Spread it around
Every year about now I can’t wait for the year to be over in the vain hope that the next will be better. Disappointment awaits. Another run at the football, anyone?
Donald Trump won reelection in 2024. He returned to the White House in 2025, writes Michelle Goldberg, “surrounded by obsequious tech barons, seemingly in command of not just the country but also the zeitgeist.” The DOGE rape of Washington followed, led by Elon Musk of chainsaw and ketamine fame. Trump undermined NATO and Ukraine. His masked secret police kidnapped and disappeared undocumented immigrants willy nilly, some in defiance of court orders. The State Department revoked the legal status of others and DHS deported them too. Trump dispatched troops to Los Angeles. His goons tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed residents in Chicago. Trump illegally slaughtered alleged drug smugglers in small boats in an attempt to justify war with Venezuela. And then on Christmas Eve, Howie Klein, our longtime friend, Down With Tyranny! colleague, and music industry legend, passed away.
So, what now? Goldberg believes there is still room for hope. You, YOU are the hope (gift link):
While Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power,” said Leah Greenberg, a founder of the resistance group Indivisible. “That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism.”
In retrospect, it’s possible to see several pivot points. One of the first was a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in April. Elon Musk, then still running rampant at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, declared the contest critical and poured more than $20 million into the race. Voters turned out in droves, and the Musk-backed conservative candidate lost by more than 10 points. Humiliated, Musk began to withdraw from electoral politics, at one point breaking with Trump. The tight bond between the world’s richest man and the most powerful one was eroded.
In June, Trump’s military parade, meant as a display of dominance, was a flop, and simultaneous No Kings protests all over the country were huge and energetic. A few months later, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a tragedy that the administration sought to exploit to silence its opponents. When the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a distasteful comment on ABC that seemed to blame the right for Kirk’s killing, Disney, the network’s parent company, gave in to pressure to take Kimmel off the air. It was a perilous moment for free speech; suddenly America was becoming the kind of country in which regime critics are forced off television. But then came a wave of cancellations of Disney+ and the Disney-owned Hulu channel, as well as a celebrity boycott, and Disney gave Kimmel his show back.
Trump’s approval ratings are in freefall. His courtiers struggle through grimaces to praise the emperor’s cognitive splendor. Citizens like you on grand juries are, repeatedly, calling bullshit on administration attempts to indict Trump critics:
But it’s become, over the past year, easier to imagine the moment when his mystique finally evaporates, when few want to defend him anymore or admit that they ever did. “I think it’s going to be a rocky period, but I no longer think that Trump is going to pull an Orban and fundamentally consolidate authoritarian control of this country the way that it looked like he was going to do in March or April,” said [Ian] Bassin, referring to Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. If Bassin is right, it will be because a critical mass of Americans refused to be either cowed or complicit.
I’m energized each week by streetcorner and overpass protests. What good are they? They give hope to anxious neighbors who really need it. Commuters give that energy right back. We’re earning their trust week by week. I’ll be urging them to vote early next October.
And when the ACA subsidies end next week, I’ll be lit up on the overpass asking 4,700 pairs of eyes per hour how much their premiums rose. They won’t need reminding who’s to blame.
Happy Hollandaise!