“Roll over and play dead.”

Democratic Party analyst James Carville raised eyebrows recently with some odd advice for progressives. Could he be right?

“It’s Time for a Daring Political Maneuver, Democrats,” longtime Democratic Party strategist and analyst James Carville began in a New York Times guest opinion essay published on February 25, 2025.

“The Republican Party is all too often effective at campaigning and winning elections,” Carville harrumphed, “but there’s another fact about it that a lot of Americans forget: The Republican Party flat out sucks at governing.”

“The first Trump administration largely amounted to tax cuts for the wealthy, 500 miles of a border wall and a destructive pandemic gone viral,” Carville pointed out. “George W. Bush got us into a harebrained war in Iraq and then tried to privatize Social Security while letting our financial system drive smack into the Great Recession. And George H.W. Bush governed his way into a one-term presidency because of the economy.”

“For Round 2 in office, instead of prioritizing the problems he campaigned on — public safety, immigration and the border and, most of all, the economy — President Trump is hellbent on dismantling the federal government,” Mr. Carville exaggerated grandly. “To accomplish this, he has put his faith in the most incompetent cabinet in modern history.”