Hey, Democrats. You Can Stop Playing Dead Now.

The time for wound licking is over. The party must now prosecute the case against Trump and his plans.

SIX WEEKS AFTER ELECTION DAY, Democrats remain in a fetal position. While Donald Trump enjoys a honeymoon, his opposition is barely protesting as he runs right over them.

While some Democrats are eager to offer up postmortems and engage in self-flagellation about how the party failed, most of them are barely speaking about Trump. Even as he outlines his mass deportation plans, makes promises of inflationary tariffs, and delivers post-election acknowledgement that he cannot mitigate inflation, Democrats are quiet. The average voter could be forgiven for thinking Democrats are more interested in what podcasts Kamala Harris didn’t go on than the high-stakes policy debates and political battles rapidly approaching.

On Monday, Trump threatened to sue a pollster, as well as the newspaper that published her poll. [Update: On Monday night, his lawyers actually filed that lawsuit.] He said he wants any Pulitzer Prizes awarded for accounts of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election retracted. From the Democrats, we heard crickets.

Democrats don’t need to wait until they elect a new party chair, or agree on a unified message to talk about this stuff. Yet they seem to be content to hunker down until they have more answers about why and how they lost so many of their former voters to Trump.

We get it. They’re in a hole they don’t know how to dig out of. Indulging their rage at President Biden feels righteous (and it is) and is easier than confronting a triumphant Trump.

But what voters need to hear from Democrats right now is not introspective screeds about what they have done wrong but sharp responses to what Trump is doing wrong. They want the opposition party to hold the president-elect to the promises he has made.

This doesn’t mean Democrats must reflexively criticize Trump or every single one of his nominees or plans. But he has nominated a guy who has never run a large organization, who has a drinking problem, and who has had multiple wives and out of wedlock children before the age of 44 to head the Department of Defense. And the Democrats seem not to have noticed.

Trump is also threatening to jail members of Congress. The president-elect has been trying to force the governor of his home state to name his unqualified daughter-in-law to a Senate seat there. His online mob has been threatening GOP senators with primaries if they don’t approve of his unfit and unqualified nominees. Do Democrats accept this erosion of checks and balances? It’s hard to know. They’re not saying much.

So, sure, let Trump give ambassadorships to friends and even his son’s ex-fiance. But maybe raise a stink about him inviting Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration? Republicans desperately don’t want to talk about it. Maybe Dems should.

And that’s not all they should be saying. Democrats should already be referring to Trump as a lame duck president because it will offend him and his allies, and will focus attention on Trump’s flirtation with running for a third term—as Steve Bannon suggests he will. This is a gimme that Democrats have chosen to ignore.

While Democrats are opposed to mass deportations, with few exceptions they are also not talking about doing anything to stop them, or offering alternatives. Notably Trump’s plans are expensive, and he has not articulated a clear process for them. Yet Democrats are asking fewer questions than Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who—as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs—has said he would oppose the use of the military in rounding up immigrants.

As Trump centralizes power, he is also building a billionaire’s playground. It seems like the coming corruption and absence of accountability in this techno-oligarchic regime would be worth talking about. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), explained on MSNBC that Trump’s effort to just tweet away regulations for billionaires is an explicit declaration of this. But this message needs to be spread far beyond the MSNBC audience bubble.

---

IN A GIFT TO DEMOCRATS, Trump conceded last week he may not be able to lower the price of groceries.

“I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard," he said.

That’s dramatically at odds with what he said during the campaign, when he told the voters, repeatedly, that their groceries would be cheaper when he assumed office. When he won that office, he even said it was because voters were angry at those prices.

“I won on the border and I won on groceries,” he said in his first interview after the election. “Very simple word, groceries. Like almost—you know, who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that.”

Trump will regret saying this. But he did say it: He owes his election—and his avoidance of prison—to high prices. Sure, Harris campaigned on the affordability issue and was tarred a socialist for her plans to combat price gouging. And she lost because those prices were Biden’s fault. But in five weeks, those eggs and their prices are going to be Trump’s responsibility.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries posted on X that “Republicans have spent four years promising to lower grocery prices. Keep your word.”

House Democratic Caucus chair Pete Aguilar offered a statement of his own, accusing Trump of “backtracking on his central campaign promise.” The rest is worth printing in full:

In less than a week, he admitted that he can’t guarantee his reckless tariff plan wouldn’t raise prices, and he acknowledged that it would be ‘very hard’ for him to bring down grocery prices. It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s economic agenda means working families will pay more for less. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are fighting with each other over the best path forward to give billionaires and giant corporations—the same corporations keeping prices at the grocery store too high—a massive tax break that will explode the deficit. Working people trying to get by aren’t going to be better off under President Trump because his billionaire cabinet is more focused on using the Oval Office to reward themselves and pad their own bottom line. The American people deserve better.

This is the way. Grocery prices, tax cuts for the wealthy, billionaires profiting off a second Trump term, and broken promises.

But a statement and a post on X are not nearly enough. Jeffries and Aguilar need to say this as often as possible, in as many places as possible.

In fact, Democrats better get used to carrying some grocery stats around in their heads so that once Trump takes office they can keep asking how much prices have gone down. And if they haven’t, they should note that at every opportunity that is presented to them—ideally ones with voters nearby.

Yes, those voters may be tuning out and indulging their political exhaustion. But elected Democrats do not get that luxury. Being demoralized to the point of paralysis is bad for their party and for the country.

But it’s great for Trump.