If I could distill Democrats’ Trump era weaknesses—poll obsession, talking point neurosis, fear of confrontation—down to a single action, it might be this one:

Top Senate Democrats plan to unveil legislation that would provide an emergency $200 monthly increase in Social Security benefits through the end of the year, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: It's the party's latest effort to highlight the Trump administration's tariff policies and now-scrapped DOGE-driven plans for service reductions to the popular benefits program….

Driving the news: The Democrats argue that the $200-a-month increase is necessary to shield beneficiaries from price increases stemming from Trump's tariff policies.

• Economists have warned that the levies are likely to drive inflation and — unlike in 2022 — that wages may struggle to keep up.

• The Social Security Administration this week backed off plans to drastically cut phone services after weeks of confusion and outcry.

• Democrats argue that their proposal shows a clear contrast with Republicans on entitlements, pointing to the GOP's plans to cut spending — and potentially Medicaid benefits — through budget reconciliation.

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This might seem like a strange observation, as Democrats are in some sense on offense here. But I don’t think you propose this “solution” to the problem of Donald Trump commandeering and sabotaging the economy unless, at bottom, you misapprehend what he’s attempting, and what opposing it entails.

It’s pretty obvious how this plan bubbled into existence—it’s right there in the Axios report. As the economic consequences of Trump’s trade war snowball, Democrats want to be caught advocating for seniors, and if they can do that in a way that puts Republicans on record against something popular, all the better.

And since it probably won’t become law, Democrats see it as pure upside. The fact that the policy itself would exacerbate inflation, and that Social Security benefits are already indexed to inflation, is of no concern.

But the underlying premise is rotten. The proposition on offer is that if Trump breaks the law or abuses power or acts corruptly in a way that harms the public, Democrats will swoop in to remediate the harm, while the crimes and abuses and corruption persist. That is, to insulate Trump from the political consequences of his own malevolence and incompetence.

The temptation needs to be rejected.

DEVINE INTERVENTION

I’ve been thinking a lot about when Democrats should intervene to limit the harms Trump inflicts on the country and the world. The best hope for the future is for Trump to fail in such a way that MAGA collapses and most of his supporters come to accept that his approach to politics was a failed experiment. That objective militates for a difficult kind of restraint—for resisting the human impulse to reduce harm.

But there are exceptions! There are forms of harm that create unacceptable precedents or threaten unacceptable damage. And there are ways to mitigate harm by reining Trump in or forcing him to back down that also tend to weaken him.

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