I frequently get asked what people can do to get involved or play some role in fighting for the future of their country — where to donate, what kind of activism has a real impact. Some people have always been activists. But many others aren’t and haven’t particularly wanted to be but now feel they have no choice. And yet the scale of the problem is overwhelming, and the range of organizations and movements calling on your time and money are almost equally so. Critically, if you’re semi-new to these things, you don’t want to find out you were wasting your time or at least not using that or your money most efficiently.

TPM is a news and commentary site, not an activism site. But at least here in the Editors’ Blog we’re not so finicky about that that we feel we can’t share our opinions, hopefully reasonably well informed and perhaps with additional reporting, about what is a good use of your time or money. So with that in mind, and after a friend suggested it, I wanted to do a series of posts on the idea of “What Can I Do?” And here I would love your participation, your suggestions via email. I have my own views of the matter but I certainly don’t have all the answers and, by design, I don’t get directly involved myself. So give me your ideas, and I will try to share my thoughts on practical ways we individually can try to save our country and, as I will explain in a moment, build a new one. What actually makes a difference and what is more like scattering seeds on the wind?

In recent weeks there’s been a recurring story, albeit with different players. This or that DHS or White House official gets asked about sending ICE to the polls in November. Will they disavow it, promise it won’t happen? The general answer has been no comment, no answer. It’s Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller. Yesterday, it was Todd Blanche at DOJ. There’s a general mood of a drip, drip, drip story, with all the vibes of looming danger and the hammer-fall of that danger being in the other guy’s hands. This is all a mistake. It’s a Trumpian sort of conditioning that is being perpetuated even though Trump himself, as far as I can tell, hasn’t addressed this particular question in some time. It’s a kind of watchful waiting in which all the power is being ceded to the hands of the White House when that is not necessary at all.

Being in a reactive mode, having the other guy holding the cards and waiting to know what they’re going to do and reacting when they do it is enervating, demoralizing, even paralyzing. And that’s always Trump’s personal angle: ‘I 100% can do it. Everyone agrees I can do it. But we’ll see what I decide,’ is more or less what he’s said about countless future crimes he’s dangled in front of an often-cowering opposition over the last decade.

I’ll be chatting with Hunter Walker about the Fulton County election office raid and the fringe characters driving the Trump administration’s latest push to interfere in U.S. elections this morning. Join us on Substack Live at 11 a.m. ET. See you there!

A few days ago Donald Trump said he’s deciding to “nationalize” American elections. He then made the comically insane claim that he won the fairly, though not totally, blue state of Minnesota three times. (Reality: 2016: -1, 2020: -7; 2024: -4). What precisely Trump means by this isn’t totally clear and in fact is totally not the point. It’s a bit like asking what the front man from a third-rate punk band means when he dives into a mosh pit for a crowd surfing adventure. It’s just not a linear thing. Not at all. To the extent we can connect it to anything, it is that same central thread as everything else beginning early last fall: Trump is getting less and less popular and, as he does, he is lashing out constantly, both from a desire to hold on to a dominant position in the attention economy and to exert some level of control over his adversaries’ fear. Both at home and abroad he is leaning into prerogative and other powers which are untrammeled as a kind of compensating salve for his loss of popularity and power.

I’ve seen a lot of people respond to this with a mix of fear, anger and most of all outrage. That is the wrong response. And by that I mean it’s the wrong public response. Obviously, you should respond on your own with whatever you actually feel. But the posture we assume and the words we use in the public square aren’t the same thing.

On Monday I saw a bunch of people on Bluesky mentioning and praising this essay by Andrea Pitzer. It’s quite good. I recommend reading it. It’s about the recent podcast discussion between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates. And that conversation turns a lot on the much-derided column Klein wrote about Charlie Kirk and how “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”

Regular readers know that I have a number of enduring disagreements with Klein. They’re actually more and less than disagreements. They’re more like dispositional disagreements. Pitzer says up front that a lot of people are dumping on Klein now and she’s not trying to do that or at least not add to that. (And I second that for what I write below.) What she sets out to do is explain why she thinks Klein is “lost” in the present moment (a point Klein actually agrees with) and, secondarily, why Coates, whether you agree with him specifically, is not. Again, it’s worth reading Pitzer in her own lucid words rather than just my synopsis. But I would summarize it thus: Pitzer says that Klein has something called “bright-kid syndrome,” by which she means the idea that a smart and hyper-educated young(ish) person like Klein can and should come up with a prescription or fix to the ills he sees in front of him. It’s not quite like the “one weird trick” of memeland. But it’s kind of like that, inasmuch as it rests on the assumption that the intractable and overwhelming can actually be solved if you think about it hard enough, if you have enough cleverness and ingenuity.