After the election, nearly all my friends, those who are political junkies and those who are only casual users (and no, I’m not friends with anyone who isn’t at least a casual user, which is something I should perhaps think about), said: “I need a break. I’m checking out for a while.” The idea that the country would ignore everything it had seen and elect Donald Trump again was just unprocessable.
We saw this manifest itself in a number of ways, notably MSNBC’s lower ratings, which right-wingers crowed about on social media. As Governing magazine put it, “When a sports team loses, its fans don’t hang around for the postgame show.” I did this myself. I took nearly three weeks off work and read relatively little news. It was kind of great.
Folks, it’s time to reengage. Trump will take the oath of office at noon on Monday. Soon thereafter, this parade of misfit toys we’ve been watching testify this week will occupy their Cabinet positions. Orders will start percolating out—from Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and other Trump deep staters—to start doings things differently. Trump already knows certain leverage points in the federal bureaucracy that took him months or years to locate the first time around. And he’ll have one big thing that he didn’t have in 2017: a pliant and willing establishment that signals a desire to be 100 percent on his side and that will give him every benefit of every doubt as he pulls at the republic’s threads.
It blows my mind, and ought to blow yours, that the three richest men in the world will be on Trump’s inaugural podium. It’s significant because, whatever their other powers and properties, they are three of the country’s most powerful media titans. Elon Musk owns the country’s most prominent news-oriented social media platform. Mark Zuckerberg owns the largest social networking service. And Jeff Bezos owns a newspaper that isn’t the ubiquitous behemoth that X and Facebook are, but even so, The Washington Post, at least to people on the broad left in the nation’s capital, means far more emotionally than the first two.
It’s worth staying with the Post for a paragraph here. Bezos bought the paper with seemingly good intentions in 2013 and poured a lot of money into it. Maybe, in retrospect, he went on too big a hiring spree. But that doesn’t excuse what’s been happening there lately. It’s a tragic mess, with its Murdoch-tainted publisher causing many excellent staffers to head for the exits. Bezos not long ago declared himself “very optimistic” and “very hopeful” about Trump’s return. This week, Post executives voted to adopt a new tag line/mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” Wow. This statement commits the paper to … what, exactly? I guess it’s quaint and hopelessly antique of me to mention that newspapers were once meant to be the people’s eyes and ears against corruption and assaults on the civic weal. The Post decided to keep “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for now. At least they didn’t vote to add, “Hey, if it happens, it happens.”
We are in an odd sort of waiting room at the moment. Trump and all his minions and enablers have told us many times what his administration will set out to accomplish: Project 2025, sweeping out the vermin, all the rest. At the same time, Trump himself has sent occasional mixed signals, indicating that it won’t really be that draconian, and every so often we read stories in the press meant to reassure us that, for example, rounding up and detaining 10 million people is literally not possible in four short years.
Well … call me cynical, but I sense a lot of people trying to convince themselves that it won’t be as bad this time around. I mean: Were you reassured by Pam Bondi’s testimony, for example? When Adam Schiff asked the attorney general nominee if she would pursue an investigation into Liz Cheney on Trump’s behalf, she said, “Senator, that’s a hypothetical, and I’m not going to answer it”—before lecturing Schiff that what he really ought to be concerned about is crime in California. But the maximum-cringe moment came when Chris Coons asked her what she’d do if Trump ordered her to do something “outside the boundaries of ethics or law.” Bondi’s reply: “Senator, I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal!” Senator Coons, how dare you!
We’ve been navigating a hall of mirrors in this country ever since George W. Bush and Dick Cheney et al. convinced America that we had to invade a nation that had done nothing to us, possessed no weapons of mass destruction, and, deplorably as it may have treated its own people, had no serious imperialist designs on its region (unlike the country—Iran—that our invasion ended up strengthening). Twenty years on, the mirrors are just stranger and more relentless and pitched at more confounding angles. And it won’t stop.
And the main point: There are more and more people in positions of power telling us, “Mirrors, what mirrors? You’re imagining things.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said this week: “There has been a meaningful shift in CEO confidence, particularly following the results of the U.S. election.” The data would suggest that he meant a shift to the negative, since the president who oversaw the creation of 16 million jobs is leaving and the former president who oversaw a net loss of jobs is returning. But that is not of course what he meant.
So here we are. On Inauguration Day eight years ago, I was at a liberal confab down in Florida (as it happened, just a few miles from a Trump property). That morning I ran into James Carville. So, I asked, are you going to watch him take the oath of office? The only-from-Carville reply: “Are you kiddin’ me? I’d rather watch my uncle’s colonoscopy.”
A great line. But I watched that day, and I’ll be watching Monday. I still feel that the more of us who witness him swearing to defend and protect the Constitution, the better. And I want to see what he has to say in his address, and you should too. You can’t tune him out, even if you wanted to. It’s time to reengage.
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.
The post It’s Time to Check Back in, Liberals—Trump 2.0 Will Be Far, Far Worse appeared first on New Republic.
