100 Days Into Trump Administration, Mikie Sherrill Outlines How Democrats Fight Back and Chart a Different Path Forward
BLOOMFIELD — 100 days into the Trump administration, Mikie Sherrill penned an op-ed outlining her vision to stand up to Donald Trump and chart a different path forward to deliver for New Jersey. Read more below:

New Jersey Spotlight News: Democrats must throw out the old playbook to fight Trump and win | Opinion
By Mikie Sherrill

We’re three months into the chaos and cruelty of Trump’s presidency, and everywhere I go, from meet-and-greets and town halls to people stopping me in the grocery store, l hear from folks who are disgusted by what they see on the news and feel in their wallets. They want to know how we can fight back and win. And they don’t want Jack Ciattarelli as Trump’s “yes man” in Trenton to bring Musk’s DOGE to New Jersey.

So here’s one of my big takeaways to defeat not just Trump, but Trumpism: Democrats need to be willing to play hardball, disrupt norms and institutions, and put outcomes over process to make government work better. We need to throw out the old playbook. And unlike Trump, we need to do it in service of working people rather than billionaires and oligarchs.

Trump won in large part because people hated the status quo. Voters knew that he might tear it all down in potentially devastating and destructive ways, but they still picked Trump’s chaos over a Democratic Party that, in their minds, seemed threatened by the thought of changing anything at all. But since Trump took office, almost every action he and the unelected billionaire Elon Musk have taken have instead made things worse. By a lot.

They’re trying to gut Medicaid health coverage, slash Social Security, defund our public schools, and they refuse to follow the Constitution as they do it. Trump is quite literally crashing our economy — and retirement savings — through tariffs that are the largest tax increase on Americans since the 1960s. And instead of making us a country where everyone has a shot at a good life, they’re breaking and reshaping our institutions to make sure the ultra-wealthy do well, and only their kids do better.

So how can we move forward? We have to play hardball and fight back in the short, medium, and long term.

We’re putting forward legislation, supporting lawsuits, and holding rallies like so many have done during the past few weeks. We need to use every ounce of leverage we have in both the House and Senate. Many Democrats, myself included, were incredibly frustrated to see some Senate Democrats give up their leverage in the government funding fight. They can’t make the same mistake again. Funding expires next on Sept. 30, and Democrats need to come to that fight unified around concrete demands in exchange for our votes.

In the medium term, we need to win elections. Republicans are scared of our power when we mobilize. Take the withdrawn nomination of Elise Stefanik, for example. Republicans are afraid they can’t win in a district Trump won by 20 points. Or look at the reporting about Trump distancing himself from Musk, just a day after Wisconsin Judge Susan Crawford swept to a 10-point victory in a state Trump won despite more than $20 million in Musk money spent against her.

Republican elected officials in Washington won’t stand up to Trump because it’s the right thing to do, but they might show a hint of a backbone if they’re scared to lose their seat.

Yes, we need to play hardball on standing up to Trump. But just as importantly, we need to play hardball on getting stuff done for people in the places where we do have power. That’s especially true with our governors in New Jersey and across the nation. We need to make government work for people, no matter what it takes to do that.

Because the truth is, governance in blue states and cities hasn’t been working well enough. Look no further than our diminishing housing supply and skyrocketing rents, our broken transit, and our rising utility bills.

Put simply, we need to prove to the American people that Democratic governance works and makes life better. We also have to be the party providing opportunity and getting stuff done. Because Republicans, whether in Washington or if we put them in charge of Trenton, sure as hell aren’t doing any of these things.

States like New Jersey — with our governor’s race in 2025 — are where we can make our stand. Where we can preserve our values and our priorities in the face of Trump and Musk’s Washington, which is hell-bent on only looking out for themselves. Here, we can build more homes that people can afford, fix our transit systems, drive down energy costs, and protect our rights and freedoms. We’re going to do it by attacking the bad actors who drive up our costs, like the middlemen who inflate prescription drug costs, and also by addressing the ways the government has driven up costs, like bloated permitting processes for housing, small businesses and clean-energy projects.

And we’re going to have to get creative and punch back. My attorney general will be aggressive taking Trump to court when he violates the law. But we have to go further. If Trump is going to roll back our clean-energy goals and the investments we made through the Inflation Reduction Act, we have to double down on our state investments. I have a plan to do just that with solar. As Trump lets Big Tech CEOs like X’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg poison our kids with addictive algorithms and hate speech, I’m going to take bold action with my plan to protect our kids and our democracy online in New Jersey. If he’s going to pursue a tariff policy that raises costs for New Jersey, I’ll be on the phone with our trade partners like Canada and the European Union to insulate our businesses and consumers from retaliation. And if he goes through with threats to cut Medicaid health coverage for kids and seniors, I’m going to bring together our health care organizations, not-for-profit hospitals, and commercial insurers to develop a comprehensive strategy to close the coverage gaps to protect our most vulnerable populations.

It’s not easy. But I believe to my core that strong Democratic governors are the way forward — Democratic governors who fix our institutions, make peoples’ lives better, and offer an alternative to the chaos and destruction in Washington.

That’s how we win back power, and more importantly, that’s how we fix what’s broken in this country.

Mikie Sherrill, who represents New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and former federal prosecutor. She is a candidate for governor.