There is a man outside a grocery store, engine off, doing the math. Gas hit $4.50 a gallon in May. In February, before a war Congress never authorized, it was under $3. He can fill the tank or fill the cart. Not both.
I have been that man. Different decade, same arithmetic. I know the feeling when the numbers don't add up. And I know what he is not thinking about: democracy.
That same month, the Treasury secretary held up a mock $250 bill with Trump's face on it. A man who can't lower your gas prices wants his face on your currency. That's not a king. That's a con.
Trump's approval rating hit his presidency's floor last month. The man in the car knows why. In Trump's first year, U.S. billionaires added $1.5 trillion to their fortunes. The four companies whose CEOs stood behind him at his inauguration took $51 billion in tax breaks and paid a federal tax rate under 5 percent. Inflation hit a three-year high this spring while Trump asked for patience. Your paycheck lost to your grocery bill. He called your gas "peanuts."
When the Trump banknote image surfaced, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called him a "wannabe king." Wrong charge. The man in the car has never met a king; he has met plenty of guys who took his money.
I spent 20 years as a Democratic strategist. The first rule was never "don't sound angry." It was "don't name the donor." We called it discipline. It was a nondisclosure agreement we signed with ourselves. I signed it too.
Here is the campaign that tears up that strategy. First, run on the robbery, not the republic. Democracy is an abstraction. The number on the pump is a fact. Nobody lost their home to a threat to democracy. They lost it to a payment they couldn't make. Say the words consultants flinch at: robbery, bought, rigged. Put a number behind each one. Don't say "our institutions are under threat." Say "Trump raised your gas and tried to put his face on your money."
Next, name the donors from both parties, starting with your own. Future Forward, the Democratic party's flagship super PAC, runs on Michael Bloomberg, the Simons hedge-fund fortune, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who also cut a $250,000 check to a Nikki Haley super PAC. George Soros was the largest Democratic donor of the 2022 midterms. All of it is legal. None of it is done for the man in the car. The donor class hedges. Confirming that is how you earn the right to be believed about everything else.
Third, win the war you're already winning. The small-dollar fight belongs to Democrats. Last cycle, ActBlue out-raised WinRed more than 2 to 1, $3.8 billion to $1.7 billion. That is a movement built by people who will never see a dime of that tax cut. Trump knows it. He sent the Justice Department after ActBlue and left WinRed untouched, even though WinRed draws seven times the fraud complaints. You don't send prosecutors after a weakness.
Finally, make Trump defend his donors. Use one line, every day, until it hardens: His donors got paid; you got the bill. Trump will not pivot. He will brag. His ego won't let him call that tax cut anything but beautiful. Every time he defends it, he chooses billionaires over the man in the car, in his own voice, on live television. He cannot keep both audiences. Make him pick, and keep making him pick, until even his voters hear the answer.
Critics will call this disarmament. It isn't. It's refusing the fight you can lose for the one you can't. Trump is not a monster. He is a salesman who sold the man in the car a tax cut for his friends and a war for his ego. Then he kept the change.
The only thing protecting the con is the language Democrats keep choosing. The real choice in 2026 is not democracy or autocracy. That framing flatters the people writing the checks and bores everyone paying the bills. The real choice is whether one party will walk up to that car window and say the rich rigged this, read the whole list—its own names included—and mean it.
He's still sitting there. Engine off, to save the gas. He knows the truth. The only question is who says it to him first.
Michael Starr Hopkins is the author of "Burn the Playbook," a former senior congressional aide and presidential campaign spokesman.
