Dana Milbank: Democrats Are Drafting Plans to Govern Like Trump in 2029

President Trump now says “there are no limits” to his power, and, over the last week or so, his administration has behaved accordingly:

His acting head of national intelligence, installed without Senate confirmation and despite having no national-security experience, has begun a mass firing of career intelligence professionals.

His cabinet agencies, in support of his dubious claim that renovation problems with the Reflecting Pool were the result of vandalism, have begun rounding up people and threatening them with 10-year prison sentences.

He has shut down a large swath of the National Mall for his attempt to hijack the nation’s 250th birthday celebration with “the biggest rally we’ve ever had” of his MAGA supporters.

He has renewed a push for legislation making it harder to vote, while a key ally encourages armed Trump supporters to flood voting precincts in November.

In other words, it has been a week like all others. Trump has used the federal government as his personal plaything, to punish opponents, reward friends, enrich himself and wield power in a way no president has done before, unencumbered by independent agencies or by Congress. His self-declared emergency powers and his capricious interpretations of the law allow him to do what he wants, when he wants, to whom he wants — often with the blessing of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the applause of Republicans in Congress.

But would Trump’s enablers cheer him on as loudly as they now do if they understood that two can play at this game?

Recently, I spent some time calling around to veterans of previous Democratic administrations and liberal policy wonks to pose a hypothetical: What would it look like if the next Democratic president wielded power the way Trump does?

The answer, it turns out, is not at all hypothetical. The advocacy arms of the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for American Progress and other influential groups on the left are already assembling lists of ways a Democratic president could use the breathtaking executive power Trump has seized.

It’s an embryonic Project 2029, though they don’t use that name, and they do not have the level of coordination that the Republicans’ Project 2025 did — yet. (A group that does call itself Project 2029, run by a pair of former Democratic staffers, has produced a relatively tame first set of recommendations.)

Happily, I heard little about plans for Trump-style vengeance. No less a pugilist than Norm Eisen, the founder of Democracy Defenders Action and a relentless warrior against the Trump administration in court, told me that Trump’s opponents “must not descend into a kind of permanent cycle of the Hatfields and McCoys,” with “endless cycles of tit-for-tat.”

Rather, the nascent Democratic effort contemplates something far more consequential — and it should be even scarier to Trump’s enablers: ways to use the all-powerful, unitary executive that Trump has invented (and the Roberts Court has blessed) to launch a new Progressive Era, in which a Democratic president imposes by executive fiat government run health care and many other ideas liberals have long dreamed about but lacked the votes to enact. Virtually all of it can be done without Congress, using powers Trump has unlocked.

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All faiths have some version of the Golden Rule. In mine, the Talmudic scholar Hillel in the first century B.C.E. argued: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah.” The rest, he said, is just “commentary.”

A version of the Golden Rule informed our system of government, too. Though we had formal checks and balances, we also had presidents who didn’t break norms — because they didn’t want their opponents to do the same. Trump has shattered that restraint.

“Trump has discovered, or created, powers that no president has ever had that have been sanctioned by a right-wing Supreme Court,” says Neera Tanden, a veteran of the Obama and Biden administrations who runs the Center for American Progress. “In many ways, Trump has widened the aperture of the powers the federal government has.”

Here’s a sampling of some policies that liberal policy wonks and officials from previous Democratic administrations believe the next president, armed with these widened powers, could implement — without the pesky inconvenience of consulting Congress:

• Creating a “public-option” government-run health insurer offering comprehensive medical coverage and a similar public-option plan for prescription drugs.
• Funneling federal funds to state-run public-option health insurance.
• Seizing patents from drug makers that developed their products with government funding and giving the patents to others that will produce the medicines at low cost.
• Establishing government-run grocery stores.
• Restarting government fertilizer production, forcing agribusinesses to cut seed prices or lose their patents, and breaking up the oligopoly in meatpacking.
• Initiating direct government lending, and perhaps government-run banks, to reduce banking costs.
• Cutting off all government funds for, and refusing to grant export licenses to, businesses that don’t significantly raise their wages, don’t remove barriers to union organizing and don’t have blemish-free records on labor violations.
• Taking “golden shares” in, or other forms of government control over, frontier AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, banks, pharmaceutical companies and others.
• Denying electrical power to AI data centers.
• Establishing government-run factories that would produce solar and other clean-energy technologies, essential medicines and more.
• Dismantling and reorganizing the Department of Homeland Security.
• Unwinding previously approved acquisitions, including Paramount Skydance’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, or forcing these behemoths to divest pieces of their businesses.
• Forcing nonprofit hospitals to spend billions more on charity care.
• Cracking down on abuses by private equity in health care and by corporate investors in rental housing.
  

Many of the above ideas came from Roosevelt Forward, the advocacy arm of the Roosevelt Institute, an economic think tank. The group’s president, former Biden administration official Elizabeth Wilkins, told me the powers to implement most of these industrial policies are already on the books (in legislation such as the Bayh-Dole Act, the Defense Production Act and the Affordable Care Act), but “we just haven’t had the chutzpah” to exercise them — until now. “Trump fundamentally changed how government works to enrich himself,” she said. “A future president should have no hesitation in doing the same for working people.”

The Center for American Progress will be preparing an agency-by-agency set of policies for the next Democratic administration. It did the same in 2008, but now it’s a “supercharged scenario” because the next Democratic president will be able to “reshape the government,” Tanden argues. While Trump often bends corporate America to his will to benefit himself and his friends, the next president “could use some of those powers to … create a kind of new social contract.”

The Supreme Court has yet to make definitive pronouncements on many of Trump’s most sweeping assertions of power: his routine use of emergency powers, his impounding of funds, his ignoring of congressional spending requirements. Should any of those abuses somehow get the high court’s blessing, it would be hard for a Democratic president to resist pressure to, say, declare a gun violence emergency, a housing emergency, a climate emergency and an affordability emergency, or refuse to spend funds appropriated for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Already, it will be difficult to “put the toothpaste back in the tube,” argues Vanita Gupta, the director of the Center for Law and Public Trust at New York University Law School and a prospective attorney general in a Democratic administration. “Independent agencies, for better or worse, likely will no longer be independent, and there the president will have significant authority.” She imagines that “consumer protection could go on steroids, antitrust regulations could be put on steroids.”

Then there’s the DOGE precedent. The same shortcuts it used to fire personnel could be used to hire workers quickly and reshape the entire federal government. Gupta proposes to “use this crisis as an opportunity to transform how you get things done.”

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I have no doubt there will be calls from some on the left for a campaign of retribution that mirrors what Trump has done: criminal prosecutions of Republican lawmakers and Fox News executives and personalities; FBI and regulatory probes of Republican donors, Trump-aligned corporations and conservative activists; revoking security clearances and protective details of former Republican officials; blocking GOP-aligned firms from government business; threatening the nonprofit status of conservative groups; using the Federal Communications Commission to challenge licenses for conservative outlets and pressure broadcasters to remove conservative voices; firing anybody hired by the Trump administration.

But that would just perpetuate corruption and validate Trump’s authoritarian behaviors. “We can’t live in a country where the president is dictating who DOJ must prosecute, nor can we have an administration that works to make the president rich,” Gupta says. “You can have transformation without corruption.”

Of course, running the country by executive fiat is a lousy way to govern, regardless of who does it. Government policy, directed by presidential whim rather than legislation, would yo-yo back and forth each time the White House changed hands. Few would find government work appealing if they knew they were always an election away from being out of a job. Things would grow ever more unstable because, as Trump has demonstrated, it’s far easier to destroy than to build.

But what if these progressive ideas caught fire? What if the American public decided that all these government interventions in the market were cutting the cost of health care, groceries, energy and banking while pushing up wages? A future Republican president might have trouble reversing them.

Some congressional Republicans have recently pushed back against Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, the White House ballroom and Iran war powers. But these are modest rebellions. Clearly, congressional Republicans, as they surrender their Article 1 powers to the president and cheer his power grabs, aren’t thinking about unintended consequences.

Maybe they are hoping the Supreme Court will turn on a dime and reject as unconstitutional the powers Trump has used when a Democratic president does the same.

Or maybe Trump’s congressional enablers expect that a Democratic president will unilaterally return to the self-restraint that guided our leaders before Trump. If so, they profoundly misread human nature. Too late, they may discover they have sown the seeds of a progressive revival.

Dana Milbank is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.