Democrats’ reliance on a series of procedural challenges to President Donald Trump’s early reforms has so far failed to inspire the type of movement that characterized their party during the first Trump presidency.
In fact, their strategy may be backfiring.
Four months after Trump led Republicans to win unified control of government, Democrats are still sifting through the wreckage for clues as to why they lost and how they might start to rebuild.
Their approach so far has involved filing lawsuits to stop Trump’s executive orders and focusing on the bureaucratic rules they say he’s breaking.
“They don’t have a positive message,” University of Chicago political science professor emeritus Charles Lipson told the Washington Examiner. “They don’t have an effective messenger. And their normal channels of communication, the mainstream media, are ebbing in influence. So all they have left is frustration and friendly courts in blue states, and that’s what they’re relying on.”
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While Democrats have notched temporary victories in court, Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, have continued barreling through federal agencies with dramatic cost-cutting and staff-reduction demands.
Meanwhile, Democrats’ messaging has changed little from their unsuccessful campaign rhetoric about the dictatorship they claim Trump wants to create. And their disconnected network of lawsuits, ranging from constitutional challenges to complaints based on arcane civil-service rules, has held the party back from rallying its supporters around a single cause.
“Because they’re playing this procedural challenge strategy, they lack cohesion, they lack direction, they lack leadership, and they completely lack energy,” Mark Serrano, a former Trump campaign senior adviser, told the Washington Examiner.
Trump has also complicated Democrats’ ability to respond effectively by dragging them into some fights in which public sentiment is tilted heavily toward his side, such as his effort to ban biological men from participating in women’s sports. The pace of his orders, too, has contributed to the Democratic Party’s struggles by introducing fresh fodder for outrage before Democrats can get tempers boiling about the previous thing Trump did.
Democrats fall into the ‘institutions trap’
Trump’s DOGE project has generated headlines that have caused headaches for the White House, particularly when the office has had to reverse cuts that its staff made too quickly.
But it has also cast Democrats as the defenders of a status quo that voters very recently rejected.
“Call it the institutions trap,” political scientist and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Ruy Teixeira wrote in a recent Substack. “Trump attacks an institution Democrats are identified with; Democrats feel obliged—pretty much no matter what it is—to defend it tooth and nail. But that simply reinforces Democrats’ brand as the institutional, establishment party, which makes them even more vulnerable to populist attacks and even less capable of defending those institutions.”
Democrats have found themselves aggressively fighting for foreign aid spending, IRS agents, and corporate media, all of which the majority of voters view with deep suspicion.
Their arguments against what Trump is doing are often not based in substantive defenses of the federal agencies and programs on the chopping block. That could be because public support for the DOGE mission remains high. A Harvard Harris poll published last week showed that 72% of voters, including 60% of Democrats, agreed that “there should be a government agency focused on efficiency initiatives.” An even bigger majority of voters, 77%, said they believe the government is “in need of a full examination of all government expenditures.”
Instead, Democrats have frequently focused on the ways in which they say Trump’s cuts violate the rules regarding what presidents can do on their own.
“Donald Trump campaigned on cutting back the government — that’s true — but he is not allowed to break the law to achieve those goals,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a speech last month. “You campaign, you put your ideas forward, and in this case, Donald Trump won. But he did not campaign on breaking the law, and the American people don’t want him to break the law.”
One problem for Democrats with that approach is that Trump’s supposed lawbreaking is difficult to explain to the average voter. The claim that fueled Democratic opposition to Trump during his first term, that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, served two purposes: It absolved Democrats from blame for having narrowly lost the race, sparing them from the task of confronting why Trump won, and it offered a clear, one-sentence allegation that Democrats used successfully to discredit much of his early agenda.
By contrast, the variety of Democratic allegations against Trump at the start of his second term include that Trump improperly used the Office of Personnel Management to urge the firings of probationary employees rather than going through the correct agency channels, that Trump violated a statute known as the Impoundment Act that lets him freeze some funding but not others, and that Trump failed to provide Congress with a required 30-day notice before dismissing agency inspectors general.
None of the accusations give Democrats an easy way to build momentum behind a message that both rehabilitates the party’s image after a bruising 2024 loss and effectively discredits a Trump agenda that remains broadly popular.
The resistance gives way to rifts
Trump started his first term facing a much more organized and energetic Democratic opposition.
The so-called resistance movement broke through beyond the political arena to popular culture, engaging celebrities and activists alike in fighting Trump at every turn.
But the fierce opposition to Trump, which acted as a unifying force for Democrats before his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, papered over divisions within the party that helped contribute to Trump’s return to the presidency and are now hampering the party’s ability to find its footing in the second Trump era.
“The Democrats don’t have a positive agenda, and so they’re all negative all the time, and it’s hard for them to settle on a positive agenda because the party is split primarily between the more progressive wing and the center-of-left wing,” Lipson said.
“You stay on negative issues where you think you can trip up your political opponents,” he added. “Since you’ll be doing it in favorable courts, you’ve got a good chance of winning, and you won’t split your coalitions apart by pursuing those cases.”
A bright spot for Democrats is that many of the lawsuits against Trump are playing out in the liberal-leaning federal court system in the District of Columbia or other legal venues more favorable to Trump’s opponents. A federal judge appointed by Biden in Seattle, for example, blocked Trump from shuttering a refugee resettlement agency. A federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton in California ordered OPM to rescind its memos instructing agencies to fire newly hired federal workers.
But the wins may be fleeting, as Trump’s Justice Department fights to escalate the disputes to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible to secure rulings that might better establish the reach of executive power.
And while Democrats spend their time on litigation against Trump, the task of litigating their own ideological divisions has moved to the back burner.
“The Democrats should be focusing on recapturing the middle class and recapturing youths and minorities because they lost them all in this election,” Serrano said. “And yet they’re conflicted because their money comes from people in alignment with their base. Their big donors are far-left radicals. So they have to continue to appeal to their paymasters.”
Money flowed to a constellation of progressive groups founded or expanded after Trump took office in 2017. Those groups harnessed the buzzing energy of the Democratic base for activist campaigns such as the Women’s March and for electoral gains in the 2018 and 2020 elections.
Democratic donors are far less eager to contribute to anti-Trump efforts today. They are reportedly angry about the lack of a message or strategy from party leadership. Recent elections for new Democratic National Committee leaders featured little in the way of introspection about what positions turned off voters just a few months earlier.
The Democrats’ focus on the procedural aspects of some Trump moves has continued to delay a reckoning with the substance of those positions.
For example, Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) made headlines last month for sparring with Trump at the White House over Trump’s executive order banning biological men from women’s sports. Yet her opposition to the order was limited to her view that it violated state and federal law. She retorted to Trump that she would “see [him] in court” over the ban, but like other Democrats, did not make a case for why transgender athletes should be allowed to play in the league of their choice.
In a subsequent statement, she characterized the dispute as a fight over whether presidents are permitted to withhold federal funds from states to secure a policy change — not as a fight over transgender rights.
Some Democratic strategists have warned that the party must do more than scold Trump in order to rebuild.
“Frankly, if Democrats believe that voters will reward them simply for opposing Trump, rather than presenting their own alternative arguments, they will remain out of power for years, much like the period between 1980 and 1992, which was dominated by the Republican Party,” Democratic consultant Doug Schoen wrote in a recent op-ed.
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Democrats have forcefully condemned some of the more controversial Trump moves by categorizing them all as evidence of a looming constitutional crisis without acknowledging the underlying public anxieties Trump was trying to address. For instance, Democrats slammed Trump for an executive order ending birthright citizenship and celebrated when courts halted his attempt to reinterpret constitutional language long thought to offer automatic citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil.
But the party has not yet offered its own vision for fixing the broken incentives that allowed illegal immigration to spiral out of control. Similarly, Democrats have decried the Trump administration’s deportation plans as inhumane, but they’ve failed to come up with a message about what they’d rather see done with the millions of illegal immigrants who have entered the country over the last few years.