How to Stop Trump Before He Starts
There are tools President Biden and Senate Democrats can use in the next two months to limit Trump’s damage.
As bad as many of us believed a Trump 2.0 administration would be, President-elect Donald Trump’s promises and actions since he won underscore that it will be even worse than we could have imagined.
Look no further than the basket of deplorables he has put forward for Cabinet and White House posts: radical right-wing polemicist Stephen Miller as deputy White House chief of staff; Russia sympathizer Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence; defender of soldiers charged with war crimes Pete Hegseth for defense secretary (who paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault but denies her allegations); former wrestling executive Linda McMahon for education; pseudoscience promoter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services; and snake-oil-peddling TV doctor Mehmet Oz for Medicare and Medicaid, to name a few.
What can be done before Trump and his gang of delinquents start running the show? The first line of defense occurs over the next nine weeks. Joe Biden is still president until noon on Jan. 20. Democrats still have the majority in the Senate until Jan. 3. It is incumbent on them to use their powers to the maximum to lessen the damage that lies ahead, by highlighting the threats from unqualified and unacceptable nominees and from the dangerous policies that Trump and his team are set to implement.
Let’s start with the president. Biden has already acted to protect Ukraine as much as he can from Trump’s virtual promise to sell Ukraine out to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In addition to this week lifting restrictions on Ukraine so they can launch U.S. missiles into Russian territory, he has agreed to send U.S. land mines and allow U.S. military contractors to deploy to Ukraine. He can follow up by delivering as much aid and as many weapons as possible, and by releasing to Ukraine several billion dollars we hold in frozen Russian assets and convincing our allies to do the same. It is critical that Biden put Ukraine in the best standing and negotiation position before Trump takes over and presses the nation to accept any press deal.
Biden cannot prevent Trump from eviscerating NATO, withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea, withholding support from Taiwan and creating a global trade war, but he can use his bully pulpit now to lay out why the political, security and economic framework crafted since World War II is far better than the hellscape Trump proposes with an alliance of vicious dictators and a regime of huge tariffs that will raise prices for all of us.
Whatever pain America endured in fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a world where our allies in Europe, South Korea and Taiwan are threatened could drag America into bigger wars and create global economic catastrophe, a small version of which would occur with a trade war over tariffs. Whatever the limits of our global trade structure, it has avoided a global depression.
Biden should also wield his pardon power to protect the innocent people whom Trump could target with bogus prosecutions – starting with retired members of the U.S. military whom Trump and his defense secretary nominee are threatening to charge with treason over the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Trump has vowed to prosecute a long list of his perceived political enemies, from the three Democrats against whom he ran for president – Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – to Special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former FBI Director James Comey and the Democrats in Congress who ran his impeachment hearings, among others.
He’s also threatened Republicans who dared to challenge him, from outspoken former House GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to lawyer and Lincoln Project co-founder George Conway, as well as those closer to him – his niece Mary Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
President Gerald Ford’s pardon of former President Richard Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974 occurred before any prosecution against Nixon, so we know it can be done. Of course, even with preemptive pardons for imagined offenses, that does not mean that Trump and his attorney general cannot invent new charges. But prosecutions of that sort would look even more punitive and illegitimate than what Trump has threatened so far. The fact that Trump could also use the pardon power for malignant ends should not stop Biden from employing it for legitimate ones.
As for the Senate, its first and most urgent responsibility is to act as a judicial confirmation machine before the next Congress begins on Jan. 3, working night and day to fill every federal judicial vacancy for district and appeals courts. Senate Democrats have confirmed a slew of Biden-nominated judges, and they are confirming more. But the pace is still too slow, and the willingness to cut deals with Republicans is too great.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin must not be swayed by the use of the so-called blue slip – a norm that allows senators to block the confirmation of judges in their home states. There is zero doubt that if Durbin allows seats to stay vacant for this reason, the GOP will ignore the blue slip when they take power, only to fill seats entirely with right-wing Trump loyalists.
These judicial appointments are particularly important to ensure the legal system can be used after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 to impede maneuvers by Trump and his cronies to bypass laws and conventions. If lower court judges who can be appointed now put up some speed bumps and stop signs to slow down Trump’s reckless policies, even this pliant Supreme Court is unlikely to green-light all of them.
The Senate can also act immediately to oppose Trump’s nominees and raise the alarm over White House officials and policy who are not subject to Senate approval. Once the GOP controls the chamber in early January, it is unlikely to give the president-elect’s picks the scrutiny they deserve.
Some appointees, like anti-immigrant extremist Tom Homan for border czar; tycoons and political dilettantes Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy for the made-up Department of Government Efficiency; and Miller for a senior White House job, are not subject to Senate confirmation despite wielding enormous power. Trump’s destructive plans – from detaining and deporting immigrants and awarding ginormous tax cuts to the rich to eviscerating health protections and destroying the civil service – need to be spotlighted and stopped before they are inflicted on the country and the world.
We need every Senate committee to mobilize for pre-confirmation hearings on this rogue’s gallery of Hegseth, Gabbard, Kennedy and Oz, not to mention Pam Bondi for attorney general, John Ratcliffe for the CIA and others.
This isn’t what Democratic senators and their leader, Chuck Schumer, want to do over the holiday period. But it’s vital that they frame for America the very dangerous consequences of Trump’s victory, and the dire implications for all of us if his worst excesses aren’t blocked.
