What The Hell America!

FIRST IT WAS So what, Sen. Cory Booker talked for over twenty-five hours, what good will it do?

Then it was So what, Democrats slashed Republican margins in two Florida elections but they still lost, what good will it do?

And then it was So what, people are protesting at rallies all over America, what good will it do?

I understand that words, whether on protest signs or the Senate floor, seem inadequate amid the daily atrocities and outrages that have made eleven weeks of Trump 2.0 feel like an epoch. Just over the weekend, Wired reported that Elon Musk’s shadowy, unvetted DOGE team is planning an IRS “hackathon” to make it easier to access private tax data; we learned that a second unvaccinated Texas child died of measles; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the nation’s antivax health secretary, who spent years lying about the MMR vaccine—attended her funeral.

Still, I hope that people generally and complainers in particular are ready to ditch the idea that resistance is futile. It’s not. It’s one of the keys to toppling the dictatorial oligarchy of billionaires that Donald Trump is foisting on America.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, made a fiery speech Saturday at the Hands Off protest in D.C. More interesting was his response to a Guardian reporter’s question about the impact of mass protests.

Drawing from a discussion with historians, Raskin said legislative parliamentary strategy alone succeeds in defeating authoritarian governments about a third of the time, and a popular resistance strategy by itself does a bit better than that. “But when you have a popular-resistance strategy and an effective legislative strategy, it wins more than two-thirds of the time,” he said. “It’s not a guarantee, but you need to have national mass popular action at the same time that you’ve got an effective legislative strategy, too.”

To that prescription, I’d add a political strategy to make sure Democrats are in position to make things happen on the legislative front, in the House and maybe even the Senate, after the midterms. They need an agenda with a name, something like their own version of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America that, unlike last year’s “wildly unpopular” Project 2025, actually appeals to voters.

Call it “Campaign for a Better America,” or “Contract to Restore America,” or any other phrase that taps into the anger and longing to once again be the respect-worthy America of reason, order, laws, freedoms, science, stability, pride, strength, and (sorry, Elon) empathy. They could even go with “Be Best America 2026,” cribbing from Melania Trump’s ironic anti-bullying initiative during the Bully-in-Chief’s first term.

For the next two years, with Republicans in the White House, Democrats won’t have an obvious path to pass laws. But winning the House, Senate, or both would make it possible to block and maybe even repair some Trump damage, and pass bills that make clear what they’d do if they sweep the House, Senate, and presidency in 2028. Here are some priorities I’d include in “Be Best America” (or whatever the 2026 blueprint is called):

■ Families. Restore the expanded child tax credit and make it permanent, pass paid family leave, get creative about zoning, and incentivize housing construction to bring down costs. Restore staff to Social Security and keep Medicaid intact.

■ Taxes. Kill the Trump tariffs if they’re not gone already, to bring prices down. Reduce the deficit and debt by making the tax code more fair, and reversing Internal Revenue Service staff and resource cuts so the agency can restore improvements in customer service, forensic audits, and tax collections.

■ Immigration. Pass major reforms including, but not limited to, increasing resources to secure the border and speed up immigration proceedings; set up a work visa system for agriculture and other industries; restore due process to deportations; give permanent residency to undocumented spouses married to U.S. citizens; and make the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program permanent.

■ Conduct investigations and oversight. Look into all possible violations of laws and the Constitution. Examine the destruction of the civil service and what looks like rampant corruption, such as programs altered to make Musk companies eligible for money, agencies investigating Musk companies gutted, people investigating them fired, and Trump turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom, as NBC put it.

■ Impeach Trump. House Democrats have already done that twice, and they may be exhausted (as are we all), but a third impeachment cannot be avoided. I hope someone is keeping a running list of impeachable offenses, no matter how many there may be. If voters step up the way they should in November 2026 and the House flips to the Democrats, they will need it.

■ Supreme Court. Pass term limits and an enforceable ethics code for justices. If Democrats control the Senate, they should waive the filibuster to get it done—even though Trump wouldn’t sign it.

■ Money in politics. Pass spending and contribution limits that reduce the impact of Citizens United and Musk-level influence on campaigns. Make clear that money isn’t speech and corporations aren’t people.

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■ Voting rights. Pass a version of the voting rights bill shaped by former Sen. Joe Manchin that sets standards for voter ID, reforms map-drawing to reduce gerrymandering, and has broad support across the Democratic party. Manchin wouldn’t waive the filibuster to get it done, but the next Democratic Senate shouldn’t hesitate.

■ Abortion rights. Codify legal abortion rights to protect women’s health, autonomy, and privacy.

■ LGBTQ rights. Get the federal government out of personal medical decisions and decisions about who is allowed to play on what team in local school districts. And if Trump succeeds or still is trying to purge transgender people from the military, a policy a judge called “soaked in animus,” reverse it or stop it.

■ Education rights. Restore the Department of Education to full strength so it can do its job, including its role in assuring poor children and children with disabilities get the education they deserve.

■ Democracy rights. D.C. and Puerto Rico don’t have congressional representation, and they want statehood. In a 2016 referendum, 86 percent of DC voters favored statehood, and nearly 59 percent of Puerto Rican voters chose statehood in a referendum last year.

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IT’S A LOT, I KNOW. Multitudes. But don’t be overwhelmed. I look back on the Booker marathon and his impressive ability to talk that long without resorting to the phone book, the Bible, or Green Eggs and Ham. Instead he highlighted all of the above and much more, for all twenty-five-plus hours. And in his last hour he touched on a communications strategy Democrats should embrace: There are so many issues to run on, affecting so many different kinds of people in so many different ways. And that’s a feature, not a bug.

Booker spoke very personally about having to get his Parkinson’s-stricken father to a movie theater men’s room in the middle of the film. He talked of Trump cutting “democratically, bipartisanly approved” funding for Alzheimer’s research, and so much other science research. Congress has the constitutional power of the purse. Congress wanted that money going to that research. Trump violated the constitutional separation of powers.

But that isn’t relevant to every voter. “So forget the separation of powers. It is important—so important. If that doesn’t get you, then maybe think about the competition with China,” Booker said, referring to America’s retreat from science and China’s march to dominate important research fields. “If that doesn’t get you—if those two don’t get you, America, think about the millions of Americans struggling with Alzheimer’s, the struggles of those families,” he said.

There are millions of stories out there—millions coping with illness or job loss, millions passionate about science or education or the Constitution or the law, millions of ways to drive these crises home to tens of millions of Americans. We can do it.