Now More Than Ever, We Must Resist Trump

Over at The Boston Globe, Yascha Mounk tells us that “a return of total resistance would be a bad strategy.” After reviewing the range of tactics employed by the resistance during the first Trump term, he concludes that "none of these attempts to oppose Trump was particularly effective.”

Never one to wait long to take an opportunity to kick liberals while they are down, Samuel Moyn wrote a New York Times column back in November arguing that “The Legal Battle Against Trump Was a Miserable Failure.” Moyn expressed his disappointment that “for decades, liberals have made the mistake of prioritizing legal victories over popular ones.” Moyn is even convinced, despite offering no evidence, that “legalistic tactics contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory, helping to produce the popular vote win he could not boast before.”

And being more straightforwardly defeatist, Shadi Hamid at the Washington Post wonders whether “demobilization is for the best. Four more years of civil unrest would probably have little effect on someone like Trump and might even trigger him to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests, as he has already threatened to do.” This sounds more like the rationalization of a battered spouse keeping their head down than of a political opposition considering a strategy.

Mounk, Moyn, and Hamid are wrong on all counts. The tactics employed to resist Trump’s first term had varying degrees of success. Sweeping claims like Mounk and Moyn’s can only be made by pundits and legal scholars for whom victory is always a concrete, either-or affair. You either win in court or you lose; you either remove the president in the Senate or you do not. But in political reality, simply buying time has enormous value. Policies take time to implement. Legislation takes time to pass, especially in our legislature. The more successfully Trump’s opposition delays any one policy, any one bill from passing, the fewer policies and bills Trump will implement and pass. In two years, Democrats will have a chance to take at least one chamber of Congress back; two years is a very short amount of time to implement much in our system. Delaying is one of the most tried and true tactics in our system and it was quite successfully employed in the first Trump term. More subtly, a political cost was paid by Trump for being impeached, just as one was paid by Clinton, even if this is harder to quantify in terms of time or votes lost.

Trump did win the popular vote this time, and because that exceeded people’s expectations, people are acting as though he has some sort of broad mandate. But the truth is that he had the smallest popular vote margin since Gore’s in 2000; smaller even than Clinton’s in 2016. Control of the House is even thinner than it was after 2016; indeed it is the barest majority in nearly a century.

Trump does not have a mandate, and we do not have an obligation to be compliant. The greatest risk of all right now is that Trump will successfully grow his personal power beyond what any president has previously achieved and take us down the road to authoritarianism. The signs are already there: all but one of his nominees are pure loyalists with no qualification for office, a Republican House committee chair has been removed purely on Trump’s say-so, and a spending bill was killed on the whim of Trump’s number one billionaire backer. Meanwhile, corporate America is lining up to swear fealty to Trump, most prominently Mark Zuckerberg, who has installed a Trump loyalist on Meta’s board, among other measures to appease Trump and his cronies.

The first steps taken by any authoritarian are to subsume the mass media to the regime and silence opposition press. Until now, however, authoritarians could only take measures to mitigate access to and the impact of major Internet platforms in their countries. America, however, can very much do to those platforms what the typical authoritarian does to locally operated news outlets. Zuckerberg and Musk’s relationships with the current Trump administration paint a dark picture of where these next four years may take us.

We must resist the Trump administration. The stakes are simply too high. We have the tools, if only we can find the political will. We must not shrink from using them at every opportunity.

Featured image is Women's March on Washington, by Mobilus in Mobili