Donald Trump is quickly consolidating and expanding his power. Trump has promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his administration. Trump has also demonstrated, repeatedly, that he will rule as an autocrat who will crush all those individuals and groups that he and his MAGA agents and other allies deem to be “the enemy within.” Trump has been remarkably transparent and direct about how his rule will be driven by revenge, retribution and corrupt unlimited power.
The Democrats, the mainstream news media and others who are searching for some desperate hope in this time of extreme dread and peril are currently fixated on whether Trump has a “mandate” for his agenda because he did not win 50 percent of the popular vote. Ultimately, Trump and his MAGA forces do not care about democratic legitimacy and the popular will. They are autocrats and authoritarians (and fascists) who impose their will on the public.
To that end, Trump is selecting people for his Cabinet and other senior administration positions whose first qualification is loyalty to him. Their professional qualifications, competence and belief (or lack thereof) in the basic tenets of real democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law are of little, if any, importance.
The manifestly incompetent Trump 2.0 Cabinet members and other senior appointees are being joined by very serious and very dangerous ideologues. As shown by Project 2025, Agenda 47 and other documents and planning, these people have spent years and decades studying how to destroy the American government and democracy as a way of advancing their revolutionary and reactionary project to tear down the social safety net, social democracy and “the bureaucratic/deep state” with the goal of bringing the country back to the Gilded Age (if not before) when rich white men, big business, White Christianity and other antidemocratic forces ruled largely uncontested. The grossly unqualified Trump officials will be the camouflage and distraction — to aid and enable — the work of the second, smaller group of ideologues. Both groups will be extensions of Trump’s will and the worst aspects of his personality, impulses, emotions and mind.
Those Americans who voted against Donald Trump and MAGA are collectively shell-shocked and wounded emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. This is especially true for “the resistance” and their news media and opinion leaders who got high on the “hopium”, having convinced themselves, contrary to the abundance of the evidence, that there would be some great groundswell of support for Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Trump would be stopped because “the American people are fundamentally decent” or “American Exceptionalism” would kick in or “suburban white women and the Dobbs decision!” would spark a backlash or, at the very least, “how could anyone possibly want to return to the Trump years?” Of course, none of this happened.
In all, these fantasies and fictions about America and the character of its people have collided with the reality of what America actually is, with all of its historical and current deep ugliness as embodied by Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris. During these last few weeks, I have experienced several moments where more “familiar strangers,” those people we encounter as part of our daily routine but have never spoken to before, are saying hello and seem to be seeking out conversation and comfort from others.
As reported by The New York Times on Thursday, the shock and disappointment are so great that many members of the anti-Trump pro-democracy movement (aka "the Resistance") are feeling like giving up:
In the days after Donald J. Trump’s electoral victory, thousands of people revived the grass-roots movement that opposed his first term in office.
Marchers in Manhattan took over streets carrying a block-wide banner that read, “We Won’t Back Down.” Activists in Los Angeles and Chicago decried Mr. Trump’s abortion and immigration policies and vowed to descend on Washington to protest his inauguration in January.
But participants noted that Mr. Trump had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent. Many have been calling for a fresh playbook.
“I thought the first women’s march would be a turning point,” said Laura Bartek, a 45-year-old nurse from Virginia, referring to the protest — with nearly half a million people — that took place after Mr. Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
“To be here eight years later with these signs,” Ms. Bartek said during a recent protest in Washington, “it breaks my heart.”
“I keep getting emails to sign petitions,” said Leslie Mac, a digital strategist and communications expert who works with grass-roots organizations. “These people coming to the White House don’t care about petitions. They don’t care how many people sign them. They don’t care what they say.”
The first Trump presidency spawned the largest protests the country had seen in half a century.
But not everyone wants to participate in another four years of mass movement work. When Women’s March shared information about an upcoming rally on Instagram, one person responded, “No im tired, yall have fun though.” (Women’s March later hid some of the pushback and limited who could respond to a handful of posts.)
The Age of Trump shows no sign of being over any time soon. It is an epic of the worst type that we “the Americans” are trapped inside of — now by choice.
In an attempt to make better sense of Trump’s surreal second election, our collective emotions and where we go from here, I recently spoke with Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan. They are the co-writers of “1/6: The Graphic Novel.” (Issue number 3 is available now.) Jenkins is a Professor of Practice at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on Race and the Law, Communication, Law, and Social Justice, and Supreme Court Jurisprudence. Before joining the Harvard faculty, he co-founded and led The Opportunity Agenda, a social justice communication lab that harnesses the power of media and popular culture to move hearts, minds and policy. Golan is an artist, bestselling author, grassroots activist, organizer and one of the lead designers of The People’s Climate March, which was one of the largest climate mobilizations in history.
This is the first of a two-part conversation.
How are you feeling given the election and Trump’s return to power? Were you surprised by his victory?
AJ: As we’ve been saying all along, the shadow of autocracy and bigotry will be with us as a nation for years, whoever our next president is. That’s why Trump is depicted mostly in shadow in our series. One of the main messages in our books is that we always must work to protect democratic values and institutions, year in and year out. Now we know what we’ll be facing.
GG: Shocked but not surprised. There have been so many off-ramps not taken and yet here we are. If there is a silver lining to defeat, it’s that we have a chance to dig deep, learn lessons and make major course corrections that may aid us in the future. Here is one important lesson: Democrats have been undercutting their own progressive grassroots movements for decades, while Republicans have been nourishing theirs. Which strategy succeeded? I think the results are in.
How are you sleeping?
AJ: I’ll quote John McCain after he lost to Barack Obama in 2008: “I slept like a baby… sleep for two hours, wake up and cry, sleep for two hours, wake up and cry.”
GG: Let’s just say that my family members who are bothered by my *consistent* snoring are getting a nice break these days.
What are you doing with those emotions to process them if anything? To balance out the worry tank and the hope tank?
AJ: Our graphic novel series is about loss and grief, but also about hope, resistance and reconstruction. That balance has always sustained me through tough times.
GG: We tend to believe we need hope to inspire action when it’s more the reverse. It is action that inspires hope. I’ve kept working with people at the grassroots level and been thinking of how we can weather the storm and protect people and still make forward progress where we can.
We are still doing an autopsy of the 2024 election. What role do you believe that racism and sexism played in the outcome?
AJ: Research and experience tell us that both conscious and subconscious bias created a much steeper hill for Harris to climb. The hill was surmountable, in my view, with a more compelling narrative and a bolder, more transformative set of ideas. But there’s no question that it was a far higher obstacle to victory than either Biden or Trump faced.
GG: The role of racism, sexism and transphobia as a factor in our electorate is undeniable. Full stop. But this was still a winnable election for the Democrats. We are in a populist moment and this was a “change” election. The Harris campaign had an opportunity to break from Biden on Gaza and also push forward a strong progressive vision rooted in popular economic policies.
That didn’t happen. Trump brought “faux-populism” while the Democrats brought “no populism” and that doomed them.
Of course, it’s not all on Harris. Biden couldn’t communicate his own successes as he had a mute button on. Then he waited too long to step aside, depriving the Democrats of a wider field of new candidates and a longer campaign run. This is another example of the Democrats holding on to power and failing to create a strong transition to a new generation. We saw this with RGB refusing to step down and then Trump appointing her successor. They forgot that your legacy is secured by the next generation, not your own and they have failed to make that transition. In tumultuous times, those new leaders often come from outside the establishment, not inside and Democrats have been very resistant to that.
Alan, you are a legal scholar and advocate for democracy. What role does the law and our democratic norms and traditions have when confronted by an elected autocrat who has promised to be a dictator on “day one”?
AJ: One of the lessons of Trump 1.0 is that democratic norms and traditions can and will be ignored by this president. Institutions, however, are made up of people and it’s up to us to ensure that they hold. That means countering the tremendous pressure that will be put on them by Trump and his allies, supporting independence and insisting on equal accountability. This will also be a supreme (no pun intended) test of our judiciary, which is the only branch of our federal government that the Framers of the Constitution insulated from public pressure. During the last administration, the courts (including judges appointed by Trump himself) occasionally stood up to him, but more often let him ride roughshod over the Constitution. Those of us who are lawyers are going to have to push judges to live up to their allegiance to the law and to our country’s highest values.
Trump's return to power has echoes of the end of Reconstruction and the rise of “Redemption” and Jim and Jane Crow. I feel like we are in some twisted simulation and pocket of the multiverse where it is "Idiocracy" and "They Live" mixed with "Robocop", "Brazil", Octavia Butler’s novels and "Groundhog Day."
AJ: There are a lot of parallels between now and the end of Reconstruction when our nation walked away from its commitment to equal justice and redefined the Civil War as a disagreement among friends instead of a battle for freedom and the soul of the nation. Whether we spend another century wandering in the wilderness of tyranny and bigotry is, in part, up to us. We can never stop working toward a more perfect union, even when prospects look bleak. Without the work of “Redemption-era” and early 20th century activists like W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells and Charles Hamilton Houston, the modern Civil Rights Movement never could have happened.
GG: We are definitely in a dystopian fiction mashup. Artists and storytellers are often our early warning system and they’ve been sounding the alarm bells for years. Leaders and activists are also visionaries and storytellers. Their vision for a better society, which we might have taken for granted in our own lives — like, the weekend, or the women’s vote, or interracial marriage — was at one point practically science fiction. It then took organizing to bring those visions into being as part of our daily, lived experience. That is the work we are being called to do: To re-envision what democracy needs to be, then do the hard work to make it a reality. The future is not yet written and we can’t miss the opportunity to define what happens next.
