Former strategist James Carville has urged the Democratic Party to be patient and bide its time following President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders in his first week back at the White House.
Speaking with MSNBC’s The Beat on Friday, Carville told anchor Katie Phang that the Republican president’s opponents ought to let him “punch himself out” before weighing how best to deal with the fallout of his “America First” agenda.
As Phang put it to Carville, “On a fascism scale of one to 10, with 10 being peak fascism, how would you rate Trump’s first week?”
Carville replied, “He’s just gonna keep plowing through. What we have to learn as Democrats, [is] just let him punch himself out. This is a little bit before your time, but people of my generation, they remember Muhammad Ali and his rope-a-dope.”
Carville added, “He’d just go to it the first six or seven rounds. And then you come in and you mash up and you start launching bombs. It’s hard to sit here and look at [any] one [thing]… Greenland, Canada, canal zone, delta smelt… you name it, but you just gotta keep bobbing and weaving, bobbing and weaving, and in due course you’re gonna be able to come in.”
Carville urged Democrats to follow a policy-first approach, which Carville said has helped him win as a strategist under the maxim of, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
He said, “[Trump’s] number one promise, the biggest political promise of his generation, was that he was gonna get food prices down. Then he got into office and said there’s nothing I can do about it.”
He added, “He keeps distracting us, and we keep getting distracted. But we’ll come back in—we’ll straddle [that] target and get it back within range before too long I think.”
