Here's another harsh reality- the next two years for Democrats are not about actually legislating. All talk of progress, of passing new laws, or of making any great change has died. No progressive legislation will pass the House. In the Senate, the value of Senate Democrats is entirely based on keeping 41 Senators together against any piece of Trump legislation. To the extent that Senate Democrats are willing to mount filibusters, they will matter. It ultimately doesn't matter if Democrats hold all 48 votes together, but they will need 41.
The situation is even more dire in the states, where Republican Governors and legislatures will simply do what the North Carolina legislature did, and move the goalposts. There is no way for Democrats to stop this. It's going to be a tough two years of legislating. It could very well be a tough two years politically too. The economy has been fairly strong in recent years. Americans have shown they can be optimistic about new Presidents even when they don't like those Presidents. Prepare for a frustrating situation.
The job of Democrats is not to win any of these fights, or to create a "liberal Tea Party," it is to stay awake and give this man no cover. Don't vote for any Medicare privatization plan. Don't vote for cuts to Social Security. Don't vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act or Dodd-Frank. Don't vote for bank and environmental de-regulation. Force the Republican Party to own all of the Trump agenda on their own. Don't even vote for misleadingly popular things he wants to do, like "infrastructure spending" that is just tax cuts for construction companies. Vote no. Point out what is wrong with what he's doing. Shine a bright light on all of the offensive and stupid things he says. Never let up. Never play along.
Expect to lose though, and that's good. The more he actually does, the more his actual record will be there to use. It's worth noting that he got 46.2% of the vote, a lower share than Mitt Romney got, meaning that even a marginally popular Democratic candidate in 2020 has a shot to beat him. The more things the GOP does on their own, the easier it is to run against them as a party in 2018, a year that was supposed to be awful for us, with 26 Senate seats up. We don't have to defend a "top of the ticket" candidate now, and the Republicans do. Gaining three seats might still be a stretch, and the House will be a lift no matter what happens, but the idea of gaining House seats and not losing Senate seats is possible, if we oppose him right. Just don't expect too much more.
Here's the good news though- I do think we will defeat Donald Trump in 2020, provided we don't give into our worst impulses. He's not seen the normal bounce for a President-elect, and I don't think he will be able to get a "9/11 bounce" from global events, like President Bush did, due to the deepened polarization of our electorate. I know that many Democrats believe he'll do dramatic things, like a new Jim Crow, but I think that's over-stating the way government works. Democrats can still defeat this man in four years, and possibly get back Congress too, if they don't self-destruct. That could be a very large "if" though.
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