The Next Democratic Presidency Means Payback
As you may recall from the distant days of 2020, the all but announced theme of the Joe Biden presidency at its start was a return to normalcy after the chaos and extremism of Donald Trump’s first term, which was punctuated by the attempted insurrection of January 6. While the new Democratic administration and its congressional allies proceeded to put a lot of ambitious plans into place, there was definitely an atmosphere of restoration, of a status quo ante being brought back.
That will not be the case if Democrats regain the White House in 2028.
Trump 2.0 has broken something fundamental in the two-party system, not just because of the policy extremism or the president’s overtly vicious and vindictive personality. Republicans have taken a very narrow election victory and, instead of trying to build an enduring majority coalition, have launched a winner-takes-everything regime that resembles in spirit the Sack of Rome rather than any sort of continuity in government. To an ever-increasing extent, there’s no “normalcy” that can be restored and no appetite for it among Democrats even if it were practicable. We see this change in attitude not just in the repeated pugilistic rhetoric of Democratic elected officials and party activists but in a very self-conscious thirst for destructive retaliation.
In the most recent example, the Democrats have spent years championing redistricting reform as a way to mitigate the arms race between partisan gerrymanders; all that has flown right out the window in the wake of Trump’s Texas power grab, a mandated mid-decade redistricting without a shred of justification other than being a way to rig next year’s midterms. Democrats are instantly plotting retaliation in California and other states they control, even as they imagine the horrors of a continued GOP Congress beyond 2026 despite the unpopularity of Trump’s agenda.
The disappearance of the status quo ante, never to return again, is most evident in a federal government being rapidly and radically reshaped by a combination of Republican executive and legislative coups. As Pete Buttigieg has rightly pointed out, the agencies being abolished, emptied, and turned upside down aren’t going to just spring back to life in a change of administration. And more fundamentally, the civil-service system Team Trump is so aggressively wrecking can’t be built back overnight either, as Protect Democracy recently explained in the wake of the president’s executive order creating a new category of political appointees:
Schedule G lays bare what we’ve long known: the Trump administration’s strategy is not just to fire civil servants; it’s to fire them and then fill their roles with loyalists. The White House is now working on the other side of this Fire and Fill equation: preparing to fill roles long held by career civil servants with loyalists.
As Schedule G’s potential to expand hiring shows, the administration’s gutting of the workforce is not about “right-sizing” the federal bureaucracy — it’s about reshaping the civil service into a tool for unchecked control and removing safeguards that protect the public from the politicization of day-to-day government services.
A future Democratic administration will have to do something with this planned influx of partisan warriors rationalized by the “deep state” conspiracy theory that treats all existing federal employees as radical leftists. And there may need to be a particularly fraught reckoning with the vast new immigration police state Trump and Stephen Miller are frantically putting together. In seeking to reverse such initiatives, moreover, the odds are very high that the next Democratic presidency will avail itself of the new executive powers Trump-friendly federal courts have authorized. Why exercise restraint, particularly knowing another MAGA administration could be right around the bend?
That leads to the final and, in some respects, most important reason Democrats can’t just hope for a return to normalcy: Even if they eschew payback and seek to rebuild a political system open to bipartisanship and evidence-based policymaking, who will be their partners across the aisle? In 2021, it was possible to hope the pre-Trump Republican Party might reemerge — conservative, to be sure, but not full of venomous conviction that Democrats are traitors who are consciously trying to destroy the country, defy the Almighty, and change human nature itself. That GOP committed suicide when it devoted itself to Trump’s vengeful comeback and began to zestfully share the MAGA movement’s cruelty and authoritarian excesses.
Are we then entering a period when America must choose between two parties equally determined to seek total victory for their point of view, perhaps lurching from one to the other metronomically as lofty-minded pundits wonder why we can’t all just get along? That’s possible. But by the time Trump leaves office for the last time in January 2029, the destruction of the political system that existed when he came down that escalator in 2015 could well be complete and all nostalgia over it forgotten or mocked. Add in the anger Democrats almost universally feel over the endless trampling of norms by people whose role models are Orbán, Bolsonaro, and Putin, and you can appreciate that sooner or later payback is on the way and it’s going to be a bitch.