The Race the Democrats Need to Run Now

What a stunning summer. A debate that rocked the political world as no other debate has in the history of presidential campaigns. An assassination attempt that nearly took one candidate’s life. The other candidate finally admitting the inevitable and leaving the race. No one could have predicted any of these things, and they suggest that more shocks are coming. But surely some things are predictable, and what may be predictable is this: that by late October and early November, most voters will likely be focused on the same thing they’re usually focused on—which party is presenting a better vision for America that will help them and their families.

Donald Trump will want to make the race about himself and his martyrdom—and, of course, about the fact that Kamala Harris is a Black woman. Harris and the Democrats should hit back hard at those attacks. But she could also throw Trump and the Republicans a curve by doing something most presidential campaigns are reluctant to do: She can sell Americans on the idea that the presidency is not just about one person; it’s about an entire government that consists of thousands of people who are working every day to defend their rights, as opposed to a government populated by servants of an authoritarian figure who wants to pick and choose which Americans “deserve” rights and which ones don’t. Trump wants an election that is intensely personalized. Harris shouldn’t duck that fight, but she should simultaneously make the election about two vastly different belief systems—and two approaches to running the federal government.

The president is a person, but the presidency is a machine. Think of it as a vast public corporation that touches nearly every aspect of life in the United States. A president fills about 4,000 political positions in his or her administration, more than a quarter of which require Senate confirmation. They make decisions about everything: broad economic and foreign policy, civil rights, environmental protection, labor rights, consumer protections, transportation priorities, workplace safety, regional economic development, welfare policy, education policy—you name it. Every day, those 4,000 people are making decisions about the kinds of initiatives and oversight the government will and will not pursue. Some of those decisions are minor. But a lot of them are enormously consequential.

A long time ago, Democratic and Republican appointees were different, but not all that different. When Gerald Ford named people to enforce civil rights laws, they … enforced civil rights laws. This started to change with Ronald Reagan, who in 1981 brought to Washington some conservatives of a stripe not seen in the capital before—people like Interior Secretary James Watt, an “anti-environmentalist” who opened up coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, among other disastrous moves. It was around this time that the right began seriously training a young cadre of believers in conservative doctrine, preparing them for jobs in Republican administrations, which also began to recruit lawyers from new right-wing law schools like Pat Robertson’s Regent University and Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. By the time George W. Bush took office two decades later, you had nominees to positions who were actively hostile to the missions of their posts. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney installed as the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality James Connaughton, a former industry lobbyist, who quickly made it a tool of big business. A Rolling Stone investigation laid out the ways in which the administration denied global warming: “The CEQ became Cheney’s shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots.”

Things just kept getting more and more extreme. By 2016, President-elect Trump was relying heavily on the Heritage Foundation for the vetting of potential appointees. Heritage wasn’t just handpicking agency staffers: The right-wing think tank also made a list of potential Supreme Court justices that Trump made public in May 2016, as he was zeroing in on the GOP nomination. It was this list more than anything else that got the evangelical leaders behind Trump, but after he took office, Heritage’s influence was felt at every level of his administration.

These people rarely make big news, but they make decisions every day that affect millions of Americans, most of whom are poor or working class, or live in a fragile or threatened area, or are being ripped off by some unethical lender or exploited by big business, or in some other way need the federal government to protect their interests. Democratic and Republican administrations treat these Americans very, very differently. Let’s quickly look at some examples.

• Department of Justice. Arguably no federal department changes more from Democratic to Republican administrations. Under Trump, the DOJ supported discriminatory voter ID laws in Texas; all but froze investigations of brutal police departments, including in Minneapolis after George Floyd’s murder; opposed race-conscious admissions at Harvard; argued in court against federal workplace protections for LGBTQ employees. Under Joe Biden, the department filed voting rights lawsuits against Texas and other states; sued Idaho after the state passed abortion restrictions; created a Reproductive Rights Task Force; opened investigations into the Minneapolis PD and other police departments accused of misconduct; won more than $100 million in relief for communities of color affected by bank redlining.

• National Labor Relations Board. Trump’s head of the NLRB was John Ring, a corporate lawyer who represented employers. Ring’s NLRB suspended union elections during the pandemic; implemented provisions to make union elections take longer and be more exposed to litigation; overruled an Obama-era rule on how a bargaining unit was determined, making it substantially easier for employers to determine the size and scope of the unit.

Biden’s NLRB, led by general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, curtailed employers’ ability to delay union elections; cracked down hard on employers that committed an unfair labor practice during an election period; expanded the NLRB’s authority to impose financial penalties on employers for unfair labor practices; and much more.

• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Under Trump appointees Kathy Kraninger and Mick Mulvaney, enforcement activity at the CFPB fell by 80 percent from its peak in 2015; refunds from mortgage-lending cases dropped by 99 percent from Obama-era levels; the bureau enforced exactly three cases alleging deceptive practices and ordered no financial restitution, compared to 116 cases under Barack Obama with consumer relief averaging $94 million per case.

Under Biden head Rohit Chopra, CFPB has been a dynamo. It ordered Bank of America to return more than $100 million to customers charged various kinds of fees; fined Wells Fargo $3.7 billion for wrongfully seizing borrowers’ homes; won back $140 million from companies that charged consumers various junk fees.

I could go on and on in this vein. The Federal Trade Commission, where Lina Khan is suing Amazon for monopolistic practices and has blocked several mergers that would reduce competition and give corporations more power. The Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, where Jonathan Kanter won an $85 million wage settlement against food conglomerates for wage suppression and collusion. The EPA, where Trump appointee Scott Pruitt made a number of pro-industry moves, and Biden chief Michael Regan has spent billions ensuring millions of Americans have access to clean water. The IRS, where wealthy Americans’ tax cheating “became almost risk-free” during the Trump years; but, thanks to the Biden-signed Inflation Reduction Act, the agency has clawed back $1 billion from rich tax cheats.

These may sound like small accomplishments individually. Collectively, though, they—and the many things I haven’t even mentioned (housing, small businesses, pharmaceuticals, medical ethics, etc.)—add up. Who do you want overseeing voting rights in this country? Someone who genuinely wants to make sure that every citizen can vote, or a graduate of the right-wing, anti-abortion Ave Maria School of Law who has been trained to think voter fraud is the problem? That’s a lot more important than any concerns Democrats might have about Kamala Harris.

With three months to go until voters start heading to the polls, we face the prospect of Trump returning to office and supercharging this whole matter with Heritage’s Project 2025, which promises to drastically remake the federal government by firing career employees and replacing them with party apparatchiks. The movement of thousands of employees from civil service to serving at the president’s pleasure means that the executive branch will be stuffed with Trump yes-people.

If employed, Project 2025 will affect the lives of ordinary people in countless destructive and destabilizing ways. It will mean the striking of the terms “abortion, reproductive health, [and] reproductive rights” from all federal rules and regulations. It will mean the review of all FBI investigations—“the deep state” in Trump’s authoritarian jargon—for the obvious purpose of ending all probes into conservatives and Republicans. It will reverse policies giving rights and protections to transgender people and shrink the EPA and rescind climate policies. It will militarize the border, severely restrict legal immigration, and deport millions of undocumented migrants. It will destroy public education as we know it. And much more.

And I haven’t even mentioned the biggest prize of all. If Trump wins, he may make three more appointments to the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas (76) and Samuel Alito (74) might well retire, allowing Trump to replace them with justices who are just like them but 25 years (or more!) younger. If he’s lucky and the rest of us aren’t, he might be able to replace a liberal. Imagine a 7–2 Supreme Court. Down goes Obergefell (same-sex marriage), Griswold (contraception), and Lawrence (relations between consenting adults). And let’s throw in Baker and Reynolds (one person, one vote). And then there are the many affirmative things such a court might do. I’ll name just one: the elimination of virtually all campaign finance laws.

Don’t think they’re not thinking about it. They won’t call it a day after a few more wins. They want a Christian nationalist country, and a country where the checks and choke points that have prevented such a radical transformation of our society are gone, thanks to the evisceration of the civil service and bureaucracy and court decisions like the Supreme Court’s astonishing recent holding that “official acts,” however a president defines them, are beyond the reach of the law. A second Trump term will get them a good ways down that road, in addition to destroying NATO and allying the United States of America with Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the rest of the world’s authoritarians.

The enthusiasm and unity with which the Democratic and progressive worlds responded to the presumptive Harris candidacy—the money raised, the endorsements—were exhilarating to behold. They suggest that Democratic voters will be far more engaged in this race than they would have behind Joe Biden. Still, there’s a lot about Harris as presidential candidate that we don’t know. About Trump, we do know all we need to know: He’ll want to make the race entirely personal—strength versus weakness, with all the race and gender nods and winks implied therein.

It’s not inevitable that Harris would lose such a race. Her early appearances since becoming the party’s presumptive nominee have been stellar; she is clearly a much stronger politician than she was four years ago. She represents the future far more than Trump, and she embodies a rising America, while Trump embodies one holding on for dear life. But that race is still a race fought largely on the terms of the man who talks, and talks, mostly about himself.

That’s all the more reason for Harris to make the race a contest between not only two people but two ideas of America, two extremely different visions of what the federal government can and will do to protect the rights of all Americans, especially vulnerable ones. That means talking about Trump’s plans. But just as importantly, it means trying to make voters understand that the presidency is much larger than one person. It’s an army of people with a set of beliefs who either will or will not protect abortion rights, defend workers’ interests, insist upon the basic human dignity of migrants, fight for the human and civil rights of LGBTQ people, continue the fight against the effects of climate change, uphold civil liberties, and respect the principles of democracy. That’s a fight that takes the focus off Trump’s martyrdom and puts it not just on the bureaucracy but on the people they serve. It’s a fight that might be winnable.