How to survive the second Trump era
He's back. Here's my advice on how to best cope with—and fight back against—the return of Donald Trump.
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He’s back. How should we deal with it? And how can we respond to the return of Donald Trump with more personal resilience and smarter political resistance?
The Banality of Corruption
Exactly eight years ago, in January 2017, my life developed a strange rhythm: Trump tweeted—and a few minutes later, my phone started buzzing. With every bizarre half-baked post, whether it was about “General E. Watch,” the infamous middle-of-the-night “covfefe,” or his various threats against the press and his political opponents, his fingers furiously raced across his iPhone and moments later, the BBC or other news outlets would ask me for a rapid response interview as part of its breaking news coverage.
This caught me off guard; I had unintentionally developed a depressingly relevant area of expertise for the rise of Trumpism. On the one hand, I had worked in US campaign politics—I helped manage a winning campaign for governor of Minnesota—so I understood some of the complex contours of American politics.
On the other hand, I had just completed a PhD studying authoritarian regimes and the breakdown of democracy across the globe, a visceral firsthand experience of understanding how autocratic populist demagogues can devastate a country, forever changing its political dynamics in the most toxic ways imaginable. The surge in Trumpian politics was sadly merging my professional life, past and present.
Over time, the tweets numbed us, the exhausting normalization of the routine abnormal. As the Trump years ground on, my phone buzzed less for the bizarre and more for the scandalous; exposés, tax frauds, impeachments, blatant racism, incitements to violence, revelations of grotesque corruption, underhanded payoffs, the hidden machinations of a narcissistic strongman.
We steadily succumbed to what I call “the banality of crazy,” in which the routine bombardment of unacceptable, disgusting, and frankly unhinged behavior simply became an accepted feature of the political landscape. By the end, the tweets were barely covered, the lunatic speeches ignored.
As Trump was launching his resurgence in the 2024 race, he floated the idea of shooting shoplifters without a trial and executing America’s top general. For several days, it barely registered, treated by the media as a forgettable, boring blip. These remarks were orders of magnitude more consequential than “covfefe,” but my phone never buzzed for them. It was a stark lesson: the news fixates on fresh narratives. Trump inciting political violence had become as humdrum and predictable as Democrats fumbling the response to it.
Today, the guardrails have become so flimsy that blatant corruption barely makes the news. On Friday night, Trump launched a meme coin—a digital token with no real-world value whatsoever—and abruptly increased his net worth by tens of billions of dollars.
Anyone in the world, whether foreign despots, criminals, or lobbyists hoping for a political favor, can now directly pay the president, a man who governs by loyalty tests and self-interested, transactional dealing. When I checked this morning, it was the tenth most prominent story on the New York Times website; by tomorrow, it will have mostly disappeared from view and discussion, even as it becomes a defining feature of his corrupt administration.
Our institutions are under threat; our norms have collapsed; and those who previously denounced Trump—from Mark Zuckerberg to the Village People—are now hoping to cash in on his return.
Today, Trump returns to power. His inauguration has been moved inside the Capitol due to the cold weather, a move that won’t much inconvenience his supporters. After all, they have already shown they know how to get inside that building.
How might we best respond? How can we cope—and endure—his exhausting, depressing political resurgence for the next four years? And how should those of us who revile his politics resist the damage he promises to inflict on our political system, all in a smarter way than before?
In this edition, I’ll draw on my experience in US politics and my knowledge of successful pushback against authoritarianism globally to:
Explain how I plan to personally behave differently between the first and second Trump terms, learning from my mistakes of the first time around (and why this term warrants some shifts based on how political realities today differ from those in 2017-2021);
Argue that the concept of relative resistance matters more than a constant outrage machine that is more easily ignored;
Give practical advice for how individual citizens can play a positive role in improving society even when the federal government is corrupt and malicious; and
Articulate my views on the different roles for pushback from political party elites (including how the Democrats should fight back) versus the ways in which the masses might create more effective resistance to Trumpism when it matters most.
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