By Frank F Islam & Ed Crego, January 13th, 2026 (Image credits: Tom de Boor, JNCGPT51)

During the past year, the Trump administration took a wrecking ball approach to governing, damaging pillars of our democracy and reversing societal and civic progress made in America. In 2026, there is a need to start the process of reconstructing those pillars and revitalizing our American community.

The Damage Done in Perspective

Damaging our democracy and society is nothing new for a Trump presidency. As we noted in two blogs posted in 2020, Trump’s first term as president was a period of Repression and Regression.

In the first blog, we detailed repression in the following areas: the coronavirus response, the branches of government, federal government agencies, the Republican party, the free press and media, immigration, voting, and civic life.

In the second blog, we detailed regression: of American workers, women, minorities, big business, small business, urban areas, rural areas, civic learning and engagement, and political partisanship.

At that time, we explained that the Trump administration was not responsible for initiating the repression and regression in those areas, but that its actions, in conjunction with those of other players, had increased the negative effects in many of them.

This time around, the Trump administration is directly responsible for the damage that is being done. This is the case for three primary reasons.

(1) President Trump is using the assaults as a means for revenge and retribution against those whom he dislikes or believes have treated him unfairly.

(2) The Project 2025 plan provides the template being employed in the destruction process.

(3) Members of the President’s cabinet are Trump’s and Project 2025’s executioners.

It is not only the damage being done and that will be done during Trump 2.0 that puts our democracy and the American dream at risk today. It’s also the damage done during the four years between Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the presidential election on November 3, 2020 and his return to office on January 20, 2025.

That damage included: Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, inspiring the rioters to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to prevent the certification of the presidential election, and his relentless activities directed at his MAGA base and “loyal” Republicans designed to widen the political, cultural, and social divide between us.

The American Condition in 2025

In combination, all of this put our democracy and American community in a fragile condition entering 2025. Trump’s wrecking ball approach in this past year has made our democracy much more fragile. It is definitely sliding toward becoming an autocracy, unless this downward trajectory can be reversed.

In late October, the New York Times editorial board published a piece titled, “Are We Losing Our Democracy?” The Board began that piece by stating:

Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

The twelve markers the board examined and their top line assessments for each are listed below. An authoritarian:

1. Stifles dissent and speech. Trump has started to.

2. Persecutes political opponents. Trump has.

3. Bypasses the legislature. Trump has started to.

4. Uses the military for domestic control. Trump has started to.

5. Defies the courts. Trump has started to.

6. Declares national emergencies on false pretenses. Trump has.

7. Vilifies marginalized groups. Trump has.

8. Controls information and the news media. Trump has started to.

9. Tries to take over universities. Trump has started to.

10. Creates a cult of personality. Trump has.

11. Uses power for personal profit. Trump has.

12. Manipulates the law to stay in power. Trump has started to.

In our opinion, the editorial board is being charitable in its assessment of what Trump “has” done and what he “has started to.” We believe Trump is much closer to “has” on almost all of these markers than “has started to.”

In support of our conclusion, consider this analysis of Trump’s behavior in this second term provided by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen in their September 23 Axios article, which begins as follows:

Not since America’s founding 250 years ago has a U.S. president expanded power — and punished critics — in more unprecedented ways than Donald J. Trump.

They continue to observe:

Yes, most presidents stretch the power of the White House and, on rare occasions, blatantly target U.S. critics on U.S. soil. But Trump has veered, often suddenly, proudly and loudly, into unprecedented territory in at least 15 different areas.

Those areas are: 1. Executive power. 2. Free press crackdown. 3. Seizing congressional purse strings. 4. Tariffs. 5. Overriding the Constitution. 6. Purging watchdogs and civil servants. 7. Eroding DOJ independence. 8. Eroding Fed independence. 9. Wartime powers in peacetime. 10. Pay-me capitalism. 11. Targeting big law. 12. Punishing universities. 13. Rewriting health and vaccine policy. 14. Profiteering. 15. Jan.6 pardons.

As we ourselves noted in our first blog of this year, the areas on the Trumping “wrecking ball” hit list include: the Constitution; the Cabinet; Congress; federal government employees; federal policies and programs; federal departments such as justice, education, and health and human services; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; American civics and history; museums; libraries; the military; higher education; large law firms; blue states; sanctuary cities; perceived enemies of the president; and the truth.

How significant or consequential have Trump’s actions been in the first year of his second term? The New York Times Magazine surveyed fifty knowledgeable legal experts, evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, before the election and did follow-up interviews with those same experts eight months into his second term.

Before the election, a majority of the respondents “were alarmed about a second term, given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered those fears were overblown.”

Eight months in, when asked “Has Trump’s second term posed a greater or lesser threat to the rule of law than you expected,” approximately 60% said “much more than I expected.” And approximately an additional 20% said “more threat than I expected.”

One can quarrel with assessments. Given the preponderance of the evidence, however, the conclusion that must be drawn is that due to the first year of the Trump’s second time as president, our nation-state is not in a healthy condition entering this new year. The question becomes what should be done about it.

Healing Our Democracy: The Democratic Party’s Role

The answer is that our democracy must be healed and made healthy again. Unfortunately, given the full-blown nature of the current assault on our American democracy, its people and institutions, there can no single or simple solution implemented to accomplish this.

The first step though must be to stop the bleeding. This can only happen if the Democrats regain the majority in at least one chamber of Congress.

That is the case because the Republicans in control of the Congress (in the House and the Senate) are subservient to the President, and have become his allies in implementing a unitary executive approach to governing the country. They are abdicating the roles and responsibilities spelled out for them in Article I of the Constitution.

As Jamelle Bouie notes in his excellent October 29 New York Times commentary, “Republicans have circumvented the text of the Constitution to make our national legislature a nullity.”

Bouie goes on to state:

Despite what the president and his apologists would have you believe — or what the executive power fetishists on the Supreme Court seem to think — the executive branch is not actually the leading institution of the federal government. The Constitution makes this clear in its structure: Article I belongs to Congress, and where the president is given a narrower set of defined duties, the national legislature is handed a broad array of powers, including powers that, under the British Constitution, had been the king’s.

With the Republicans in charge, Congress will not discharge the powers it was given in the Constitution. It has ceded them, not to a king, but to the President who acts as if he is the king.

Given the precarious condition of our democracy, and a Washington Post/ABC Ipsos poll conducted in October, which disclosed that “Americans broadly disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling his job, and a majority say he has gone too far in exercising the powers of his office…”, Democrats regaining at least one chamber of Congress would seem to be a slam dunk.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. The same Post/ABC Ipsos poll revealed, “But a year out from the 2026 midterm election, there is little evidence that negative impression of Trump’s performance have accrued to the benefits of the Democratic Party, with voters split almost evenly in their support for Democrats and Republicans.”

That, and the continuing disarray of the Democratic party nationally as we start this new year, is bad news. But the results of the off-year elections held on November 4 of this year brought very good news to counteract the bad.

The Democrats swept the table across the country. They won the three major races being contest: Abigail Spanberger was victorious in the Virginia governor’s race, Mikie Sherrill was victorious in the New Jersey governor’s race, and Zohran Mamdani was elected New York City Mayor.

Spanberger and Sherrill were viewed as moderate or centrist candidates, while Democrat socialist Mamdani was seen as a progressive left candidate. In spite of the differences between them, they shared three things in common in their campaigns.

First, their leading and overriding issue was affordability. Second, they stressed local issues that mattered to the voters, and connected directly and personally with those voters, rather than depending solely on media and ads for communicating their positions. Third, they criticized and sometimes condemned the Trump administration’s policies and practices, but did not attack the Trump supporters or voters.

That common ground enabled them to exceed all expectations in their margins of victory. It also enabled those winners to swing first-time Trump voters in the 2024 presidential, such as Hispanics and Asian-Americans, to them.

While Spanberger, Sherrill and Mamdani grabbed the headlines for winning, the Democrats prevailed in other major contests, including: winning the lieutenant governor race, attorney general race, and picking up 10 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in Virginia; winning three more seats to gain a supermajority in the New Jersey State Assembly; securing three new 10 year terms for three Democratic justices on the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court; flipping two seats on Georgia’s Public Service Commission; and passing Prop 50 in California, which redraws the state’s congressional maps.

These other Democratic victories attest to the across-the-board negative results of these off-year elections for Republicans. Will the midterms of 2026 yield similar results in the Congressional contests?

Possibly. William Galston of the Brookings Institution believes probably. In an article he posted, two months before the elections, he looked back at past midterms, and came to the following conclusions:

• The presidentʼs party almost always loses ground in midterm House elections, as has happened in 20 of the past 22 midterm elections stretching back to 1938, and both exceptions reflected unusual circumstances.
• The presidentʼs job approval has a strong impact on the outcome of midterm House elections.
• The odds that public sentiment will shift enough to extend Republicansʼ control of the House seems low, an assessment reinforced by the partiesʼ changing demographic bases.

The overwhelming Democratic dominance in the off-year elections makes Galston’s assessment more probable.

There is no guarantee that the Democrats will win at least one chamber of Congress in the midterms. But if they employ the model used by Spanberger, Sherrill, and Mamdani in their campaigns, that will make the probability even more likely.

Two other pieces of advice that will increase that probability come from Eugene DePasquale, former Auditor General of Pennsylvania, and current chair of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, and the New York Times Editorial Board.

Salena Zito wrote a Washington Post article featuring DePasquale that ran right before the off-year elections. In it, she quotes him speaking to a Pennsylvania Democratic Party committee, saying, “Trump has given us Democrats an opening on all the things he has not delivered on, but we have got to do our part of actually not only relying on his failure, but putting together a positive agenda to get the working-class voters back.”

DePasquale expanded on that perspective in an interview with Zito stating, “They want us (Democrats) to be for something, to offer solutions with a message that broadens our coalition, not shrinks it.”

DePasquale advocated putting forward ideas about solving problems that matter to every-day people, rather than just criticizing Trump or being a left-wing or progressive Democrat. He didn’t say take the center lane, but the Times editorial board does.

Through its research on the 2024 election, it found that “…the only 16 House candidates to win in districts their presidential candidate lost were moderates” (13 were Democrats, 3 were Republican). And “Senate candidates running on centrist messages often outperformed their party’s presidential nominees. This group included four Democrats who won states that Mr. Trump won last year.” Those Democrats were: Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin), Ruben Gallego (Arizona), Jacky Rosen (Nevada), and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan).

In our opinion, what the Times has right is not necessarily whether a candidate is a moderate or a centrist, but does the candidate represent — and do his or her messages — pass the 3 P test. Are the Policies proposed right for the People and Place in which they are running for office? Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, and political commentator and journalist Eza Klein, recognize the importance of and put the 3 P’s into the proper perspective.

In talking about why he picked Eugene DePasquale to be the Democratic Party Chair of Pennsylvania, Shapiro said, “Eugene’s got a lot of wonderful qualities and attributes, but I think what really sets him apart is like me, he understands the power of place and the importance of showing up.”

In his November 2 New York Time Opinion piece, Klein observed,

Think of it this way: If Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayor’s race running as a democratic socialist in New York City and Rob Sand wins the Iowa governor’s race next year running as a moderate who hates political parties , did the Democratic Party move left or right? Neither: It got bigger. It found a way to represent more kinds of people in more kinds of places.

That is the spirit it needs to embrace. Not moderation. Not progressivism. But, in the older political sense of the term, representation.

The Democratic party used to be the party of the working class, the party of the people, and the big tent party. In the elections of 2025, the party started to rediscover who it was and who it needs to become.

If the party can continue that rediscovery process, it will do more than win the midterm elections. It will position itself to be a leader in healing our American community.

Healing Our American Community: American Renewal Plan

One of the things that the Democratic Party should do in that leadership role is develop an American Renewal Plan (ARP or Plan). We called for and outlined an approach for creating such a Plan after Trump’s incredibly destructive first 100 days in office.

Unlike the Republican Project 2025 plan, the ARP should not be a political plan, or a plan targeted at the Radical Right. It should be dedicated to making America a better and fairer nation for all.

The Plan should not be a vehicle to elevate Democratic interests. It should be nonpartisan plan focused on reconstructing and revitalizing our American democracy and community in the numerous areas identified in this blog that have been harmed by the Trump administration.

Each and all of those areas matter. In our opinion, among the most important to the future of our great American experiment are: restoring the primacy of Congress; telling the American story fully; and elevating the American spirit.

Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, stresses the importance of making “Congress great again” in his New York Times article, in which he writes:

A movement to reinvent government can start by insisting that politicians embrace the responsibilities they currently spurn in Congress, while committing to downsizing the presidency through legislative action.

And advises that as part of this process,

Congress must (also) reclaim its authority to build an administrative state that is a reflection of its policy goals, rather than an instrument for each president claiming a mandate. Equally essential is a suite of clearer laws insisting that the executive branch spend Congress’s outlays, while constraining the president’s ability to fire personnel and restructure government.

Repairing Congress is essential in order to make our country whole again. So, too, is telling the whole American story in our history and civics courses. This will ensure that our future citizens develop the fundamental knowledge, skills, and abilities required to engage positively with each other in moving our democracy forward rather than backward.

The Trump administration has placed an emphasis on history and civics during the first year of his second term. The Department of Education (DOE) increased spending on its American History and Civics Seminars Program and designated grants for “patriotic education.” The DOE is also partnering with more than “40 leading national and state-based organizations” in the American 250 Civics Education Coalition. The Coalition is “…dedicated to renewing patriotism, strengthening civic knowledge, and advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”

Taken out of context, this sounds as if these initiatives are positive developments. The problem is that all of the Coalition members are conservative organizations, and the organizations receiving DOE funds may not tell the whole unadulterated story, but only the parts they want to be heard. They may want to “whitewash” our history.

As Justine McDaniel and Laura Meckler note in their Washington Post article:

Civics instruction is often viewed as a unifying topic and has typically enjoyed bipartisan support, but it has become more partisan as conservatives boost civics — the study of the rights and duties of citizenship — as a way to offer a positive narrative about the United States and shift away from discussion of disturbing elements of U.S. history such as slavery and systemic racism.

The Trump administration and its allies have promoted a narrative of American history using a lens that often ignores the nation’s flaws, particularly when it comes to race relations. Labeling discussion of historical facts about slavery and other difficult issues as divisive or negative, the administration has taken a host of steps to instead promote what it describes as patriotism or civics.

What we learn early in life shapes who we become, how we view the world. It determines whether we have the capacity to elevate the American spirit— or to denigrate it.

In 2017, after Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, and had just begun his first term as president, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough published a book titled The American Spirit, with the subtitle, Who We Are and What We Stand For.

In 2026, after the first year of Trump’s second term, that title, changed slightly, provides an important question, asking, who are we as Americans and what do we stand for? Millions of people have begun to answer that question in the No Kings protest marches, and millions more have done so in the off-year elections by rebuking the Trump actions and agenda. There are millions, though, who disagree with those millions.

Colin Woodward, director of The Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, framed this disagreement and divide as follows in the opening of his guest essay for The New York Times:

There is a battle raging across America (and soon in the halls of the Supreme Court) over what it means to be an American and what our nation should aspire to be.

It’s part of a war between two stories of nationhood that we’ve been waging since the United States was created 249 years ago.

One vision is civic. It says that we Americans may lack a common history, religion, or ethnicity, but what we share are the ideals in the Declaration of Independence: Each human has a natural and equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To be American, in this tradition, is to create a society dedicated to making these ideals a reality.

The other vision — an animating force inside the Trump administration — is exclusive and ethnonationalist. Vice President JD Vance laid it out explicitly in a speech this summer: a national identity based not on ideals, but on privileged heritage and bloodlines.

Peter Wehner, former speechwriter for three Republican presidents, makes a similar point in his Atlantic article, writing:

We are one-fifth of the way through Trump’s second term; things will get much worse. So, it’s too early to know whether the damage that Trump and his MAGA movement are inflicting on the foundations of the United States is reversible, or whether the injury to our civic and political culture is repairable.

If America recovers, the path will lie not simply through electoral politics. The fate of the country rests on the recovery of republican virtue, the cultivation of an active passion for the public interest, and a willingness to sacrifice individual interests for the common good. Words and phrases such as honor and love of country have to stir people out of their lethargy and into action.

As we noted above, millions of people have been stirred out of their lethargy; they are elevating the American spirit and speaking out and standing up with honor for love of country. They are concerned citizens.

The nonpartisan American Renewal Plan will provide a framework those concerned citizens can use to heal our American community. Given the devastation that has been wrought, that healing will take years and possibly even decades.

Concerned citizens will understand that. They will have learned what to do by studying America’s history. They will realize that they are writing its next chapters. They will commit themselves to making our American democracy stronger, and our American community more inclusionary and egalitarian, rather than exclusionary and authoritarian.

They will heed the words of David McCullough:

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.

And of former president George W. Bush:

I talk about a larger goal, which is to call upon the best of America. It’s part of the renewal. It’s reform and renewal. Part of the renewal is a set of high standards and to remind people that the greatness of America really does depend on neighbors helping neighbors and children finding mentors.