Fix the System, Not the Man

Why fighting Trump isn’t enough

We’re heading into yet another phase of political paralysis in Washington — this time over a government shutdown. And as Democrats search for an off-ramp that doesn’t look like surrender (increasingly difficult to imagine at the moment), it’s worth pausing to ask a deeper question:

What’s the most effective way to oppose Trumpism?

For nearly a decade, our politics have revolved around one man’s gravitational pull. First, Republicans spent years trying to figure out how to resist him — until most eventually surrendered. Now it’sthe Democrats’ turn to face the same strategic test. Are they going to spend every ounce of energy trying to block this Trump, or start building the guardrails that could prevent the next one?

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When Opposition Becomes a Reflex

The Republican Party of 2025 is no longer grappling with whether it’s Trump’s party. It is. Whatever debates defined his first term have evaporated in his second. The GOP has a leader — an authoritarian one, perhaps, but a leader nonetheless.

The Democrats, by contrast, are leaderless. They have leaders, plural, but none who can lead. That’s why this shutdown feels so paralyzing. Every Democrat sees the obvious constitutional overreach, yet there isn’t an obvious way, even with party unity, for them to successfully oppose Trump — not without the help of some Republicans. And while there were Republicans ready to sign up for stopping (or at least slowing) Trump in his first term, those Republicans are in the wilderness for this second Trump presidency.

Opposing Trump feels righteous. But too often it resembles punching a hole in drywall: it provides the illusion of strength while leaving a mess to patch later. Mitigation is harder — it means accepting the structural constraints of the moment and focusing on how to rebuild what’s broken.

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The Hand-on-the-Stove Problem

Trump’s opponents keep assuming he’ll eventually touch the hot stove and recoil. But what if he doesn’t care if his hand burns off — or can’t even feel it? When you live in an information silo that never tells you your hand is burning, pain ceases to be a deterrent. Shame and pressure don’t work on a movement insulated from both.

That realization — that the old rules of shame and consequence no longer apply — should shape how we respond. So Democrats and democracy-minded independents and Republicans have to decide: spend the next three years obsessed with the latest outrage, or start fixing the wiring that keeps letting the stove overheat?

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Mitigation, Not Capitulation

Mitigation isn’t surrender. It’s triage — using every institutional check left to contain the damage while building something better. Corporate America calls it “risk management.” Many CEOs told themselves they were simply mitigating when they accommodated Trump’s demands. But too often that “mitigation” became capitulation dressed up as pragmatism.

When the law is on your side, you don’t capitulate. Corporate America may have thought it was simply mitigating the damage Trump could do to their companies. But when you don’t even test whether the law and Constitution are on your side, that’s not mitigation — that’s surrender.

The challenge for Democrats and civic reformers is to mitigate while mobilizing — use the system to restrain Trump now (mostly through the courts), but spend far more time designing a system that won’t produce another one later.

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Fixing the Machinery That Failed

If we’re serious about preventing another Trump, we have to look upstream. We’ve over-partisanized every stage of political life — from gerrymandering to closed primaries to the information ecosystem — and the result is a government that can’t function for the entire electorate.

We’ve let money distort politics beyond recognition. We’ve allowed Big Tech to fuse with Washington in ways that echo the robber-baron era. And like that era, it could all end in collapse — a modern version of Teapot Dome, followed by a digital-age Great Depression.

We should also strengthen the Constitution itself to prevent personal profit from public power. The Founders assumed Congress would act as the check — through the Emoluments Clause and its oversight powers — but that assumption has failed in the modern age. The legislative branch has proven either too partisan or too timid to enforce the principle that public office cannot be used for private gain. And because separation of powers prevents Congress from simply legislating a ban on presidential profiteering, it’s time to consider a constitutional amendment requiring every president and vice president to place their assets in a fully blind trust. It’s the only way to close the loophole that Trump — and future Trumps — have so brazenly exploited.

We cannot have a political system that is seen as a path to riches. Once citizens come to believe that every public office is a personal ATM, faith in democracy collapses faster than any institution can rebuild it. The Trump-led GOP is currently a kleptocracy, and if we don’t do something about it now, the entire system will become a kleptocracy, which puts us one step closer to destroying the Republic as we know it.

Equally urgent is the need to depoliticize the Justice Department and our broader law-enforcement apparatus. Every administration in the modern era has eroded public trust in the department, but Trump has blown past even Nixonian boundaries. If we want Americans to believe again that justice is blind, we have to make its structure more independent — and more balanced.

That could mean embedding political diversity directly into law enforcement leadership. Imagine a constitutional requirement that federal judges receive a three-quarters confirmation vote, forcing consensus instead of party-line steamrolls. Or that the chief opposition party in Congress appoints a share of the top deputies at the Justice Department — say, two of the four. We could stagger their terms to avoid partisan purges and eliminate the president’s power to install “acting” officials, transferring that authority to the judiciary instead.

There are multiple ways to do it, but the principle is the same: create new checks and balances inside the justice system itself so that no president, of any party, can weaponize it for personal or political gain.

These reforms may sound ambitious, but we’ve reinvented the machinery before.

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The Hopeful Precedent

A century ago, reformers confronted a similarly corrupt system. Out of that chaos came the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and the income tax — changes that made democracy more accountable. We can do that again.

But to do so, we have to stop behaving as if Trump is an unstoppable force. He’s not. Trump won’t be on the ballot forever. Maybe a family member will try to carry the torch, but the man himself won’t last another full term. Fatigue always sets in. And even if he somehow found a way on the ballot to seek a third term, the public would likely punish the GOP for trying to blow past that constitutional restriction — to the point that it could decimate the party itself.

The smarter play is to focus less on defeating him now and more on reforming the system that made him possible.

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The Long Game

None of these ideas requires a constitutional convention — just a willingness to relearn the habit of self-government. If we really want to future-proof our democracy, here’s where the work begins:

• End partisan primaries. Taxpayer-funded primaries effectively subsidize private political clubs — an arrangement that would look unconstitutional in any other context. Equal protection, anyone?

• Redraw congressional districts with nonpartisan commissions (and expand the actual House of Representatives while we’re at it).

• Rein in money and influence through transparency, not just regulation. That may take another constitutional amendment.

• Reinvigorate Gov’t regulation for the modern era: whether it’s examining and preventing algorithms that are explicitly weaponized against us, either for political or financial profit, that ought to be a role of a healthy democratic republic.

• Rebuild local media to reconnect citizens with reality and trust. Start by encouraging more service journalism at the local level — journalism that helps people live their lives.

• Modernize constitutional rules for accountability, representation, and blind-trust requirements.

• Depoliticize justice through structural independence, not partisan norms.

Opposing Trump in the moment may feel satisfying. But mitigation — and systemic reform — is how democracies survive demagogues. Punching the drywall feels good for a second. Fixing the foundation keeps the house standing.

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The next Trump won’t be beaten in court. He’ll be prevented by design.

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Author’s Note

This column continues a thread from my recent pieces — “The Broken Congress,” “Do Democrats Have a Primary Problem?,” “Outrage Is the Business Model, and America Is the Customer,” and “Stop Fearing the Voters: The Lazy Death Spiral of American Representation.” Each explores a different fracture in our democratic architecture. Together, they argue that our crisis isn’t just about Trump or Biden or any single election; it’s about a political operating system that no longer serves the country it governs.

Click here to watch my interview with Shane Smith.