The Left seems quiet right now – a little too quiet. They are working, busy as ever, organizing to defeat the policy agenda of President-elect Donald Trump once he takes office.
I am a former Democrat Senate staffer and a former campaign junkie who has spent time working for and with Left-wing grassroots organizations and causes for 15 years. This election, I voted for Donald Trump because I believe in his ability to dismantle government bureaucracy, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies so that they cannot be used as a weapon against American citizens.
I was delighted to see Donald Trump win and Republicans take both the House and Senate on Election Day this cycle. My former friends and colleagues on the Left were not. They have known this cycle could go either way, and in the back of their minds they have been preparing for this moment.
Outside of the legal battle going on in Pennsylvania over the Senate seat that David McCormick has rightly won, it may seem like things are just a little too quiet from my friends and former colleagues on the Left, given what we know what is at stake. They have been working. Behind the scenes, they have been organizing, ready to defeat a Trump Administration agenda.
You are now starting to see spots of messaging of how they plan to challenge the agenda of President-elect Trump. Last week, one-term House Member Wiley Nickel (D-NC-13), in what can only be described as a Democrat fever dream, proposed a “shadow cabinet" which appears to be either a desperate attempt to retain power or secure his place as a talking head on whatever is left of mainstream media. There are Left-wing organizations forming and a network of existing organizations picking up the “shadow government’ banner and calling for opposition to the agenda of Trump while making plans to defeat him before he even takes office.
At the federal level, Leftist tech companies like Movement Labs are subsidizing efforts like “Civil Service Protecting Civil Society” which is “dedicated to stopping the far right and saving democracy.” For their program, which they started planning during the election, if Trump was elected, they believed civil servants would be “pressured to apply retribution to pro-democracy forces - and many will resign rather than resisting that pressure.” In other words, they believed that agencies and civil servants working within those agencies would be required to do their jobs, and would no longer be allowed to use their positions towards their own ends or the ends of their party. They were specifically looking to hire somebody to build a program organizing within the agencies to prevent that “retribution” (read: making them do their actual job) from happening.
At the state level, new organizations are being formed. One example is Governors Safeguarding Democracy - a non-partisan organization dedicated to using their collective legislative, budgetary, executive, and administrative powers to protect state-level institutions of democracy. They will likely work in lockstep with the Democratic Governors Association of which both the founders, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis, are members.
The Left will always tell you what they plan to do before they do it. There is no one guy behind the curtain pulling the strings and pushing the levers. It is always the most well-funded activist organizations and corporations with an agenda which develop ideas, see what sticks, and act with precision based on what moves the needle. They do coalition politics better than anyone. When they have a singular goal, and feel their back is against the wall, they are incredibly disciplined. For them, right now, that goal is defeating the agenda of President-elect Trump.
Thankfully, the Right has the majority will, the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. What it needs to counter the attacks of the Left so that President-elect Trump can achieve what he has laid out, and what we elected him to do, is an infrastructure that can counter the attacks coming from the outside Left. It requires existing organizations and supporters of President-elect Trump to put pressure on the Senate to confirm his nominees. They, and only they, can address the threats coming from inside. This also includes building a partisan and non-partisan issue based network that targets and messages efficiently and effectively using data. This, in turn, requires funding data-savvy (including new media) organizations that are interested in long-term, systemic change, not immediate political wins. Doing so allows the Right to combat the Left issue-by-issue, “shadow cabinet”-by-cabinet from the outside.
President-elect Donald Trump has, at most, 18 months after inauguration to implement the boldest government reforms we have seen in our lifetime. Voting for him is not enough, it is incumbent upon us to do our part to make them happen.
Ami Sanchez has 15 years of experience in DC with a focus on Congress, defense, small business, and federal rulemaking and the regulatory process. She spent more than eight years as a former Democrat U.S. Senate staffer for multiple Senators, and worked on a variety of issues including healthcare reform, immigration reform, and regulatory reform. She was a life-long Democrat and voted for Trump this election.
