Trump and Republicans made a series of promises as outlined above, which, if fulfilled, would bend the federal government toward authoritarianism and Constitutional crisis. An openly partisan Supreme Court has already paved the way for an imperial Executive, and Trump will get the compliant generals and advisors he lacked in his first term. The threat issued by The Heritage Foundation's Kevin Roberts, that the "second American Revolution" will "remain bloodless if the left allows it to be," is real.

Based on Trump's and Republicans' promises, the following outcomes may be anticipated.

Tariffs on imported goods will fuel inflation and wealth inequality.

Tariffs have been the defining feature of Trump's negotiation with our allies. The stock market has fallen. Inflation has not been reduced, and fears of stagflation have emerged.

The Department of Justice will answer to Donald Trump and prosecute his enemies.

The tone set by Attorney General Pam Bondi does not inspire hope that the DOJ will retain its nonpartisan pursuit of justice.

Formerly nonpartisan agencies will be restaffed with those willing to bend to Trump's whims, ending the use of facts and science to formulate policy in matters of climate, health and economics.

The chaos sown by Elon Musk's DOGE, through capricious and self-serving firings of government employees, has nothing to do with saving money. The purpose is to cripple the federal government such that it can be bent to Trump's and Musk's will. Courts are pushing back, leading to Trump insulting judges and quite likely inspiring violence against them.

Trump will weaken NATO and our ties to allies. He will hand Putin a large chunk of Ukraine, if not the whole country, in return for peace. Ukraine will have none of it and fight on its own, with potentially disastrous consequences for them and for the free world.

Trump has operated based on the mindset that Ukraine and its natural resources exist for himself and Putin to divvy up. The end game is not defeat for Russia and freedom for Ukraine, but hegemony of superpowers over Ukraine's sovereign territory.

Managing Russia from the position that it is a co-equal superpower, mutually entitled to acquire and exploit the resources of the rest of the world, will end in disaster for the US.

Millions of immigrants—including hard-working and law-abiding residents, and those brought here as children—will be rounded up and deported, creating needless suffering and denying employers the workers they desperately need.

Detention camps have been established for immigrant families. ICE raids have stoked fear in immigrant communities, even among legal residents. Illegal deportation flights to El Salvadorian prisons, some of the most brutal and cruel in the world, have been carried out despite a judge's explicit order to turn the planes around. The deportees received no due process considerations.

Hostility toward foreign visitors has not been limited to undocumented persons. Europeans with visas have been detained and removed.

At Trump's whim, the military will be deployed against US citizens protesting his and Republicans' actions.

Numerous Republican have branded peaceful protest, protected under the Constitution, as illegal, and called for the arrest of protestors who have broken no laws. Non-citizens have faced deportation for exercising their right to free speech on our soil. The stage is being set for suppression of the very free expression essential to a democratic republic.

President Trump has called for those who have vandalized Tesla dealerships to be detained in El Salvador prisons. Thus the door to US citizens receiving the same extrajudicial treatment as immigrants has opened a crack.

Tax cuts for the wealthy will cripple the federal government's ability to meet its financial obligations, placing community safety, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid at risk.

Medicaid has been curtailed.

Chuck Shumer's capitulation on the recent Continuing Resolution (CR), which will fund the government as President Trump desires through September, has been gleefully interpreted by Trump as a signal that he will be able to cut taxes on the wealthy and enact other right-wing initiatives with Democratic support. Trump may be right.

Musk has called recipients of government payments the "parasite class." His loathing is palpable. Currently, it is within the scope of his power to cripple these programs simply by firing a critical mass of the employees administering them. An act of Congress is not needed. He has already begun doing so.

The number of women without access to abortion and life-saving reproductive care will continue to rise, as will unnecessary deaths of women denied such care.

Prosecutions have begun against physicians accused of providing abortions in states with bans. In what resembles a cold civil war, states with shield laws wrangle with those who have passed abortion bans.

Fed chair Jay Powell will be forced out and the Fed will lose its independence.

Thus far, rather than singling out Jay Powell and the Fed as the cause of bad economic trends, Trump has chosen to claim that restoring the economy will require short term pain: a bizarre twist for someone who promised to bring down costs on day one.

The Affordable Care Act will be dismantled, denying millions access to life-saving medical care.

Since the election, the ACA has been absent from the news. We await the effects of Musk's job cuts on administration of the ACA, and any action by Republicans in Congress on health care legislation.

Extremists will continue to undermine free and fair elections and the rule of law.

Trump promised evangelicals that he would "fix it so good," they would "never have to vote again." His recent executive order on election "integrity" erects a series of roadblocks to voting in a system which, as presently constituted, has not experienced significant voter fraud.

Elections Are about Feelings

People vote for the candidate who makes them feel better, or at least not as bad. Reasoned arguments have a place. But they cannot be relied upon to sway the electorate. Americans did not feel good about the Biden years, and voted for change, without regard for the hardships that change might entail.

Winners Make Their Case to All Persuadable Voters

Everyone wants to know how you intend to make their lives better. The Democrats' messaging was not purpose-built to influence middle America. Instead, Democrats divvied up the electorate into interest groups, and targeted them. A large percentage of Americans were left out.

Few of Us Want Government Assistance

While corporate leaders love bailouts, individuals do not. Americans want to provide for their families from their earnings in a private economy. Help from the government is seen by most as a last resort. (Notable exceptions are Social Security and Medicare, which are correctly identified as programs folks paid into for their entire working lives.)

Democrats proposed one targeted bailout after another, feeding fears of government continuing to spend beyond its means, and sowing doubt that Democrats understood how to steer a thriving private economy toward broadened prosperity.

We Rebel Against Victimhood

On a related note, Americans do not like being seen as victims. We are suspicious of groups other than our own who persistently claim the mantle of victimhood, even when such claims are supported by evidence. By default, we question both the motivation and sincerity of self-appointed allies.

In 2024, the Democratic platform might accurately be described as allyship on a grand scale.

Outrageous Claims Get Attention

Taking it to the max, however cruel or disingenuous or hyperbolic the claim might be, moves public opinion. Republicans are masters of such exploitation; Democrats are not. (In this one instance, I would be ok with Democrats ceding an advantage to Republicans. We have to stand for something; it may as well be integrity.)

Understanding Cultural Trends Is Key to Political Marksmanship

Putting yourself out there, with the willingness to reshape your message to suit the audience of the moment, is the essence of campaigning. Current libertarian, populist, and anti-establishment trends are a poor fit to a party whose mainstream prides itself on institutional governance. Democratic leaders multiply the pain through a stifling, insider-driven process of candidate selection and development. Excitement at the fringes is snuffed out before it has a chance to blossom and bear fruit.

Conventional Elites Are Despised, Irreverent Elites Become Anti-Heroes

In the US, a billionaire with the chops to position themselves just-so can be forgiven for any transgression. We love anti-heroes, and shrill attacks against them (grounded in fact though they may be) bore and fatigue us. Only when we see a direct link between our anti-heroes actions and bad things happening to us do we turn on them.

Social Media Posts Matter

Yes, social media is new. But media and its influence is not. The collective weight of social media posts has become a formidable driving force in American politics. When one group is demonized by another on social media, those voters will rally against the group demonizing them.

Gender Norms Persist

Outside of progressive circles, men feel pressure to provide for their families, and women seek "high value" men able to do so—or at minimum, men who can grow into the role of primary provider or co-provider.

People Hold Contradictory Thoughts in Their Minds without Discomfort

It's human nature, and occurs regardless of intelligence or achievement. Compartmentalizing is a mental survival skill. It's how we get things done in a world devoid of absolutes. Discomfort comes not from recognizing cognitive dissonance, but from having others point it out.

Trump won PA by 120K votes on his way to the White House. Republicans hold the Senate 53-47 and the House 220-215. The lone bright spot is that Democrats retained control of the PA State House by one seat, the slenderest of margins, aided by the success of Newtown's State Representative Perry Warren.

Trump's popular vote total rounds to three million more votes than he earned in 2020. It was enough to win, because Democrats earned seven million fewer votes than in 2020. Millions of Democratic voters cast no vote for President at all. Notably, 53% of white women voted for Trump.

Inexplicably, Bob Casey failed to make a coherent case to voters, and lost by a very slim margin to a billionaire who isn't from here and couldn't care less about us. Ashley Ehasz lost her second race against incumbent Brian Fitzpatrick by a narrower margin than in 2022 but by a wider margin than other Democratic candidates.

On the final three days before the election, I participated in Get Out the Vote (GOTV) phone banking with the Harris campaign. I had a number of conversations with Pennsylvania voters which caused me grave concern. Two of them stood out.

The first was with a woman in her 70s who hated Trump for his misogyny. She had a great deal to say about the "low energy" young men Trump was courting. "No wonder women won't date them," she said. Her misandry reminded me that Democrats had made few attempts to persuade het cis men in general, young or otherwise, to vote for them.

The second was with a man, who also hated Trump. In protest of Biden's economic policies, he was not voting for President at all. He said Biden had fueled inflation and made his life on a fixed income much harder. He believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that Harris would win comfortably without his vote. The man acknowledged that Trump would do nothing to fix the economy. Nonetheless, I could not persuade him to vote. He felt slighted by his party, and he wanted them to know it.

Among politicians and pundits alike, there is no shortage of opinions on what Democrats should do in 2025. The principle divide is between "Stand and Fight" proponents vs. those who want Dems to lay low as the ship of state sinks from the many holes Trump and Republicans are drilling in the hull.

On social media, Democrats have engaged in a lot of hand-wringing and talk of trauma. There has been concern for marginalized groups who would be endangered by Trump's announced policies. More specifically, each person has expressed concern for the narrow band of marginalized groups they had focused upon in their activism prior to the election.

One marginalized group Democrats have not expressed concern about are folks who can't afford their groceries. If these folks have been mentioned at all, they've been called dumb for thinking Trump would help them.

Unsurprisingly, many Democratic politicians see distress among those in their base as a fundraising opportunity. For example, Josh Shapiro has taken to Facebook urging Democrats to get up, dust themselves off—and send him money.

In Bucks County, local Democratic organizations—the municipal clubs—are banding together and partnering with non-governmental activists like Indivisible to organize protests of the kind seen during Trump's first term, while all but ignoring municipal and county elections happening later this year.

I find myself agreeing with James Carville that, at the national level, doing very little makes more sense than declaring political war. Yes, jab sticks into Trump's spokes, in the courts and in Congress, but do so without fanfare. Mainstream American voters are not in the mood for performative displays, and public protests only emphasize the extent to which Democrats are out of power in all three branches of federal government. Further, such protests could harm the campaigns of candidates in 2025 seeking to preserve and expand Democratic control on school and township boards, in borough councils, in the county row offices, and in the courts.

Moderate Trump voters will extend patience to Trump in quantities Joe Biden never experienced, in part because it will take them some time to admit their mistake. Yes, it's heartbreaking to see harm being done to our country and to individuals for no reason other than the incompetence and avarice of Republicans and their billionaire enablers. Getting too far ahead of mainstream voters, though, will extend Democrats' misery into 2025 and beyond. Before changing their minds, voters will have to feel the pain within their small circle of family and friends. In time, they will.

Meantime, Democratic leaders should formulate policy and messaging with centrist appeal. They should anticipate a chance to show voters what principled, helpful, efficient government actually looks like.

Our gender politics has evolved—or rather, devolved—rapidly in recent years. What feminists and LGBTQ+ activists find appalling worked as intended to help secure Republicans victories up and down the ballot.

What the GOP did

GOP strategists leaned into cultural and economic trends

The Democratic response

Often taking cues from feminists, Democrats and their surrogates initially crafted a message for and about women. If men were mentioned at all, they were cast as villains who needed to be kept away from positions of power. It's very difficult to win an election while ignoring or demonizing half of the electorate. To their credit, Harris strategists came to understand the problem, and worked to reach out with messaging on the economy and with their choice of Tim Walz as Harris's running mate. But that strategy didn't trickle down to state and local campaigns, and the unifying message wasn't received or understood by individual voters.

The cultural backdrop: transgender rights

In the aftermath of horrifically violence incidents visited disproportionately upon certain groups of Americans (Black, LGBTQ+, non-Christian, immigrants, students), Democrats in the late 2010s spent a little time racing each other to the far left of the political spectrum. Emotional fuel for that leftward migration came, in no small part, from the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Trump was perceived even by mainstream voters as a threat to anyone not White, Christian, and male.

As statues of Confederate heroes tumbled across the South, Trump warned they'd be coming for Jefferson next, and he was right. The 1619 Project was a broad indictment of the United States' institutionalized dependency on slavery and other disposable humans. Leavened by anger and grievance, and guilty of occasional overreach, 1619 Project authors nonetheless created a damning thru-line from past abuses to those of the present. Defenders of the status quo, including most Republican politicians, saw the 1619 Project and the CRT and DEI initiatives it spawned as a threat they needed to put down. Their efforts stumbled out of the gate, with book bans and hateful rhetoric which disturbed even moderate Republicans. In the 2023 municipal elections, Bucks County voters chose Democrats over Moms For Liberty Republican candidates they perceived as dangerous extremists.

The GOP learned from its mistakes, and in 2024 focused publicly on two groups holding little political capital with which to fight back: transgender persons and immigrants. The broader plan to vanquish anyone deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump's narrow vision of American liberty, Project 2025, was kept at arm's length, to the extent possible. The strategy worked; suddenly, those on the left who expressed concern about Project 2025 were seen as the extremists.

The transgender rights debate stirs something primal. Go to one of those newly designed public restrooms, with individual stalls for relief and a central area for washing up shared by everyone. In my experience, the discomfort is palpable. (Perhaps it's counterintuitive that men would prefer a space crowded with exposed male genitalia to one with total privacy, but here we are.) Habit around gender norms is formidable in US culture, even as women make inroads into traditionally male spaces. Muscular women such as Ilona Maher are criticized for being unfeminine. Men who are comfortable in the background as their successful wives garner attention are perceived as weak.

The culture war over transgender rights was and is uglier than any such conflict in recent years, starting with ads run by the GOP before the election and continuing to the discriminatory measures Trump and his surrogates are now pursuing.

Anyone familiar with the rules of argumentation will be thoroughly depressed and frustrated by this "debate" on the Whatever podcast: a anti-trans bully engaged in preemptive framing, ad hominem attacks, begging the question, and false equivalence; an ally unable to respond coherently to the onslaught. The bros who consume this content with regularity ate it up. We wait, possibly in vain, for the bulk of the American people to rise up against the cruelty, which has and will continue to inspire deadly violence.

The cultural backdrop: gender norms and relationships

In times characterized by the "hustle"—influencers and OnlyFans, stone cold manipulation of people and markets to secure income and possessions—perhaps men and even some women see Trump's excesses as less objectionable than before. He's just better at the game than most. A bitter pill for progressives to swallow: what they revile about Trump and Elon Musk earns these men praise in and out of the MAGA-sphere.

Here's a primer from the male perspective. If you're bored or infuriated, hang in there with it until he talks about salaries, around 11 minutes. Or skip ahead. You'll get a bleak picture of what young people are up against.

As for White women, a majority clearly did not want the apple cart of gender norms upset. White women either embraced, tolerated, or laughed at MAGA brazenly trying to put them "back in their place." And in the end, no amount of misogynistic and sexually violent behavior perpetrated by Trump himself would cause White women to fear him more than they mistrusted the Democratic agenda.