I was not terribly happy with the resolution of the 2020 Democratic primary. From my safe perch in South Korea where it took months before I knew anyone who caught COVID (ironically, someone traveling form the US), I fretted as I saw my favorite grad school professor die, my closest cousin die, and an assortment of older relatives pass on in a state where people were reluctant to talk directly about the pandemic for fear of making Trump look bad as he was denying, minimizing, and suggesting outrageous responses to the pandemic. The stakes felt higher than at any time I had ever known in my lifetime and I did not think Biden was up to the task of kicking out Trump.
It turned out I was wrong. I thought the moment demanded new leadership or new ideas or both and Biden represented neither. However, the unusual circumstances of the pandemic allowed Trump to be the incumbent as the world was falling apart and Biden was able to campaign for change from a venue that minimized his weaknesses and maximized his strengths.
The loser Trump was humiliated and he and his followers did their incompetent best to overturn the results of the election by sowing as much chaos and craziness as they could. The loser that he is was plain for all to see and he handled it in the typical way a loser does.
The big mistake the defenders of democracy made was to be magnanimous and assume that the loser was down for the count and would back off. Merrick Garland should not have backed off. State and federal prosecutors should not have held back. Trump should not have been given any deference but should have been treated like any other criminal stealing sensitive documents, any other traitor fomenting insurrection, any other petty scammer, or any other creepy sexual offender.
I lost friends over the election. Biden was about as conservative a Democrat could be and still stand as an agent of change. Even so, “friends” and acquaintances constantly demonized him as extreme or radical while constantly blaming him for the conditions Trump had cultivated. I had to read a former acquaintance post the most outrageous lies again and again.
This time the truth must hold and we must fight the lies with the truth. As soon as Trump contradicts his election promises, everyone must hear about it. His campaign for the “working class” has already given way to meetings with billionaires and promises for big tax cuts for oligarchs. Trump ran from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, but his new media supporters are already embracing it as their real platform while Trump admits he thinks it is all a great idea.
You may or may not be in a position to trumpet the truth in your world, but you can complain. Trump’s plans do not involve fighting price gouging so you can start complaining about how bad prices have gotten as of January 20 and it will be Trump’s problem. Come January 20, you can start asking why a real estate baron cannot solve the housing crisis. Come January 20, any weird weather attributable to climate change is the fault of the administration that promised billionaire carbon magnates not to do anything about it. Come January 20, anything good that happens in the economy is the effect if the Biden economy and anything bad that happens is the effect of the Trump economy. In fact, you can already complain about House Republicans running interference for Musk’s business interests in China.
A lot of voters are expecting mass deportations of criminals and bad people (the Obama policy), and expect wages and job opportunities to shoot up. Mass deportations may or may not happen, but the real point is to strike fear and cow immigrants so that they and their advocates do not speak up for themselves. The first Trump Administration experience suggests that there is going to be an accelerated targeting of easy-to-find immigrants who are often also the most sympathetic, while Trump the Loser will be too lazy to go after the “bad hombres” like he and his toady Vance promised.
The last Trump Administration was the most corrupt in US history and signs already say Trump II is going to blow out all records, with Trump already having sold himself out to a handful of billionaires, often in return for very specific quid pro quo deals that the Supreme Court will say are covered by presidential immunity. They do not need to stay in the shadows and should remain in the sunlight and must be in the forefront of voter’s minds come 2026. The media cannot be trusted to do it themselves. We must create the vibes, but this time with the truth instead of the lies.
Women’s lives and the lives of people who can get pregnant are not going to be getting any easier. This is the majority of the nation. Most voters given the choice to vote for abortion rights did so out of real concern for women’s real material conditions. Trump and his movement are not just shockingly gross and unseemly, but are going to try to make women’s lives actively worse. This needs to be fought so that we do not go one step back.
Bad people acting in bad faith have been cut way too much slack for too much time. The media have made clear that they are not going to do the job of standing up for truth so we need to do everything we can to remind people of what is real and what is not. The climate, the economy, the democracy, and our very way of life cannot afford for this extremist Republican administration to be more than a freakish one-off thing.