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If you aren’t endeavoring to sleep through the next four years, and aren’t also a malevolent Trump supporter cheering the sabotage of the state, you’re probably overwhelmed. You may at this point be overwhelmed by hearing about how overwhelmed everyone is.
The tech writer Mike Masnick called the blitz of lawlessness, nonsense, and other intentional efforts to stretch our attention thin, “a distributed denial of service [DDOS] attack on people who believe in reality."
That captures it well. I’ve been attempting over the last couple weeks to categorize the Trump administrations’s maneuvers mentally, both to gain a handle on the strategy from the MAGA perspective, and to help the rest of us set priorities. If you’re deluged from above, build a canopy, grab some buckets, and sort.
Here’s roughly where I am:
To my mind we have four main kinds of provocation raining down on us: headfakes, attacks on liberal pluralism, policy sabotage, and genuine constitutional crises.
This schema isn’t perfect. The categories are largely distinct, but sometimes overlapping, and in some cases it isn’t clear what belongs where. For instance, at the moment I sort Donald Trump’s incitement against Canada, Denmark, and Panama into the nonsense or headfake bucket. It isn’t nonsense for the officials in those countries who have to ascertain whether Trump is menacing them for show or a genuine madman. And obviously if he were to use American military and economic power to steal territory from sovereign nations, that would probably necessitate a bucket all its own. But for now I think those of us trying to limit the damage should bracket these things as clownish bluster. Mock Trump for being a fool who can’t even succeed at bullying, but focus real energy on real crises.
The most mean-spirited and demoralizing provocations fall into the pluralism bucket. They range from the largely symbolic (the elimination of Black History Month observances, the prohibition on federal worker affinity groups, the blaming of all policy failure on DEI) to the cruel and lawless (discharging transgender service members, the contemplation of a concentration camp for illegal immigrants in Guantanamo Bay).
These are almost all bigoted initiatives, because the administration is bigoted to its marrow, but also because Trump wants Democrats and liberals to flock here. They want to catch Democrats advocating to reinstate “DEI” in the government, or to find some flimsy pretext to accuse them of that. They want Democrats to side with “criminal” immigrants, to fixate on where we incarcerate trans prisoners, and which if any barracks they should sleep in. But they aren’t just mining the liberal conscience for attack ads—they know that time is a non-renewable resource, and the more time Democrats spend on these issues, the less they’ll have to spend resisting dictatorship and the dissolution of the liberal order.
Republicans also recognize that these are all wedge issues; that when liberals and Democrats like me argue that we shouldn’t make Trump’s gratuitously nasty H.R. policy or bigoted propaganda the epicenter of resistance, it’s upsetting to advocates and others who devote themselves to the causes of immigrant rights, trans rights, workplace diversity, etc. But holidays can be restored, personnel decisions can be reversed, Trump can (and probably will) discredit his institutionalization of cruelty by wrecking the country again.
One way to block the wedge is to recognize that resistance around these issues won’t be resolved through public-facing activism. There are things that the Trump administration has the power to do that liberals and progressives simply can’t stop; there are other things (military discharges, violations of due process) that courts will either gum up or reverse.
Damage here will not be entirely reversible no matter what happens, though. Trump and his loyalists recognize that changing facts on the ground can alter things irreversibly, even if they’re ultimately forced to revert to the status quo ante. If they drive people out of government through unlawful means, those orders might not survive court challenges, but many if not most of the affected people will have moved on by the time it all gets sorted out. There is, unfortunately, little that can be done about that.
Policy sabotage refer to things Trump is doing, or intends to do, to upset the applecart domestically and internationally, in ways that are much stickier. Here in the U.S., that’s punishing blue states after natural disasters, angling to kick millions of people off Medicaid, pitting his supporters against the rest of America, further curtailing reproductive freedom etc. Internationally it’s threatening or imposing tariffs on certain allies, rattling his saber at others, undermining NATO. Much of this is improper, irregular, corrupt. But most of it is legal.
To illustrate the point about overlap, culture-war provocations can veer into policy sabotage easily. When smearing immigrants becomes the Laken Riley Act, it transforms into a rooted policy booby trap; if the government really does build a concentration camp in Guantanamo, and begins to fill it with people, that’s no longer simply psychological warfare against liberals.
Generally, though, this is where Democrats in Congress feel most comfortable. It’s where Trump’s antics show up in grocery prices and service outages and health care access. It’s where Republicans in Congress feel wedged themselves. It’s already the source of real misgivings among marginal Trump voters.
For this reason, I’m least vexed by these crises, even though they threaten to be disruptive, impoverishing, even deadly. Democrats don’t really fear engaging on these issues, and are poised to capitalize on them. Part of me thinks they should do less to resist Trump here and simply get out of his way. In too many realms over too many years, our system and the liberal-minded people in it have insulated too many Trump voters from the consequences of their decisions, and it’s hard to defeat MAGA as a movement if MAGA is mostly bluster mixed with the economic stability Trump inherits from his predecessors.
Again, that isn’t to suggest anyone should be indifferent about anything. It certainly isn’t to say Democrats shouldn’t try to stop Republicans from gutting Medicaid, for instance. The potential for damage in this realm is tremendous. It includes economic crisis, the dissolution of NATO, and legislation that rolls back safety-net policies that help people be truly free, among many other things. Stopping that stuff will be important, more important than letting Trump and the GOP own the consequences of their catastrophes. Alliances can’t easily be rebuilt; major legislative reforms are hard to enact. But questions like “how should the U.S. government serve its citizens?” and “what is America’s proper place in the world?” are also at the heart of “normal” politics. Trump may not care about policy or have “normal” reasons for doing what he does. He certainly lied about his agenda in order to obtain power. But even major changes to social and foreign policy are survivable. Unless, of course, they’re imposed dictatorially.
That’s why I’m most fixated on that final category: constitutional crises. ...
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