What Trump might trade with a Democratic Congress, and what he won’t
Democrats won the House and the Senate. By Wednesday morning they held 54 Senate seats, with two races still uncalled. The coverage is all about what Democrats will do with power. In reality, they have little power other than to hold hearings and investigate.
In Count the Promises They Can Deliver I scored House Democrats’ 100-day agenda: five promises, one deliverable, and even that one came with an asterisk. I also noted that a Senate majority buys something real, control over nominations, and that it wasn’t on their list. Now they have the Senate. That’s bonus points, but it doesn’t do much more.
The better question is what Trump will be willing to deal on, so that after two years they have more to show than hearings.
Off the table
The Iran war is not a chip. I covered that in Does Winning Congress Give Democrats an Iran-War Off Switch? The power of the purse can’t stop it.
Trump is proud of his decision to go to war with Iran and is not going to apologize for that in any way. Even while conceding the war was a piece of the loss, he defended launching it.
The ACA subsidies are dead. Restoring them means raising taxes. Non-starter. People tell pollsters they want the rich taxed, but opponents tell them something bad will come of it, and the party that votes for the tax increase often pays at the next election. Without the tax increase, the subsidies could be put on the credit card. But then Democrats own the deficit increase. Either way, Trump would have to sign it.
Nobody is cutting defense, either. If anything, we need more, with China, Russia and Iran making problems.
And he’s not going to fold and roll back his signature Big Beautiful Bill. It’s a lifetime goal he achieved.
What Congress wants
Affordability and accountability.
Trump does not need anything. His life may be difficult, but he is not afraid to shut down the government. He can be impeached, but removal from office is unlikely, and then they just get Vance, which is a wildcard and could turn out to be much worse. He was also talking about immigrants eating pets, spreading the 2024 rumor about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
Democrats need the war to end and the trajectory of gas prices to go toward normal.
Government funding runs out December 11, while Republicans still control Congress. That’s the vehicle everything rides on. But Trump does not need a budget; Congress does. He can veto any budget he does not like. Trump cannot run for office again.
On the other side of the ledger, Democrats want Ukraine aid. The stalled bill offers $8 billion for Ukraine’s defense in loans. Loans, not grants. Trump can give up torturing Ukraine to keep something else. That one is not likely important to him.
Congress needs relief on tariffs for affordability.
The big things Democrats want in regard to health care, they are not going to get without tax increases or adding more to the credit card.
Substantial things Trump might be willing to do
Tariffs. Trump might be willing. He already has. Days after Democrats swept the off-year elections in November 2025, he exempted more than 200 food products, beef and coffee among them. When the Supreme Court pushed him onto a stopgap tariff this year, he exempted more than 60 percent of imports from it, against 38 percent at the height of the emergency tariffs. The difference now is that Democrats can claim the credit.
Affordability
People don’t care about the Iran war. They care about the price increases it brought. Democrats need to help him finish off Iran to get gas prices down, not oppose him. Ending the war quickly will only happen if they help him end it. Fighting him over it will get nowhere. That is the main path to delivering on affordability.
Tariffs and gas are probably the main things about affordability. Democrats can’t fix health care any more than Obama could when he had both houses.
There is no stomach for universal health care. What Democrats need first is to get spending under control. There is huge stupidity. Move Over, AI – The Real Boom Industry Is Autism is just one example. Even the FBI started investigating: in December 2024 agents raided Minnesota autism centers in a probe of Medicaid fraud in the state’s autism therapy program. In May 2026 the Justice Department brought what it called its largest autism fraud case ever, and said the program’s claims grew from about $600,000 in 2018 to more than $400 million by 2025. And just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported the FBI is investigating a Brooklyn autism-therapy provider that billed some families’ insurers more than $30,000 a day and sent one mother a $911,000 bill. Federal figures show taxpayers spent $10 billion on autism therapy in 2025, up from $2 billion in 2021.
Nobody is willing to challenge the folly of the current autism overreach. Yet they are treating some of the symptoms.
It’s one example. You can’t sign a blank check for health care.
The U.S. spent about $14,800 per person on health care in 2024. Germany spends roughly two-thirds of that, Japan less than half. Both cover everyone, and both live longer than we do.
Same thing with making college free. They need to get the costs under control first.
Afghanistan was unpopular, and Biden leaving it killed his popularity. Democrats are not likely to make that mistake again.
Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war, tripled the troops in Afghanistan, and left office with Americans still fighting in both.
Ending the war is not the same as ending it on any terms. In May, Economist/YouGov found 68% wanted a deal to end it quickly, but only 34% would take one that let Iran keep its enriched uranium. I covered that in What the Iran War Polls Really Say — and What They Don’t.
Helping Trump finish it means helping him finish it right.
The cheapest currency for accountability: people
Trump’s real bargaining chips are his appointees. He has shown he’ll swap them. This year alone:
March: He fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a shutdown of her department, after bipartisan criticism in both houses. A sitting senator, Markwayne Mullin, replaced her. The Senate confirmed him.
April: He removed Attorney General Pam Bondi after her handling of the Epstein files drew wide criticism.
The policy didn’t change. The faces did.
The next nominations will need Senate approval. This time, a Democratic Senate. Many of the current ones would not have gotten Republican approval if not for Trump’s control of things. Hegseth was confirmed only on JD Vance’s tie-breaking vote. Robert Kennedy as health secretary would get one vote, if that many, under normal circumstances.
Here’s the list, as Democratic leadership would see it.
Pete Hegseth. A former Fox News weekend host who had never run a large organization. Then Signalgate, a strike that killed two drug-boat survivors, more than two dozen generals and admirals fired or pushed out mostly without explanation, and an Iran war that Republican Thomas Massie wants to impeach him over. Replacing him puts someone competent in charge of the war.
The ICE director. Officers have shot and killed people, including two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, and Trump’s last nominee had little immigration experience and was withdrawn after Republican Rand Paul stalled him. A director a Democratic Senate confirms could run enforcement competently.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A lawyer with no medical or public-health training. Trust in vaccines and immunization rates have dropped on his watch, says Republican Bill Cassidy, the doctor whose vote confirmed him. Replacing him is a health-care win.
Some of the economic advisers. Peter Navarro’s tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court and are blamed for prices, and Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street CEO with no trade background, faces calls from both parties to resign after Justice Department files contradicted his account of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Dropping them signals tariff relief.
Todd Blanche. Trump’s former defense lawyer, whom Bondi blamed for the botched Epstein files, was confirmed 50–49 after Republicans Thom Tillis and John Cornyn came around once he dropped a $1.776 billion fund both parties called a slush fund. Trump gave up a policy to keep his man; next time the trade can run the other way, and an attorney general who isn’t the president’s lawyer answers the charge that Justice works for Trump.
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Two real-estate men, neither a trained diplomat, are negotiating wars, and Ukraine’s, which Trump promised to end on day one, is still going. Kushner’s credential is the Abraham Accords, which I’ve argued were an arms deal dressed up as peace. Benching them is entirely Trump’s call, and it puts diplomacy back with professionals.
It’s not purely symbolic. Democratic leadership would count it as accountability, not in regard to corruption but in regard to competence and the absence of sycophancy. The people traded satisfy accountability without impeachment hearings and endless investigations. It will show bipartisan unity, because Republicans didn’t like those people either. Both sides can sell that.
Democrats can give voters visible accountability: the firings, plus hearings that don’t dominate the news. Hearings that dominate the news will not help them.
The folly of the extreme version of accountability
The extreme version is impeachment and endless hearings and investigations.
This time Democrats ran on dissatisfaction with Trump over affordability, something they themselves lost on just two years ago. That is not showing that they can govern. Spending their currency on rage, and fighting someone with a veto pen who is not afraid to use it, will not likely help them in 2028. If they want to really squander the situation, they can have Jeffrey Epstein hearings.
When one party wins, the country is still closely split, but the winner always assumes a mandate it didn’t get. Trump won the popular vote in 2024 by about a point and a half. He was supposed to close the border and help affordability. He took it as a mandate for his wish list from the last 30 years, which went way beyond what people wanted. Democrats are possibly about to make the same mistake.
They do things that half the country, people who also live here, don’t want. For example, half the country does not want tampons in the men’s room. Keep pushing on that and you will never get the other things you want that are more important. That is partly why voters think less of the Democratic Party than of Trump himself. In NBC’s polling, only 27% viewed the party favorably, the lowest since NBC began asking in 1990. Gallup found just 25% had confidence in Democrats’ congressional leadership, also a record low. Trump’s job approval, a different question but the closest comparison, has run between about 34% and 42% in polls this year.
If you legislate that way, the next time there is a recession, voters are going to throw your party out whether it’s their fault or not, and the other party is going to repeal all the legislation they don’t like. And don’t expect the Supreme Court to write laws for you again until this one dies of old age and you are lucky enough to get your replacements (something that took 50 years the last time, for the Republicans). The current Supreme Court does not believe in legislating from the bench.
The other things the Democratic leadership thinks make them different and special are just delusions.
Take usury-level credit card rates. Those are a huge affordability issue, and they have been untouched since the Supreme Court’s 1978 Marquette ruling, nearly half a century. Democrats have had unified control three times since. The one time a cap came to a vote, Bernie Sanders’s 15% amendment in 2009, it failed 33–60, with 22 Democrats voting no. I covered it in How We Got 20% Credit Card Rates and Why You Should Care and If Democrats Cared About Affordability, They Would Be Pushing for 10% Credit Card Caps.
The idea that they are the protectors of democracy is another joke. I’ve written about that from three angles. On the democracy claim itself: Is Democracy Really Under Siege, and If So, From Whom? On the street resistance to ICE: The Democrats’ Version of January 6. On the Supreme Court, which was legitimate when it ruled their way and now needs packing: The Democrats’ Love/Hate Relationship With the Supreme Court.
The Democratic leadership is as phony as a three-dollar bill.
Crowing over their victory and calling Trump, someone they already think is thin-skinned, names and dissing his legacy is going to be as useful as what he did with Canada. His “51st state” taunts and “Governor Trudeau” jabs in early 2025 united Canadians against him.
Insult a man with a veto pen and you get vetoes.
Trump does not think he did a bad job. He thinks he did a great job. On election night he posted that if he had been on the ballot, Republicans would have won in a landslide. The midterms are over. Negative rhetoric is not going to help anything, and it shows that Democrats can’t govern either. I made that case in a three-part series: One Party Can’t Govern, One Shouldn’t, Part 2 and Part 3.
What’s next?
History tells me that the Democrats will do nothing intelligent and squander the two years and their opportunity with investigations, optics and resistance, but let’s see what happens.