Overreach

Trumpism finds its limits

Since Inauguration Day, the attack on our country has been premised on speed and destructive power. “Muzzle velocity” is how Steve Bannon described it to PBS in 2019.

“The opposition party is the media,” Trump’s former adviser and MAGA jedi master said. “And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time.

“All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all our stuff done. Bang, bang bang. These guys will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

It worked.

The world trading system will never be the same. NATO has been essentially shattered. Public health has been dealt a devastating blow. US foreign aid has been gutted. Elections are under attack from the White House, with the clear goal of controlling their outcomes. Media concentration in the hands of Trump’s billionaire cronies proceeds apace. The reputation of the United States around the world is in tatters. Corruption in the presidency reaches levels never seen in our history. Et cetera.

The Trumpist blitzkrieg through the government, cultural institutions, and international systems has been breathtakingly successful. This time, his team was locked and loaded for the presidency, and they are executing on the plan with a mad, ruthless efficiency—and a contemptible disregard for the laws and traditions that have historically circumscribed and checked the power of the presidential office. If you don’t care about the Constitution, it turns out, you can move very fast and break a helluva lot of things as president.

But the success so far of the autocratic Trumpist project has not come because it has widespread popular support. Far from it. On the issues, Trump is sinking, as Nate Silver’s analyses of issue polling over the last eight months clearly shows:

These numbers prove something important: Americans are not ideologues. We are pragmatists; we like what works. Right now, Trumpism isn’t working for most Americans.

No amount of bloated pageantry or statistical flim-flammery or bullying bluster or scapegoating of innocents is going to fix the issues captured in that graph. And Trump’s policies are likely to make it all worse, first for the country, then for his political support.

But don’t get your hopes up—yet. Trump, like other successful illiberal leaders in democracies around the world, has been lucky in his opposition. The Democratic Party’s favorability rating with the American people is at its lowest point in decades. The party’s leadership in DC is seen as ineffective and old-fashioned. And the party’s base took several left turns on cultural issues in recent years that have alienated many voters, especially among working-class Americans, who used to be the base of the party. Trump won those voters last year.

So it is going to be hard to stop Trump. You knew that already. But something is stirring out there among the people, beyond party politics and beyond the news and even beyond the bread-and-butter issues that decide most elections in our pragmatic country:

The old, all-American, middle-class commitment to decency.

Sounds pollyanna, I know. But hear me out. I think that word—decency—is one of the most important and underrated in the American political lexicon. Most Americans are not ideologues, and neither are they louts, haters, extremists, or trolls. Most Americans try to be good neighbors. Most steer clear of the bullies and liars and scammers that you can find in any town or city. Most of us are live-and-let-live when it comes to people’s personal choices. And most Americans don’t support policies of needless cruelty, or censorship, or hatred.

This is where Trump is overreaching. And this is where solidarity is already working against him, as people rise up in defense of ordinary American decency, find each other—and make a difference.

Take a look at that graph from Nate Silver again. Look at what has happened to Trump’s numbers on immigration. He’s almost 15 points down since the beginning of his term on his signature issue. When people understood his immigration policy to be rounding up gang members and dangerous criminals in our country illegally—"the worst of the worst”—that made sense to them. When they saw masked ICE agents snatching women from their children in courthouses, tackling ordinary working men in the streets and disappearing them into a kind of American gulag, without access to lawyers or family members—that was too much for them. Why? Because they are ordinary, decent Americans.

You did that. All of you who spoke up, who showed up, who stood up for our country’s basic values. By doing so, you brought attention to what was happening. Hearts and minds changed. Solidarity worked.

Or consider the Jimmy Kimmel saga. His ratings—like those of all the late-night shows—may have been declining, but when Trump’s FCC chair thuggishly threatened Disney and ABC’s affiliates if Kimmel wasn’t taken off the air, millions of people weren’t having it. The Hollywood community rose up. Ordinary people were canceling subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu. Even Ted Cruz came out against it. And Jimmy is back on the air tonight. Why? Because ordinary Americans will have no truck with censorship.

Solidarity works. That’s the lesson.

I don’t fool myself. There’s much more work to be done, and it’s going to be hard work. There’s no guarantee of success. But Trump will overreach again. And one crucial way to stop him will be to summon civic arguments and engage in civic actions that call on people’s decency, on their best sense of what being an American is all about.