Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with four Times Opinion columnists about how anger at President Trump can be harnessed into effective opposition and why Democratic Party leaders are struggling to do it.
Patrick Healy: In my job I hear a lot from readers. Over the last few weeks I’ve received some of the angriest and most despairing emails and phone calls of my career, from people saying President Trump is systematically degrading and destroying the United States. They wonder if there will be fair elections in 2026 or 2028. They’re furious this week about the Signal group chat on national security and war planning. But they’re also angry because they feel there’s no effective opposition to Trump, be it from Democratic elected officials or the party, the legal system, universities or other institutions.
Many Americans feel in real peril. They don’t want to wait out Trump or keep their heads down. They want to fight for their country. So my first question to you is: Why has fighting and opposing Trump proved so hard? Is it simply that Republicans hold all the cards in government? That can’t be the only reason — this anger is palpable in part because a lot of Americans believe something can be done.
Jamelle Bouie: Patrick, I think your initial question can be broken into two separate ones. The first: Is fighting and resisting Trump difficult to do? The second: Why have Democrats struggled to do either?
I do not think it is particularly difficult to fight Trump. Democrats could have, from the jump, assumed a posture of total and unrelenting opposition. They would not have been able to stop most of the president’s actions — that is the consequence of losing control of Congress — but they would have made clear the radicalism of the administration and, more importantly, they would have sent a signal to ordinary Democratic voters that there’s no need to give the president the benefit of the doubt.
Healy: And many voters have been hungry for what you’re suggesting, Jamelle. Why have Democrats struggled to do that?
Bouie: The issue is that Democrats — along with many people in our position as professional political commentators, I’d add — interpreted the 2024 results as a broad “vibe shift” toward the right. They said to themselves, in effect, that the country was Trumpy and that they had to get with the program in one way or another. But this wasn’t true. Trump won because a critical portion of the public wanted to roll the clock back to 2019. If he could do that, he would have a successful presidency. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t. And if Democrats had understood that the election was less a vibe shift than a provisional second chance, they would have been better prepared than they were to act as an opposition.
Zeynep Tufekci: But Jamelle, I think this is about leadership, too. Whether it was Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in the 2024 campaign, or Democratic officials now, leaders need to be able to understand and then talk about what’s happening. The run-up to the November election showed that the Democratic Party isn’t up to the task. Their lips portrayed Trump as an existential threat to the country, but their actions shouted they didn’t believe it. I mean, if they truly believed that the country would be in extreme peril under Trump, how could so many leaders of the party sit on their hands while they ran an obviously weak candidate, Biden, followed by a last-minute swap when it became untenable to continue as is? The Democratic leadership hasn’t caught up to reality, yet, and that leadership vacuum makes it harder to have an organized, strategic and smart resistance to the Trump agenda. That’s why it’s been hard for them to oppose it effectively.
Nicholas Kristof: The problem is that Democrats are outraged over Trump eroding our democracy and system of laws — but that isn’t an issue that has as much resonance with many Americans. Democrats are right that we’re drifting toward authoritarianism, and as someone who has spent much of my career covering oppressive governments, I’m horrified by this. But a winning argument has to be about not what you find most compelling, but about what the distracted, centrist voter in Wisconsin finds most important.
Healy: So what does that winning argument look like, Nick?
Kristof: Well, it may have less to do with appalling operational security on Signal group chats, or disgraceful revenge attacks on Perkins Coie, and more to do with the cost of eggs, or losing Medicaid, or the Social Security office not answering the phone. I have friends near me in rural Oregon who are belatedly indignant at Trump because the wife is having trouble signing up for Social Security because of cutbacks. That’s what will get voters rising with pitchforks.
M. Gessen: Nick, I’m not sure I agree. Self-interest is very important in organizing, but it’s insufficient. Or, maybe, a better way of putting it is that self-interest needs to be understood more broadly than grocery prices or access to Social Security. Arlie Hochschild’s terrific book, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” published in 2016, provides a very useful way of thinking about this. Hochschild tackled the trope that people vote against their own interests. The problem comes down to narrowly defining these interests as economic. What she saw as a key is what anthropologists call “deep story” — a narrative about one’s self, one’s people, one’s country.
Healy: That’s so central to leadership — giving people something to fight for and inspiring them to think big. Zelensky has done that in Ukraine.
Gessen: Understanding this helps us understand why people don’t vote on the price of eggs, or the price of eggs alone. On the flip side, we need a story of who we are, what this country is, that can help bring together the outrage one might feel at the cost of living and the dismay at war operations being discussed on Signal and the attacks on trans people and immigrants and the Trump administration’s efforts to bring universities and law firms to their knees and the disdain for the judiciary that the administration is demonstrating. It’s not enough to say that all of these things are elements of an autocratic breakthrough — though they are.
Kristof: Masha, given the kind of alienation that Arlie Hochschild captured and the “deep story” it reflects, don’t you think there’s a danger if Democrats rush out to defend a status quo that people feel, not entirely wrongly, has betrayed them? That’s one reason I think egg prices and Social Security ineptitude make a good target.
Gessen: Yes, absolutely, the Democrats (or anyone) cannot move forward without really addressing the deep dissatisfaction, the sense of being systematically let down and even betrayed that so many people in this country feel. I think that defending the status quo is precisely what cost the Democrats the 2016 and 2024 elections. Saying “don’t break the system” when people feel, with good reason, that the system is broken signals that the Democratic Party is out of touch. And yet I feel that egg prices and Social Security, while very important, are insufficient — there has to be a bigger story that includes them.
Tufekci: Nick, I agree that the Democrats cannot run effectively on merely defending the status quo before Trump, but to figure out where to go they need painful self-examination. It’ll probably only happen if forced on them by the grass roots.
Healy: The party certainly isn’t doing a big autopsy. Honestly, I wonder if they will lose another presidential election in 2028 before they realize they have to get serious about their problems and ask hard questions of themselves, like the Democrats finally did after losing in 1980, 1984 and 1988.
Tufekci: Well, Democrats who worked in the Biden presidency don’t give much reason to feel encouraged. They circled the wagons indiscriminately against most criticism. Some of them gaslighted people about inflation, claiming they were brainwashed on TikTok. Since when did lecturing voters that they were misinformed about something so palpable work? A tendency toward closed-mindedness and self-congratulation made it harder for them to have a realistic assessment of their or Trump’s strengths and weaknesses. I got so many angry objections when I described Trump as charismatic, for example. Charisma is not a virtue, it’s just a trait, but something important to take into account. Barack Obama and Bill Clinton had it and so does Trump. And you can’t run uncharismatic politicians against charismatic populist strongmen politicians. It doesn’t work anywhere. That’s why realistic assessments are important.
Bouie: It seems to me, on the contrary, that the past decade, give or take, has been nothing but Democrats engaged in self-criticism about their failure to reach out to the Trump voter. And I’m going to push back on the idea that Democrats spent the past four years lecturing voters about inflation. Just the opposite, the administration’s public engagement (to the extent that it had any) was falling on top of itself to acknowledge the pain that ordinary voters felt.
Healy: Not right away, though, Jamelle. We saw a lot of reporting in 2021 about how the Biden team saw the economy as booming and did not want to change its messaging to better acknowledge the pain many voters felt.
Bouie: In any case, if all that was necessary was self-criticism, then the Democratic Party should be well-equipped to deal with the political situation. I think the issue, for Democrats, relates to an outdated understanding of the larger political landscape. We have all discussed, on multiple occasions, the fact that Democratic Party leadership is, with few exceptions, old. These are lawmakers and politicians who cut their teeth in the 1970s, 80s and — if they’re on the younger side — the 1990s. Which is to say, they are the product of a political world that is just fundamentally different than the one we exist in. Those Democrats clearly believed that there was some combination of economic policy and soothing words that could bring us back to the status quo ante. What they failed to understand is that it did not matter what they did if they could not capture the attention of a highly distracted public. Trump knows how to capture attention. I think this is the entire difference.
A Democratic Party that is oriented toward attention seeking, toward picking fights, toward telling a simple story of big problems and clear villains, toward performing politics as much as talking about policy is a Democratic Party that would be a little more successful than the one we have. I should add, too, that this is a Democratic Party whose policy orientation would probably be a little more populist than what it is now.
Tufekci: Jamelle, you can’t capture attention if your candidate isn’t out there, active and truly running. I didn’t see Biden on the campaign trail feeling people’s pain every day, as the cliché goes, and forcefully framing the inflation problem as leftover from the Trump era and the pandemic, and energetically talking about what they were doing to resolve it as quickly as possible. I definitely heard them, including many of his surrogates, alternatively blame the news media, social media or bad faith attacks — that’s not effective politics. Capturing attention may be hard, and Trump is very good at it, but it’s definitely much harder if the opposing candidate isn’t out there fighting for attention.
Bouie: I’ll just say that this — Biden wasn’t visible is a different claim than “Biden was lecturing voters about their pain.” I agree that Biden wasn’t visible! It was a really big problem!
Healy: I’d like to bear down a bit on Democratic anger today. Is it anger primarily at Trump and his policies? Or the incompetence of people like Pete Hegseth sharing war plans in a group chat that accidentally included someone who shouldn’t have been there? Or is the more enraging thing to Democrats that they don’t see their side doing more?
Kristof: Having a president try to smash democratic norms, undermine our institutions and seemingly aspire to be an updated King George III is a pretty good reason for Democratic anger. And then this administration layers itself with hypocrisy: Republicans were beside themselves about the security risks from Hillary Clinton’s emails, yet Trump’s team risks American military lives by planning a Yemen op on a Signal chat that includes a journalist?! Any junior civil servant or soldier would be fired for that.
Healy: Or risk criminal prosecution.
Kristof: Yes. And yet these guys enjoy impunity for potentially criminal actions even as they send people to prison in El Salvador without due process and seemingly on the basis of little more than their tattoos? There are also signs that this administration is doing what authoritarians often do: monetize the show with growing corruption. How can one not be horrified when Trump creates a meme coin that creates a possible pathway to bribe him legally, or when the White House tries to sell Teslas on its lawn? Corruption is something that I think will antagonize the public, even if it’s not so offended by the authoritarian drift.
Gessen: Patrick, your question gave me pause, and that in itself is telling. I have no trouble understanding why Trump voters are angry, and this is because they have not one but many mouthpieces who broadcast their anger over and over. Anger at Trump is much less well articulated. But I’m going to add a guess to what Nick and others have already said. I think many people find the stupidity and incompetence of this administration deeply offensive. Institutions of political power are usually aspirational: Politicians sound and dress and furnish their surroundings in ways that broadcast a vision of our better selves. The Trump administration is the opposite; it even lies artlessly.
And I think the incompetence is very much the point of Trump’s anti-political, destructive politics. This debasement, as much or even more as the apparent use of the presidency for personal gain, is what’s so offensive about Teslas on the White House lawn.
Tufekci: The anger from non-Trump supporters is easy to understand. The first few months of this administration may well be among the most consequential periods for the United States in the 21st century. Institutions that took decades to build but needed reform are now being torched in a way that may be very hard to recover from. Congress has been largely missing in action as the executive wields more and more power subject only to checks, maybe, by courts. But the Supreme Court is now 6-to-3 Republican to Democrat appointee in large part because an ailing Ruth Bader Ginsburg wouldn’t resign long after she obviously should have, which means this may be a generational lock-in. And the Democratic Party leadership didn’t make a strong enough fuss about it even as that was happening. And they’re still not acting like they understand the seriousness of the situation, let alone being on their way to finding a way to lead effectively. Of course people are angry.
Bouie: I don’t think the anger at Trump is all that mysterious. Whether you judge by his personal characteristics, his political rhetoric, the people he has empowered, his policy choices or simply the clear effect he has had on public life in the United States, Donald Trump is one of the worst people this country has ever produced. He is a living avatar of selfish greed. He tried to overthrow the constitutional order and he’s currently in office hoping to finish the job! From the moment he came down the escalator in 2015, he has inspired as much visceral hatred and dislike toward him as he has support and adulation for him.
As for anger toward the Democratic Party, this seems pretty simple too. People want representatives who will visibly fight for their interests! They want representatives who will, again, perform the intensity of emotion that they feel. I’m going to return to the generational point — so much of the Democratic Party’s leadership was acculturated at a time when politics was less (at least publicly) messy and fractious than it is now. And that acculturation took place within a political party that then saw itself less as an ideological vehicle or even a vehicle for the discrete interests of a segment of the public (such as workers) but as a brokerage party for a variety of different interest groups.
But these times call for something more ideological and more movement-driven, and many of the people who lead the party are just not equipped to provide that. They want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.
Healy: As Trump and his lieutenants get more oppressive, the opposition matters more. Where should it come from? Should Democrats count on their own elected officials? Should they form new alliances? Should trans Americans form a new association if Democrats aren’t going to fight for their rights? Should there be new labor alliances? New groups representing moderates the way the Democratic Leadership Council once did, or a new group to compete with the conservative Young America’s Foundation?
Gessen: All of the above. But that wouldn’t be enough. A lot of what you are asking about, Patrick, is already happening. There are protests — Erica Chenoweth, a very interesting political scientist who studies nonviolence, has shown that there are many more protests than there were in 2017, when it felt like the resistance to Trump’s first presidency was more robust. And pushback in the courts, on the part of judges and, of course, the lawyers who are challenging a range of executive actions, is something to behold.
So the question is: What’s missing? Why does it feel like resistance is absent or weak or futile?
Let’s start with who is missing: the Democrats, as a legislative force and as a political force. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the literal exception that proves the rule, because their evidently very resonant tour is not an expression of the Democratic Party’s position. In the two-party system, when the opposition party is absent, it means that there is no broad understanding underlying the opposition to Trump. You can’t make up for that by creating a group that would defend trans Americans, a group that would stand up for the universities and a group of young Democrats — though, organizationally, all of these may be good ideas.
Tufekci: I think a lot of the anger is over the incompetent, inept opposition people witnessed since Trump took power. There is a similar dynamic in Turkey, now embroiled in protests after the popular, charismatic mayor of Istanbul expected to challenge Recip Tayyip Erdogan was recently arrested and may not be able to run. Many people are in the streets and they’re fuming at this arrest, but they are also angry at the opposition parties which did not strategize and organize effectively during two decades of Erdogan’s rule when he had less concentrated power.
And I’ll say this as someone who wrote a book on protests and has studied them (or participated in them) for decades: There is no magic in the streets or in large numbers showing up for protests unless it’s part of a smart, strategic and organized mobilization over time. Nowadays, politicians routinely survive large street protests that aren’t part of a larger, effective and long-term strategic action by ignoring them, repressing them, criminalizing them or even just by shrugging their shoulders and organizing counterprotests.
Kristof: Opposition can and should take many forms. But I think we also need to take a deep breath. During Trump’s first term, his outrageous behavior moved many of us — me included — to the left in ways that diminished our effectiveness in countering him. When Trump was tearing apart families at the border, I was ready to embrace every immigrant I could find. And as a result, we didn’t pay adequate attention to the tens of millions of Americans who were saying they wanted some tighter lid on immigration. And if you consistently ignore voters on an issue that is a priority to them, you lose elections.
Bouie: I don’t know, this seems to run counter to the fact that the vociferous opposition of Trump’s first term produced a string of political victories for the Democrats, and that the attempt to accommodate various concerns has had more mixed results.
Gessen: Nick, here I couldn’t disagree more. Trump and Vance have used immigrants as a scapegoat very effectively, arguing — falsely — that immigrants are taking Americans’ jobs, housing, votes and household pets. And yes, I am putting the pet libel in the same sentence as the much more mainstream but equally false or maliciously misleading claims. These claims effectively channeled voters’ economic and social anxieties, and I don’t think that the way to respond to them is to embrace the idea that people want tighter controls on immigration. For one, these controls won’t help — either with job security or with votes for Democrats. The problem isn’t not listening to voters on immigration; the problem is failing to understand that voters feel anxious and abandoned by their government. I believe that it is not only possible but necessary to address these anxieties with a politics of humanism and justice — which would mean moving left.
Tufekci: Nick, as an immigrant myself, I don’t see what’s so difficult about understanding that uncontrolled mass waves of immigration are destabilizing to any country while also forcefully advocating for humane treatment and the rule of law for people already here.
Healy: So how do you effectively harness anger in a society? Masha mentioned Bernie Sanders and A.O.C. and their Fighting Oligarchy tour. Is that effective in harnessing anger? I have to say, I’m surprised that it’s taking so long for Democratic senators and House members to hold nonstop town hall meetings with voters in their states and districts to talk about the threats to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, Pell Grants, rural and farmer aid, etc. Or holding town halls showing the Signal text message chain with Hegseth and Waltz and making the case about this national security debacle. I will admit, talking about town halls feels a little like bringing a ham sandwich to a knife fight.
Tufekci: Town halls are a good idea and a bare minimum. But yes, they aren’t worth that much by themselves. Any opposition worth its salt has to organize, strategize and mobilize, and the first step is realizing this has to be a long-term effort, but it has to start now. I think the Democratic Party has too many people who are expecting someone in authority — a teacher, a parent, the moral arc of the universe, someone, anyone — to give them kudos, good grades and cookies for having a good heart and having put in good effort or being on the right side of something. That’s not how power works. It’s not a classroom and there is no angel of justice or a professor to hand out report cards with A for effort, participation and good behavior.
Bouie: Given that the task right now is to dramatize opposition to Trump, I think every Democrat should be holding rallies and town halls, either for their voters or for Republican voters who are upset with, and feel neglected by, their chosen representatives. And the party should meet every scandal with outrage. Call for resignations! Demand firings! Force the administration to respond to your provocations, versus the other way around.
Healy: Is the anger that Democrats feel being directed at the right targets? Just for instance: Is it a mistake for Dems not to portray Trump as a normal/standard-issue Republican, rather than frame him as an authoritarian or fascist?
Kristof: I think it’s accurate to portray Trump as authoritarian; I just don’t think it’s particularly helpful politically, and that should have been one lesson of the November elections. The Democrats who outperformed in swing districts were those who mostly focused on local and economic issues about well-being. Trump is enormously vulnerable in that respect, for his economic policies are a mess and will probably exacerbate the inflation that helped elect him. He benefited from working-class frustration, but Medicaid cuts and squeezes on Social Security will amplify the struggles of the working class. And corruption, hypocrisy and manipulation — they never go over well.
Gessen: Nick, I think the word well-being is the key here. I think Democrats do well when they come across as caring. It’s obvious, but apparently bears repeating. It’s incredible that Trump has been able to communicate to so many voters that he cares about them more than the Democrats do (incredible, but it happens all the time with autocratic leaders). His actual evident, blatant lack of care should be a target. It includes his autocratic aspirations — he doesn’t care what others think — but it can’t be limited to them. He doesn’t care if you lose your retirement savings, as long as he can impose his tariffs. He seems to be purposefully tanking the economy because enough economic hardship makes people easier to govern, and because billionaires stand to benefit from a recession — again, he doesn’t care about you.
Tufekci: I don’t care what they call him. And I don’t understand why portraying him as a nonstandard Republican does, since the Never-Trump Republicans, bless their hearts and some of them are my friends, seem to exist more in newspaper pages as pundits than as having a political base worth bothering about. Academics like me will argue about what exactly to call Trump forever, probably. Who cares? The Democrats should focus on the concrete acts, the policies, the violations, the consequences and the reality of this administration, and work to bring that home to the people.
Healy: After Democrats lost the presidency for the third time in a row in 1988, Bill Clinton and some other moderate Democrats started thinking about the policy future and political vulnerabilities for the party. They were pretty unpopular with Washington Democrats and the party establishment. Before he ran himself, Clinton conveyed a simple message along the lines of: don’t worry about who, worry about what. Worry about the ideas and everything else will fall into place. Out of that America got national service/AmeriCorps, the middle-class tax cut, reinventing government, tripling the earned-income tax credit, “ending welfare as we know it,” “shared sacrifice.” What are the ideas that might be salable today? Ideas that might rally the opposition to Trump and offer paths forward for Democrats?
Tufekci: Ideas are good, but you can’t sell ideas without a charismatic leader who can be perceived as authentic and deliver the message convincingly. For the Democrats, that requires having a really open competition — the last time that happened, without a feeling of coronation for the Democrats, was over 16 years ago, and produced Barack Obama, a virtual unknown who got the nomination because of immense political talent in organizing and inspiring people.
As for ideas for how to make America better? How can Democrats be struggling with that? I don’t think the shortage here is lack of ideas, it’s lack of vision, lack of strategy and lack of a realistic understanding of how politics actually works, and a will to rock the boat as necessary.
Kristof: I think health care — broadly construed to include mental health and addiction — remains a great issue for Democrats, particularly at a time when Republicans seem about to try to take a bite out of Medicaid. And Medicaid serves 40 percent of American children; it’s a pillar of our care system. I was just at the Common Sense Media conference on children and families, and it was striking how many young people are reporting a generational mental health crisis and see much greater need for accountability for tech firms that have been wildly irresponsible in this regard.
And in the international sphere, Trump has effectively switched sides in Europe: We are now siding with the Kremlin against freedom fighters in Ukraine, in ways that may incentivize China to think of taking a bite out of Taiwan. Trump promised to make us more safe, but what I see is that he is making the world more dangerous and us more vulnerable. More vulnerable to diseases, ranging from avian flu to polio, and more vulnerable to war with China in Asia.
Gessen: I think it would be a huge mistake to look for a more moderate Democratic politics or to try to out-Trump Trump on issues such as immigration. The Democratic Party needs a vision as broad and soaring as Trump’s — and yes, he does have a vision, even if it’s a very bad one: It’s a vision of greatness, of a reinvented American empire. I deeply believe that political visions of greatness, which drive autocracies, ought to be countered by visions of goodness, which drive democracies. We need a Democratic Party that says, “We are a good people, capable of great mutual care, of building a better life for all of us.” We have the resources for it, such a party would argue — as our colleague Ezra Klein argues in his new book on abundance. And, such a party would argue, we have the heart for it.
Bouie: When it comes to actually winning office, I think ideas are overrated. Yes, you want to have a set of policy ideas — or at least a theory of the case — when it’s time to govern. But far more important than the content of the message is the nature of the messenger. Rather than try to moneyball the exact language necessary to win in suburban Wisconsin, it would be more useful for Democrats to look for the best political talent they have in the field. Who is compelling? Magnetic? Charismatic? Who are the best communicators? Who seems authentic? A talented politician can make the best of almost any message, a mediocre one will struggle with even the most effective lines.
Healy: I mentioned at the start that I was hearing from a lot of angry people. Here’s one who wrote me — she said: “Anyone who isn’t totally alarmed by now is simply not paying attention. I live in a liberal little town in New York and every single woman and many men I’ve talked to in the last few weeks are preparing to defend themselves physically because we see what’s coming. NO ONE thinks this is going to end well.” I thought of her letter the other day when I came across this comment from Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote that the right “needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last 200 years.” I’m curious for your reaction to the letter writer’s sentiments — do you feel this way, too? Or if not, how do you see what’s coming America’s way?
Kristof: In my reporting career, I’ve repeatedly seen how a bad leader can swing a nation’s trajectory and create devastation that lasts decades. General Zia screwed up Pakistan. Putin took Russia in absolutely the wrong direction after Yeltsin. And I think the letter-writer is correct about the threat that Trump poses to America, both by taking us in authoritarian directions and by overturning our foreign policy so that we empower Russia and China and mortgage America’s own future. So the stakes are indeed enormous.
That said, I think the impulse among the left is of course to protest, and that is necessary — but what might help even more is for us to fix our blue parts of the country, which right now amount to talking points for Republicans. We may not be able to block some of Trump’s damaging policies, but we can do a much better job addressing homelessness in California, Oregon and other states — that’s our fault, not Trump’s. We have no excuse for our failures in the states we govern. And so I hope we will spend the next four years not only standing up to Trump at a national level but also doing a much better job cleaning up our act in the places where we are the ones failing voters.
Gessen: I think that letter captures something very important: a sense of personal risk. Even before Trump, the United States normalized a lack of fundamental protections: A majority of people in this country are defenseless against a catastrophic medical event, and an unconscionable number of people are unhoused or could lose housing easily. But there were many things we took for granted, such as a safe food supply, and a working public-health infrastructure, though Covid has shown us that it’s not as reliable as it should be.
And now the underlying sense of insecurity has been amplified manifold. Regulatory agencies are being decimated, the secretary of health is a quack, federal programs such as Social Security are under attack, intelligence agencies and the defense department are in the hands of reckless incompetents, and so on — not everyone is paying attention to all of these things or experiencing them in the same way, but I do think that we have entered a period when, as a country, we feel like the rug is being pulled out from under us.
I am familiar with this feeling because I have spent most of my life in Russia, a country where no one ever felt protected, except by a private security force or a tall fence. Unfortunately, it is much easier for an autocrat to control a population of people who feel fundamentally unsafe. I think Trump has an excellent instinctive understanding of this.
Kristof: Masha, I couldn’t agree more with your point about how autocrats thrive when people feel unsafe, physically or economically. That insecurity helped propel Trump to the White House, and I fear that his policies will perpetuate insecurity that he will blame on others, leading to an authoritarian spiral. Will he get away with it? Over our dead bodies!
Tufekci: I do think many people are correct to feel that something fundamental is being broken, and that it puts them in harm’s way. Without enforced rule of law and the right to due process, what’s to stop the administration from grabbing and deporting a citizen to a prison in El Salvador where they may face torture — which shouldn’t happen to anyone as it’s been practiced, as it goes way beyond deporting someone here without legal status, and torture is an internationally recognized crime against humanity — before they have a chance to prove their legal status or contest the charges against them. The rule of law is the foundation of modern civilization.
There is that famous poem by the German pastor Martin Niemöller that has the “first they came for…and I did not speak out…. “ repetition, ending with the regime coming for him and no one left to speak out. That’s just true in all sorts of regimes: The rights that aren’t forcefully defended on principle because the current victims are marginal, demonized or unsympathetic erode over time, until they no longer protect anyone. It’s truly alarming.
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