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This time, the Trump Resistance should be more careful [1]

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Date: 2025-01-19

All of these factors fed into a particular set of prescriptions about how best to oppose Trump’s presidency: total resistance. If Trump had been elevated to the White House through a series of unfortunate coincidences, then the best way to neutralize the danger he posed to American democracy seemingly was to oppose him in every possible way. The goal of the #Resistance was to stop Trump from taking over our institutions or becoming sufficiently “normalized” to gain a permanent foothold in American politics. If only his opponents could withstand this unique period of acute danger, it was assumed, things would go back to normal.

When Donald Trump was first elected president in the fall of 2016, his elevation to the most powerful office in the world seemed like an aberration. He had faced a particularly unpopular Democratic opponent. He had lost the popular vote. There were all kinds of rumors about assistance from foreign powers. And then there was the nature of Trump’s electoral coalition: Heavily reliant on older white voters , it was widely interpreted as the last stand of a demographic bloc that was destined to decline in importance over the following years.

The paradigm of total resistance inspired a wide range of tactics. Some were self-defeating or outright delusional. During the transition, serious academics called on the Electoral College to elevate Hillary Clinton to the presidency even though she had lost the election. Cable news hosts on MSNBC spent months and years arguing or insinuating that Trump was an actual Russian agent. Some protest movements tried to win over hearts and minds; plenty of others self-consciously refused to appeal to anybody who might have voted for the president. This was the predominant feeling among many progressives: The people who had voted for Trump, many of my friends and acquaintances told me, were irredeemable racists and bigots. Trying to change their minds was futile, perhaps even morally suspect. The only question would be how to outmobilize them.

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Other tactics inspired by the strategy of total resistance were — or at least promised to be — more subtle and effective. For example, there was still a widespread assumption that most Americans held in high regard certain categories of professionals who claimed to be nonpartisan. Many opponents of Trump therefore believed that getting hundreds of former judges or military officers to denounce Trump might make a real impact on public opinion. Enormous effort was invested in organizing a variety of public letters in which such people, citing their professional experience and nonpartisan standing, warned about various aspects of the Trump administration.

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And then of course there were the endless attempts to investigate or impeach Donald Trump. There was James Comey’s investigation into his ties to Russia and the long-running probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. There were congressional investigations into everything from his tax returns to his COVID-19 response. There was a 2017 attempt by House Democrats to launch an impeachment process after Trump’s remarks about the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and a 2018 attempt invoking the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Then there was the first impeachment, regarding Trump’s demand that Volodymyr Zelensky investigate Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine before the United States released military aid to the country, and the second impeachment, launched after the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump had only days left in office.

Demonstrators gathered in front of US Representative Brad Sherman's office in Los Angeles to call for the impeachment of President Donald Trump on Aug. 17, 2017. EPA

As it turned out, none of these attempts to oppose Trump was particularly effective. This was most predictable when it came to the practices and demands that flagrantly broke with the traditions they claimed to defend. To suggest that you can save democracy by exhorting members of the Electoral College to overturn the outcome of the election is absurd. To save the country from “fake news” by going on the air to falsely claim, night after night, that you have the receipts to show that the president is effectively a foreign agent is not much better.

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But even some of the tactics that seemed reasonable at the time proved to be ineffective. For example, it turns out that old political cleavages no longer matter when a polarizing figure like Trump turns much of the country’s public life into a referendum on himself. To political elites, the old divisions between Democrats and Republicans were still immensely meaningful in 2016, and so the willingness of both historically Democratic-leaning and historically Republican-leaning professionals to denounce Trump seemed like an objective indication of the danger he posed. But a lot of voters had by then realized that Trump’s arrival on the political scene had forced traditional Democrats and Republicans onto the same side. Fairly or not, these voters accordingly dismissed “bipartisan” condemnations of Trump.

Many of the investigations into and impeachment proceedings against Trump were built on a similar delusion. They assumed that some information they surfaced, or some level of attention they commanded, would lead to a sudden breaking point. A public that seemed largely inured to being scandalized by his behavior would finally come to understand just how abnormal he is; wavering Republicans who secretly hated the man who had usurped their party would suddenly find the courage of their convictions and join with their Democratic colleagues in removing him from office. But those breaking points never arrived. Many Americans remained indifferent to Trump’s alleged misdoings. Virtually all of the Republican senators who privately expressed their hatred for him publicly expressed their support when the decisive votes were tabled.

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Each of these tactics turned out to have shortcomings of its own. But more fundamentally, all of them foundered because they were rooted in a mistaken analysis of the situation. For as Trump’s resounding reelection has shown, his success wasn’t an aberration.

This time around, Trump won the popular vote. He was able to vanquish Kamala Harris even though she had far less political baggage than Hillary Clinton and was not subject to a damaging FBI investigation. There is no reason to believe that interference from foreign adversaries made a material difference in the election. Most strikingly, the narrative according to which Trump’s political appeal is restricted to one declining demographic segment of the electorate — widely assumed for the past years to be true even among the country’s leading political scientists — has turned out to be badly wrong. Unlike in 2016, his electoral coalition in 2024 drew heavily on Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and even African Americans.

A "Resist Fascism" protest across the street from Madison Square Garden in New York on Oct. 27, 2024. BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images

All of this means that the task facing Trump’s opponents is much more difficult than it seemed in 2016. The conviction that the diversification of the American electorate will eventually deliver inevitable victories to Trump’s opponents now looks hopelessly naive. The most obvious ideas about how to oppose him have been tested — and found to be wanting. Rather than “merely” getting through a one-time four-year emergency for the Republic, his opponents need to figure out how to defeat a political movement that has appeal within every major demographic group — and now threatens to grow into the dominant force of an entire political era.

Let me be honest: I don’t have the solution for any of that. And speaking to a number of senior Democratic politicians and strategists over the course of the last weeks, I have the strong impression that none of them do either.

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For now, new ideas are few and far between. But the failure of the resistance offers some preliminary lessons of a more indirect kind: It can teach us mistakes we shouldn’t repeat. And it can tell us something about the form that an effective opposition to Trump would need to take.

Accountability without hysteria

Trump’s extreme language and erratic behavior practically beg for his critics to fall into rhetorical overreach. But it has long been obvious that he thrives on the excesses of his adversaries. It places him at the very center of public debate. It demonstrates that some of the least popular institutions in the country, including its most widely known media outlets, seem to have it out for him. Too often, it even distracts from his genuinely dangerous or unpopular actions: If everything from jokes about “Governor” Justin Trudeau to serious attacks on the separation of powers is treated as a five-alarm fire, many Americans falsely conclude that nothing he does is actually dangerous. Trump’s opponents would do well to speak about his failings in measured and graduated tones, reserving full-throated outrage for words or actions that are truly deserving of such condemnation.

A similar point holds for ill-judged attempts at accountability. Democrats need to use their voices in Congress to oppose bad policies and champion better solutions to the country’s problems. An important part of that role is to provide oversight of the government. They need to demand that the administration actually deliver on Trump’s promises to lower inflation, create millions of manufacturing jobs, and raise the standard of living for ordinary Americans. And, yes, they also need to investigate any suspected malfeasance. But in doing so, they must be realistic about what such investigations can accomplish and avoid turning them into ineffective spectacles that will widely be perceived as partisan grandstanding.

Back when Democrats started their first impeachment proceeding of Trump, I argued that these efforts would backfire if, as seemed likely, they would ultimately result in his acquittal. Impeaching a president for the sake of the history books makes little sense if doing so seems likely to grant him even more space in those books. For similar reasons, congressional attempts at oversight should — even after 2026, if Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives — focus on preventing concrete abuses of power, not on trying to produce the dramatic moment that will miraculously make Trump vanish from the political stage.

This leads me to the most important lesson. Since Trump’s rise, much of his opponents’ energy has been taken up with figuring out some clever workaround to his popularity. (At times, #Resistance writing verges on the language of infomercial clickbait: The One Clever Trick for How to Defeat Authoritarian Populists That Political Scientists Don’t Want You to Know.) But in a democracy, such workarounds don’t exist. In the end, the only way to beat back demagogues like Trump is at the ballot box.

Now Trump according to recent polls is more popular than he has been at any point since 2016, including the day he got reelected. Even young voters, on whose overwhelming support Democratic strategists long thought they could count, are more open to his appeal than they were in the past. But what is striking is not so much that roughly equal numbers of Americans have a positive view of Trump as have a negative view. It is that clear majorities of Americans disapprove of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, have a negative view of the Democratic Party, deeply distrust established institutions ranging from Congress to Harvard University, and hate mainstream media outlets like CNN and The New York Times.

The key question for anybody who — like me — believes that there are valuable things worth preserving in our institutions is not “Why do they like him?” It is “Why do they hate us?” Until the Democratic Party — along with the wider world of the American Establishment with which it is now deeply associated in the minds of voters — is able to give (and act on) an honest answer to that question, every clever tactic for how to resist Trump is doomed to fail.

Anybody who hopes to change the current trajectory of American politics needs to understand why so many of their compatriots — young and old, gay and straight, white and Latino and Native American — have rejected the apparent certitudes on which our most important institutions are built. And that means taking seriously the possibility that though the man who has proven so adept at channeling their anger may be a self-serving charlatan, there are good reasons for that anger. Listening with an open mind and an open heart to those with whom we fundamentally disagree does not amount to an answer for how to oppose Trump. But unless Trump’s opponents regain a willingness to look at the country as it is and enter into conversation with their compatriots in a spirit of civic friendship, that answer will continue to prove elusive.

The ordinary rights of democratic citizens remain an important tool in the armory of those who seek to oppose Trump. If and when the administration does something truly outrageous, his critics should be ready to write to their representatives or take to the streets. When the next elections come along, they should consider supporting a local campaign they believe in or even running for office. The Trump administration is likely to abuse its powers in a variety of ways, and an active civil society remains important in curtailing the damage this may inflict upon longstanding constitutional values like the separation of powers.

But the strategy of total resistance, which has failed over the last eight years, is even less likely to succeed over the next four. Shouting ever more loudly about how bad a person Trump is won’t change anybody’s mind. And unless a lot of Americans change their mind over the next years — not only about the merits of Donald Trump but also about the trustworthiness of America’s most important institutions — Trump’s presidency will turn out to be but the prologue to a much longer epic.

Yascha Mounk is a professor of the practice at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, the founder of Persuasion, and host of The Good Fight podcast.

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[1] Url: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/01/19/opinion/trump-resistance-second-term/

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