America’s Undoing Project
Eight actions necessary to put the Trump nightmare behind us
Recently published on Medium, reposting here for anyone who wants to update their 2026-2029 bingo card.
In the American elections of 1932, Democrats won a Senate majority, 59 to 36. Over in the House of Representatives, Democrats gained 97 seats for a 313–117 majority. These results were seismic. Only two years earlier, Republicans had held slim majorities in both Houses of Congress: 48–47 in the Senate and 218–216 in the House.
For those of us who still have some familiarity with American history, the reasons for this seismic shift are well-known. Herbert Hoover had terribly misjudged the American economy, which failed spectacularly in the Stock Market Crash of 1929. That collapse, in turn, ushered in the Great Depression, which Hoover seemed to believe would work itself out on its own. By 1932, Hoover’s leadership had lost all credibility and the American people were ready for regime change. Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the Presidency in a landslide and used his mandate to launch a “New Deal” that revolutionized the American government. Democrats as a result were able to dominate Congress for nearly half a century, only to be displaced by another revolution, the Reagan Revolution, in 1981.
How do such seismic shifts happen? I have argued elsewhere (here, here) that major change only occurs when three prerequisites are present: intolerable PAIN in the present, a persuasive VISION of a better future, and an actionable set of FIRST STEPS to begin implementing the vision. Missing any of these three elements, so the theory goes, people’s natural resistance to change cannot be overcome. The pain must be real and lived, the vision must be clear and mobilizing, and the first steps must be doable and available. All these conditions were in place in 1932: the Depression provided the pain, FDR’s New Deal provided the vision, and the new Democratic majorities in Congress provided the legislation to put in place the practical first steps that made the New Deal a reality.
Today, it’s not hard to see we face a rather similar situation. We may not be in Depression territory yet, but the Trump 2.0 regime is aiming us inexorably in that direction. Under Trump, America has bifurcated into two nations, a nation of “haves” and a nation of “have nots”. The “haves” constitute about 10% of the population and they are doing quite well. So well, in fact, that on average the economy as a whole appears to be doing well, but it is not. Down where the work is actually done, people are struggling with historically high debt, stagnant wages, rising inflation, job insecurity, inadequate or unaffordable healthcare, and a sense of foreboding that is almost palpable.
For those Americans who can manage to look beyond their own financial concerns to larger issues like democracy, freedom, and the dangers of creeping fascism, the view is even more distressing. The stench of corruption and criminality is everywhere. Our President is rapidly deteriorating before the nation’s eyes. Rogue fascist agents seem to be running the country for their own personal benefit, whether in the DOJ, DOD, FDA, IRS, or any other agency that has been taken over by Trump lackeys and depopulated of legitimate leadership. Our international allies are turning against us. Our former adversaries are chuckling with glee.
People are scared. It is clear to anyone not suffering from deep denial that Trump’s plummeting popularity, combined with the unprecedented string of Democratic victories in off-year and special elections since his inauguration, is signaling something potentially epic: a sea change in the electoral preferences of the American public.
However, if my theory of change is correct, all this pain and all these fears are not enough to trigger a political earthquake like we witnessed in 1932. The Trump 2.0 regime may be providing all the pain we need, and more. But it is up to the Democratic Party to provide the vision, much as FDR did in 1932, and it will be up to a new Democratic majority in Congress, and a new Democratic President in 2028, to provide the necessary first steps to begin repairing the damage Trump 2.0 (with or without Trump at the helm) will have inflicted on the nation.
Revolutionaries show up with a plan. Thomas Jefferson had a plan. FDR had a plan. Ronald Reagan was handed a plan. As was Donald Trump. Trump’s plan was called Project 2025. He kicked it off with 143 Executive Orders in his first 100 days (CBS News). Like it or not, the Trump gang must be given credit for coming prepared.
What is the Democrat’s plan for a post-Trump America?
As I’ve been idling away my time waiting for the Trump 2.0 regime to dissolve into chaos, I’ve been contemplating this question. And I’ve come up with a concept of an idea of a plan, a modest proposal, that may be useful to Democrats should they indeed be given the opportunity to take over the smoldering wreck that will be post-Trump America. I call it:
America’s Undoing Project
One benefit of the Trump years is that we are learning in excruciating detail what can be broken in the American political system, how easily it can be broken, and what will be needed to fix it. If I imagine America’s Undoing Project as a book, kind of like that other “project” book we’ve been living with, I envision a chapter-by-chapter outline and plan of action that looks something like this.
Chapter 1: Very publicly disavow and undo Trump’s most egregious public actions
Here are seven things a new Democratic Administration can do on Day 1. These are all symbolic and performative gestures, but they have the benefit of signaling to the American people that a new sheriff is in town and things are going to change:
Halt demolition of the White House complex and construction of the Trump ballroom.
Announce plans to restore Jackie Kennedy’s White House Rose Garden.
Remove all Trump “decorations” from the Oval Office, West Wing, and residence.
Strip Trump’s name off the facade of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Replace all the official portraits Trump has hidden.
Begin undoing other public displays of racism & misogyny ordered by Trump (e.g., in museums and military bases).
End Trump’s efforts to rename military bases for Confederate traitors.
Chapter 2: begin dismantling the worst and most harmful Trump policies
These are actions that can be taken quickly. The purpose is to alleviate the most egregious and immediate sources of pain inflicted by the Trump regime.
Cancel all Trump 2.0 Executive Orders.
End Trump tariffs and return tariff payments to the entities (mostly American importers) who have paid them (this, of course, is only the first step in reestablishing trade relationships and rebuilding alliances)
Halt ICE raids across America
Halt deportations across America
Chapter 3: Enact accountability for Trump and GOP crimes and corruption
These are actions that require more than the stroke of a President’s pen. This is where the hammer of accountability finally begins to come down. All crimes must be revealed, investigated, adjudicated, and punished.
Release all Epstein files, minimally redacted to protect only the identities of the victims.
Launch a historic Congressional investigation into the Trump Administration, modeled after the Watergate investigations. Make it public, televised, riveting, and criminally actionable.
Purge the insurrectionists: Investigate all oath of office violations by sitting Representatives, Senators, and other oath takers. If any are found to have engaged in insurrection or rebellion, they must be removed from office with lifetime bans as required by the 14th Amendment.
Open a forensic investigation of Elon Musk regarding his activities as head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). If he is found to have broken any laws, he should be prosecuted, deported, and his contracts with the US government cancelled.
Open investigations into Trump family profiteering and corruption during the second Trump regime. Review significant scandals, identify violations of law, and pass along recommendations for appropriate indictments and prosecutions to a freshly fumigated Department of Justice.
Chapter 4: Begin rebuilding the democratic processes and institutions Trump and the GOP have gutted
Up to this point, the focus has been on hauling away the garbage. The next imperatives focus on rebuilding processes and institutions that have been weakened, compromised, or corrupted by the Trump regime. Here is how and where the necessary repairs might get started:
The next American President must immediately begin using the Presidential bully pulpit to educate the public and reassert the country’s commitment to American values and principles: due process; civil rights; freedoms of speech, religion, assembly, and protest; freedom of the press; equality under the law.
Shore up voting rights: pass and sign into law the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. These laws have been waiting for passage since 2021 and render illegal most of the electoral shenanigans Republicans have adopted in their quest to overthrow democracy.
Enshrine One Person, One Vote into law. Failure to explicitly codify the right to vote in the Constitution has been a source of mischief for decades. Correct it with legislation that elevates this right to the same legal status enjoyed by the rights defined in the First Amendment.
Return activist and expert leadership for key agencies that have been decimated under Trump 2.0: DOJ and FBI, FDA and CDC, IRS, FCC, FEC, all Cabinet departments, the Federal Reserve.
Aggressively repopulate civil service agencies and strengthen civil service protections against political interference. Expert agency leaders who have been fired or forced out should be invited back with large signing bonuses. Million dollar incentive should not be out of the question to entice the most crucial experts to return. Trump has done them incredible personal damage and they are owed compensation.
Disband ICE , but only following a detailed investigation to uncover and prosecute all violations of due process under the Trump regime.
Similarly reform Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and replace and prosecute all leadership who have violated the legally-protected rights of immigrants, asylum seekers, and citizens.
Begin SCOTUS investigations and reforms, including the following: enact ethics rules; investigate ethics violations (Thomas & Alito in particular); investigate John Roberts’ record as Chief Justice. Consider impeachment if warranted.
Codify major SCOTUS reforms into law: expand the number of justices, enact term limits, depoliticize the appointment process, install an independent inspector general, and enact other reforms as needed.
Chapter 5: Try to repair America’s international reputation
The operative term here is “try”. The United States is not going to be welcomed back into the community of democratic nations without some significant groveling to convince the world that it has put the Trump regime’s celebration of racism, isolationism, mercantilism, and authoritarianism behind it. This will not be an easy task and Americans should be prepared to accept a future in which the United States never again achieves the levels of international respect and clout it enjoyed prior to unleashing Donald Trump on the world. But here are some steps America must take if it wants to make the effort to rejoin a world that Trump has so brutally insulted and abandoned.
Reaffirm America’s commitment to freedom, democracy, and international institutions around the world. A global “apology tour” by the new American President might help.
Revive and restore USAID.
Revive and refund the Voice of America.
Renew and expand support for Ukraine, increase sanctions on Russia.
Chapter 6: Legislative Wave 1 — undo bad SCOTUS decisions
Next, the first post-Trump Administration must turn to the challenge of undoing the many flawed Supreme Court decisions that have paved the way for the assault on democracy that culminated in Trump 2.0. This is the job of Congress and the President, working together to undo legislatively the most egregious legal actions taken by the Roberts Court both before and during the Trump years. Top of agenda should be undoing several rulings that have been disastrous for American democracy.
Undo Citizens United: make bribery illegal again, nullify the toxic concept that corporations have the same rights as people.
Nullify the presidential immunity decision (Trump vs. United States) and restore the principle that no one — including the President of the United States — is above the law.
Reinstate the “Chevron deference doctrine” overturned by the Roberts Court in June 2024. Return the power to interpret ambiguous federal law to the agencies that must implement the law.
Reauthorize and strengthen overturned sections of the Voting Rights Act.
Chapter 7: Legislative Wave 2 — tackle and fix deliberately-broken policies and systems
There are many policy areas where Republicans prefer to keep things broken, rather than fix them. Why? Because policies that are poorly executed, inadequately funded, or simply neglected make people mad. They make people think the government doesn’t work for them, that government is incompetent and self-serving. Fixing these deliberately broken policies will go a long way toward eliminating many of the policy gaps and ambiguities Trump has exploited in both his terms.
Immigration: After the horrifically cruel and racist attacks on America’s immigrants by the Trump 2.0 regime, enacting a sane and humane immigration policy, properly funded, staffed, and policed, with clear rules for moving through the system, should be a top priority for the first post-Trump administration, a priority the American people are likely to embrace with relief.
Healthcare: Republicans are doing their best to dismiss Americans’ need for quality, affordable healthcare. Democrats will be rewarded with an opportunity to fix this. First, they will need to shore up the patchwork of programs operating today (ACA, Medicaid, Medicare). After that, they will be able to make the case, on both economic and moral grounds, for a national healthcare system that gives all Americans, not just the rich, access to the healthcare they need, when they need it. On this issue, Americans are going to need credible assurance that their government is not trying to kill them anymore.
Energy and Climate: America requires a coherent national energy policy, one that acknowledges the reality of climate change and rolls back the insane giveaways the Trump Administration has bestowed upon the fossil fuel industry. Trump’s demolition of Biden climate policies and energy research infrastructure must be halted and reversed. America’s climate expertise will need to be rebuilt, fortified, and protected from the kind of damage the Trump regime has inflicted on it.
Tax reform: After watching too many billionaires and corporate titans cozy up to Trump’s fascistic vision for America, not to mention enduring the ketamine-fueled chaos wrought by Elon Musk, Americans may finally be ready to put aside their fetishistic worship of the rich and support a tax policy that ensures the wealthy pay their fair share in federal taxes. This should include a return to high marginal tax rates for the rich as well as fully funding Social Security, largely by removing the cap on Social Security tax payments for incomes above $176K (the current inflation-adjusted cap). The next administration should also consider taxing wealth, not just income, to begin a much needed correction of the extreme inequality that has robbed American workers of $80 trillion since 1975.
Women’s rights: The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn of Roe v Wade in 2022 set in motion a flood of punitive measures in red states that essentially criminalized American women’s health and bodily autonomy. Congress must codify into law the basic rights guaranteed by Roe v Wade. It should also take this opportunity to formalize the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and officially add it to the US Constitution.
Guns: Americans have been demanding stronger gun laws for decades, only to to be thwarted by Republicans (and some Democrats) deeply beholden to the Gun Lobby. By 2029, following a significant escalation in violence during the Trump years, the country may be ready to pass comprehensive background checks, red flag laws, an assault weapons ban, and other measures meant to decrease gun violence in general, and school shootings in particular.
Campaign finance: One of the most important reforms Congress must take up as part of any post-Trump recovery program is the strengthening and enforcing of campaign finance laws. This, perhaps more than any other action, can rein in the billionaire funding that is now fueling the Republican Party’s anti-Constitutional assault on American democracy.
Crypto: The rise of cryptocurrencies has been closely associated with various schemes to increase the personal wealth of Donald Trump and his family. Trump has recognized that cryptocurrency transactions are a great, untraceable way to bribe public officials, including himself. So he is all in. But in addition to being an excellent tool for political corruption, cryptocurrencies are also a significant threat to economic stability. A post-Trump American government will need to impose strict regulatory controls on the crypto industry, if not ban it altogether.
Social media: Finally, under Trump 2.0 social media platforms have been allowed to metastasize into a cesspool of algorithmically-driven hate speech, conspiracies, and performative racism. To get serious about regulating the social dangers of social media, the next administration should consider creating a successor to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to oversee online platforms in the same way broadcast platforms were overseen prior to the demise of the Fairness Doctrine under Ronald Reagan in 1985.
Chapter 8: Legislative Wave 3 — new policies to set America on the right course
Up to this point, America’s Undoing Project has necessarily been focused on the critical tasks of removal, repair and recovery. All the actions described so far are basically clean-up exercises, efforts needed to take out the trash, repair what is repairable, and recover what has been tossed aside. The purpose behind these actions is to make American government function again.
But even with all these repairs in place, the fundamental issue that got Donald Trump elected in the first place (and the second place) remains unanswered:
The great majority of Americans no longer believe the government works for them.
As Paul Krugman has highlighted in an excellent series of posts on affordability, inequality in America has reached a tipping point. Most Americans now assume, correctly, that the system is rigged against them, and has been for decades. They feel excluded from the benefits of the American economy; they feel economically insecure in the knowledge that a job loss or medical emergency could ruin them financially; and they feel angry at the unfairness they witness daily, as the political power of the ultra-wealthy dictates the priorities of the Trump 2.0 regime. But Krugman’s conclusion offers a ray of hope:
It’s obvious that this situation creates big political risks for anyone perceived as complicit in these economic and political failures — a class that now clearly includes Trump and Co. And it correspondingly creates opportunities for those who can claim to offer to right the economy’s wrongs.
We are once again reminded that intolerable pain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for overcoming resistance to change, and that the Trump regime has gone well beyond the call of duty in providing it. But real change also requires a vision of a better future and practical series of first steps to achieve that vision.
I believe the template for that vision has been sitting in front of us for 81 years. It is FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights, announced in his 1944 State of the Union address but never implemented. I’ve discussed the origins and details of this proposal in previous posts (here, here), so won’t repeat that material here. I will, however, redisplay this summary of results from a 2023 survey that shows just how much the public still desires these rights, not just on the political left, but all across the political spectrum:
We can now see why every one of these rights identified by FDR 81 years ago is still unmet for most Americans today. It is because the Republican Party has been committed to blocking the attainment of these rights since the day they were first articulated. Due to various structural and anti-democratic features built into the American political system, Republicans have been wildly successful in thwarting every effort to make progress on these issues. But now that the GOP is committing political suicide thanks to its blind devotion to the corrupt and disastrous Trump 2.0 regime, its ability to obstruct and delay is going to be seriously diminished going forward. Should political power shift as radically in 2028 as it did in 1932, the American government may for the first time since the 1960s be in a position to pursue these goals unimpeded. Both the American people and the Democratic Party stand to benefit.
The Republican Party must be held accountable. Are Democrats up to the task?
Thanks to the wake-up call provided by Donald Trump and his army of governmental and extra-governmental insurrectionists, a majority of Americans now recognize and acknowledge that our country has been deeply betrayed by the Trump regime. Our federal government is in tatters, led by fools and racists, drained of expertise and experience. Our civil society is frayed, polarized, and infected with escalating political violence. Our international reputation is in ruins. One question remains: can the Democratic Party rise to the challenge of recovery that this existential mess requires? Can Democrats rally a divided and wounded nation to embrace anything like this Undoing Project?
I am not confident that current Party leadership is up to the challenge. They seem to be hoping for a return to a status quo ante that vanished when Republicans decided to abandon American democracy and the US Constitution in the name of fascist oligarchy and dictatorship. The Republican Party today does not work for the American people, it works for a small coterie of billionaires who have recently decided they prefer a fascist dictatorship to a democracy. As a result, the goals of the Republican Party are now aligned with foreign fascist dictatorships and morbidly rich “tech bros” who dream of a new techno-feudalist society under their own benevolent rule. The Party has demonstrated that the American people are simply pawns in its plans, not constituents. If America is to recover from Trump 2.0, the GOP must be held accountable for its crimes, not welcomed back into the American political ecosystem as a legitimate partner in American governance. The proper comparison here is not to any “normal” political party that has risen or fallen in America’s long history of party competition, it is to the only other political party that has tried to end the United States of America, the Confederate Party.
The Democratic Party must adapt itself to the needs of the moment. If today’s leaders are not up to the task of purging the government of the insurrectionists and traitors who now occupy it, Democrats must demand and recruit new leaders who will. In Donald Trump, Republicans have provided us with an even more incompetent Herbert Hoover, along with a political crisis of existential proportions. Whether Democrats can find the FDR-inspired leadership required to lead America out of this crisis is the fundamental question in American politics today. It will begin to be answered in November 2026, but will not be fully answered until November 2028. In the meantime, let’s fasten our seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Great. Let's get the one-pager together. And I recommend starting the list with outlawing all private money in political campaigns before 2028, as democratic representation that even our wealthy Founders eventually accepted is the only thing that will make everything else fully viable.
Excellent piece that we need to present to Congress and the DNC.