In a number of recents posts I’ve been trying to make sense of the climate of drift and enervation that now seems to suffuse the Trump administration and, in a way, the country. Making sense of these things isn’t just interesting in the abstract or an opportunity to dunk on the administration. It’s important to know just where we are, what’s possible now that might not have been possible in the Spring or even a few months ago. And that’s important because we’re all kind of worn out. It’s not just the Trump administration. In a way the opposition to Trump is, too, albeit in a very different way. It’s been a really long year.
I first proposed my DOJ-in-Exile idea back in April. If you’re not familiar with the DOJ-in-Exile concept, this post explains the idea. But the main points I’m about to make don’t require knowing those details. As I’ve mentioned a few times here and to a number of you in email correspondence, it was harder going than I anticipated. For a mix of reasons, I did not want to run it myself or even be involved. I wanted to find a group that wanted to do it and hand the idea and the name off to them. But people were scared. Without my really asking, various TPM Readers came forward with soft pledges totaling probably upwards of a million dollars. So money wasn’t going to be a problem. But the kind of people who would run it or take responsibility for it were scared. People in the key do-gooder groups were scared. People who are hard-chargers were scared. Sometimes they wouldn’t quite say as much in calls but I could read their intonations and I realized a conversation wasn’t going to go anywhere.
In a way that mirrors a pattern I’ve described over the year: elites or people in positions of social and professional prominence were scared, but ordinary people were not. Now, “ordinary” people don’t offer six-figure contributions to an embryonic idea like the DOJ-in-Exile. So I’m not just talking about average Joes working average jobs. Obviously some of these people must have a lot of money. But there’s still a difference here. Those who are visible and operate within the systems of elite power and those who don’t. That’s a big dividing line. And one of the things we’ve learned during the second Trump presidency is how an effectively weaponized presidency and a pliant judiciary can very effectively cast a penumbra not only of fear but of genuine menace across especially elite society. The presidency’s fingers dip into almost everything. Some things are clearly illegal. But if the judiciary decides the president is a sovereign whose will is essentially un-reviewable, anything becomes possible.
But it’s been clear for a while that the calculus of fear and menace has shifted. In some cases, new and corrupt modes of operation are taking on lives of their own. Many people don’t care what the rules are. They just want to know what they are and how to operate within them. So some new rules of the road are congealing. At the same time, many people are less afraid and ready to oppose. That balance shifts as the 2026 midterm election comes into view and people see that Trump’s unchallenged power is not permanent. And that it could be cleaved back significantly in as soon as a year.
In any case, all of this is a way of saying that the time, I think, is more ripe now for these projects than it was in the Spring or Summer. Much of the strength of a political opposition is its resilience. When a rogue executive is truly in the saddle and on fire the real order of business is just rolling with the punches and holding on. Now the administration is much more vulnerable.
I don’t know what that means specifically about the DOJ-in-Exile project. This post is really about projects like that. (And I will repeat again, whoever you are, please steal the idea. Just do it right.) And to conclude this post, I want to make a point about different kinds of opposition efforts. Democrats finally seem to have arrived at some meeting of the minds on “affordability”, it’s not the fuddy-duddy squish talk of “kitchen-table issues” that progs hate and it’s not the scary, socialist weirdness that more center-left Dems see red at. That makes a lot of electoral sense. It captures within it a whole range of middle class and working class precarity (not just grocery prices but ACA prices and a lot more) while also speaking directly to the reality of oligarchic rule. It’s a language that can speak to prices as well as corruption and the connection between the two. But electoral projects are not the only kinds of projects. That freights elections with too much baggage. The point of elections is to win them. No more and no less. But shaping opinion and articulating a path to a different future are different. They work different. They have different goals. They have different kinds of messages. They do different things.
That is where you need groups, or projects or new organizations to do things that define a public record, creating an expectation of accountability and a vision of a different kind of future. Stuff like the DOJ-in-Exile idea — but there are endless numbers of permutations. I think they are more viable now than they were before. And they are critical now. And people should be setting them up and getting off the ground now. What’s important is that these are in a different lane from electoral efforts. It’s not one or the other or one having more valor or seriousness than the other. But now is the time.