidency, when it’s needed now more than ever.
It’s understandable that Trump’s second inauguration would be less shocking, if only because we have seen it once before. But it’s also more traumatic. Trump is both more experienced and more extreme than he was in 2017: He and his allies have learned from their failures the first time around and are pursuing a nakedly fascistic agenda. And the fact that he is once again taking the oath from Roberts proves the total failure of Democratic and Resistance efforts to banish Trump from public life. Now Democrats have to face a new reality: Not only is Trump here to stay, but they have to find a new way to defeat him—and, just as importantly, extinguish the growing movement he leads.
During what will now depressingly be seen as the first part of the Trump era, Trump’s opponents held fast to the belief that he could be ejected from public life—if only they could figure out how to do it. They tried a number of different strategies: Russiagate (which led to his first impeachment); elections (voters rejected Trump himself, and MAGA broadly, in 2018, 2020, and 2022); holding him accountable for January 6 (which led to his second impeachment); and a host of criminal charges, all of which highlighted his innumerable moral, character, and political flaws.
Democrats fixated on Trump’s vulgarity, disdain for democracy, and general aura of chaos in part because it was hard to focus on anything else, given his singular ability to dictate the news cycle. But they also did this because they were clearly disgusted by him, as were many other Americans. His election challenged the premise of Barack Obama’s presidency—that we were an imperfect nation that was nevertheless bent on moral progress—and was an affront to many of America’s more high-minded founding principles. Trump was an abomination, and Democrats treated him that way from the jump.
But the focus on Trump himself was also politically convenient. For the last eight years, Democrats have, again and again, run campaigns focused on the existential necessity of defeating and rejecting Trumpism. By rejecting Trump entirely and making every election a referendum on him, Democrats could also conveniently dodge political accountability. Thorny issues like immigration policy could be shunted aside or treated with mealymouthed bromides because there was a fox in the henhouse. That’s not to say that policy issues were ignored completely, but that Democrats consistently made it clear that they thought that Trump was the biggest political problem the country faced, and that nothing else was nearly as urgent.
By treating Trump as a singular political force, one who had cast a spell over tens of millions of Americans, the Democrats could position themselves as the wizards who would break that spell—without having to necessarily provide a political alternative to Trumpism. In retrospect, this was remarkably naïve. Egged along by those who Trump had exiled from the GOP—many of whom, like the members of the Lincoln Project, enriched themselves selling Democrats the fantasy that millions of disaffected Republicans would vote against Trump—there was a guiding belief that, if Trump were defeated, the Republican Party would somehow return to normal (never mind that its drift toward authoritarianism and obstruction began long before Trump descended the escalator in 2015). Above all else, it allowed Democrats to ignore that Trump was changing the reality of American politics.
As Trump returns to the White House, it’s clear that this approach has failed miserably. Trump won not only the Electoral College but the popular vote too—the first Republican to do so since a wartime President George W. Bush in 2004. He is stronger than he has been at any point in his political career. That may change as his administration is beset by factional infighting and voters are reminded of just how insane life under his leadership is. But for now, he has expanded his base while running the most extreme presidential campaign since the advent of the Civil War. Far from ending “American carnage,” Trump is now promising to visit it upon his many imagined enemies.
Democrats, meanwhile, still haven’t woken up to this political reality. That may change, but for now, the resistance to Trump’s second term isn’t anywhere near as strong as it was eight years ago: A “People’s March” held in D.C. on Saturday drew a tiny fraction of the Women’s March’s attendance in 2017. For what it’s worth, elected Democrats are hardly manning the barricades themselves. The early days of 2025 have been marked by the party—once united in an obstinate refusal to go along with Trump on just about anything—showcasing an eagerness to cooperate and compromise at every turn.
It’s easy to see why: Democrats have no idea what to do. They missed their opportunity to vanquish Trump and his movement—which has to be the biggest political failure of this century, if not longer. Now Trumpism is the dominant strain of Republican politics for at least a generation, and the task before Democrats is not only different, but what it should always have been: proposing an actual alternative to Trump’s demagogic promises. Not being the party of Trump is no longer enough. Then again, it never was.
