As the new Musk-Trump administration becomes ever more unhinged and reckless, people are wondering with increasing urgency whether anything can be done. In a world where pessimism has become a synonym for realism, where can anyone turn to find slivers of hope in such scary times?
In a column here on Verdict last week, “How the Tide Might Turn: The Inevitable End of Trumpism,” I identified three reasons that the current dystopia is likely to end, possibly soon. My first two reasons drew from the obvious reality that the political coalition that supports Trumpism is highly unstable. Not only does it include people with very different priorities, but some of the subgroups’ goals are directly in conflict with each other. The most obvious of those differences has to do with immigration and nativism, where two groups of bigots—one wanting to allow “the good ones” (like tech engineers) into the United States no matter their demographic backgrounds, the other more absolutist about its White Christian nationalist goals—have already been at odds with each other.
Moreover, the cult of Trump exists because of Donald Trump specifically, which means that whatever glue is currently holding the disparate pieces together will shatter as soon as he is gone (at the latest). The various factions will claw each other’s eyes out in the post-Trumpian free-for-all, and although that might end badly, it can also be an opportunity for everyone else to begin to set things on a better path.
Making that better path a realistic option, of course, can only happen by doing the work necessary to offer real solutions and to act on them whenever opportunities arise, while Trump is alive as well as after he is gone. In last week’s column, I offered as my third reason for hope a reminder that positive ideas can triumph in even the most unpromising of circumstances, emphasizing in particular the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. The Civil Rights era dismantled (not completely, but in profoundly important ways) a system of de jure and de facto American apartheid that had lasted for nearly a century. That is far too long to wait, but the Civil Rights movement made it possible to do the work of replacing repression with strides toward true freedom.
Consider just how improbable it would have seemed to someone even in 1961 or 1962 that the country would pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with a slew of other progressive laws. Such a sea change would have seemed unthinkably utopian and unrealistic even to optimists, just as the same-sex marriage movement decades later was initially hampered by honest doubts about pushing too far, too fast. Yet good things happened—not without years of pain and frustrating setbacks, but they happened all the same.
Where will the energy and the ideas come from now, and how will any opposition come to be embraced by a country that is governed by an anti-democratic movement that seeks to dismantle the rule of law? Some of the answers are already emerging.
Revulsion, Remorse, and Resistance
A large majority of Americans did not vote for Donald Trump in 2024. He received 49.8 percent of the popular vote, and additional millions of 2020 Biden voters abstained this time around. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans were prevented from voting by Republican-led purges of voter rolls, gratuitously onerous registration hurdles, and old-fashioned voter intimidation. Some of that was illegal but was nonetheless allowed to occur. Even so, Trumpists have shown that they have no respect for the fact that they barely snuck into office with the support of only a distinct minority of the country. Now ensconced, they are showing no restraint in unleashing their ugly ids.
The fact is, however, that most people do not like what they are seeing. It is telling, for example, that Trump and his spokespeople are desperately trying to convince people to ignore their own eyes when it comes to the tragic outcomes of their policies. Trump told an NBC interviewer in December, for example, that the public would turn against him if the media showed sympathetic families being torn apart by his immigration policies. That he used that claim to try to justify deporting even some American citizens is its own outrage, but he was right to say that people will indeed be repulsed by the reality that they see on their screens.
Similarly, the White House is now frantically trying to spin the damage caused by the cuts in foreign aid as merely isolated photo ops and bad optics. This is part of a panicked attempt to have it both ways, because they would certainly dismiss as “too abstract” any reporting of statistics documenting the aggregate harms caused by their policies, yet they also sneer at examples of truly horrible individual harms that we can see in the flesh.
Again, Trump’s confederates have no choice but to engage in the tactics of distraction, because they know that their policies are indefensible. And those tactics truly are threadbare, with a spokeswoman claiming that the recent runup in grocery prices is happening because of bad things that the Biden administration supposedly did. That is the kind of argument that will appease the base of people who are unshakable in their devotion to Trump, but that was never even close to a majority of Americans.
In two recent columns on Verdict (here and here), I discussed the shockingly anti-Christian views of many on the religious right. Even after writing two very long columns on that topic, I could barely scratch the surface of the deeper problem. J.D. Vance has recently decided to use his useless office to side with a neo-Nazi political party in Germany, and he is also being revealed as more and more of an extremist within his adopted Roman Catholic Church.
As I noted in those earlier columns, all faith groups (and certainly Christians) have seen centuries of internal struggles, but Vance’s embrace of a particularly extreme Catholic insurgent group is notable. Vance has even gone so far as to insult some Catholics who follow Christ’s teachings (specifically their Savior’s fundamental calls to be kind to the weak and the poor), slandering them by saying that they are not “worried about humanitarian concerns” but instead are merely “worried about their bottom line.” Catholic charities are somehow making a profit from their charitable efforts, I guess? This again shows how little Vance cares about the Godless message that he is sending out to the public at large.
Even though my earlier columns amounted to distressed exclamations about how un-Christian some self-described Christians have become, the fact is that large numbers of Christians do take the basic messages of the Gospel to heart, even many of those who voted for Trump. And if the political tide is ever going to turn, it will happen in part because some Christians, as well as people who simply believe in human decency as a matter of fundamental morality, see what the Trump administration is doing and decide that they cannot close their eyes any longer.
No, Trump Is Not “Just Doing What He Promised to Do”
But wait, how can I say that some Trump voters will turn against him because they did not vote for what he is doing? I have, after all, explicitly rejected the idea that Trump’s voters did not know what they were getting into when they supported him. In particular, my January 30 Verdict column described my “respect” for his voters, saying that they were not merely angry about grocery prices but in fact consciously voted for Trump and against Kamala Harris.
Should that not mean that I cannot now sign onto the new narrative that many respectable people in the non-Trump world have embraced, which is that once Trump’s voters see that he has not reduced prices, they will suddenly understand that they have been hoodwinked? It is true that I cannot endorse that logic, but that is not the only way to imagine that Trump’s voters might turn away from the reality of his depredations.
The core of my argument in that column was that Trump’s voters must have had some reason(s) to vote for Trump other than the “I’m unhappy about the economy” answer that they gave to pollsters, because Trump had never even come close to offering reasons to believe that he would make the economy better. Indeed, his single economic idea was to return to nineteenth-century levels of tariffs, which would increase prices.
Those voters are not, I continue to believe, stupid or too distracted to care. To see that point more clearly, consider that if Harris had been the one saying that she will “reduce prices on Day 1,” everyone would have said, “How … exactly?” But Trump received a pass, because there were more than enough people who were unwilling to vote for a woman (especially one of color), so they signed on with Trump even though it was obvious that he would do nothing to make their lives better.
All of which brings us to a blunt reality. Trump has already fulfilled his most important campaign promise—that he will never be a Black/Indian woman—which would be enough to satisfy his voters, even if he never decided to go forward with all of his terrible ideas that are now giving people buyers’ remorse.
Again, however, the Trumpists now claim that Trump is merely doing what he said he would do. That is manifestly not true, because he never said that he would cut cancer research or worsen air safety, among too many examples to name. OK, I will name a few more examples: Trump’s voters could not have known that they were voting to have the U.S. invade Panama, violently seize Greenland, extort Canada, or forcibly evict nearly two million Palestinians from Gaza to make way for an American-created spa in the eastern Mediterranean.
But did Trump not at a minimum say (even more often than his lies about what was in fact a very strong economy under President Biden) that he would deport people? Promises made, promises kept, right?
There are two flaws in that characterization. First, Trump frequently contradicts himself—sometimes even within a single sentence—which allows his defenders to say that anything he has done or said is coming true (while ignoring all of the inconvenient counterexamples). This was especially clear when Trump pointed during the campaign to a Snopes article that purported to debunk the fact that Trump had called American neo-Nazis “very fine people” after the marches and killing in Charlottesville, Virginia. The only way that Snopes could reach that conclusion, however, was by noting that Trump had said other things that were critical of the neo-Nazi marchers in the same speech.
That supposed exoneration of Trump was similar to one of his earliest scandals, when he said that former Senator John McCain was not a hero. The transcript showed that Trump had also said the words “he’s a hero,” which obscured the fact that he said those words sarcastically and then went on to demean McCain by saying that the latter was called a hero merely because “he got caught.”
So yes, Trump’s people can often say that he is merely doing what he said he would do, but that is only because he says so many contradictory things that he must inevitably end up being right about some of them.
The second flaw in the idea that people should simply allow Trump to do what he said he would do is that his advisors and supporters have spent years telling everyone to ignore what he says, assuring everyone that his most outrageous statements are nothing more than “Trump being Trump,” to be taken as entertainment or at most exaggerations but not as statements of serious intent to do bad things. So, when people voted for Trump even while knowing that he had no plans to do anything good, those voters were simultaneously being told that his political opponents were being nervous nellies who were incapable of taking a joke.
Consider Trump’s claims that he was going to round up millions of immigrants (or perhaps people who are related to immigrants, or even those who merely “look like” immigrants?) and put them into camps. Trump’s whitewashers (pun intended) quickly claimed that he would obviously never do something so un-American as what Trump had said he would do. But sure enough, Trump’s new administration immediately started shipping immigrants to Guantanamo (known infamously as America’s Gulag) with no evidence to back up claims that those men had done anything wrong at all, much less that they were the “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem assured us that they are.
Or consider the pardons of the real criminals whose cases were adjudicated in courts of law with full due process protections after the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Trump said during the campaign that he would pardon them, but his enablers tried to calm the waters by saying that pardons—if they even happened at all—would be for only the nonviolent convicts. In the weeks leading up to the change of government on January 20 of this year, even J.D. Vance said that “obviously” there should be no pardons for violent offenders. On the first day, Trump pardoned every single one of them.
So, did Trump keep his word? What was his word? More importantly, should we believe that Trump’s voters approved of his promises to pardon everyone or instead that they believed that voting for him would not be tantamount to approving of his most outrageous promises? And when Republican U.S. Senator Tom Tillis reportedly “acknowledged that what Musk is doing ‘runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,’” but “nobody should bellyache about that,” should we imagine that Trump’s voters did or did not approve of such constitutional violations?
In short, even though I continue to credit Trump’s voters with being aware of what they were doing and were not merely brain-fogged by the price of bacon, that does not change the reality that Trump is not doing what they voted for him to do.
To repeat, as long as Trump continues not to be Black, from India, or a woman, he has kept his word to key swing voters. Imagining that they are going to be happy about mass layoffs of government employees—including those who safeguard nuclear weapons or carry out research on cures for deadly diseases—is more than a bit of a stretch.
Another Reason for Optimism: The Trumpists Have Embarrassingly Bad Arguments—When They Bother to Argue at All!
Finally, it is essential to remind ourselves that the Trump people have revealed themselves again and again to be incapable of making coherent arguments. They are following the lead of Musk, whose online persona is merely a series of insults and non sequiturs. Beyond his mindless response to criticism by posting poop emojis, he recently deflected criticism about his Nazi salutes with this example of his genius-level logic: “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” No, everyone is not Hitler, but people who make Nazi salutes are probably Hitler-curious, at the very least.
Similarly, Musk once responded to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s argument for a wealth tax by calling her “Senator Karen,” which is not merely a content-free ad hominem attack but does not even use the “Karen” trope correctly. Other Trump trolls respond to criticism with comments like “Get back on your meds” or “You’re just a woke loser,” which they apparently think are devastating putdowns but merely expose their own lack of seriousness.
And to be clear, Musk is hardly the only participant in the content-free Olympics of Trump apologia. As one example, I noted in my January 29 column that Senator Lindsey Graham had admitted that Trump broke the law by firing inspectors general, but he justified Trump’s lawlessness by saying: “What do you expect him to do, just leave everybody in place in Washington?” Trump’s defenders have taken to justifying everything and anything with either attacks on those who raise questions or with chest-thumping “But We Won” vacuousness.
Not bothering to make sense, of course, does not by itself mean that the new administration lacks the power to do senseless things. Sadly, they currently do have a great deal of power, though not the power to do everything that they are doing. But their recklessness, lack of self-discipline, and the inevitable harm that they will cause in the world are not going to be invisible to people, even those who voted for Trump.
Democrats, disaffected (and purged) Republicans, and independents will get their feet under them as time goes by, so the current hand-wringing about the Democrats’ supposedly being adrift is both inevitable but also will not be the story going forward.
My overarching point is thus that the seeds of a possible widespread public backlash to Trump are already being sown, and even in post-democratic autocratic states, power is not a forever thing for the rulers. It is a shame and a tragedy that the United States and the world will be forced to endure what Musk and Trump have in store, but even though there are no guarantees, the world has seen even bleaker times that turned around when it at last became impossible for despotic rulers to continue to cheat the laws of political gravity.
Again, hope and optimism are in short supply right now, and what I have written here and in last week’s column might seem inadequate. Yet change must begin somewhere, and the good news is that the oppressors are busily undermining their own legitimacy. May the backlash begin soon.
