Martin: “You’ve also written that it has become painfully self-evident that Democratic self-restraint is a form of unilateral disarmament. Can you say more about why you think this self-restraint has hindered Democrats and others who find Trump’s behavior objectionable? Not just objectionable, but dangerous.”

ROSENZWEIG: “Well, I mean, consider the arc of the Biden presidency. When President Biden took office, he had two paths he could take. One was the normal path of legislating around traditional Democratic priorities, expanding healthcare, Inflation Reduction Act, you know, the bipartisan infrastructure act. Or he could have treated this as a critical moment in which the legislative priorities should have been, could have been strengthening the electoral guardrails against Trump’s strength via limiting the possibilities for an executive to exercise unilateral power. He chose the former of those paths, as did the Democratic majority for the first two years of this presidency. And that was I think in large part because they couldn’t bring themselves to believe — and again, to be fair, nor could I. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe that the American people would return to the aberration of Donald Trump and make him a phenomenon. So they self-edited. They didn’t do things that would have strengthened their ability to resist Trumpian excess. Things like limiting executive powers, things like insulating the military against what Trump has now proposed, which is a wholesale firing of disloyal generals. Again, you know, adopting a law, proposals to bring in two more states that would have given them four more Democratic senators. All those would have been extreme things that we would have thought unnecessary up until a few years ago, but now in the face of Donald Trump’s promises, seem palpably essential.”

Martin: “You say that Democrats need to consider unprecedented legal tactics at this point. So the — you know, so the train has left the station when it comes to some of the things that they could have done when the Democrats had not only the White House, but they also, you know, had the Senate. They don’t have any of those things now. So now what should they do? And when you say responding in kind, you know, what does that mean?”

ROSENZWEIG: “Well, there’s a — there’s a host of things ranging from large to small. A small example, I think that President Biden should consider not attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, because doing so sends a symbolic message of normalizing Trump, and he shouldn’t be normalized. That’s a small thing. It’s a norm-breaker. It’s not a huge lift. The Biden Administration in the time that is left to it should consider every — doing everything it possibly can to strengthen the Ukrainian hand, because we know that the first thing that Trump will do when he takes office is sell that poor country out to Vladimir Putin. Going forward, you know, I think that some of the things that we are already starting to see, like with Governor Newsom and Governor Pritzker in California and Illinois, of strengthening state laws as resistors to federal activity, that’s not something that we would have ever thought should be done, that a state should pass laws resisting the federal government and trying to undermine federal authority. But now it seems a reasonable step to take in order to erect as many barriers as possible to, for example, Trump’s threat to use the National Guard to deport illegal immigrants. State law, for example, prohibiting any state’s National Guard from being federalized for that purpose would be an extreme step, but one that may — will be considered necessary.”