Why Aren’t We in the Streets?
On Trump the Almighty and his so-far quiescent capital.
February 27, 2025
Last Friday night, minutes after President Donald Trump announced the firing of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a purge of the military’s top lawyers, I received an e-mail from my cousin in Los Angeles. “Why are we not in the streets?” she wrote. “The Germans even marched against Musk. The French would have barricaded every government building.” All week long I’ve been thinking of that message, composed in the heat of the moment after an unprecedented event that already seems forgotten amid all the subsequent unprecedented events.
In the days since then, Trump warned agency heads to prepare for “large-scale” layoffs by mid-March, fired thousands of additional government employees, and ordered Elon Musk, deputized as his chief job-slasher, to “GET MORE AGGRESSIVE.” He’s axed bird-flu inspectors in the midst of a bird-flu outbreak and got rid of thousands of Internal Revenue Service personnel at the height of tax season. On Monday, the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump ordered the U.S. to stand not with Ukraine but instead with Russia, in a U.N. vote that put America on the side of dictatorships and against most of our democratic allies—a profound shift in American foreign policy. On Tuesday, Trump’s White House abolished a century-old tradition by decreeing that only news organizations handpicked by the President’s staff would be allowed in the press pool. On Wednesday, at the first Cabinet meeting of his second term, Trump allowed Musk to hold forth before any Senate-confirmed members of the actual Cabinet. (“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” he asked. “If you are, we’ll throw him out of here.”) On Thursday, Trump vowed to impose stringent twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico next week, as well as additional levies on Chinese goods—which, if he follows through, are likely to result in higher prices for American consumers already concerned about inflation.
And yet, making my way around Washington this week, the city showed no signs of the Trumpian tumult. Disruption, apparently, is just our new normal. There were no major protests in the quiescent capital, unless one counts the lawsuits against Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” that have been piling up in federal court, or the small crowd that gathered on Thursday outside of U.S.A.I.D.’s now shuttered headquarters with hand-lettered thank-you signs for the thousands of workers who were given fifteen minutes to clean out their desks. These acts were a far cry from the popular uprisings that presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services.
Instead, the opposition was receiving this counsel from James Carville in the Times: “Roll over and play dead.” (His actual words.)
Maybe the legendary strategist will once again prove his political genius with his advice to Democrats to do nothing and simply wait for Trump to screw everything up before, eventually, descending “like a pack of hyenas” and going for his “jugular.” In the meantime, however, Carville’s call for “strategic political retreat” sure seems like something a lot closer to unilateral disarmament. What’s the point of having two political parties in our democracy if one of them is no longer loyal to the Constitution and the other one is so weak and consumed by infighting that its response is to say, Never mind, we can’t get our act together. Sorry that Trump is ruining the country but we’ll be back next year in time for the midterms?
Mindful of this argument, I took a scroll through the social-media feed of the House’s Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, which contained not a single mention in recent days of either Musk or Trump, and for the most part simply restated talking points against the proposed Republican budget resolution that passed this week in a 217-215 vote. (Over in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at least had a lot more to say on X about Trump and the “billionaires’ club” and the “chaos” across the land.) Civil society, too, has been remarkably muted in its response. After Trump’s White House seized control of the press pool, there was no boycott or organized resistance and not much more than expressions of Susan Collins-esque deep concern; rival journalists quickly accepted the press pool access that was stripped from their politically noncompliant colleagues.
Carville’s case for doing nothing, incidentally, is not merely some provocative outlier. I’ve heard many Democrats make versions of it privately since Trump’s victory in November. One friend joked that they should treat Trump’s attack on Washington like Napoleon’s march on Moscow, drawing the President and his party into an unwinnable fight. (Though, to be fair, the Russians had to burn down their own ancient capital before defeating the French invaders.) Like Carville, many justify their choice to do nothing with the argument that the “resistance” to Trump failed during his first term—a bizarre act of rewriting history that I have a hard time understanding. Did they forget how Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms? Or that many of Trump’s own first-term appointees successfully resisted from within, preventing him from following through on his most disruptive ideas for slashing the American government, attacking the rule of law, and reorienting our foreign policy, many of which he is now acting on? Did they forget that Trump was defeated in 2020 in an election that ended with Democrats in control of not only the White House but both houses of Congress?
There’s also a partisan cynicism embedded in this calculation—that Trump’s second term isn’t really the fascist threat that Democrats warned about on the campaign trail but a regrettable interlude that must be waited out. Talk about a risky assumption, one that seems premised on the idea that the damage from Trump 2.0 can be undone in four years just as quickly as it’s being done.
Is this really the week to make that case?
There is no doubt that Trump is power-tripping like never before. And why shouldn’t he? It’s not just Democrats walking off the field. Republicans are offering him a level of adulation that would make Kim Jong Un blush. In the House, his party members are competing with one another to turn sycophancy into law, proposing everything from a Trump-branded airport to a Trump-themed federal holiday, according to the Wall Street Journal. At Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting, the session opened with a prayer from his new Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner. “Thank you, God,” he said, “for President Trump.” In a White House photo op this week, Trump posed with a red baseball hat emblazoned with the slogan “Trump Was Right About Everything!” (I received a fund-raising e-mail from Trump on Thursday, selling the hats for forty-seven dollars.)
Trump’s recent rage at Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly pushing back on him for “living in a disinformation space” was telling: Trump views himself as the President Almighty, as one foreign diplomat recently put it to me—no challenges are welcome. At such a moment, I understand the theory of the case: let him dig his hole and bury himself in it.
But my fear is a different one. In just five weeks in office, Trump has asserted sweeping authorities and consolidated control over the executive branch by appointing what is undoubtedly the most extreme Cabinet in American history. What we don’t know yet is exactly how far he plans to go, now that so little apparently stands in his way. Will he follow through on his past threats to investigate and imprison political enemies? Or to use the American military to crack down on political dissent at home, given that he’s fired top generals and wants to replace them with others willing to profess loyalty to him personally? I don’t know, but I do know this: the man who calls himself our King is more than delighted for his enemies to wallow offstage in their own weakness. Nature, and Trump, abhor a vacuum. ♦
