Many Democrats appear to have been caught-off guard by how swiftly President Donald Trump has moved to upend Washington — dismantling agencies, firing federal workers and trying to impound congressionally appropriated funds.
Now the party is mobilizing in opposition, and one of the key strategists is a familiar face: Rep. Jamie Raskin, who was a floor manager for Trump’s second impeachment after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor, Raskin has been tasked by Democratic leaders with serving on their “rapid response and litigation working group,” where he’ll help lead the party’s effort to slow down Trump’s agenda in the courts.
In an interview for the Playbook Deep Dive podcast, the progressive Maryland Democrat acknowledged that the party’s strategy was “evolving” and likened Democrats to a boxer who’s been punched in the face.
But he expressed optimism Democrats would ultimately beat back efforts by Trump and Elon Musk to rapidly reshape the federal government.
“We’ve won 14 temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions,” he said. “We are winning in court and the rule of law is going to stand.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity by Deep Dive Producer Kara Tabor and Senior Producer Alex Keeney. You can listen to the full Playbook Deep Dive podcast interview here:
Listen to this episode of Playbook Deep Dive on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're in a different world now than we were in Trump 1.0, when you were the face of what it looked like for Democrats to resist Donald Trump.
But when I talk to folks now about what that resistance actually looks like, I hear a lot of frustration that people feel like there's no strategy on the Democratic side. Are you just still getting your ducks in a row?
I think it's fair to say that the strategy is evolving, but I think it's very much coming into focus.
So what is it now?
Overall, we have to work on a short-term, daily basis to defeat and block every authoritarian, fascistic move against the rights of the people, against the separation of powers, against legislative supremacy to be the lawmaking power. Mid-term, we have to be focused like a laser beam on winning back the House in 2026 and cutting this reign of terror in half. And long-term, we have to be building international democratic solidarity to defend freedom against all of the autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic, authoritarian threats against the democratic world.
That's the strategy that I see unfolding, but there’s the boxing motto: “You get punched in the face, your strategy changes.” We've got to roll with the punches here.
The 2024 election was largely run on a lot of what you're talking about now — defending the Constitution, fighting for freedom and democracy — but that argument did not work. What people were paying attention to and what they felt was inflation and the economy. So why isn’t there more focus there? How does the party strike the right balance?
Well, I know it feels like we've been at this for three years. But it's been three weeks. I think that message will get through.
They got in under fraudulent pretenses that they were going to solve Russia's filthy, bloody invasion of Ukraine on day one. They, of course, haven't done anything about that other than cater to Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump's sick idol. They were going to lower prices for groceries, for eggs, for rent, for housing. They've done nothing like that. All they want to do is lift the debt limit by more than $4 trillion in order to give another tax cut to the richest people in the country. That's the reality of what's going on.
If we haven't done a good enough job in communicating that, we will do a better job communicating that. What else can we do? We're not going to go home and resign. We are the party of democracy and freedom and social progress in America. We're just going to get better. We're going to learn from our mistakes.
I've talked to a lot of strategists in the party that are frustrated that there wasn't a win-loss strategy on some of these. The things that President Trump is doing are things he promised to do. For example, the idea of getting at the federal workforce was one of his promises.
They're implementing the Project 2025 playbook, which Donald Trump repeatedly disavowed. He said he'd not read it, he didn't know anything about it, and he ran away from it. He was going to get the price of eggs down. That's why he won.
But he talked about the federal workforce and that it was too bloated.
If you look at any of the studies of what broke through for them, it was about inflation, and it was about the border, immigration. He has no mandate for authoritarianism or fascism in America.
Why do Democrats themselves feel like the party's flat-footed?
I don't feel that at all.
Well, you don't, but there are a lot of folks who do. I know you probably hear from them.
People are disappointed about what took place and the fact that Trump eked out this extremely narrow victory, and we're all disappointed that we're a couple of votes behind in the House of Representatives.
I don't know that it pays much to look back. I'll just say that any incumbent who was in office — left, right or center — during the post-Covid-19 inflationary period was kicked out of office.
In any event, what do the American people really want? We want to get prices down and make life more affordable. We want the working and middle class to have a chance. Well, what do they want to do? They want to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which adopted rules cutting credit card late fees. We have cut down bank overdraft fees at the CFPB. Well, now the Republicans, they want to repeal those regulations. If, for some reason, they were able to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people, well, then we're going to do a much better job of exposing what their real plutocratic, authoritarian agenda is.
Your leader, Hakeem Jeffries, was at this week's Save the Civil Service rally. He told the crowd that there was an “all hands on deck” effort to keep Musk and Trump from meddling with government workers. This is something that is really close to you and your constituents. Who are the hands that are on deck and what are they doing?
I am working on one small committee, which is the Litigation Committee, where we're working on amicus briefs, legal brainstorming and coordination with lawyers, federal workers and immigrant rights groups all over the country to defeat this onslaught. We're winning. We have won more than a dozen —
Fourteen last time I checked.
Is it up to 14 now? OK. We've won 14 temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions. I think they've won one, which was really on standing. They had a union dismissed on standing saying that the workers themselves had to go to court over Elon Musk's Godfather offer “Fork in the Road” memo, which he took verbatim from the same letter he sent the workers at Twitter when he got in. But we are winning in court and the rule of law is going to stand.
Now, I don't want anybody to get complacent about that because it does have to go up, or some of these will go up, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which Donald Trump has bragged about having packed and stacked to overthrow women's right to choose and of course, it's stuck around to hand him a lot of pulling-a-rabbit-out-of-a-hat victories, like giving him presidential immunity for felony crimes he commits while in office. It remains a very dangerous moment. But right now, the federal district court judges, not just in the District of Columbia, but all over the country are standing up for the rule of law. And the American Bar Association is standing up for the rule of law.
People everywhere are protesting and I go to every rally I can. The first thing I say when I get up is “a rally a day keeps the fascists away.” So we need to have galvanized popular protest at every turn in the country. Right now, we're doing great with the improvised one-a-day pop-up rallies that are taking place in every state capital all over America, at all of the federal agencies and departments.
We were both here in Trump’s first term when there was a protest every single day. People would walk past what was then the Trump Hotel, and protestors would be there, or out in front of the White House, and the Capitol — the rallies could be humongous. Why isn’t that happening now? Are people just exhausted?
No, they are humongous. I don't know if you've been going to them. I've gone to every one. There are thousands of people who came to the Treasury Department, who came to USAID, the Department of Education. They're all over the country.
There were tens of thousands of people at some of these rallies the first time around.
Those were organized. These are pop-up rallies. They're being organized in two or three hours.
This is a very serious time when all of our institutions are under attack by a determined authoritarian movement that wants to replace democracy with something else.
Listen to even what Steve Bannon says about Elon Musk. Steve Bannon says that he's a truly evil individual, and there are lots of people in MAGA who are saying, “Listen to what those Silicon Valley people are talking about.” They are looking for something like a techno-monarchy where a king will emerge to rule over a techno state, and they will leave American constitutional democracy in the dust. That's what they're saying.
How do you make that argument to a mother of four who's a single mom who can't afford eggs? How do you make that argument matter to her? Because that's the disconnect, right?
It's not a disconnect. This message is getting out to people.
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, who gets billions of dollars every year from taxpayers, and Donald Trump, who's a billionaire of some kind, who's been taking illegal unconstitutional emoluments from foreign states as Musk gets lots of money from China and other foreign nations — a working-class person in America is not going to get anything from these people. They are interested in their own wealth and power. I don't know how I can say it any more simply.
What we've seen in just a few weeks is a merger of the tremendous power of the government with the even more tremendous power of the techno-oligarchs and their control over the communication systems.
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How do you win over the voters that did vote for Donald Trump with this argument? Who do like Elon Musk and who do think that he should be doing what he's at DOGE.
I don't think it's difficult. One of the great things about America is that there's always another election around the corner. In democracy, people have a right to make a mistake. I would hope that the vast majority of people who voted for Donald Trump would think of it as a mistake by this point.
The real leverage that you guys have here in Congress is government funding. Speaker Mike Johnson is going to need votes from Democrats to make sure that the government stays open. What is the strategy there to use that leverage?
Here's what I think. The Republicans control the House narrowly. They control the Senate and they control the White House. They said they're going to bring down inflation. This is their chance to govern. If they think they can do it without us, then by all means, go ahead and be our guest.
Now, if they need us —
Which it seems like they probably will, if history proves correct.
If they need us, then they come to us the way that we do in representative democracy.
You call them and say, “Can we have breakfast? Can we sit down and talk about what we need to do in order to pass a budget?” That's our job. That's why we're in politics to do that, but then you have to have a real conversation. If you want to come in and make an offer, great. We'll make a counteroffer, and then we're into the business of legislative compromise.
So you do believe you guys should go back and forth about this?
Well, absolutely, because it's the Democrats who bailed them out every single time in the 118th Congress. The government would have closed down without us, because they can never do it, because they can never keep this or that lunatic fringe of extremists on this or that issue together in their conference, but the Democrats are unified and focused.
Should Democrats vote against government funding if Republicans try to codify the DOGE cuts?
First of all, I don't know what a DOGE cut is. The spending power of America is embodied in Article 1. Congress has power of spending, right?
So if they try to codify what Elon's doing —
What's being struck down in court is all of these cuts of programs and agencies that Congress created. Why didn't they come to Congress? They control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House. They even control the Supreme Court, obviously. At least sometimes they do. Well, why didn't they bring these cuts there? Because they could never get them passed. Because guess what? There are lots of people who live in districts represented by Republicans who believe in NIH, who believe in FDA, who believe in NOAA.
Even if they don't know the name, they're using the services.
They're using the services. They believe that government must be an instrument for the common good. They've been whining about destroying the Department of Education for decades. Why are they not just coming and getting it passed? They could never get it done, and there are dozens of Republicans who would never want to vote for that extreme, right-wing agenda. In other words, they don't have the votes to get that done, which is why they're doing it illegally and unconstitutionally.
But the budget, at least up until this point, they haven't tried to completely rip the Constitution to shreds. They understand it's got to go through Congress. But we're not going to allow them to lay a glove on Social Security, on Medicare, on Medicaid, on Title I, which closes the gaps between rich school districts and poor school districts, on nutrition for children. We're not going to let them do that.
We have tens of thousands of workers who took the fork in the road. It seems like DOGE is not done shrinking the workforce. What do you think it will do to the economy when those jobs completely disappear?
The Trump administration is clearly attacking unions and attacking job security, pension security for the working middle class. And that’s true whether or not it’s workers at a private company for Elon Musk or workers who are at a federal agency, people like air traffic controllers, research health scientists at NIH, or food and drug safety inspection experts at the Food and Drug Administration. Authoritarian societies always target and hollow out the middle class. They don't want a professional middle class. They don't want people to have that kind of security. They want people to be intimidated and afraid to fight their power. Kings love peasants.
Democratic societies build strong middle classes. The labor movement did that in America with the support, I'm proud to say, of the Democratic Party. The party of the plutocrats and the autocrats and the billionaires and the oligarchs will do everything they can to dismantle the bargaining power of working people.
I imagine that you probably feel that there is some kind of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government.
Lots of it.
And that there is a world in which looking for that is a good thing.
The Pentagon has never passed a single audit.
Trump says he's sending DOGE into the Pentagon.
Yeah, well, I hope he then recuses Elon Musk, who has a major conflict of interest.
I don't think he is.
He gets billions of dollars directly from the Pentagon. By the way, we haven't seen his conflict of interest forms, which the rest of us in federal government have to fill out, nor have we seen his conflict of interest waiver forms.
But Elon Musk and DOGE are ostensibly looking for waste, fraud and abuse, right? Which, I think most people would agree is a good thing —
Oh, I think it's a great thing for we in Congress. Let's take the inspectors general. Congress set up a system where there are corruption fighters targeted explicitly at waste, fraud and abuse in every federal agency and department. The first thing the corrupt incoming administration did was to fire 17 inspectors general. They also violated the law in doing that, which says they've got to tell Congress 30 days before they fire an inspector general, setting forth the specific rationale for why they did it. And they didn't tell us, they didn't notify us, and they didn't tell us why. Because telling us why would mean they would have to say, because they want to clear the way for corruption.
But there's no world in which you feel like Democrats could say, “Elon, we actually want to work with you on this. Let's slow down and let's talk about this. And let's do this in the right way.”
We have saved tens of billions of dollars in Congress on corruption. And I can lay out all of the work that we've done on the Oversight Committee. What I don't understand is that they control the Oversight Committee. They control the Judiciary Committee. They control Congress. So they could have hearings and they've got the subpoena power. They can bring anybody in they want to talk about waste, fraud and abuse.
If you have an accountant come and look into your business, do they take over your computers? No. You show them the financial documents and then they analyze where the money's going. That's what a real accounting looks like. This is something very different. Don't fall for the nonsense that this is about some kind of anti-corruption crusade. They got rid of the anti-corruption crusaders, the inspectors general.
What do you think of the argument that Democrats are, in talking the way that you have today and focusing so much on Elon Musk, wasting time? That it should strictly be focused on the economy being bad, as Donald Trump talked about during the election so much?
Well, the economy parallels what's happening in the government. It's a takeover of the government for the wealthiest plutocratic forces in the country and it's a takeover of the economy for the exact same purposes. They will dismantle unions. They're not interested in increasing the minimum wage. They will impose tariffs if they can because Trump wants them even though it's going to be a nightmare and it's going to drive prices up.
We're fighting for an economics and a politics for the vast majority of the people against the plutocrats and the dictators, and they want politics and economics that will suit their purposes.
So you think when some of these impacts of what's happening right now trickle down to the economy, it’ll be an easier argument for you guys to make about how, “They're not focused on you, we're focused on you.”
People are already living them and they're trying to throw tens, no, hundreds of thousands of people out of work right now.
Does so much of this fall under the category of elections have consequences?
Of course they do. The problem is that we're in a Super Bowl-style fight right now. The real fork in the road is between —
Are Democrats the Kansas City Chiefs in this scenario?
No, we're the Commanders. We're going to win next year. The fork in the road is between democracy and autocracy. That's the real fight.
You believe that deeply?
I know that we're in that fight. I understand that we're in that fight. And it's a long-term fight.
We are going to mobilize people to a populist, progressive politics for the vast majority of people and for the things that we believe against all of the sinister designs of their new techno elite. You saw they were sitting right behind Donald Trump at the inauguration. The billionaire oligarchs were in front of the cabinet and rightfully so, right behind Donald Trump.
But that merger of the billionaire tech oligarchs with extremist politics is going to give us a right-wing corporate state. That's what we have to defeat and overcome. We're going to do it and we've got the means to do it. That's our historic assignment.
With all the naysaying and all the cynicism out there, I have been feeling very hopeful about everybody's willingness to fight this. And people are feeling scared. But remember, courage is not the opposite of fear. You've got to feel the fear and then you keep going and that's what courage is. It's not obviating and destroying the fear. It's recognizing it. It's acknowledging it because you've got to feel the weight of what's taking place, but keep going. Keep going. Don't stop.
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