The Smarter Anti-Trump Resistance: More Facts, Less Outrage
What the latest polls on
the Trump transition tell us about how to fight back during his second term
Nov 25, 2024
In yet another “how could this be?”
moment for liberals and Never Trumpers of all stripes, we’re now seeing polls
on the president-elect’s transition, and he’s getting, you guessed it, pretty
good marks. When asked by Pew recently whether they approve
of the policies and plans for the future authored by the man who wanted Matt
Gaetz to run the Justice Department and still wants a Putin fan-girl to be in charge of U.S.
intelligence and a former congressman who pushed the idea that vaccines cause autism
to lead the Centers for Disease Control, 53 percent of respondents said they
do, while 46 percent said they disapprove.
More: Pew asked the same respondents
whether they have warm or cool feelings toward Trump. “Cold” and “very cold”
still combined to top “warm” and “very warm,” 47 to 42 percent, but his warm
rating today is considerably higher than it was in 2016 or 2020.
This means one obvious thing: The
independent voters whom the exit polls say he narrowly lost to Kamala Harris
(49-46, says CNN) have decided to give him a chance.
And that, in turn, means something
else. Our efforts to paint Trump as a sui generis extremist
failed. All those warnings about the unique danger he poses to this country, so
obviously true and dire to us, didn’t really register with swing voters. Or
maybe they registered to some extent, given how close the election was. But
they didn’t prove to be decisive. These voters see Trump as rude and crude,
maybe, but they weigh his words and promises in pretty much the same way they
weigh any other politician’s; Trump does not, for these people, sit outside
American political tradition at all.
And this has implications for the
resistance to Trump 2.0. It will have to take an entirely different approach
this time around.
I’ll get to that, but first, an
admission: I confess I’ve been mystified by this lack of alarm. I’ve said and
written many times that I understand MAGA true believers better than I
understand these swing voters. MAGA true believers at least recognize that
Trump is unlike anyone else who has come down the pike in American politics in
our lifetimes. This is one thing those of us who revile Trump have in common
with those who adore him: We all understand that he’s unique.
It’s the people who don’t see him as
unique who have baffled me. I just haven’t understood how that’s possible. My
best guesses are as follows. One, they’re more cynical than the average voter
and they think every politician is a corrupt liar, so Trump doesn’t
particularly stand out to them in either regard. Two, they just don’t care
about politics very much—we always need to remember that there are a few
million voters out there who pay attention to politics the way I pay attention
to gymnastics; that is, for about a month every four years. Three, they either
sort of like him personally, or at least they like the fact that he’s a
“successful” businessman. Yes, narrow majorities have always thought of Trump
this way, and one Biden official once told me that the view was just impossible
to dislodge.
Whatever the reason, there we have it.
Their hair is not on fire about RFK Jr. They may have thought Gaetz was an odd
choice, but they’re totally on board with Pam Bondi, who is clearly qualified
on paper. People like us read The Washington Post’s report Sunday that she’s going to move to
prosecute Trump’s prosecutors, and we have convulsions. Don’t misunderstand
me—we’re right to. Bondi was an election denier and is a complete loyalist, and
while we can hope that her years in the law have instilled in her some modicum
of respect for the need for evidence, her political history gives us ample
reason to suspect that she’ll carry out Trump’s revenge agenda.
But it’s also apparently the case that
swing voters don’t care, at least not yet. And no amount of screaming on our
part is going to make them care. We don’t need outrage this time around. We
don’t need marches. We need facts. We need evidence. We need smart and
aggressive lawyers who have the funds at their disposal to do what they need to
do. We need Democrats who aren’t afraid and will repeat the facts and the
evidence relentlessly, daily, hourly. And in the face of a right-wing media
machine that, come 12:01 p.m. on January 20, will start pronouncing on how
great everything in America suddenly is, we need mainstream journalism that
will do the same.
Trump entered office in 2017 with a 45
percent approval rating. In four years, he never once topped 50 percent, according to
Gallup. We should be prepared for him to start at 50 this time around.
If we’re right about Trump, he’ll
start going down pretty fast. If a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods turns
that $300 tablet into a $420 one, if it raises prices on groceries and toys and
clothes and refrigerators, people will notice. If he really does use the
justice system for retribution, they’ll notice that, too. If he frees the
January 6 “hostages,” he’ll pay a price. If he hands a chunk of Ukraine to the
Kremlin and weakens NATO and aligns the United States of America with people
like Putin and Orban, even those one-month-every-four-years voters will
disapprove. If he has a political opponent arrested on spurious grounds, people
will see through it.
We needn’t lose our conviction that
Trump is a dangerous extremist. That conviction is correct and will be proven
so. But it will have to be proven through a democratic process: smart
opposition, a vigorous press, persuasion of our fellow citizens. The person
most likely to discredit Trump is Trump himself.
