General Discussion

I think that the one viable strategy to use against Trump is basically what is going on right now, which is a disparate, scattershot approach involving many different attack vectors. Any advantage, no matter how small, should be pressed, because you never know when a small crack in Trump's armor might turn into something larger. See the sudden and dramatic re-emergence of the Epstein scandal over the past week.

I think articles like the one in the OP encourage people to rely too much on the idea that the Democrats could save America right now, but are choosing not to because they're not "taking off the gloves." But at this point in the political cycle -- immediately following a presidential election, where one party has gained control of the House, Senate, and presidency -- our system is not set up to allow for singular, focused opposition. We don't have a "shadow president" -- a single figure that our opposition to Trump can rally around.

A single opposition leader will eventually emerge, but not for another few years -- certainly not until after the 2026 mid-terms. It will begin when various Democrats announce that they are running for president, and are able to gain media traction and focus on their individual messages, and it will reach its peak when the Democratic primaries are over and we have a presidential nominee to get behind.

But until then, we're kinda on our own. At this point in the cycle, "we are the ones that we've been waiting for" as Obama used to say. And I'm fine with that. Anything that can be done to draw attention to and create public disgust over Trump's fascist ways is helpful.

That certainly includes things like Alex Padilla standing up to Kristi Noem, or Cory Booker holding the Senate floor for 25 hours, or Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez holding town halls across the country. But it will take more than that. Democrats wiped out the Republicans in 2008, but it wasn't Republican leaders who brought the party back in 2010. The Tea Party was financed behind the scenes by right-wing activists, but it was powered by regular people. What we have been seeing from No Kings, Indivisible, etc. is something similar. Also see the anti-ICE protests all over the country. Despite the happy face the administration is trying to put on everything, there is broad disgust for many of Trump's policies.

Unlike the author of the Guardian article, I don't believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution to Trump -- instead, we should be focusing on political death by a thousand cuts, and grabbing at anything that makes Trump look weak, whether that's putting him on the defensive over Epstein, or pointing out that he's looking really, really unhealthy these days. If there's anything we should learn from Trump, it's flexibility. We know that his strategy is to bounce from scandal to scandal as quickly as possible, so that his opposition can't focus on one before the next one occurs. So we need to embrace that. Don't complain that his latest scandal is a distraction from the last one, don't fret about the media no longer focusing on something awful that happened a week ago -- instead just pivot to the new scandal as fast as Trump did, and start attacking it. Then move on to the next one. Just keep the pressure on at all times, from as many different angles as possible.

Campaigning -- especially for a shameless freak like Trump -- is relatively easy. You can promise people the world, and if you're a world-class con-man, you can get them to believe whatever you want. But governing -- actually running the country -- is hard. The more Trump's policies negatively affect people, and the more we can keep poking and prodding and diminishing him in as many different ways as possible, the more people will drift away from him.