Stop Talking About the Reflecting Pool
As an independent thinker, I’ve voted for candidates from both parties my whole life. In most of those elections, I’ve had a choice between two fairly distinct governing philosophies. Today, no viable choice exists. Trump versus anti-Trump is not a real choice.
The tireless preoccupation by Democrats and the media with all things anti-Trump is exhausting. Recently, former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill showed similar frustration in making an obvious point on Morning Joe: “We do need to do something besides just say Trump sucks.”
To that I can only say “obviously.” But why is this so hard? The answer is emerging all around us. It is substantive, viable, and will appeal to independent thinkers from both parties.
It is called several things. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson coined the term Abundance. There is a bipartisan caucus that calls themselves the Build America Caucus. I like the simple “pro-growth.”
Call it what you want, it is an agenda that leaves behind the reflexive Democratic identity politics and reliance on higher taxes and more redistribution and focuses on the creation of greater supply in the areas that matter most to Americans. It’s supply-side economics without the tax cuts.
It is simple and compelling. So why isn’t it breaking through?
I think the answer is in the Reflecting Pool
Trump does two things that simply don’t matter.
First, he thinks out loud. This is a nice way of saying he has no filter. I think this is how he learns and how he develops his own thinking. That in combination with his 24/7 microphone creates a relentless stream of things that don’t matter. When he lands on something he believes in, he creates policy. That is when things start to matter.
The second thing he does that doesn’t matter is hard to categorize so let’s just call it “redecorating things.” That would include lining the Oval Office with gold, “fixing” the Reflecting Pool, putting his name on buildings, and staging cage fights on the White House lawn.
That is why the Reflecting Pool reflects the answer. These things simply don’t matter in the long run. We all need to tune this part of the President out. Don’t take the bait. Encourage the media to ignore it. Say next question please. Stop indulging your own ego in showing your disgust.
By ignoring the things that don’t matter you reclaim time for your message.
In many respects this is elementary communication advice. My music teacher used to tell me to “keep my audience wanting.” While it is doubtful that there ever was an audience for my music, his point was to never saturate your audience or they will stop listening. That advice applies here. The opposition to Trump is saturated. By adding your voice to that you drown yourself in the chorus, a chorus that has become its own form of noise to the audience.
A better choice is to announce you are finished responding to every utterance. Let him speak for himself, and go do your job.
Republicans, for what it is worth, have their own version of this problem. Watching Republican senators contort themselves daily to defend whatever the President said that morning is its own form of wasted energy. My advice to them is identical: Stop performing the daily ritual.
None of this means closing your eyes to everything the President does. There will still be critical things of importance that require legitimate responses, as I wrote recently in The Signal and the Noise. The President might invade a sovereign country without congressional approval, institute illegal tariffs, or violate the traditional independence of the Justice Department. But if you’re busy obsessing over the Reflecting Pool, which is just noise, your voice won’t be heard when there is a true signal.
Pivot from the Reflecting Pool to policy
Anti-Trump is not a governing agenda. You cannot run a winning campaign, or a winning party, on opposition to one man. Opposition tells voters what you are against. It tells them nothing about what you would do with the power they hand you.
We need to talk about building things: more supply in housing, healthcare, energy, and food. Government has spent decades making it artificially hard to build the things people need, and the fix is removing those obstacles, not writing another check.
The growing pro-growth movement
This is not a theory. It is happening. This work is getting done by mayors and governors all over America. It might even be gaining traction in Congress. More of us need to pay attention and give it a voice that will break through and render Claire McCaskill’s point obsolete.
Take my state of Massachusetts, not one known for anti-regulatory reform. But that is what we are seeing. The 2021 MBTA Communities Act required 177 cities and towns served by mass transit to allow apartment buildings near transit stops, by right, without the usual gauntlet of special permits and public hearings designed to kill projects through delay. Most state housing laws like this one pass and then go quietly ignored, because nobody enforces them.
Attorney General Andrea Campbell enforced this one. When the town of Milton voted to undo its compliant zoning, she sued. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled for her unanimously in January 2025. Milton lost access to 13 state grant programs while it held out. By June 2025, Milton voters reversed themselves and approved compliant zoning, freeing up capacity for as many as 2,461 new homes. As of January 2026, 165 of the 177 towns are compliant or actively moving that way. That is a housing law with teeth, and it is the most copyable enforcement model operating anywhere in the country right now.
Governor Healey followed that up by signing the Affordable Homes Act in August 2024, a single statewide rule that now requires every city and town in Massachusetts to automatically approve in-law apartments on single-family lots. No hearing. No discretionary review. No ability for a neighbor to block it. The Massachusetts Municipal Association itself said the law strips away almost all local authority over these units. One clean rule, applied everywhere, doing more than a decade of local fights ever could.
This is not a one-state story, and it is not a one-party story. Colorado's Jared Polis pushed through transit and accessory-unit zoning reform after splitting one failed comprehensive bill into several smaller, harder-to-oppose pieces. Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro sued the regional electric grid operator over its pricing rules and won a settlement that reduced costs by an estimated $8.3 billion in a single auction cycle. California finally gutted the environmental review process that opponents of every political stripe had been weaponizing for years to block ordinary apartment buildings on land that was already developed.
And in Congress, something genuinely rare happened. A bipartisan Build America Caucus was launched in 2025 to push permitting reform, and now stands at 41 members; 22 Democrats and 19 Republicans. Members who disagree about almost everything else agree that it should not take a decade to build a transmission line or a clean energy project. That kind of coalition does not form around outrage. It forms around results.
When true signals surface
A true threat to our institutions, or a true difference in policy position, is a true signal. When true signals surface, suppress the outrage and whining and focus on concrete policy and legislative proposals that will restore that which has been damaged and prevent the same damage in the future. This means considering things like a statutory sunset on emergency war powers, term limits on Supreme Court justices, and specific funding-withdrawal penalties for agencies that defy congressional appropriations. That is policy. A daily statement of outrage is not.
As importantly, make the case that strong institutions are essential to our freedom and our economic system. Don’t make it anti-Trump. Make it pro-growth because it is.
The agenda that wins in 2028 already exists. It is being built, town by town and statehouse by statehouse, by Democrats and Republicans who stopped waiting for Washington and started fixing the things actually in their power to fix. The only thing missing is more people with platforms willing to stop talking about Trump long enough to tell people about it.