In the age of the tech bro oligarchy, it’s fitting that one of the most ubiquitous phrases in Silicon Valley is “You can just do things.” It burbled up as a self-motivating call for those in the tech industry to quit their jobs, “go founder mode,” and get rich. But it’s now become the governing philosophy of the people currently running the country.

Last weekend, those same words came from Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer who has wormed his way into Trump’s inner circle after writing a manifesto all about how to launch a campaign of violent persecution against his “unhuman” left-wing enemies. At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Posobiec gave a speech declaring an essential Führerprinzip for President Trump, calling him “the living embodiment of the American Constitution” before restating the president’s ominous intonation that “a man who saves his nation violates no law.” Shortly afterwards, Posobiec tweeted that same maxim, “You can just do things,” alongside photos of himself giving the speech.

Since taking power last month, Trump has been proving that this principle applies to American politics more than any of us realized. Almost entirely through executive fiat, he has been swiftly and ruthlessly enacting his agenda. During his first 10 days in office, Trump signed far more executive orders than any recent president signed in their first 100 days. Many of them have been directly in line with Project 2025, the authoritarian Heritage Foundation playbook that was unveiled for Trump’s return to power. Independent journalist Adrienne Cobb has been tracking the implementation of Project 2025 agency by agency and found that just over a month into the second Trump administration, 36 percent of it has already been accomplished.

While Donald Trump is busy enacting his agenda of xenophobia and government destruction, it can be easy to forget that ruling parties can enact their agendas for good, also. If people have forgotten this, it's probably also because the Democrats have not used their power to pass legislation that would benefit ordinary people. Comparing the two ruling parties shows a stark difference in how they make use of power.

Through executive action alone, Trump has launched a massive assault on immigrants—cutting off the means to claim asylum, ending refugee protections, ordering indiscriminate ICE raids and deportations, and sending migrants to an unaccountable concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay where they lack any due process or ability to contact legal representation. On his first day, he ordered the end of birthright citizenship, an explicit constitutional right that he’s hoping the Supreme Court will curtail.   

He has reversed anti-discrimination policies in federal contracting, weakened discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, and systematically erased transgender recognition by the federal government. He has dismissed members of the National Labor Relations Board and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who were appointed by previous presidents and still had years left in their terms. And he has fired the inspectors general who are meant to monitor abuses of power.

Without heed to explicit laws forbidding him from doing so, he has allowed an unelected billionaire, Elon Musk, to strangle or outright kill federal agencies and departments created by Congress. He has ordered the destruction of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), put critical humanitarian aid on hold, and blocked money for medical research. He’s carried out a campaign of mass firings of tens of thousands of federal employees with crucial jobs: employees who work in pipeline, hazardous materials, highway, and aviation safety; IRS employees who collect the taxes that fund the government; doctors and nurses who care for veterans; workers who monitor earthquakes and volcanoes; and researchers who monitor pandemics.

The executive branch block of federal funds is blatantly illegal, and an oversight agency has ruled that Musk’s mass firings likely are illegal, too, but the Trump administration has pressed ahead with them regardless because they assume (probably correctly) that nobody will stop them. Some of Trump and Musk’s unilateral decisions—on birthright citizenship, refugees, and freezes to federal spending, have been momentarily held up in court. But the administration has suggested that if courts rule against them, they may simply ignore them. There’s of course the aforementioned quote from Trump that “he who saves his country violates no law.”

But Vice President J.D. Vance has implied that this is more than just bluster. Last week, he wrote on X that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” What exactly he means by this largely depends on what the word “legitimate” means. But it’s pretty clear from other statements that he is not shy about the president simply ignoring court rulings when he sees fit. In previous interviews, Vance has encouraged a then-theoretical president Trump to outright ignore court rulings. In 2021, he said on a right-wing podcast that a theoretical President Trump should  “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, [and] every civil servant in the administrative state … and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” In 2023, Politico's Ian Ward asked if he still believed that and Vance replied, “Yup.” Dan Bongino, the recently appointed Deputy FBI Director, has encouraged Trump to “fabricate executive powers” by creating his own courtroom inside the White House to “start making judicial decisions.” 

The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize the federal government to coerce state level officials, something they’ve accused Democrats of doing, to further their agenda. Most notably, they made a “deal” with New York’s Mayor Eric Adams to drop corruption charges pursued by the Department of Justice in exchange for his “collaborating” with Trump’s deportation regime. They have made no effort to hide that this is a campaign of open blackmail, with border czar Tom Homan threatening to crawl “up [Adams’] butt” if he doesn’t hold up his end of the deal. Elsewhere, Trump has tried to coerce state and local governments to end sanctuary policies for immigrants by threatening their federal funds, which would effectively freeze grants and social services that their people rely on.

Part of the reason Republicans seem to be acting with such impunity is that they face no substantive opposition right now. They hold both houses of Congress and have an iron grip on the Supreme Court. Democrats have protested that they are completely powerless to do anything about Trump’s multi-pronged assault on the norms and policies they supposedly hold dear. When asked if there was any sort of plan, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries asked, “What leverage do we have?” Others like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seem content to just sit around and wait for Trump to screw up. Last week, Democratic strategist James Carville penned a New York Times op-ed arguing that “[I]t’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”

Perhaps things have not gotten bad enough yet under Trump, but this strategy of “playing dead” does not appear to be working. People don’t seem to miss Democrats very much, yet. Their approval ratings are the lowest they have been since Quinnipiac began measuring it in 2009. An astonishing 49 percent of Democratic voters said they disapproved of how their own party is acting in Congress. Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson wrote last month that the Democrats have been a “feckless opposition,” which is true. But arguably a major reason why they are currently stuck as a minority party in the first place is that they plainly refused to use power when they had it.

A word you’ve probably heard a lot from Republicans in the last few months is “mandate.” At CPAC, they endlessly trumpeted that anything they did was just because the "American people" had given them the permission. They have taken Trump’s 1.5-point victory in November as an invitation to go full-throttle on all their wildest ambitions.

But in 2021, Joe Biden and the Democrats entered government with a “mandate” of their own—Biden had won the popular vote by 4.5 points. Democrats, meanwhile, had an unexpected Senate majority and a significantly larger House majority than the one Republicans have right now. But their approach was markedly different. Instead of using their power to “just do things,” that they were elected to do as the Republicans have, there was always an excuse for why they had to limit their own ambitions, for why better things were not possible.

Biden’s core campaign message, more than anything, was a “return to normalcy” following the upheavals of the pandemic and the January 6 insurrection. While Biden ran on many policy proposals—some quite ambitious—he was less concerned with whether they were executed than the way in which they were executed. He was obsessed with notions of restoring “compromise,” “civility,” and “bipartisanship,” norms of governance that he was the last to realize were totally dead. “Just doing things” to deliver campaign promises to people who’d voted for them was antithetical to that notion.

When and why to defy norms and even laws is a question that the Left needs to reckon with. But there are specific instances from the Biden years where a more assertive approach to power would have not only been a more effective strategy for enacting a vision than what Democrats actually achieved, but would have led to more just outcomes.

Easily the most glaring failure of the Democratic coalition during Biden’s first two years was the failure to eliminate the Senate filibuster to pass their agenda with just a simple majority. It took them a year in power before they made any serious effort at this, with many at first fearing what Republicans might do if they retook the Senate. (It turns out that even with the filibuster still in place, as it is now, they’d just ignore Congress and do whatever they wanted anyway.) But by January 2022, 48 Democratic senators, including many who were initial skeptics, had come around in support of reforming the rule, which was allowing Republicans to tank their entire agenda without lifting a finger. Democrats sought to pass a slate of voting rights reforms that were meant to counter Republican voter suppression tactics and generally make voting easier and more convenient. With no hope of support from Republicans, they introduced a resolution to change the rules of the filibuster, just for that specific bill, so the GOP would be required to physically talk on the floor to delay a vote on the legislation. The filibuster reform fell two Democrats short, with abstentions from corporate-backed saboteurs Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). 

By failing to eliminate the filibuster, Democrats basically forfeited most of their domestic agenda by the end of year two. As a result, huge agenda items fell by the wayside. These included:

• A police reform bill that banned choke holds and no-knock warrants, restricted the use of military equipment by cops, restricted qualified immunity, increased penalties for misconduct, and required body and dash cameras.
• The PRO Act, which would protected the rights of labor unions to organize, eliminated right-to-work laws, allowed gig economy workers to unionize, and eliminated many common union-busting tactics.
• Gun control bills proposed in the wake of the horrific Uvalde school shooting, including an assault weapons ban, a ban on high-capacity magazines, and universal background checks.
• A bill to codify abortion protections into federal law after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
• Statehood for Washington, D.C., which would have added two Democratic senators, thereby making Manchin and Sinema less powerful.

Senate Democrats were forced to rely on the budget reconciliation process (which passes with a simple majority) to accomplish anything, and Manchin and Sinema forced them to remove many other key pieces from the 2021 Inflation Reduction Act. These included:

• 12 weeks of mandatory paid family and medical leave.
• Extensions to the Child Tax Credit, which cut child poverty in half.
• Climate measures like a national “clean energy standard” for companies and hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives for wind and solar energy.
• Lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60.

The Biden administration adopted a posture of helplessness as Manchin and Sinema doomed his agenda. Biden refused to wage a public campaign against them, instead trying to persuade them behind the scenes, to no avail, and hoping for Democrats to have a stronger hand after the 2022 midterm elections. (They lost the House, making any proposal without Republican support dead on arrival.) 

It’s instructive to think about how Trump would have handled a similar situation where a clique of Republicans was holding up his agenda. For one thing, he would have passed as much as possible without the help of Congress. In the absence of legislation, Biden still could have declared a climate emergency, allowing him to access funds from the treasury for climate projects. He could have used provisions in the Affordable Care Act to give people Medicare benefits following the COVID emergency declaration. And while he could not force changes to local police conduct unilaterally, he could have conditioned police funding to states on their implementation of policies to reduce police violence or had the Justice Department strip funding from police departments with severe misconduct problems. And those are just things he definitely had the legal authority to do.

As for disciplining Manchin and Sinema, Biden’s prospects were limited by the fact that they clearly did not care about remaining in politics and were willing to serve their corporate donors if it meant they’d get cushy private sector jobs afterward. (Which they ultimately both did!) But one tool of leverage he was unwilling to touch was the use of the justice system against them. 

But both senators were openly corrupt, and it was well-known at the time that they were accepting large donations in exchange for pushing legislation that helped Wall Street and stymied climate action. And Manchin has likely benefitted directly from illegal activity. His daughter Heather Bresch, the president, top lobbyist, and CEO of a pharmaceutical company (jobs that she, of course, got through her merit alone!), was involved in a bone-chilling case of corruption in which she made a backroom deal with Pfizer to acquire a monopoly on life-saving EpiPens that allowed her company to jack up the price by 500 percent. Her company was later fined $465 million for ripping off Medicare and Medicaid. Bresch is one of the largest donors to Manchin, who has in turn pushed for legislation to benefit the pharmaceutical industry. Manchin has also influenced federal legislation in order to directly enrich his family’s coal mine operation, which has earned him millions of dollars.

In a post-2024 election podcast with the pro-Biden Pod Save America guys, the popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker raised the idea of using the threat of investigation or prosecution to pressure Manchin. The host, Jon Lovett, responded with horror and incredulity, “So you want the president to politicize these agencies and use them to go after people?” 

I can understand the trepidation on some level about using the Justice Department as a political tool. But would Lovett have argued that prosecuting Donald Trump was wrong? It certainly would have benefitted Democrats to have him behind bars. But it was the right thing to do because Trump was, and is, a flagrant criminal. (Arguably the failure to put Trump behind bars, with Attorney General Merrick Garland slow-walking his prosecutions in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, is another example of the Biden administration’s failure to execute its power.) Manchin and Sinema have likewise engaged in some pretty flagrant corruption. Biden would have political motivations for threatening to investigate or prosecute them, certainly. But the outcome would have been just either way: a pair of crooks faces accountability for their self-dealing or they are forced to pass legislation that benefits their constituents instead of their corporate donors. That would have certainly been closer to justice than the outcome we got, where nothing got done and both Manchin and Sinema got to cruise out of Congress facing zero consequences for years of selling out their constituents’ interests to the highest bidder.

Perhaps it’s asking a lot of Biden for him to take such an admittedly drastic step. But my patience runs dry when you consider that he balked at using his power in ways that were much more benign and unquestionably legal out of a fealty to governing norms. The most infamous and emblematic example of this is the Biden administration’s refusal to overrule the Senate parliamentarian, an unelected advisor who popped up out of nowhere to tell Democrats that they were not allowed to include a $15 minimum wage—something Biden claimed to be a top priority—in their COVID relief bill. The parliamentarian’s rulings have no real power. They are simply non-binding guidances that interpret what the Senate’s rules say, and the White House has the power to overrule the parliamentarian and has done so on previous occasions. But instead of doing so, Biden’s press secretary instead simply stated he was “disappointed” and that “he respects the parliamentarian’s decision and the Senate’s process.” With that, raising the minimum wage was never seriously considered again. This tends to be forgotten, but the parliamentarian also killed an immigration bill that would have provided a pathway to citizenship for over 6 million undocumented immigrants—this could have potentially saved millions of people who are currently facing the threat of deportation under Trump.

And on the altar of retaining government norms, Biden also refused to do anything about the increasing lawlessness of the Supreme Court, even as the most extreme justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, took lavish bribes from rich donors. Like with Manchin and Sinema, the right thing would have been for the Justice Department to threaten them with prosecution if they did not step down from their posts, allowing Biden to name their replacements. But even if he were not willing to go that far, he could have at least pushed for Congress to add more seats to the Supreme Court. But he still balked at court packing because “If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it maybe forever in a way that is not healthy.” He instead chose to watch and merely shake his head as the supposedly non-political court laid waste to his student debt forgiveness plan; torched the ability of federal agencies to issue regulations; overturned affirmative action; upheld the right to religious-based discrimination; and, just in time for Trump to retake power, gave presidents immunity from criminal prosecution as long as they commit crimes using their official powers.

What did all of this supposed concern for norms get us? The return of a president who is more emboldened and lawless than ever and determined to take revenge. Democrats fretted endlessly that if they bent rules, Republicans would take it as permission to break them. But they don’t need permission to do anything and never did. If they have the power to just do things, they will do them. While Democrats look at this as a moral shortcoming, it really isn’t one. Republicans believe that the monstrous things they are doing are right. Because they believe they’re right, they are unwilling to let some petty rules—and certainly not mere niceties—get in the way. And because they have seen what Democrats do when they take power, they are not afraid that what goes around will come back around.

There is a good chance that we are about to see Republicans push us into some very dark territory in the next four years. If Republicans do the things they have promised, there will be more concentration camps, threats to journalists, violence toward protesters, billionaires looting every public service we depend on, wars of expansion, an acceleration of the climate crisis, and an ethnic cleansing. It may not even be four years—top Republicans have begun calling for Trump to run for an unconstitutional third term. 

If there is ever another Democratic president, they need to be willing to be just as ruthless in their efforts to rebuild from Trump as he has been in tearing everything down. That will not come from obeying norms for their own sake but from using raw political power as an instrument of justice. As voters, we need to make sure that we keep up the pressure to show our leaders that there are consequences for refusing to do whatever it takes to pass the agenda they were elected to pass.