Can Democrats Prevent a Coup d’État?

By Peter Montague, SEHN fellow

A coup d’état is under way. Can Democrats stop it?

It is now clear that Donald Trump’s Republican team is executing a coup d’état against the United States. Timothy Snyder, Yale historian of authoritarian regimes, warned on February 2 that a coup had begun, but it has expanded since then. A dozen or more federal judges have been pushing back, issuing temporary restraining orders to stop Trump’s many illegal and unconstitutional acts—but several Trump advisors, including Vice-President J.D. Vance, are telling the president to ignore the judges’ orders, to essentially declare a presidential dictatorship. If the Trump team continues down this path, the U.S. military will have to decide which side to support—a mad-king commander-in-chief or the Constitution.

What does the public want?

Is Donald Trump simply doing what the public wants? Has the American public taken a hard right turn? Does the election of Mr. Trump mean most Americans want their neighbors deported, think climate change is a hoax, and oppose abortion rights? The answers are no, no, no, and no.

Yes, in 2024 Trump squeaked into the presidency by 1.5 percent of those who voted but he’s no more popular now than he was in 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden. Trump only won this time because 19 million Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 didn’t vote in 2024. Many who stayed home, especially young voters, did so to protest U.S. involvement in the Gaza war, Biden’s expansion of oil drilling, and the rising cost of living.

As Michael Podhorzer explained recently in his Weekend Reading Substack, the 2024 election was not a strong endorsement of Trump or MAGA; instead, it was a vote of no confidence in Democrats. Podhorzer is a well-known American political-data analyst and former political director of the AFL-CIO, the largest labor coalition in the United States.

“The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA,” Podhorzer writes. 

He continues, “Americans are fed up. This election wasn’t just a vote of no confidence in Democrats; it was yet another vote of no confidence in our entire political system.”

Why are Americans fed up with our political system? 

Our political system is not delivering what Americans want most, which is economic stability: being able to afford a home, groceries, gas, car payments, healthcare, giving the kids a decent start (daycare, education), saving something for a rainy day, and maybe even taking a short vacation every year. Instead, they’re getting mediocre wages and sky-high prices. Nearly three-quarters of workers feel their paycheck is too small for the quality or amount of work they do.

Measured against wages paid in past decades, today’s paychecks are pitifully small. During the three decades after World War II (1945-1975), as national wealth-per-person increased each year (measured as gross domestic product, or GDP, divided by total population), wages rose in lockstep. However, after 1978, wages grew more slowly than national wealth-per-person because big corporations and super-wealthy individuals started hording a bigger share of the nation’s wealth for themselves, stiffing their workers. Economic inequality began to rise.

In 2020, a study by the Rand Corporation calculated all this in detail. In its study, Rand showed that, from 1978 to 2018, if workers’ wages had risen in lockstep with wealth-per-person (as they did during 1945-1975), each worker in the bottom 90 percent of wages would have earned an extra $1,144 per month, month after month, year after year, for a total of $13,728 additional wages each year for 40 years, or $549,120 total additional wages for each worker over the 40 years. For each worker. In all, over the past 40 years, the richest 1 percent of Americans have taken $50 trillion dollars from the bottom 90 percent.

On top of that, for decades Democrats have championed education and job skills as their main solution for economic inequality instead of labor rights, union strength, minimum-wage laws, affordable housing, universal healthcare, taxing the super-rich, and, when all else fails, price controls.

Now half of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and 37 percent say they can’t pay their bills, which means they’re relying on credit, or they’re skipping meals, or they’re homeless. Meanwhile the people who dominate the Democratic Party—affluent, well-educated professionals and their wealthy backers—insist that the economy is doing great. They boast about job creation without mentioning the quality of the jobs. Republicans, on the other hand, say the economy is a disaster, which resonates with millions of people because prices are sky high and so are interest rates on credit cards, home loans, and car loans. 

If you’re in the professional class and you’re saving 15 or 20 percent of your income, you have a big hedge against inflation. But if you’re a worker whose paycheck doesn’t keep pace with inflation, you’re probably going into debt to stay afloat.

Americans have a mountain of credit card debt—$1.2 trillion—and that total debt rose 51 percent during the Biden presidency. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively deregulated credit cards in 1978, and interest rates have surged upward since then. The average annual interest rate on credit cards today is 21.5 percent. For new credit card offers, the average is 24.3 percent, which is what many young people are facing. 

In sum, people with moderate or low incomes—especially young people—who rely on credit card debt are paying 20 to 25 percent more to cover basic expenses, compared to wealthier people.

Republicans Benefit From Economic Stagnation and Decline

As New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall recently observed, “Electorally speaking,… Republicans profit from economic stagnation and decline.” Therefore, in a perverse way, it makes sense for Donald Trump and his billionaire overlords to oppose everything that actually improves people’s lives: collective bargaining rights; union strength; unemployment insurance; Social Security; Medicare; Medicaid; the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”); food stamps; cost-free public education (pre-K through trade school and college); access to broadband internet; decent, safe affordable housing; reproductive rights; anti-discrimination laws; limits on interest-rates for debt; affirmative action for the historically downtrodden; environmental initiatives to restore the climate and protect nature; community policing and a fair justice system; strong civil rights safeguards; affordable medicines; anti-price-gouging laws; rent controls; a rock-solid right to vote; and more.

It must be obvious that, if Democrats actually improve the lives and livelihoods of the people who do all the work, they can once again become the majority party for decades into the future. Can Democrats do that?

If we are still holding elections in 2026 (no longer a certainty), by then the public will be disillusioned with the MAGA billionaires and their toadies, creating a huge opportunity for Democrats.

For Democrats to win big, a good place to start might be an economic bill of rights—a modern version of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 proposal: Everyone has a right to a job; an income adequate for food, shelter, and recreation; freedom from unfair competition and monopolies; decent housing; adequate medical care; social security; and education.

Democrat control in Washington in 2028 could make possible expanding the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster in the Senate, eliminating the Electoral College, and ending the corruption of our elections by big money, thus establishing majority rule for law and policy. This, then, could set the stage for the Mission for America, a massively ambitious program to end the climate emergency and, at the same time, create huge new wealth for the general public. 

Because we face two major crises (the climate emergency and an economy that has failed so many people, empowering the authoritarians) and because Republicans rely on economic decline to win elections, the path is open for Democrats to stand up for real economic reforms and win big in 2026 and 2028, and then to mold a decent future for the United States and the world. 

Of course, that will require new, young leaders—and they are getting ready now. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) recently voted 24-year-old David Hogg as vice-chair. Hogg started the group Leaders We Deserve to help young people win elections and he (and others) have vowed to “fix” the Democratic Party.

Is the Democratic Party up to the challenge? Unfortunately, many Democrats in the U.S. Senate have voted to empower the Trump team that is now subverting the Constitution. To cite but one example, every Democrat senator voted to install Marco Rubio as Secretary of State—the same Marco Rubio who is now helping destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); arranging to send U.S. prisoners to a notorious penitentiary in El Salvador, famous for mental and physical torture, sexual violence and forced labor; and selling Trump’s illegal plan to seize Gaza.

To stop the Trump coup, the opposition party can provide total, unyielding opposition.  As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said recently, "We have to stop playing nice in the Senate and block every damn thing that we can." Will the Democrats do that?  In three recent senate votes—for Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget, for Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services—every senate Democrat voted No. It’s a promising start.