When Donald Trump won the election last November I think those of us who are mercifully immune to the lure of the MAGA cult knew that this second term was going to be bad. If you were following the campaign closely (many people were not) you knew about Project 2025 and you knew that Trump was inexplicably attached at the hip to the weird multi-billionaire Elon Musk. You also knew that he was fixated on starting a tariff war with America’s biggest trading partners and was irrevocably hostile to our long standing allies around the world. But I don’t think any of us could have predicted the exact confluence of atrocities being committed at warp speed from every direction. Shock and awe doesn’t adequately describe it. It is a cataclysmic political earthquake.
The full list of outrages is too long to list here and I assume that most informed readers know about most of them. But the general outline includes such abominations as masked government thugs abducting people off the street and disappearing them into a secret detention system, people being deported to a foreign gulag with no due process, curtailing cancer and Alzheimer’s research for no reason, shutting down dozens of vital government services, threatening social security and health care for millions of vulnerable citizens, targeting veterans, destroying foreign aid in ways that will literally result in the deaths of millions of people, using the Department of Justice to wreak revenge on the president’s enemies and much, much more. It is overwhelming, which is exactly how they planned it in Project 2025. The reality is much worse than the abstract planning document foretold.
And yet, most of us are still living our lives in more or less normal fashion. Yes, many immigrants, even those in the country legally are now living in a state of abject terror. And vast numbers of workers have abruptly lost their jobs with many more to come. But the vast majority of Americans are still going to work, taking the kids to school, hanging out with their friends, pursuing their hobbies. Life is just going on in the midst of the most serious political crisis of any of our lifetimes and the cognitive dissonance of that is making us feel a little bit crazy.
During the pandemic I binged watched a wonderful series called “A French Village” which chronicled the lives of the people in a small town during the Nazi occupation. It’s not a story about the terror of the Holocaust or even the brave Britons who lived through the blitz in England. This is about living day to day and adapting to fascist oppression as it becomes more and more dangerous and violent. The villagers still had to do business, shop (and later find food), the kids had to go to school, people made love and had babies — and they all had to confront at some point how they were going to deal with the occupiers. Some collaborated, some left, some resisted, some subverted and some just tried to get by. Through it all life went on, even under the Nazis, until it didn’t.
Obviously, we’re not in that situation. It’s only been 68 days since Trump took office and we still have a way to go before it’s clear that the system has completely broken down one way or another. But I think we can all sense that it’s much shakier than we anticipated.
It’s been evident for years now that the Republican Party as we once knew it has ceased to exist as anything but the political arm of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. It no longer has a distinct ideology and exists purely to serve his wishes. And yes, the Democrats in Washington seem to be in a state of suspended animation. But I confess that I didn’t expect to see so many of our major institutions, from corporations to universities to elite law firms follow their lead. They are, for the most part, capitulating to the administration’s threats.
We might have expected corporations to resist being told how to run their businesses but dozens of them have eagerly complied with the crusade to ban DEI and abandon all attempts to fulfill the promise of the civil rights act. Men at Wall St firms tell reporters they are thrilled to be able to talk about “p**sy” in the workplace again. Law firms, meanwhile, having been told they will lose their access to the federal government including necessary security clearances due to their previous willingness to defend some of Donald Trump’s personal enemies have bowed down and agreed to do whatever the president orders them to do. Universities, meanwhile, are now allowing the federal government to dictate their policies under threat of losing federal funding. This was unexpected. These giant, wealthy institutions all have the ability to stand up to Trump and chose not to.
I am a little bit surprised that we haven’t seen more of an exodus from the big law firms. I suppose they all figure if the big bosses are terrified, they probably should be too. And I confess that I would have expected some energy from the college campuses but virtually none has materialized. According to this NBC report from Columbia University, the top target of Trump’s strong arm tactics, the students say they are tired after the demonstrations last spring and are terrified of what the government might do to them if they protest against it. Considering that students are being kidnapped, you can’t exactly blame them. Columbia mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus described the campus this way:
“Classes are continuing, athletic competition is continuing, the libraries are open. I was watching a campus tour go by outside. It’s just a weird combination of normal and very abnormal.”
Normal and abnormal. Life goes on.
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that for all the capitulation of the institutions, the paralysis of the official political opposition and the fear and trepidation of employees and students who fear for their futures if they speak out, there is quite a bit of resistance building up out in the country.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have been on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that’s garnering unprecedented huge crowds, even for them. Democrats are hosting town halls in red districts all over the country. And voters are turning up at events in huge numbers and registering their unhappiness with what Trump and his cronies are doing. Smalls protests have been breaking out all over the country, including at Tesla showrooms while some big demonstrations are planned, starting this April 5th with a national mobilization sponsored by Indivisible. Grassroots resistance to Trump is ramping up.
Most of us are still watching the unfolding crisis from afar. But before too long what Trump and his accomplices are doing will start to impact us personally and we won’t be able to avoid it any longer. We’ll all have to make a conscious decision as to whether we will resist, collaborate, leave, or just try to keep our heads down until it’s over. Whatever we choose we should be very clear in our own minds that while life does go on in the midst of a political crisis, the country is being changed in some fundamental ways that are not going to be easy to reverse. This nightmare is real and it isn’t going away.
Carney: "The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over." pic.twitter.com/LKYkpO8JD0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2025
He knows it. So should we.
Salon
