How to Attack Trump
/By Don Varyu
Jan 2025
fter the election, I wrote Moment of Truth: A Revival Plan for Democrats. It suggested specific steps to get the Democratic party back in touch with what was once its key voter base—the working class. It urges a series of short, weekly videos explaining the dangers and unfairness of a grossly top-heavy economy--an imbalance that seems a lock to get worse under Trump II. I suggested that former Labor Secretary Robert Reich as the leading spokesperson to tell these stories.
As it turns out, Reich is already on the case! Please watch a video he posted in December that is fully in line with what I imagined. (However, in my mind, this longish video needs to be broken into much smaller, more digestible pieces.)
He urges Democrats to become the “anti-establishment party.” And he challenged them to ardently push these ten positions:
Paid family leave
Medicare for all
Free public higher education
Stronger unions
Higher taxes on the rich
Much higher levels of home construction
Forcing corporations to share more profits with their workers
Limits on CEO pay
Elimination of stock buybacks by corporations
An end to unneeded corporate subsidies and tax breaks
o liberals, these sounds really, really good! But there are a couple of problems. First, we’ve been calling for all these things for decades, and how far did that get us?
And second, what chance is there to get any of this done during a second, even more deranged Trump dynasty?
Well, let me offer a couple small rays of hope.
First, the failure so far of things like Medicare for All and taxing the wealth of the rich does not in any way diminish their public support. (Over 60% want a wealth tax; 57% say government should ensure health care for everyone, whether public or private. Support for stronger gun laws and a higher minimum wage are even more robust.)
Still don’t believe me? Well, here’s one strong but isolated proof point from my home state of Washington. As a whole, we are solidly Democratic here—but there are also counties which strongly favor Trump and other Republicans. In 2024, those deep red counties gave Trump more than 70% of their votes. However, those same voters also supported:
a capital gains tax on the wealthy to support education, and,
a payroll tax to fund long term care for the elderly.
See, even ardent Republican voters sometimes want government to do more to help people!
The second opportunity is this: Trump’s control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches is so total that anything that goes wrong will have to be blamed on him.
And a lot will go wrong.
This means Democrats not only have an opportunity, but a mandate to attack his lack of policies…and thus, his inevitable lack of success. Point to the problems he won’t be solving: prices, immigration, Ukraine, domestic terrorism, Fentanyl, rising rents, violent crime, Gaza, interest rates, climate catastrophe, home prices, public education, health care costs, gun violence, etc. All those failures will be HIS failures.
Of course, he will deflect and deny, while defining new enemies. But soon, there will be nowhere for him to hide. We can spend the next two years (and probably four) demanding solutions. Biden and Kamala and Pelosi and the “squad” and the Cheney commission and the impeachment investigators have all been shoved to the sidelines. The “deep state” is now his state.
We can spend years laying out our evidence to the public before having to present our full case to a voting jury. He is vulnerable, because his ego can’t stand the criticism.
Let me finish by getting a little nerdy on what is my central issue: the obscene concentration of wealth.
First, the good news:
America has only four percent of the world’s population…but 30% of total world wealth. And since 2008, wealth has increased for every segment of Americans. When people boast that we have the strongest economy in the world--they’re right!
The clearly not-so-good news:
However, prosperity—the beneficieries of that strong econoy—are overwhelmingly the top ten percent.
In other words, we Americans are doing an absolutely miserable job of sharing all that wealth. We may have 30% of global wealth, but also 30% of global billionaires. Of all adults on Earth, 43% of those worth more than a million dollars are in the U.S. And every day, those velociraptors gobble up riches that should be more fairly distributed to all Americans—especially young ones.
There’s a calculation called “real wealth”. It’s simple—income increase minus inflation. For the last 30 years, the average growth for American has been one half of one percent. In raw terms, that’s a total of 15%. In the same three decades, growth for the Chinese has been 400%! Is it any wonder why they’ve caught up to us as a global econmy? They’ve grown a middle class…while we’ve shrunen ours.
Three billionaires—Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg—combine to own more wealth than all of the 160 million Americans in the bottom half of the U.S. economy.
The Swiss-based investment bank UBS breaks all this down in a particular way. First, they look at the “average” wealth per adult among the 20 richest nations. This is a pretty simplistic calculation: just take all the wealth and divide it by all adults. And here, America is a shining #4, behind only the dinky countries Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong. By this metric, the average U.S. adult is worth $565k—wow! that sound great! (In other words, if you live with a partner and you’re not collectively worth a million yet, whatever have you been doing?)
But UBS also measures the much more telling “median” income—that is, n other words, the exact point where half of everyone is worth more than you, and half less. On this score, America ranks a paltry 14th, with an individual value of $112k. This still sounds impressive…but the “average” is still five times higher than the median.
The difference between the two could be called the “rip-off gap.” And this can be compared across nations to see which countries are ripping off their citizens the most.
Here’s the list of the four most “top-heavy” countries:
Everyone else in the top ten is 2.5:1 or less.
America is the welathiest nation in the world—run by the grediest.
one of this information is a secret. It’s all freely available. But it’s beyond optimistic to expect the typical voter to dig it all up.
But this is a perfect job for out-of-power Democrats.
We coulduse all this to constantly assail Trump. But, to repeat, we can’t afford to waste citizen attention by slamming him personally—you know, with things like, “he’s so stupid,” “he’s so corrupt”, or “all he does is lie.” Of course, all this is true; but it’s a losing strategy. He (probably) won’t be running again, so what good does that do?
The new target is the Republican party writ large. Shift focus to Congress…to all of Trump’s knob polishers in the Senate and the House…the ones entrusted to fix things. They won’t be fixing any of our problems. They will only make them worse.
In his second term, Trump will fail. Congress will fail along with him. Of course, they will never admit that.
So everytime he declares some kind of victory, loudly ask whether it will bring down the price of eggs—you know, the cost he couldn’t stop pinning on Biden. Hammering all those unforced errors at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and do it constantly.
This is the way to bring this whole damn charade down.
