Member Newsletter
As the clock winds down on the Biden presidency, Democrats and the Democrat-adjacent are hashing out, often awkwardly and painedly, what stance to take toward the second Trump presidency. I’ve already discussed this issue in the piece I wrote back on November 14th: “The Most Pernicious Anticipatory Obedience Hides in Plain Sight.” As I wrote in that post, there’s a species of Democrat who imagines there’s “some power or badassery or even a species of courage in” declaring constantly that Trump is all-powerful and everyone is powerless before him. Today this is playing out over Trump’s threat to jail the members of the Jan. 6th committee after pardoning the insurrectionists themselves.
For myself, I’m with former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, whose response to Trump was “bring it on.” This isn’t just about the personal and aesthetic importance of standing or going down fighting rather than cowering. (And yes, obviously it means much less coming from me than Kinzinger.) There’s also the deeper issue I discussed in that November post, which is how much fuel anyone should give Trump, how large a penumbra of fear and shock we should allow Trump to cast with boasts he probably lacks the courage to make good on and would probably struggle to make good on if he were up to trying. This isn’t the same as ignoring these crazed and degenerate threats. And it doesn’t mean these threats couldn’t come to pass. Managing that balance is at the heart of this period we are living through.
In a series of arguments over this on the rising social platform Bluesky over the weekend I let myself call this tendency “militant pussydom,” a phrase I’d never use here on the site. But the sentiment is merited. If someone is tapped out, overwhelmed, overcome by pessimism — I get that. It’s that need some people have to make an ideology of that sadsackery, to propagandize for it. Where does that urge come from, that inside-out valor? It’s weird, is all I have to say.
In the course of these fraught exchanges I was confirmed in all my disdain. But I also realized that at least a portion of this is people talking past each other. I’ve pointed out repeatedly that Donald Trump cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order. It’s right there in the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment and that clear meaning has been confirmed and buttressed by 150 years of case law and attestations by the United States government. It’s very important to state these realities confidently and right in his face. The guy is constantly operating within the territory of his boasts and trash talk and it’s his opponents who end up letting him.
This doesn’t mean he won’t try to do this or that he won’t find judges who will back him up. It’s clear to me that not a few people think that putting Trump to his test, saying “we’ll believe it when we see it, champ,” is the same as saying “nothing bad can happen.” There’s some weird needing of guarantees in life behind this concerted, dogged collapse. When Kinzinger says “bring it on,” I’m pretty sure he’s not saying “yes, I welcome you putting me in jail. And I’ll be pumped in jail.” I think he’s saying that knowing Donald Trump’s cowardice and with his history of being all talk and little follow through, he doubts Trump’s up to it. But he’ll hit it standing on his feet regardless.
We need a lot more of that.
The talking past each other is born, in part, by the fact that there are a lot of people who feel pretty burnt by the rhetoric of “norms” and institutions and the law, what would hold and what wouldn’t. And in a way they’re right to be. But that rhetoric and discourse was always the thinnest and most vacuous part of the opposition to Donald Trump during his firm term in office. None of those things are self-enforcing. It’s too bad people got confused about that then. And the folks who preached that were fatuous and misguided. But here we are.
We’re in a worse place than we were eight years ago and in real but by no means all ways we’re in a worse place than we were four years ago. As is always the case, we don’t know where we will be in four years. But the range of possibilities is pretty wide. It’s also the case that the American presidency has a lot of powers to it, especially if it’s backed by a compliant judiciary and Congress. But the reality is that the American system is replete with levers oppositions can use to stymie, block, slow down, obstruct and reverse those same powers. Anyone familiar with American history and the dispersal of power in American government knows this. Here federalism, so often the bane of reformists, actually amplifies this reality to a great degree. There’s a lot of governmental power in a lot of different places.
Yeah, there are no guarantees. Why would there be? But there are a lot of tools too. It’s easy to be overawed by talk and boasts and threats. But we don’t need to be.