The Post-Trump Reordering Dems Should Embrace Now

Previously “Radical” Solutions Are Now Politically Expedient

Recent anti-Trump resistance has been explosive. Raucous crowds have swamped major cities, raising their hilarious, devastating signs up and back toward the horizon. But they have not stopped Trump’s societal wrecking ball from swinging.

After nationwide rallies on April 5 and 19, Trump has shown no indication that he’ll stop defying Supreme Court orders, that he’ll offer people due process before shipping them to El Salvador, or that he’ll return the very innocent Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a foreign gulag to be united with his wife and children. Instead of a weakened hand in a constitutional crisis, post-rally Trump appears fully victorious and bouncing gleefully to his next fight against universities.

But massive rallies remain a crucial gambit for rescuing democracy. They forge psychic connections between citizens desperate for an end to economic chaos and threats to members of their communities. Collective action strengthens people’s resolve for the next call to action, and the next. Plus, profit-motivated billionaires and brand-building CEOs monitor these rallies, trying to predict how changing public sentiment will affect business and investments. Members of Congress watch demonstrations for indications that the environment might become safe enough to take a public stance that will define their careers.

More directly, rallies in 2025 will help boost midterm voter turnout in 2026, champion House investigations in 2027, and win back the White House in 2028. But I am one of millions who can’t wait years for Trumpian damage to innocent livelihoods to stop. Accepting the “wait for the midterms” timeline for Trump is morally bankrupt given his aggressive robbery of social security from seniors, education from talented immigrants, research from cancer patients, and medicine and food from millions in the global south by terrifying their relatives working critical jobs in the U.S.

The Founding Fathers anticipated a moral maniac might win the White House and wrote multiple methods for eviction into the Constitution.

1. Article I empowers Congress to remove a President through impeachment, which would require enough GOP legislators to vote against Trump.

2. Section 4 of the 25th Amendment empowers the President’s Cabinet to remove a President if a majority deems them unable to fulfill their duties.

3. The 25th Amendment also outlines procedures following a President’s resignation, which only happened in 1974 when GOP leaders and swirling scandals convinced President Nixon to leave office less than two years after a resounding election victory.

Trump’s pathological obsession with power, love of defiance, and cult of personality make these scenarios seem unlikely. However, Trump's frenetic, unhinged governing style has caused him to overstep multiple times, losing key allies, creating new enemies, and sparking new public protests at each turn.

His threats to close social security offices, his crashing of the global economy, and his Stalin-esque renditioning of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador (then posting his wife’s address online, forcing her to move to a safehouse) each constitute a “last straw” for different people and push Trump’s approval numbers steadily downward. New outrages each day bring Trump’s protective dam closer to breaking.

But progress is far too slow, and most Americans are still avoiding political news. One reason is that there is no attractive alternative to Trump. Democratic party popularity is at a record low. Two out of three Gen Z-ers disapprove of Congressional Democrats’ job performance.

Everyone knows Democrats stand against Trump, but not what they stand for. Democratic policies and principles are rarely bold, exciting, or attention-grabbing. Only rarely do they pack the energy of hopeful, systematic change. The recent Kamala Harris campaign softened its stance and messaging on most issues, opting to continue old economic policies, expand existing healthcare programs, resurrect zombie tax credits, restore previously-held rights, add officers to an unpopular immigration system, and leave NATO as it is despite Russia walking unimpeded into Ukraine.

The Democratic Party should anoint a platform of societal improvement policies bold enough to shake disaffected citizens by the t-shirt. Here is one option.

Drain corporations. No company should control 90% of an industry (like Google does with Search) or control almost half of online consumerism (like Amazon). The more they do, the quicker they stop improving products and employee work conditions and start buying back stocks, freezing wages, attacking unions, deploying lobbyists, buying or destroying their competition, and raising prices on consumers left with no alternative for similar products or services. There is no part of our cost-of-living crisis not directly inflamed by corporate consolidation.

Dynamic solutions to hyper-inequality are plentiful: Limit how much of an industry a company can control (high single-digits at the most). Award government contracts to firms too small to co-opt American foreign policy (like Elon Musk did with Starlink). Make shell companies, private equity, corporate lobbying, and limitless political donations by businesses illegal. Bring massive public control onto industries exploding the cost of living - housing, education, and healthcare - so that rents, co-pays, and tuitions can't skyrocket with the swings of any market or the ploys of any CEO.

Make media a utility. The media is “The Fourth Estate” because it educates citizens to make informed financial, societal, and electoral decisions. Societies where the media is profit-driven reliably tear themselves apart. We now have epidemics of teen depression, ADHD, online doxing, hyper-partisanship, deaths of despair, and a fully unresponsive and now harmful government as a result.

Social media algorithms that decide what millions see should never be unknown to the government, yet they are. Things powerful enough to cause genocide abroad should never be in the hands of neurodivergent sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. And like them, no one should ever be too rich to regulate or jail. It is no exaggeration that every person in a U.S. jail has caused less harm to society than Mark Zuckerberg. The Dems should make criminal justice make sense again.

Dems should vow to kill Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and its legal protections for platforms causing massive harm with the content they proliferate. The government should give platforms 48 hours to turn over algorithms or face jail time.

Make “hardship alleviation” the government's primary role. The most salient political philosophy in the Western World is “Justice as Fairness,” devised by an American academic at an American institution, which says social or economic inequalities are immoral unless they make the worse-off better off. Our government has ignored this wisdom and spent untold hours helping lobbyists drill loopholes in bills that help them avoid taxes and dodge lawsuits against the harms their companies cause.

The New York City skyline, beautiful as it is, is a sad trophy case to our society’s mindless default toward ravenous money accumulation. The Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Freedom Tower are packed full of hedge funds, financial consultants, and corporate lawyers working 100-hour weeks to protect our richest entities against threats to revenues.

A compelling Post-Trump vision of the world would fill those gorgeous towers with free universities, state-of-the-art mental health clinics, lavish safe houses for women and immigrants, massive job placement offices for the underemployed, and around-the-clock clinical trials researching cures for cancer, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, teen depression, and all types of deaths of despair.

Grade schools would bring field trips to these towers, where students can witness, volunteer, study, and work in public service positions that fund a comfortable living, rendering those doing the most to improve society free from want and need. We should expand this model to every city and town from sea to shining sea.

This list is in no way exhaustive of policies that would boldly swing society from divisive Trumpian retribution to a formulation more in line with the ideals our founding documents espouse. That these policies are “radical” is stark evidence we've lost our way, and that barely any politician, aside from AOC, will risk the professional capital to fix it.

A utopian vision for post-Trump America is available for the taking. Democrats only need to find the courage to grab it by the t-shirt right now.