The Weekly Sift

Recovering from the disillusionment of the election is taking longer than I expected.

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Many articles are being written about how best to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected assault on democracy and human rights. I had planned to write a post curating those articles for you, picking out the best ones and summarizing their advice. Unfortunately, I’ve bookmarked more of them than I’ve read, and I haven’t given the ones I’ve read enough serious thought.

That lack of motivation has forced me to admit something about myself: I’m not ready to resist yet. I hope I will be soon.

Everybody’s absorbing the reality of the election at their own pace and in their own way, I suppose. Prior to the election, I advised my readers over and over again not to speculate about what would happen. Like many advice-givers, I almost listened to myself. I refused to anticipate and dwell on either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. (I’m dating myself: When I was growing up, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” was the well-known catch-phrase of ABC’s Wide World of Sports.) And yet, deep down, I stubbornly refused to believe the American people would do this. Even at the lowest points, like after Biden’s disastrous debate, I would think about a second Trump administration and think, “No. That can’t happen.”

In retrospect, my faith in the good judgment of the American electorate looks like the faith of a wife who is certain that her husband won’t ever cheat on her, or a child who is sure Dad will never go back to drinking, because it led to so much pain the first time.

But here we are.

I had imagined I was living in an early British detective novel, where Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple would eventually figure everything out and justice would triumph. Instead, I woke up in an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammit or Raymond Chandler, where the Powers That Be have known all along who the murderer is, but see no reason to do anything about it.

Here we are.

Many of my friends have reported periods of anger, which I haven’t experienced yet. Maybe that’s still coming or maybe I’m just not built that way. Instead, I’ve been living with a deep sense of disappointment. I don’t anticipate any satisfaction coming when Trump voters lose their health insurance or see his tariffs reignite inflation in their grocery stores. When Trump-supporting Hispanics have their naturalization revoked or see their birthright citizenship denied, I don’t expect “I told you so” to taste delicious in my mouth. It will be a sad day, even if they did it to themselves. They are my countrymen, even if my country tells me otherwise.

But I’m still not ready to construct my resistance strategy. I hope I will be soon. Andrea Pitzer is right about this much: Most countries that experienced a fascist takeover didn’t enjoy the luxury of three months to plan. But one of those months is gone already. The clock is ticking.

I can tell I’ll eventually come around. One weird aspect of my psychology is that I’m aware of a subconscious personality who communicates with me — and occasionally critiques my behavior — through my brain’s musical soundtrack. (I noticed it my senior year in college, when I was trying to keep a relationship from getting too serious because I anticipated it ending with graduation. All spring I unaccountably found myself humming “Frosty the Snowman”.)

Lately it’s been playing a song I haven’t heard in years, maybe decades: Graham Nash’s “Chicago“, which he wrote in response to the Chicago 7 trial. It’s aimed at someone Nash wants to “come to Chicago” to protest, and hopes that the listener isn’t like Jack, who won’t help “cause he’ll turn the other ear”. And he envisions this:

We can change the world.
Rearrange the world.
It’s dying to get better.

I wonder.

In my uninspired wanderings through resistance articles, I have noticed a few things, which I’ll pass on in lieu of a better post in some future week.

The simplest advice has been repeated by many people, so you’ve probably heard it already: Timothy Snyder says “Don’t obey in advance.” In their formation phase, authoritarian regimes wonder what they can get away with. When people anticipate the regime’s demands and comply before they’re asked, they teach the government what it can do. We’ve seen simple examples already: When the Washington Post and LA Times owners torpedoed their editorial departments’ Harris endorsements, they signaled to Trump that he can control the press through the government’s influence on the owners’ other businesses. Seth Moulton — my congressman, sadly — has already offered that many Democrats are willing to surrender trans rights without a fight.

Other examples are more local, like libraries that remove LGBTQ memoirs or non-White fiction before anyone demands it, or sociology departments that voluntarily pare back their programs to avoid discussing White supremacy.

The other thing I’ve been struck by is the importance of perception. The power of an authoritarian regime rests more on belief than on institutional power or even guns. No one resists because everyone believes that (in the words of Star Trek’s Borg Collective) “resistance is futile”. But if enough people believe resistance isn’t futile, then it’s not.

That’s why Trump and his people are working so hard to assert that his sub-50% showing in the election is a “mandate” or even a “landslide“. But if you voted for someone other than Trump, you belong to the majority. And there’s certainly no mandate for implementing Project 2025 policies, which he explicitly denied during the campaign.

Similarly, we can expect a Day One shock-and-awe campaign, where it will seem as everything is happening at once: mass deportation, attacks on abortion rights and trans rights, tariffs, oil drilling on public lands, rolling back environmental regulations, firing civil-service workers, and so on. Trump and his people will make it sound as if these are all done deals — it’s happened already, get over it.

But in fact it won’t have happened. Most of his Day One moves will be challenged in court or require agreement from Congress, either of which will (at a minimum) take time, and may result in significant revisions or even reversal. Every delay means that less gets done, and the secret to saving American democracy is making sure that Trump doesn’t finish it off before the next elections.

So one of the worst things we can do is be defeatist, and claim that democracy is already lost. That does Trump’s work for him.

A George Orwell quote from 1946 is relevant here:

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

Trump’s overthrow of democracy has barely started. We can’t let him pretend that it has already succeeded.

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Perry Bacon‘s list of things to do or avoid doing is well chosen. The gist: Get involved in something beyond electoral politics, like union, a local issue-oriented group, or a politically committed liberal church. (After initial skepticism, Perry is a UU now. Welcome!) Don’t obsess over political news or Democratic strategy.

People who used to deny that Trump is a fascist have been changing their minds.

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From the beginning of his first presidential campaign, it was clear Donald Trump was not like other candidates. The difference was not in political philosophy, because he barely seemed to have one. On any given day, he might be for or against a national healthcare program. He might want to raise or cut taxes on the rich. If “conservative” had been defined by Ronald Reagan and carried into the present by Republicans like Paul Ryan, then Trump was not a conservative.

Meanwhile, he celebrated his supporters’ violent tendencies, called Mexican immigrants rapists, and promised to ban Muslims from entering the country. Maybe we needed a different word for this. Maybe the word was fascist.

For years, the word fascist had mainly just served as an insult in American politics. Yes, there were people on the right-wing fringe who waved swastikas and celebrated Hitler’s birthday, but they had no power and nobody took them seriously. If you heard some congressman or cabinet secretary described as a fascist, it was hyperbole. No significant player in American government was literally a fascist. [1]

But maybe it was time to dust that word off as a serious descriptor. If you were going to do that in a responsible way, though, you had to be clear about what you were using the word to mean. It couldn’t just be “somebody more conservative than me” or “somebody I don’t like”. It needed a real definition that could be applied objectively.

And that was actually kind of tricky, because historical fascism has not displayed a defining set of policy positions, like communism’s public ownership of the means of production. Once in power, fascists become chameleons, championing whatever ideas their leaders find useful. Fascism often resembles a charismatic religion more than a political philosophy; the important thing is the spirit, not adherence to some 10-point plan.

But by November of 2015, I was ready to start using the word again, so I wrote “The Political F-Word” to say what I would mean by it. I said fascism was more about social psychology than politics, and described it as:

“a dysfunctional attempt of people who feel humiliated and powerless to restore their pride by:

• styling themselves as the only true and faithful heirs of their nation’s glorious (and possibly mythical) past, [2]
• identifying with a charismatic leader whose success will become their success,
• helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence,
• under his leadership, purifying the nation by restoring its traditional and characteristic virtues (again, through violence if necessary),
• reawakening and reclaiming the nation’s past glory (by war, if necessary),
• all of which leads to the main point: humiliating the internal and external enemies they blame for their own humiliation.”

I could easily see Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fascism in that description, and believed that it fit Trumpism as well, with its vague allusions to making America great “again” (without specifying when exactly that greatness was present or how it was lost), its persistent claims of persecution and victimhood, its emphasis on “owning the libs”, its hatred of immigrants, the violence of its rhetoric (which is frequently echoed in the manifestos of mass murderers), its focus on “real Americans”, and (most of all) the cult of personality around Donald Trump himself. [3]

The subsequent eight years, I believe, have borne out what I saw in 2015. The January 6 insurrection, for example, was a direct manifestation of “helping that leader achieve power by whatever means necessary, including violence”, and so are the current threats of violence against the prosecutors and judges who attempt to make Trump submit to the rule of law.

Still, not everyone agreed, and calling Trump a fascist was controversial. To many, fascist meant Hitler, and (whatever you might think of him) Trump was not Hitler. This week, Tom Nichols summarized his thinking like this: He was against using fascist through the 2016 campaign because

Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill.

At the time, I thought this view was unhistorical, because Hitler also had seemed ridiculous to many Germans, even after he had become chancellor. But Nichols continued:

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

Well, Nichols is now shocked and alarmed. What changed his mind? The same things that have swayed a lot of pundits lately: the escalating rhetoric that now routinely dehumanizes his opponents as “vermin” and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country“, coupled with a series of ominous proposals for his second administration:

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Nichols is not alone. [4] Though The Economist does not use the F-word, it says that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024”. WaPo’s Dan Balz also avoids fascist, but says his rhetoric is “associated with authoritarian leaders of the past”, whoever they might be. His colleague Aaron Blake puts recent Trump quotes side-by-side with Hitler’s use of the same language. The New Yorker’s John Cassidy warns that the 2024 election is

a struggle to prevent the election of a President whose embrace of fascistic imagery and authoritarian governance goes well beyond what comes out of his mouth.

In short, it’s not just the crazy things Trump says or how he says them. It’s what he’s done and plans to do.

The 2020 election plot. It’s important to realize that we’ve gone well beyond the point of Trump-says-a-lot-of-crazy-things. Openly fascist ideas and proposals are percolating in TrumpWorld right now, and are still not being taken seriously by many American voters. But before we go into those, we need to lay out what Trump has already done: launched a plot to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.

People who think we can put January 6 behind us tell the story like this: After it became clear that Trump had lost the 2020 election, he latched on to every rumor of fraud because he didn’t want to admit defeat. His stolen-election rhetoric resonated with his most radical supporters, and the result was a January 6 rally that got out of hand. Eventually, though, Trump told the rioters to go home and left office peacefully. He still may be claiming he won in 2020, but so what?

Both the evidence gathered by the House January 6 Committee [5] and the Georgia and D.C. indictments against Trump, though, tell a different story:

• As soon as it became clear that Trump was likely to lose the 2020 election, he began preparing to claim fraud and stay in office.
• Within a few days of the November 3 election, his campaign officials and other top advisors told him that he had lost.
• Within a few weeks, all his administration’s top investigators — Bill Barr in Justice, Chris Krebs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and others — told him that his claims of election fraud had no basis in fact. No one in a position to know supported those claims.
• Republican officials in key states — Georgia, Michigan, Arizona — told him that the votes had been counted accurately. Again, no one in a position to know said otherwise.
• In order to find support for the view that he had won the election, Trump had to turn to amateur conspiracy theorists like Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell.
• Barr’s successors at Justice refused to send state legislators a letter falsely claiming that evidence of significant election fraud had been found and recommending that they reconsider their states’ electoral votes.
• Republican-controlled state legislatures all refused Trump’s urging to ignore the election results and appoint Trump electors instead of Biden electors.
• Officials close to Trump coordinated attempts in multiple states for Trump supporters to falsely claim to be electors, and to fraudulently cast Electoral College votes for Trump.
• His own vice president, Mike Pence, resisted his urging to count the votes of the fake electors, or to refuse to count electoral votes from states Biden had won.
• The January 6 assault on the Capitol was planned in advance by groups like the Proud Boys, and their leaders have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. A direct connection from the White House to the Proud Boys has not been nailed down in evidence publicly available, but may have gone through Roger Stone.

The more details come out, the clearer it becomes that this plot could have worked if only Trump had more yes-men in key positions. If the Justice Department had backed rumors of election fraud, Republican legislatures would have had cover to submit alternate slates of electors, and Mike Pence might have been convinced to count those votes, creating a constitutional crisis that the Supreme Court (with three Trump appointees) might have been unwilling to resolve in Biden’s favor. A military leader unlike Mark Milley might have provided troops to put down any subsequent disorder, and Trump would be President for Life. [6]

From the preparations for his second administration, we can conclude that Trump has learned a lesson from his first failed attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, and will not make the same mistakes again. He’ll appoint a compliant attorney general, a compliant vice president, and military leaders willing to do what they’re told. Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly put it like this:

The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs. The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.

Plans for Trump’s second term. According to many reports, Trump did not expect to win in 2016, so he paid little attention to the transition plan drafted by Chris Christie. Top jobs were filled in a haphazard way, often with conservatives who had little previous connection to Trump, like General John Kelly, or with people like Senator Jeff Sessions, who backed Trump but retained independent views of how government was supposed to function. The Trump legislative agenda was largely left to Speaker Paul Ryan, who engineered a Reagan-style tax cut for corporations and the rich, but failed to “repeal and replace” ObamaCare.

As a result, Trump was frequently told that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do; it was illegal or unethical or against the norms of the federal government. By the end of his term, he had gotten rid of most of those people, but there were still enough establishment conservatives around to thwart his attempt to steal a second term.

He doesn’t want that to happen again, so plans are already in place to hit the ground running with sweeping proposals and a list of Trump loyalists ready to implement them.

Weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Trump claims that the indictments against him are purely political. [7] But rather than promise to restore the Justice Department to its proper function, Trump promises to do to his enemies what he (falsely) claims has been done to him. In an interview with Univision, he said:

What they’ve done is they’ve released the genie out of the box. … They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization, and the people aren’t going to stand for it. But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party. I mean, if somebody if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them. Mostly what that would be, you know, they would be out of business. They’d be out they’d be out of the election.

At a New Hampshire rally in October, Trump said:

This is third-world-country stuff, “arrest your opponent”. And that means I can do that, too.

In general, I’m trying to source Trump’s second-term plans to his own words and quotes from allied organizations and named advisors, rather than anonymous sources (though the Mueller Report often attached names and testimony under oath to anonymously-sourced reports Trump had labeled “fake news” at the time). But I’ll make an exception for this quote from the WaPo:

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

One person who believes this account is John Kelly:

There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.

Use the military against Americans. During his administration, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows deploying the active-duty military to enforce law and order within the United States itself. (During riots and natural disasters, governors may call out their state’s chapter of the National Guard, which consists of ordinary citizens and is the successor to the “militia” mentioned in the Constitution.) According to the NYT, he was talked out of doing so by Attorney General Bill Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley — exactly the kind of appointees he will avoid in a second administration.

Instead, Trump reportedly plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on Day One of a second term. This would put the military on call to respond wherever he found it necessary.

Turn the federal government into a patronage machine. In the early days of the United States, the government worked according to the “spoils system”, in which federal jobs were plums a new president could award to his political allies. This led to a lot of corruption and inefficiency, so a series of reforms were passed that made most federal jobs nonpartisan civil service jobs.

Trump began trying to undo the civil service in his first term. A month before the 2020 election, he ordered the creation of “Schedule F” jobs — tens of thousands of positions formerly protected by civil service rules that would become fireable by the president.

Rather than take advantage of this power grab, President Biden reversed Trump’s executive order. But Trump has pledged to restore it if he regains office. Presidents already need to make about 4000 appointments when they take office, but Trump’s plan could cover ten times as many jobs. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is assembling a database of Trump loyalists who could fill those jobs. According to Axios:

intense attention will be given to the social-media histories of anyone being considered for top jobs. Those queasy about testing the limits of Trump’s power will get flagged and rejected.

Create massive detention camps for immigrants and the homeless. Trump has pledged to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”, a statement fleshed out by Trump advisor and speech-writer Stephen Miller, who told the NYT:

Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.

Miller is talking about rounding up not just “illegal” immigrants, deporting “millions per year”, but also revoking the legal status of many others: foreign students who participate in demonstrations Trump disagrees with, immigrants granted temporary protected status because they escaped from countries the US deems unsafe, Afghans evacuated after the Taliban takeover, and others.

To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

Trump has also proposed tent cities for the homeless, who would be arrested and relocated. [8]

The threat of non-action. In addition to the things Trump is planning to do in a second administration, we have to consider the things he might choose not to do: enforce the law against groups who do violence against his opponents. From the beginning, Trump has defended his supporters when they get violent, from describing two Trumpists who beat a homeless man in 2015 as “passionate” to saying “We love you. You’re very special.” to the January 6 rioters, whom he says he will pardon.

In the early Hitler years, the more serious threat was not that the official Gestapo would whisk you away to a concentration camp, but that the unofficial Brownshirts would beat or murder you with no interference from the police. Kristallnact was not police enforcing draconian laws, but hooligans running free. If you think the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers wouldn’t like to play a similar role today, you haven’t been paying attention.

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[1] On the Right, the word communist is still used this way, as when Trump promised to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”. I doubt he could define communist, Marxist, or fascist. The words are simply barbs that he throws at people.

[2] Four years after my F-word post, Trump made this point clearly in his January 6 speech:

Just remember this: You’re stronger, you’re smarter, you’ve got more going than anybody. And they try and demean everybody having to do with us. And you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.

[3] The 2020 Republican Convention, for example, refused to write a platform that would endorse any specific policies, but declared instead that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump” and would “enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda” — whatever turns that might take.

any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order

Going forward, the Republican Party would be Donald Trump, and its policies would be whatever Trump said they were.

[4] You might think Nichols’ article would have an apologetic tone, something like: “You guys were right, he is a fascist.” But no. Those of us who saw further ahead than Nichols are to blame for “the overuse of fascist” that “wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words”.

I see it the other way: Maybe if people like Nichols had taken Trump’s fascism more seriously in 2015, more of the public could have processed the threat then, and we could have avoided this whole mess.

[5] Trump supporters discount the January 6 Committee’s findings because (after Kevin McCarthy pulled all of his appointees and Nancy Pelosi named Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to replace them) no members of the committee defended Trump.

What this point ignores is that nearly all the testimony heard by the committee came from Trump appointees, Republicans at the state level who supported Trump’s 2020 campaign, and even members of the Trump family. There would have been more even testimony from Trump supporters if so many (including Trump himself) had not refused to testify. Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Peter Navarro went so far as to defy subpoenas.

I can’t help believing that if any of those people could have testified to Trump’s innocence without committing perjury, they would have.

The possible bias of the Committee’s report was an issue in the recent hearing in a Colorado court about whether Trump is disqualified from being on the ballot in 2024 by the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. The judge’s ruling noted:

while Trump spent much time contesting potential biases of the Committee members and their staff, he spent almost no time attacking the credibility of the Committee’s findings themselves. The Hearing [in Colorado] provided Trump with an opportunity to subject these findings to the adversarial process, and he chose not to do so, despite frequent complaints that the Committee investigation was not subject to such a process. Because Trump was unable to provide the Court with any credible evidence which would discredit the factual findings of the January 6th Report, the Court has difficulty understanding the argument that it should not consider its findings

[6] You might think, “A second Trump administration would just be four years, because of the 22nd Amendment.” But already during the 2020 campaign, Trump floated plans to serve more than two terms.

We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.

Doubting his intent would be repeating another mistake Germans made with Hitler: believing that he didn’t really mean what he said. Hitler’s 1925 book Mein Kampf laid out much of what he wanted to do and later did, but many Germans refused to take his writings seriously.

[7] That position is hard to square with the evidence those indictments lay out. Trump has been indicted because he committed crimes.

In practice, Trump simply does not address the evidence against him. See the quote from the judge’s ruling in note [5].

[8] In this context, it’s worth pointing out that the Nazi death camps did not start out as death camps, and did not specifically target Jews. In the beginning, the camps housed “undesirables” like Communists. Over time, the definition of “undesirable” expanded, and the limits of what could be done to them loosened.