How To Resist Donald Trump
Also, why YIMBY won't save us.
Frank Sinatra in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)
Donald Trump’s return to the White House occasioned my first-ever public-policy-anxiety attack. One night in late January I woke up in a sweat and quite literally couldn’t fall back asleep because I was gripped by terror at Trump’s wholesale elimination of government programs, his pathologically cruel brutalization of immigrants, and his bizarre determination to destroy the economy. The result was a piece posted online today by The New Republic in which I canvass politicians, lawyers, activists, union leaders and others for their best ideas about what you and I can do to defend republican government, the rule of law, and common decency against Trump’s depredations. I won’t write a more important piece this year. Please read it, and if you like it, please share it. You’ll find the piece here.
Having now announced that I won’t write a more important piece than my citizen’s guide to resisting Trump, I also direct your attention to a less-important essay that also went online today at The New Republic. That is a piece—the first in a two- (or possibly three-) parter—about the new cult of supply side YIMBY liberalism, as put forward in the new books Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson; Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman (the best in the batch). I’m not anti-YIMBY, but I don’t think this much-ballyhooed fresh new approach addresses any of the issues that put Trump in the White House. You can read that piece here.
The institutional ‘Christians’ who still vocally and politically support Donald Trump tend to see him as literally Godsent. Many, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her reporter boyfriend Brian Glenn, also perceive Trump’s presidency as divinely-intended punishment against liberals. (By institutional Christianity, I mean those ‘Christians’ most resistant to Christ’s fundamental teachings of non-violence, compassion and non-wealth.)
If God really is as vengefully angry, even seemingly blood-thirsty, as institutional Christianity generally portrays Him to be, is anyone — including supposed ardent followers or conservative Bible believers — truly safe or really ‘saved’? One could reasonably theorize that He’d be especially peeved by those self-professed Christians He’d (likely rightfully) deem as fake or frauds. After all, Jesus, a.k.a. God incarnate, was about non-violence, genuine compassion, love and non-wealth. His teachings and practices epitomize so much of the primary component of socialism — do not hoard gratuitous wealth in the midst of great poverty.
Yet, they are not practiced by a significant number of ‘Christians’, likely including many who really seem to worship Donald Trump, a callous man who stands for very little or nothing Jesus taught and represents. … The Biblical Jesus would not have rolled his eyes and sighed: ‘Oh well, I’m against everything the politician stands for, but what can you do when you dislike even more what his political competition stands for?’
Meantime, some of the best humanitarians I, as a big fan of Christ’s unmistakable miracles and fundamental message, have met or heard about were/are atheists or agnostics who, quite ironically, would make better examples of many of Christ’s teachings than too many institutional ‘Christians’. Conversely, some of the worst human(e) beings I’ve met or heard about are the most devout believers/preachers of fundamental Biblical theology.
Speaking as somebody who is very active in the YIMBY / Abundance movement -- I was at an Abundance Network book launch party, with Derek Thompson, ahead of a City Arts and Lectures discussion among Derek, Ezra, and Michael Pollan, just last night -- I'd say very few of us, if any, are under the illusion that the policies we're advocating are _sufficient_ to turn back MAGA fascism. We also have to cope with various other things like how the information environment is working against us.
Paul Krugman wrote a very good summary about this problem the other day, in a piece about Social Security:
<quote>
I can’t help noticing that the inverse correlation between how Americans voted in 2024 and their real interests makes it clear that two of the main factions in the intra-party debate about Democrats’ next moves are talking nonsense.
On one side there are relatively conservative Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits telling us that the party must move to the center. But when it comes to Social Security, which is really important to most Americans, Democrats — who want to preserve the program — are very much in the center, while Republicans — who want to kill it — are extremists. Yet last November, the voters who have most to lose from this extremism didn’t notice.
On the other side there are progressives who argue that Democrats are in trouble because they abandoned the working class. But even if you think that Democrats have been too friendly toward globalization, or deregulation, or low corporate taxes, the Democratic Party has been far more favorable to workers than the Republicans. The Biden administration was especially pro-worker. But working-class voters didn’t notice.
What all this says is that the priority for Democrats isn’t to pursue whatever you think is a better policy mix. It is to get voters to notice.
</quote>
If you like the Politix podcast, by your fellow Substackers Matt Yglesias and Brian Beutler, basically this is coming down on Beutler's side of a perennial argument between those two, about how important policy substance is relative to control of attention.
Nonetheless, the Abundance Agenda is a _necessary_ aspect of winning back power in a durable way. We need to demonstrate, in the cities and states where we hold power, that we're capable of delivering. You can't claim to be the party of the working man, when you're driving working people out of the places where you rule, with high housing costs, transit systems that are treated more like jobs programs than services for riders, and so on.
And people as diverse as AOC on the left, across to Ruben Gallego toward the current right edge of the Dem coalition, as well as plenty of center-right anti-MAGA ex-Republicans, do seem to get this.