THE DAY AFTER

A thought experiment in what could happen once President Trump leaves the White House.

Democrats, urges political journalist and podcaster Cohen, need to stop playing nice, which has been what allowed autocracy and plutocracy to rule the land. Instead, he writes, Democrats “need to understand [that] the old norms aren’t coming back”: Congress now functions like a parliamentary system, where “there is no notion of bipartisanship, no value placed on agreement across the aisle. There’s a majority, and that’s where the power lies.” Americans also need to recognize that there’s “nothing conservative” about the so-called conservatives in power, he writes; the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is “radical and revolutionary,” and it means to strip Americans—pretty much everyone except straight white males, that is—of their rights. The work after Trump will take years, the author says, and it will involve constitutional amendments and a wholesale remaking of the government: “Our goal should be the transformation of our institutions, not merely their restoration.” To that end, he argues, a number of key steps will need to be taken. One is to eliminate the filibuster, which “protects a status quo that the voters have rejected time and time again.” On that note, he adds, since the popular vote seems not to matter much anymore, the Electoral College needs to be scrapped. Still more sweeping is Cohen’s call to remake the Supreme Court, adding four more justices (one for each federal circuit court), term-limiting them to eight years (which, Cohen notes, 76 percent of Americans support), and requiring a justice’s retirement at age 70. Add to that his suggestion, among many others, to retool the Justice Department, so a whole division is devoted to prosecuting “corruption cases throughout the Trump years.”

A battle cry for “complacent friends of democracy” to bestir themselves to meaningful action.