Having said that, I am also in favor of democracies regularly changing governments, swinging from left to right and back, with each government providing some counterweight to the other. If you leave one government in power for too long, things always degenerate. Democracy is served by letting the other side try to do better. Democracy is also served by that other side failing to do better. There are some parties in Europe that are in permanent opposition, and I find it far too easy for them to criticize the people who govern, while never taking on that responsibility for themselves.

Effective opposition to me is basically a running commentary on a) what the government is doing wrong, and b) why the policies of your side would lead to a better result. Unfortunately, effective opposition is rare these days. Some opposition parties just refuse to do anything at all, just waiting for the next election. Other opposition exaggerates in the other direction: Constant outrage and hyperbole at anything the government does, conveniently leaving out the part how to do better. The worst is opposition by political violence.

I do not subscribe to the idea that the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th were freedom fighters, while the people throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorists. But neither do I subscribe to the reverse position. I would even say that it is dangerous to try to either justify one with the other, or to try to relativize one form of political violence by pointing at another and saying "they are worse". The burning Tesla cars generally do not belong to Elon Musk, and a lot of people bought a Tesla or opened a Tesla dealership long before Elon went crazy. I totally support boycotting Tesla, and generally smile when I hear about Tesla's drops in sales in Europe, and corresponding drop in share price. Publishing a database of all Tesla owners and encouraging activists to seek these private citizens out and light their cars on fire to me is not valid political protest, and morally wrong, because it hurts innocent people far more than it hurts the purported target. Political violence to me is also the exact opposite of effective opposition, as it creates sympathy for the victims instead of underlining what they did wrong.

It seems to me as if the Trump administration is doing a great job of sabotaging itself. Effective opposition would be running a split screen of the story of how the government is using non-classified public social media platforms to discuss war plans side by side with Republicans shouting to "lock her up" at Hillary Clinton. Showing Republican hypocrisy talks louder than Democrats now expressing outrage.

On other subjects, I do believe that even for an American it is hard to understand the exact ultimate consequences of some of the decisions of government. I don't think it is a good political platform to claim that every single federal government employee is necessary and doing a great job, as that runs counter to the experiences of the citizens (and not just in America, but pretty much everywhere else). To foreigners, some of the discussion is simply incomprehensible: For example the government wants to cut 80,000 jobs in the Department of Veterans Affairs; such a department doesn't even exist in many other countries, and non-Americans might well scratch their heads when they hear that this is the largest part of the government, and that the US has more employees in the VA Department than it has active serving soldiers. It took me some research that this is because the VA Department is basically running a completely parallel national health service for 3% of the population, which tells you a lot of what even the US government thinks about the health service for the other 97%. To me that appears to be a bigger problem, one that can't be solved either by adding or subtracting any number of employees to the department.

I also personally don't believe that tariffs are going to revive the US manufacturing sector. Even if working as intended, tariffs at best make a US company competitive again by raising the price of the goods of foreign competitors. Whether they buy foreign or US, the customer will always end up paying more for the same goods, and ultimately end up with less goods for his money. While it will take time to see how all this plays out, it will take considerably less time than 4 years. Again, effective opposition for Democrats might be to just show old Republican footage. Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" question comes to mind here. And sometimes effective opposition means realizing that the other side has a winning subject, and stealing it; I would believe that Democrats would be better served by coming up with their own plans on how to make government more efficient or how to create jobs in the US economy, than just blindly promising to reverse all changes.

In short, I believe that Trump is clever enough to correctly identify what the day to day problems of average citizens are. But his solutions to those problems are just populist hogwash, or based on flawed ideology. It doesn't seem an insurmountable obstacle to come up with better plans for the Democrats, or to point out the various failings. But voters clearly were also unhappy with the situation before, so going back isn't an option either.