Actually, the #Resistance is working

One particularly demoralizing storyline for Democrats — not that they have many helpful ones to choose from — is that they are so overwhelmed by the speed of the Trump administration that they don’t know how to fight it.

That’s not really true. There was a playbook in place for a Trump restoration, built during the 2024 campaign, when the party messaged relentlessly against the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda and tried to make its authors famous. (Quick: Name a former OMB director who’s not Russ Vought.) Democratic legal groups and attorneys general previewed their plans in The New York Times one week after Kamala Harris’ defeat.

Then they executed the plan. There’s a debate happening among liberal lawyers about which cases are the strongest, and which ones risk an adverse precedent if they get to the Supreme Court — a 6-3 supermajority less friendly to them at any time in the first Trump term. But the goal was stopping as much of the agenda as possible, and some of that has worked.

But the faces of this are dispersed and often obscure state attorneys general (Tish James in New York, Rob Bonta in California, Andrea Campbell in Massachusetts) who don’t have their own press corps or big social media personae. The media apparatus that covers Congress has watched Democrats lose, then gotten them to explain why they lost, repeatedly. On social media, there’s been particular progressive angst about Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, who beat New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for the chief House Oversight role, and whose biggest early move — subpoenaing Elon Musk to talk about DOGE — didn’t work.

“My motion to subpoena him, I thought, would have some broader support on the Republican side,” Connolly told MSNBC after the failed vote. “It had none.” That clip was shared widely by the journalist Ken Klippenstein, who has carved out a beat from the stumbles of geriatric House and Senate Democrats.

Another clip, of Schumer chanting, “We will win!” at another federal worker rally, got even more traction. Stewart made fun of it on his show, which has recovered some of the liberal appointment viewing clout it had during George W. Bush’s presidency; it appeared in a New York Democratic Socialists of America spot that encourages voters to register with the party to vote for left-wing mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. (“Look at these fossils,” says an actor in the spot.)

On the Hill, Democrats have heard the complaints about why they’re not doing more. But some say that their voters are listening.

“It’s a whole-of-movement approach,” said Florida Rep. Max Frost, the youngest House Democrat and an organizer for some of the protests outside of endangered agencies. “I’ve heard from a lot of my constituents that they’re feeling better and better about how Democrats are responding.”

Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley praised her state’s attorney general, Campbell, for joining legal actions against the administration. But she acknowledged that the action wasn’t immediate.

“The problem is, it moves slower,” she said. “That’s hard for people to digest, because the threats are so urgent that you want to see a response to counter it that’s just as urgent.”

The Trump administration has described its losses in court as illegitimate judicial hackery, while abiding by most of them.

“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch, where district court judges in liberal districts across the country are abusing their power to unilaterally block President Trump’s basic executive authority,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday, though some of the judges ruling against the administration were appointed by Republicans. “We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists, rather than honest arbiters of the law.”