Opinion The second resistance to Trump must start right now
Donald Trump will probably be even more extreme, radical and cruel to his ideological and political enemies in his second term than he was in his first. We need another resistance to take him on — starting right now.
I suspect most Americans, including some who voted for Trump, don’t want to see deportations of millions of undocumented immigrants, super-high tariffs, mass firings of federal employees, the National Guard being called in to stop protests, and other extreme ideas that either Trump or his top allies floated during the campaign. Instead, it’s likely Trump won because of lingering frustration with the high inflation after the covid-19 pandemic and the Democratic Party’s blunder in, at least initially, allowing a deeply unpopular President Joe Biden to run for a second term. That left Vice President Kamala Harris only a few months to campaign on her own.
That said, I expect Trump and his team to try to implement their policy agenda, even the most controversial parts. The president has surrounded himself with conservative true believers. And the president-elect has a decent case that Americans want a full-throated Trumpism. Voters knew who and what they were voting for and still chose to give Trump four more years in the Oval Office.
And I worry that Trump and his team won’t be alone in interpreting his second victory as a mandate from the public. Mainstream news outlets, business leaders and other parts of civil society who were very critical of Trump during his first term may now feel that he is a mainstream figure whose leadership they should generally accept. So the “resistance” to Trump may not be as broad as it was during his first term.
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But accommodating Trump would be a huge mistake. History is full of examples of autocratic parties and leaders (such as Democrats in the Jim Crow South) gaining power through fairly legitimate means, including winning elections, but still taking horrific actions once in office. Trump and his aides are likely to make it much more difficult to get an abortion, join a union, participate in a mass protestor get financial benefits designated for low-income Americans. They will seek to make living in the United States much less comfortable if you are an undocumented immigrant or a transgender person.
They may strip funding from colleges, cities, states and other entities that don’t go along with their agenda. They almost certainly will demean journalists, judges, left-leaning politicians and anyone else who questions their authority. They will also likely start unjustified criminal investigations of their political opponents.
Whether you consider the political movement that Trump leads to be best described as fascist, authoritarian, populist, Christian nationalist or just modern-day Republican, the most important thing to understand is that it will have real, damaging effects for millions of people. And for Americans who are not in danger of being deported because they are undocumented or arrested because they get an abortion, there is the less tangible but still emotionally taxing reality of living in a country that is going back and becoming less multicultural, equitable and free than it was before Trump’s rise.
“It really can happen here. The ‘It’ is unlikely to be a fascist dictatorship that looks exactly like 1930s Germany. But people need to accept that things can change. … It really could get much, much worse,” Georgetown history professor (and German native) Thomas Zimmer wrote recently.
Trump won the election. But that doesn’t mean his ideas are fair, moral, just or right. Americans who disagree with him should work as hard as possible to make sure his policies and views don’t become law.
So we should resist — again. Journalists, activists, nonprofits, left-leaning officials and everyday Americans need to go back to their posture of 2017 to 2020, carefully tracking every action of the president and his administration and being ready to aggressively contest it. There should be deep analysis and debate about why Trump won and what liberals and Democrats should do to prevent such victories in the future. But the first and most pressing priority is to make sure that people under direct threat from Trump, such as immigrants who have lived for years in the United States and done nothing wrong, aren’t treated inhumanely.
And this resistance can’t be too reliant on Democratic Party leadership. After losing by so much among White voters, particularly those without degrees and who are Christians, Democratic politicians may for electoral reasons distance themselves from undocumented immigrants, transgender people and others who might not be popular with some voters. So other institutions will need to defend those groups.
There will be prominent voices, including people on the center-left, who will say that anti-Trump Americans should guard against being too alarmist. That’s wrong. Trump aides have already started building the legal and logical infrastructure to carry out their plans. They aren’t waiting for Inauguration Day — and neither should their opponents.
An aggressive, persistent opposition was vital to forcing Trump to back down at times during his first term, particularly when his administration was separating children from their families at the border. A movement with fascist elements will soon be in charge of the country. Be alarmed — and start acting accordingly.“
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