U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi on the sidelines of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
A year after returning to the White House, Donald Trump just keeps getting away with it. Each violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law, act of retribution, denial of due process and abuse of presidential authority that goes unchallenged has emboldened him to go further.
And Democrats seem clueless about how to stop him.
Even former Trump adviser Steve Bannon marvels at the lack of serious pushback against his ex-boss’s efforts to move what is known in political science circles as the Overton window – the boundaries of acceptable policy and political conduct – to increase his power, advance his agenda and leave Democrats struggling to catch up.
“Remember, our strategy – I say it every day – is maximalist, a maximalist strategy. You have to take it however deep you can take it and, quite frankly, until you meet resistance,” he told The Atlantic’s Ashley Parker. “And we haven’t met any resistance.”
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Ms. Parker attributes the weakness of the opposition to Trump Exhaustion Syndrome, which has replaced Trump Derangement Syndrome, as Americans increasingly choose to tune out of the chaos their President intentionally causes in domestic and international affairs. The sheer volume of Trump-generated disruption is too much for the average voter to process.
At the same time, the Trump White House has set a series of political traps for its opponents that make it hard for Democrats to gain traction. The administration accuses those who denounce the inhumane tactics of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of defending criminals. It ridicules critics of the military operation to seize Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro as a violation of international law, suggesting they would rather make excuses for a “narcoterrorist” who endangered American lives.
The best and perhaps only hope for restoring some kind of check on Mr. Trump’s rogue presidency lies in a Democratic victory in this fall’s midterm congressional elections. Unfortunately, Democrats have yet to show they can get their act together and win back the confidence of voters.
Polls conducted to mark the first anniversary of Mr. Trump’s return to power showed that a solid majority of Americans think the President is too focused on foreign adventurism – he began 2026 by invading Venezuela, threatening to bomb Iran and vowing to take over Greenland – and not enough on the domestic economy. Most say he has failed to reduce the cost of living, reneging on a core promise of his 2024 election campaign.
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Yet, Democrats should not feel overconfident heading into midterms. Their party is viewed even more unfavourably than Mr. Trump and the GOP. And ideological divisions among Democrats continue to hinder the party’s ability to develop a consistent economic message and repel Republican charges of left-wing radicalism and out-of-touch elitism.
A Wall Street Journal poll found that Democrats held only a four-percentage-point lead over Republicans on a generic congressional ballot – a comparatively narrow gap for an opposition party in a midterm election year. Moves to redraw congressional-district maps by Republican state legislatures have complicated Democrats’ path to retaking the House of Representatives in November. Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has also struggled to shift members’ focus from identity politics to the economy.
Democrats are seeking to make gains this fall in Maine, Alaska, North Carolina and Ohio (and possibly even Iowa and Texas) to flip the Senate from Republican control. But that will be a tall order, to say the least.
“Right now, Democrats have no credible path to sustained control of the Senate and the White House,” Democratic strategist (and former Barack Obama campaign manager) David Plouffe wrote recently in a stinging indictment of current party leaders.
He urged Democrats to adopt a relentless focus on the economy, and the corollary issues of health care and child care, promising to abolish Mr. Trump’s inflationary tariffs and place limits on the use of artificial intelligence to eliminate jobs and spread misinformation.
This will be much harder to do than it sounds. Mr. Trump and other Republicans will continuously bait Democrats exasperated by the steady erosion of democratic norms. But calls from left-leaning Democrats to abolish ICE or to impeach Mr. Trump will hurt Democratic candidates in swing states and districts.
One can only hope that, sooner rather than later, enough average Americans will decide they have had enough of Mr. Trump’s chaos. Until then, however, Democrats will need be strategic about choosing their battles.
As one former senior administration official told The Atlantic’s Ms. Parker: “[Mr.] Trump is a master at getting his enemies to defend things that are politically damaging to them.”
And that may be the most sinister aspect of his destructive presidency.