It’s important we squarely face U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s victory and what there is to do about it.

Trump has already signaled the kind of president he will be: revengeful, uncontrolled, and unburdened by past norms and current laws. I won’t go through the litany of awful things he’s pledged to do, since that’s been well-established with his words, Project 2025 plans, and excellent analyses from authoritarian experts.

For us to be of any use in a Trump world, we have to pay grave attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion, or constant disorientation.

Looking into an even more destabilized future is not easy. If you’re like me, you’re already tired. The prospect of more drama is daunting. But authoritarianism isn’t going away no matter the election results. So here’s some thinking about ways to orient so we can ground ourselves better for these times ahead.

I am blessed to have spent time writing scenarios about what might happen, developing trainings for a Trump win, and working alongside colleagues living under autocratic regimes. One of the things they keep reminding me is that good psychology is good social change. Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other, and exhaustion at the utter chaos. We’re already feeling it.

Thus, for us to be of any use in a Trump world, we have to pay grave attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion, or constant disorientation.

1. Trust Yourself

I started writing this list with strategic principles (e.g. analyze your opponents’ weaknesses and learn to handle political violence), but actually the place to start is with your own self.

Trump is arriving at a time of great social distrust. Across the board, society has reduced trust in traditional institutions. Yes, there’s more distrust of the media, medical professionals, experts, and politicians. But it extends beyond that. There’s reduced trust in most community institutions and membership groups. Whether from Covid-19 or political polarization, a lot of us have experienced reduced trust in friends and family. Even our trust in predictable weather is diminished.

Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide. We can see that in the casual nature of Trump’s rhetoric—telling people to distrust immigrants, Democrats, socialists, people from Chicago, women marchers, Mexicans, the press, and so on.

Trust all these things inside of you because trust in self is part of the foundation of a healthy movement life.

This is a social disease: You know who to trust by who they tell you to distrust.

Trust-building starts with your own self. It includes trusting your own eyes and gut, as well as building protection from the ways the crazy-making can become internalized.

This also means being trustworthy—not just with information, but with emotions. That way you can acknowledge what you know and admit the parts that are uncertain fears nagging at you.

Then take steps to follow through on what you need. If you’re tired, take some rest. If you’re scared, make some peace with your fears. I can point you to resources that support that—like FindingSteadyGround.com—but the value here is to start with trusting your own inner voice. If you need to stop checking your phone compulsively, do it. If you don’t want to read this article now and instead take a good walk, do it.

Trust all these things inside of you because trust in self is part of the foundation of a healthy movement life.

2. Find Others Who You Trust

I promise I’ll head towards practical resistance strategies. But the emotional landscape matters a great deal. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism explored how destructive ideologies like fascism and autocracy grow. She used the word verlassenheit—often translated as loneliness—as a central ingredient. As she meant it, loneliness isn’t a feeling but a kind of social isolation of the mind. Your thinking becomes closed off to the world and a sense of being abandoned to each other.

She’s identifying a societal breakdown that we’re all experiencing. Under a Trump presidency, this trend will continue to accelerate. The constant attacks on social systems—teachers, healthcare, and infrastructure—make us turn away from leaning on each other and toward ideologically simple answers that increase isolation (e.g. “distrust government,” “MAGA is nuts,” “anyone who votes that way doesn’t care about you”).

In a destabilized society, you need people who help ground you.

In extreme cases, like Chile in the 1970s and ‘80s, the dictatorship aimed to keep people in such tiny nodes of trust that everyone was an island unto themselves. At social gatherings and parties, people would commonly not introduce each other by name out of fear of being too involved. Fear breeds distance.

We have to consciously break that distance. In Chile they organized under the guise of affinity groups. This was, as its name suggests, people who shared some connections and trust. Finding just a few people who you trust to regularly act with and touch base with is central.

Following Trump’s win: Get some people to regularly touch base with. Use that trust to explore your own thinking and support each other to stay sharp and grounded.

For the last several months I’ve been hosting a regular group at my house to “explore what is up with these times.” Our crew thinks differently but invests in trust. We emote, cry, sing, laugh, sit in stillness, and think together.

I’ve written an agenda for such gatherings right after a Trump win that you can use.

All of us will benefit from actively organized nodes to help stabilize us. In a destabilized society, you need people who help ground you.

3. Grieve

No matter what we try to do, there’s going to be a lot of loss. The human thing to do is grieve. (Well, apparently humans are also very good at compartmentalizing, rationalizing, intellectualizing, and ignoring—but the damage it does to our body and psyche is pretty well documented.)

If you aren’t a feelings person, let me say it this way: The inability to grieve is a strategic error. After Donald Trump won in 2016, we all saw colleagues who never grieved. They didn’t look into their feelings and the future—and as a result they remained in shock. For years they kept saying, “I can’t believe he’s doing that...”

An alternative: Start by naming and allowing feelings that come to arise. The night that Donald Trump won in 2016, I stayed up until 4:00 am with a colleague. It was a tear-filled night of naming things that we had just lost. The list ranged from the political to the deeply personal:

Losing a presidency to an awful man means you and your people lose a lot.

“Trump will leave the Paris climate agreement, and that means much of the world will soft pedal its climate plans.”

“Ugh, I’m gonna have this man in my dreams. We’re all going to sleep less and wake up to bat-shit crazy headlines each morning.”

“Trump’s gonna constantly attack immigrants—the wall may or may not happen, but he’s gonna raise the threshold for racism. I don’t think I can take it.”

“Friends I know who signed up for DACA are never going to trust government again.”

And on and on. It wasn’t only a list, but it was finding the impact inside of us of sadness, anger, numbness, shock, confusion, and fear. We alternated between rageful spouts and tears. We grieved. We cried. We held each other. We breathed. We dove back into naming all the bad things we knew we’d lost and things we thought we’d be likely to lose.

It wasn’t anywhere near strategizing or list-making or planning. It was part of our acceptance that losing a presidency to an awful man means you and your people lose a lot. Ultimately, this helped us believe it—so we didn’t spend years in a daze: “I can’t believe this is happening in this country.”

Believe it. Believe it now. Grief is a pathway to that acceptance.

4. Release That Which You Cannot Change

Growing up my mom had a copy of the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Notably, that prayer comes from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr as he was watching the rise of Nazis in Germany.

Trump’s first day likely includes pardoning January 6 insurrectionists, reallocating money to build the wall, pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, and firing 50,000-plus government workers to begin replacing them with loyalists. There’s little reason to believe that day two will get much quieter.

Under a Trump presidency, there are going to be so many issues that it will be hard to accept that we cannot do it all. I’m reminded of a colleague in Turkey who told me, “There’s always something bad happening every day. If we had to react to every bad thing, we’d never have time to eat.”

Public angsting as a strategy is akin to pleading with the hole in the boat to stop us from sinking.

An elder once saw me trying to do everything and pulled me aside. “That’s not a healthy lifelong strategy,” she said. She’d been raised in Germany by the generation of Holocaust survivors who told her, “Never again.” She took it personally, as if she had to stop every wrong. It wracked her and contributed to several serious ongoing medical conditions. We can accept our humanity or suffer that lack of acceptance.

Chaos is a friend of the autocrat. One way we can unwittingly assist is by joining in the story that we have to do it all.

Over the last few months I’ve been testing out a terribly challenging tool. It’s a journaling exercise that invites you to reflect on which issues you’ll spend energy on. It asks: What are issues you’ll throw down on, do a lot for, a little for, or—despite caring about it—do nothing at all for? That last question can feel like a kind of torture for many activists, even while we’re intellectually aware that we cannot stop it all.

Unaddressed, this desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy. Nine months ago when we gathered activists to scenario plan together, we took note of two knee-jerk tendencies from the left that ended up largely being dead-ends in the face of Trump:

• Public angsting—posting outrage on social media, talking with friends, sharing awful news
• Symbolic actions—organizing marches and public statements

The first is where we look around at bad things happening and make sure other people know about them, too. We satisfy the social pressure of our friends who want us to show outrage—but the driving moves are only reactive. The end result wasn’t the intended action or an informed population. It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action. Public angsting as a strategy is akin to pleading with the hole in the boat to stop us from sinking.

Symbolic actions may fare little better under a Trump presidency. In whatever version of democracy we had, the logic of rallies and statements of outrage was to build a unified front that showed the opposition many voices were opposed to them. But under an unleashed fascist—if it’s all you do—it’s like begging the suicidal captain to plug the hole.

Let me be clear. These strategies will be part of the mix. We’ll need public angsting and symbolic actions. But if you see an organization or group who only relies on these tactics, look elsewhere. There are other, more effective ways to engage.

5. Find Your Path

I’ve been writing scenarios of how a Trump presidency might play out. (You can read the scenarios written as a choose-your-own-adventure-style book at WhatIfTrumpWins.org or order the book.) The initial weeks look chaotic no matter what. But over time some differentiated resistance pathways begin to emerge.

One pathway is called “Protecting People.” These are folks surviving and protecting our own—especially those of us directly targeted, such as trans people, folks choosing abortions, and immigrants. This might mean organizing outside current systems for healthcare and mutual aid, or moving resources to communities that are getting targeted. Further examples include starting immigrant welcoming committees, abortion-support funds, or training volunteers on safety skills to respond to white nationalist violence.

Another pathway is “Defending Civic Institutions.” This group may or may not be conscious that current institutions don’t serve us all, but they are united in understanding that Trump wants them to crumble so he can exert greater control over our lives. Each bureaucracy will put up its own fight to defend itself.

Your path may not be clear right now. That’s okay. There will be plenty of opportunities to join the resistance.

Insider groups will play a central battle against Trump fascism. You may recall government scientists dumping copious climate data onto external servers, bracing for Trump’s orders. This time, many more insiders understand it’s code red. Hopefully, many will bravely refuse to quit—and instead choose to stay inside as long as possible.

Institutional pillars understand a Trump presidency is a dire threat. The military, for one, is well aware that Trump’s potential orders to use them to crack down on civilian protesters would politicize them permanently.

These insiders will need external support. Sometimes it’s just folks showing compassion that some of our best allies will be inside, silently resisting. A culture of celebrating people getting fired for the right reasons would help (then offering them practical help with life’s next steps). Other moments will need open support and public activation.

Then there’s a critical third pathway: “Disrupt and Disobey.” This goes beyond protesting for better policies and into the territory of people intervening to stop bad policies or showing resistance.

Initially a lot of that prefigurative work may be purely symbolic. In Norway, to create a culture of resistance during World War II people wore innocuous paperclips as a sign they wouldn’t obey. The symbolism is to build preparation for mass strikes and open resistance. In Serbia, protests against their dictator started with student strikes before escalating to strikes by pensioners (which were both largely symbolic) before finally escalating to the game-changing strike of coal miners.

In effective “Disrupt and Disobey” type actions the ultimate goal is paving a path for mass noncooperation: tax resistance, national strikes, work shut-downs, and other nonviolent mass disobedience tactics—the most effective strategies to displace authoritarians. (Training on how to do that in a new Trump era can be found here.)

Lastly, there’s a key fourth role: “Building Alternatives.” We can’t just be stuck reacting and stopping the bad. We have to have a vision. This is the slow growth work of building alternative ways that are more democratic. It includes grounding and healing work, rich cultural work, alternative ways of growing food and caring for kids, participatory budgeting, or seeding constitutional conventions to build a majoritarian alternative to the Electoral College mess we’re in.

Each of us may be attracted to some pathways more than others.

Myself, I’m attracted to “Disrupt and Disobey”—though I know when certain moments hit I’ll be pulled into some immediate “Protecting People.” I’m perhaps too impatient for most “Building Alternatives” and too unhappy with the status quo to do “Defend Civic Institutions.” However, I’m delighted others will do that work!

I’m reminded of another way of finding your role that comes from my friend Ingrid’s grandfather, who lived in Norway under the Nazi regime. He learned that the resistance was hiding people in the basement of a church near a cemetery. As a florist he already traveled to and from the cemetery—so he found a role smuggling messages in funeral wreaths, delivering them all over the city.

He didn’t go out designing his perfect role. In fact, I’m not sure he would have looked at the list of possible “roles” and found his political path. Instead, he found his space by circumstance.

In other words: Your path may not be clear right now. That’s okay. There will be plenty of opportunities to join the resistance.

6. Do Not Obey in Advance, Do Not Self-Censor

The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times’ cowardly refusal to endorse a political candidate is, it appears, a classic example of self-censorship. Trump did not have to make a direct threat to these media outlets. Their own leadership told them to “sit this one out.”

Why? Because they wanted to stay safe.

If autocrats teach us any valuable lesson it’s this: Political space that you don’t use, you lose.

This is a message to all levels of society: lawyers advising nonprofits, leaders worried about their funding base, folks worried about losing their jobs.

I’m not coaching to never self-protect. You can decide when to speak your mind. But it is a phenomenally slippery slope here we have to observe and combat.

Timothy Snyder has written a helpful book called On Tyranny—and turned it into a video series. He cites ceding power as the first problem to tackle, writing: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Put simply: Use the political space and voice you have.

7. Reorient Your Political Map

A few months ago I sat in a room with retired generals, Republicans like Michael Steele, ex-governors, and congresspeople. We were scenario-planning ways to prevent using the Insurrection Act to target civilian protesters, playing step-by-step who would give the orders to whom, and how the worst could be avoided.

For a committed antiwar activist, the phrase “strange bedfellows” doesn’t begin to describe the bizarre experience I felt.

I came out of it realizing that a Trump presidency reshapes alignments and possibilities. The bellicose, blasphemous language of Trump will meet the practical reality of governing. When you’re out of power, it’s easy to unify—but their coalition’s cracks will quickly emerge. We have to stay sharp for opportunities to cleave off support.

Trump has been very clear about using his political power to its fullest—stretching and breaking the norms and laws that get in his way. The movement will constantly be asking itself: “Are you able to stop this new bad thing?”

How we position ourselves matters: Are we interested in engaging with people unhappy with the regime—whether because they love the current institutions or are unhappy with Trump’s policies on them? Are we able to tell a story that explains how we got here—and do political education? Or are we only interested in maintaining ideological purity and preaching to our own choir?

Even if you don’t want to engage with them (which is fine), we’ll all have to give space to those who do experiment with new language to appeal to others who don’t share our worldview of a multiracial true democracy.

Empathy will be helpful here. I write all this with a particular moment in mind: At the end of the scenario day, we whipped around the room with conclusions. The generals said “The military cannot stop Trump from giving these orders.” Politicians said “Congress cannot stop it.” The lawyers said “We cannot stop it.”

I could see a lot of pain in high-ranking people of great power admitting a kind of defeat. I felt a level of compassion that surprised me.

Only the left activists said: We have an approach of mass noncooperation that can stop this. But we’d need your help.

I’m not sure that projected confidence was well-received. But if we’re going to live into that (and I’m far from certain we can), we have to get real about power.

8. Get Real About Power

In Trump’s first term, the left’s organizing had mixed results. With John McCain’s assistance, we were able to block Trump’s health proposal. Rallies proved less and less effective as time went on. The airport shutdowns showed that disruptive action can activate the public and helped pave the way for the court’s dismissal over the Muslim ban. But Trump was still able to win huge tax cuts and appoint right-wing Supreme Court judges. The narrative lurched, and sizeble chunks of the population have now been captivated by the “Big Lie.” It was elections that ultimately stopped Trump.

This time will be much harder.

The psychological exhaustion and despair is much higher. Deploying people into the streets for mass actions with no clear outcome will grow that frustration, leading to dropout and radicalized action divorced from strategy.

Trump has been very clear about using his political power to its fullest—stretching and breaking the norms and laws that get in his way. The movement will constantly be asking itself: “Are you able to stop this new bad thing?”

We’re not going to convince him not to do these things. No pressure on Republicans will result in more than the tiniest of crumbs (at least initially). We’re not going to stop him from doing these things just by persuasive tactics or showing that there are a LOT of us who oppose them.

It will be helpful to have a power analysis in our minds, specifically that’s known as the upside-down triangle. This tool was built to explain how power moves even under dictatorships.

The central tenet is that like an upside-down triangle, power can be unstable. It naturally topples over without anything supporting it. To prevent that, power relies on pillars of support to keep it upright.

Casually, the left often focuses on pillars of support that include governments, media, corporations, shareholders, and policymakers. Describing the pillars of support, Gene Sharp wrote:

By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps, or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.

Removing one pillar of support can often gain major, life-saving concessions. In response to Trump’s 2019 government shutdown, flight attendants prepared a national strike. Such a strike would ground planes across the country and a key transportation network. Within hours of announcing they were “mobilizing immediately” for a strike, Trump capitulated.

Another example comes from the recently deceased long-time activist Dick Taylor. In his book Blockade, he writes about how he and a tiny group changed U.S. foreign policy by repeatedly blocking armaments sent to support Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan. The ragtag crew sent canoes to block mighty military shipments leaving from East Coast ports until eventually the International Longshoremen’s Association was persuaded to refuse to load them. This broke the back of national policy.

For larger system change we have to look outside of recent U.S. organizing. A good place to start is with Waging Nonviolence’s recent interview series with folks sharing key lessons on fighting autocracies and aiming for system change.

In our country, pressuring elite power is reaching its end point. Power will need to emerge from folks no longer obeying the current unjust system. This tipping point of mass noncooperation will be messy. It means convincing a lot of people to take huge personal risks for a better option.

As a “Disrupt and Disobey” person, we have to move deliberately to gain the trust of others, like the “Protecting People” folks. Mass noncooperation does the opposite of their goal of protection—it exposes people to more risk, more repression. But with that comes the possibility that we could get the kind of liberatory government that we all truly deserve.

9. Handle Fear, Make Violence Rebound

Otpor in Serbia has provided an abundance of examples on how to face repression. They were young people who took a sarcastic response to regular police beatings. They would joke amongst each other, “It only hurts if you’re scared.”

Their attitude wasn’t cavalier—it was tactical. They were not going to grow fear. So when hundreds were beaten on a single day, their response was: This repression will only stiffen the resistance.

This is attitude.

They were also practical. They would follow their arrested protesters to jail cells and insist on making sure they were being treated well. They would target police who beat them up—showing up outside their houses with pictures of the people they beat up. Their call was rooted in the future they wanted: “You’ll have a chance to join us.”

Making political violence rebound requires refusing to be intimidated and resisting those threats so they can backfire.

Handling fear isn’t about suppressing it—but it is about constantly redirecting. One activist described to me two motions in the universe: shrinking or expansion. When Donald Trump directs the Justice Department to use sedition charges against protesters or arrest his political enemies like Jamie Raskin or Liz Cheney, what’s our response?

Activist and intellectual Hardy Merriman released a studied response about political violence that had some news that surprised me. The first was that physical political violence hasn’t grown dramatically in this country—it still remains relatively rare. The threats of violence, however, trend upwards, such as this CNN report: “Politically motivated threats to public officials increased 178 percent during Trump’s presidency,” primarily from the right.

His conclusion wasn’t that political violence isn’t going to grow. Quite the opposite. But he noted that a key component to political violence is to intimidate and tell a story that they are the true victims. Making political violence rebound requires refusing to be intimidated and resisting those threats so they can backfire. (Training on this backfire technique is available from the HOPE-PV guide.)

We can shrink into a cacophony of “that’s not fair,” which fuels the fear of repression. Or we take a page from the great strategist Bayard Rustin.

Black civil rights leaders were targeted by the government of Montgomery, Alabama during the bus boycott in the 1950s. Leaders like the newly appointed Martin Luther King Jr. went into hiding after police threats of arrest based on antiquated anti-boycott laws. Movement organizer Rustin organized them to go down to the station and demand to be arrested since they were leaders—making a positive spectacle of the repression. Some leaders not on police lists publicly demanded they, too, get arrested. Folks charged were met with cheers from crowds, holding their arrest papers high in the air. Fear was turned into valor.

10. Envision a Positive Future

I don’t feel certain, and I’m not predicting we win. But we’ve all now imagined storylines about how bad it might get. We would do ourselves a service to spend an equal measure of time envisioning how we might advance our cause in these conditions. As writer Walidah Imarisha says, “The goal of visionary fiction is to change the world.”

In my mind, we’ll have to eventually get Trump out of office. There are two paths available.

The first: Vote him out. Given the bias of the electoral college, this requires successfully defending nearly all local, state, and national takeovers of elections such that they remain relatively fair and free.

A very public loss like this can cause what Timur Kuran calls an “unanticipated revolution.” He noted many incidents where political leaders seem to have full support, then suddenly it evaporates.

Winning via the path of electoral majority has a wide swath of experience and support from mainstream progressive organizations and Democratic institutions. It’s going to be a major thrust.

In my scenario writing I’ve explored what that strategy could look like, including preparing electoral workers to stand against last minute attempts by Trump to change election rules and even stymie the election with dubious emergency orders. They don’t obey—and go ahead with elections anyway.

The second strategy is if he illegally refuses to leave or allow fair elections: Kick him out. That means we are able to develop a national nonviolent resistance campaign capable of forcing him out of office.

I’ve written several versions of this: One where large-scale strikes disable portions of the U.S. economy. If you recall from Covid-19, our systems are extremely vulnerable. Businesses running “just in time” inventory means small hiccups in the system can cause cascading effects.

Sustained strikes would face deep resistance, but they could swing communities currently on the fence, like the business community, which already is concerned about Trump’s temperamental nature. Trump’s own policies might make these conditions much easier. If he really does mass deportations, the economic injury might be fatal.

In another scenario I explore another strategy of taking advantage of a Trump overreach. Autocrats overplay their hands. And in this imagined scenario, Trump overreaches when he attempts to force autoworkers to stop building electric vehicles. UAW workers refuse and keep the factories running. Eventually he’s unable to stop them—but in the process he’s publicly humiliated.

A very public loss like this can cause what Timur Kuran calls an “unanticipated revolution.” He noted many incidents where political leaders seem to have full support, then suddenly it evaporates. He gives as an example the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. “None of the major intelligence organizations—not even the CIA or the KGB—expected Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime to collapse. Right up to the revolution, they expected him to weather the gathering storm.”

Kuran’s analysis reminds us to look at Trump’s political weakness. Political hacks like Lindsay Graham appear to be sycophants—but if given the chance to turn their knife in his back, they might. This means exposed political weaknesses could quickly turn the many inside Trump’s campaign against him.

That feels far away from now. But all these remain possibilities. Practicing this future thinking and seeing into these directions gives me some hope and some strategic sensibilities.

On the days when I can’t sense any of these political possibilities (more than not), I zoom out further to the lifespans of trees and rocks, heading into spiritual reminders that nothing lasts forever.

All of the future is uncertain. But using these things, we’re more likely to have a more hopeful future and experience during these turbulent times.

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset passed a second reading of two bills that effectively ban the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) from carrying out "any activity" in Israel and occupied Palestine.

Simply put, the decision is catastrophic, because UNRWA is the main international body responsible for the welfare of millions of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, and throughout much of the region.

Israel followed its decision by attacking and damaging an UNRWA office in the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. It was the Israeli government's way of demonstrating its seriousness regarding the matter.

A key player in the war on UNRWA was Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former U.S. President, and now President-elect, Donald Trump.

This is not the first time that Israel has pursued an anti-UNRWA agenda and, contrary to claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israel officials, the decision is not linked to the current genocidal war on Gaza, or the unfounded claims that UNRWA supports "terrorism."

An independent review commissioned by the U.N. revealed that Israel "made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations," but that it "has yet to provide supporting evidence of this."

Israeli claims, however, did a great deal of damage to the organization, as 13 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, and Italy, withheld badly needed funds which were helping Gaza stave off a horrific famine.

Eventually, most of these countries reinstated their financial support, though without apologizing to the Palestinians who were adversely impacted by these countries' initial, unfair decision.

Unrepenting, Israel continued to unleash its relentless war on the organization. "UNRWA workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable," Netanyahu said in a statement on October 28.

The anti-UNRWA rhetoric remains functional for Israel. Amplified by the ever-willing U.S. mainstream media, Israel has managed to keep UNRWA's name in the news, always associating it with "supporting terrorism." So, when the Israeli Knesset voted for the anti-UNRWA bills, mainstream media conveyed the news as if they were the only rational conclusion to an essentially fabricated story.

Israel's problem with UNRWA has little to do with the organization itself, but with its underlying political representation as a U.N. entity whose mission is predicated on providing "assistance and protection to Palestine refugees."

UNRWA was established in 1949 by the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV). It began its operations on May 1, 1950, and with time, it became central to the survival of a large number of Palestinian refugee communities in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

Many have rightly criticized the U.N. for failing to supplement UNRWA's humanitarian mandate with a political equivalent that would ultimately help Palestinians achieve their Right of Return in accordance with U.N. Resolution 194. For Israel, however, UNRWA remained problematic.

According to Tel Aviv's thinking, UNRWA's existence is a constant reminder that there is a distinct group of people called Palestinian refugees. And though UNRWA is not a political organization, the Palestinian refugee crisis and all related U.N. resolutions that emphasize the "inalienable" rights of these refugees are very political.

Taking advantage of the initial, albeit brief, sympathy with Israel worldwide, and the massive campaign of misinformation emanating from Israel and its allies, Netanyahu used October 7 as an opportunity to further demonize UNRWA. However, his campaign had started much earlier.

A key player in the war on UNRWA was Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former U.S. President, and now President-elect, Donald Trump. Kushner, who invested much time in helping Israel defeat the Palestinians once and for all, made UNRWA a key point in his plan. He vowed to carry out "sincere effort to disrupt" the work of the organization, a leaked email revealed.

Due to international rejection and solidarity, Kushner ultimately failed. Even the withholding of funds by the U.S. administration did not force the organization to shut down, although it did negatively impact the lives of millions of Palestinians.

The ongoing war on Gaza and the push to annex large parts of the West Bank represented a golden opportunity for Netanyahu and his extremist government to increase the pressure on UNRWA. They have been enabled by unconditional U.S. support, and the willingness of various Western governments to recklessly act upon Israel's false claims regarding the U.N. organization.

By allowing Israel to delegitimize the very organization responsible for enforcing international law, the U.N.'s crisis becomes much deeper.

The impassioned plea on October 30 by U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese reflects the frustration felt by many U.N.-affiliated officials regarding the growing irrelevance of the U.N.

In her speech, Albanese pointed out that, if the U.N.'s failures continue, its impact will become even "more and more irrelevant to the rest of the world," especially during these times of turmoil.

This irrelevance is already being felt by millions of Palestinians, mainly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Though Palestinians continue to withstand and reject and resist Israeli aggression, they are fed up with an international system that seems to offer them only words, but little action.

Israel's banning of UNRWA should represent an opportunity for those concerned about the standing of the United Nations, to remind Israel that U.N. members who have no respect for international law deserve to be delegitimized. This time, words must be accompanied by action. Nothing else will suffice.

On September 17, 1787, the last day after the drafting of our Constitution in Philadelphia, Ben Franklin was leaving the building when a prominent resident, Elizabeth Willing Powel, asked him “Well Doctor, what have we got—a republic or a monarch?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

On November 5, 2024, our fragile Republic became a Monarchy-elect. A majority of voters elected a Dictator. This is no exaggeration. Look at just some of the damage Donald Trump has done and the appalling things he has said. In July 2019, he declared, “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as president.” And he did, throughout his four years, he violated all kinds of federal laws and provisions of the Constitution, mostly openly, with impunity. He obstructed justice from the White House as a way of life. He defied over 125 congressional subpoenas. He is a very successful fugitive from justice with lawyers skilled at endlessly delaying judges and courts where federal and state prosecutors have obtained indictments. His convictions and adverse civil verdicts are like water on a duck’s back.

He openly admires foreign dictators and meets with them proudly, musing about wanting to be more like them. Moreover, he is gathering around him a large number of vengeful, dictatorial Trumpsters readying to take over the federal departments and agencies. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, 900-page report prepared a detailed blueprint for the corporate state that is the definition of fascism, American style. Together with Trump, they have their “enemies list” both individually and collectively.

Get ready this January for chaos, revenge, greed, rampant abuses of power, and the unbridled control of corrupt plutocrats and oligarchs. With Elon Musk in the lead.

In speech after speech, Trump, JD Vance, and others have spoken as if they will have boundless power after January 20, 2025. They are not wrong. They control the compliant Republican House and the Senate. The U.S. Supreme Court (6 to 3) decided fanatically last June that a president’s “official” conduct no matter how extreme was immune from criminal prosecution. Three of the justices were Trump’s nominees.

He believes his presidency will be above the law. There is no one to challenge him. Ordinary citizens have no “legal standing” to sue. And as is the practice, he will replace all the federal prosecutors working at the Department of Justice, under the new attorney general whom he chooses.

Trump may be on facts and policies, “dumb as a rock,” “with a low IQ!”—to use his words about other persons, but when it comes to knowing the electorate and the mass media, he is a master magician who induces mass masochism. As with violent climate disruptions are “a hoax, drill baby drill.”

He weaves a web of fantasy about his past failed business and presidential records and constantly repeats his megalomaniac refrain: “Only I can fix it.”

His daily lies often come across to his supporters as a form of entertainment garnished with massaging their own grievances and biases into political campaign fodder. He tells those who think they are victims, that he is their savior. He promises a paradise in America in his next presidential term but doesn’t have a clue about how to get there.

As far as the media, his denunciations of them, “fake news,” and the “failing New York Times,” only result in journalists giving him constant top-level coverage, even repeating in CAPITAL LETTERS his pejorative nicknames for people who are not given a chance to reply in the press.

True, the major newspapers have exposed his numerous dark sides—whether personal against women; commercial against workers, students and creditors; against the government with his tax evasions; or as past president, with his brazen violations of law and overt unethical self-enrichment.

Mark Green and I contributed two books—Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption, and General Bullsh*t in 2019 and Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All in 2020—about dangerous, corrupt Donald.

However, in the end, nothing stuck or mattered. Do-little Donald’s fulminating lies were embraced by his followers. His slippery Teflon persona was underestimated. Voter acceptance of the Trumpian mirage reflects poorly on the majority of the voters who cast their ballots for him.

Trump did have some crucial luck. A weak, arrogant Democratic Party leadership, loaded with inhibitory corporate campaign money, constrained by corporate conflicted political and media consultants, who control the party’s campaigns and bar input from the experienced citizen community (see, winningamerica.net) made it impossible for the Democratic Party to learn from its past mistakes or its recurring disastrous strategies.

Trump played the Democratic Party, from its bungling nomination process to the anemic Harris campaign like a fiddle—repeatedly, personally, and without a teleprompter, he fed his crowd blatant falsehoods, hateful rhetoric, and delusionary promises. And he gave the middle finger to the “deep state.”

People must realize they are, with all voters, in a two-party duopoly Trap, excluding full access to third-party and independent candidates. No Western country erects, as the USA does, such barriers to ballot access and many other exclusions and endless harassment. (See Theresa Amato’s book, Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny). A competitive democracy we are not. Still, at the presidential level, alternative candidates are often on the ballot if not in the news or in the debates. But most voters want “to be with a winner,” and glumly or willingly accept their electoral incarceration.

Get ready this January for chaos, revenge, greed, rampant abuses of power, and the unbridled control of corrupt plutocrats and oligarchs. With Elon Musk in the lead.

Fascistic states flow into exercises of terror. The majority of the voters have elected an American Fuhrer. Trump will be our founding father’s greatest nightmare. They inserted numerous protections in our Constitution to block another King George III tyrant with their separation of powers and checks and balances. Come 2025 these protections will be shredded.

As administrator of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, I have spent decades trying to usher visionary, regenerative, and decentralist ideas into the American body politic. So have many of my counterparts in organizations across the country. But sometimes I think we’re no closer to making a difference on a national scale now than we were in the 1970s. What is holding us back?

The usual answers are “capitalism” and the two-party system. But the more experience I’ve gained, the more I’ve come to believe that those are just excuses, and the real answer lies elsewhere.

Mark Satin’s new book—Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics—makes a powerful case that the real answer lies within: We visionary activists have been so internally divided, and so driven by ego and unexamined personal pain, that we’ve never been able to harness the life-giving ideas of people like Jane Jacobs, Ivan Illich, Hazel Henderson, David Korten, Kate Raworth, and E.F. Schumacher himself (all of whom turn up in Satin’s book) to a viable national political organization.

The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”

Satin’s book reads like a novel, and it is admirably, some may say shockingly, specific. It spends a lot of time on activists’ parental, collegial, and love relationships, not just on their political organizing. And Satin finds all of it wanting. (He is as tough on himself as he is on anyone, which gives the book a feeling of heartache rather than blame. And there is redemption at the end!)

To stick to the political organizing—the first part of the book tries to demonstrate that the New Left of the 60s was an inadequate vehicle for us. Satin shows in devastating detail that the leading members of his Mississippi Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee group were more interested in Black nationalism than in integrating the local schools. He shows that the older student leaders of his campus Students for a Democratic Society group were more interested in promoting socialism than in listening to the emerging ecological, decentralist, and humanistic-psychology ideas of younger students. And he shows that the leaders of the Toronto Anti-Draft Program (North America’s largest draft-resister assistance organization) were more interested in fomenting a Marxist revolution than in providing practical help to the resisters.

According to Satin, these and similar experiences led to the collapse of the New Left—and to the rise of thousands of independent feminist, ecological, spiritual, appropriate-technology, etc. organizations. In addition, two visionary organizations arose that aimed to synthesize such ideas and bring them into national politics.

The first of these, the New World Alliance, drew its Governing Council from a wide range of professionals, educators, businesspeople, and activists. It included three future Schumacher Society participants, Alanna Hartzok, John McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale. But it fell apart after four years of constant bickering over policies, processes, and fundraising, often caused (Satin seeks to show) largely by personal jealousies and rivalries. At one point, spiritually oriented Planetary Citizens president Donald Keys accused McClaughry of being in league with the Devil! Some of the scenes in this chapter are so tragicomic that they’d work as skits on Saturday Night Live.

The chapter on the U.S. Green Party movement, though, is pure tragedy. By the mid-1980s, America was yearning for a major third party. Amazingly well-connected people were waiting in the wings to help the Greens get off the ground. But, instead, the principal organizers of the Greens—a spiritual feminist, an anarchist, a socialist, and two bioregionalists—created an organization in their own narrow image. As Satin sees it, this was a classic case of the organizers and their cohorts preferring to be big fish in a small pond. The resulting Green “movement” then engaged in phenomenally ugly infighting over the next decade—what happened to three Green women is truly sickening to read—and the Greens emerged in the end not as a major beyond-left-and-right political party capable of spearheading a regenerative economy and culture, but as a minor far-left protest party.

In more recent years, Satin found hope in what he calls the “radical centrist” or “trasnspartisan” movement—people and groups that are more interested in fostering cross-partisan political dialogue than in providing Correct Answers. He felt this would be an excellent way to insert the views of visionary thinkers into the national dialogue—and to win support for all kinds of local and regional experimentation. But he notes that the track record of radical-centrist groups like New America and No Labels has so far been disappointing. They’re as internally divided as the Greens and a lot snootier. What Satin really wants, he confides to us, is a new political movement of committed listeners, bold beyond-left-and-right synthesizers, and savvy organizers.

A powerful conclusion urges visionary activists to live more like ordinary Americans, in order to decrease arrogance and deepen understanding. The last page reveals the “moral” of the book: “Only by becoming kind people can we create a kind world.”

When E.F. Schumacher wrote his famous book Small Is Beautiful, he entitled his chapter about political economy “Buddhist Economics.” Later he must have had second thoughts about characterizing his ideas in such an oppositional way, for his later book, A Guide for the Perplexed, makes it clear that his ideas are consistent with the beliefs of all the great religions, including of course Christianity. When Satin argues that we visionary activists cannot move forward unless we (a). learn to be kind to self and others, and (b). listen to and learn from all engaged Americans, he is following in Schumacher’s footsteps. We should listen to him.

Mark Satin, Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (New York: Bombardier Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster, 2023), 380 pages, $21.95 pbk, $12.95 eBook.

Donald Trump is once again elected president of the United States only days before more than 30,000 people are expected to attend COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan to negotiate new global commitments on protecting the planet not only for those inhabiting it today, but also for future generations. Trump’s victory is sounding alarm bells in the climate community as his administration has made their disregard for global climate action abundantly clear across their campaign, but the world recognizes we cannot afford inaction.

When Trump announced his plans in 2017 to withdraw the country from the Paris agreement, an international treaty to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C, Gebru Jember Endalew, chair of the Least Developed Countries group, which represents 48 countries, stated “global climate momentum will continue with or without the U.S.” China also joined the E.U., Canada, and many more governments to reiterate their commitment to the agreement and global climate action.

Even if the Trump administration chooses to ignore the importance of investing in our planet, climate change will continue to affect our lives.

In 1995, the first Conference of the Parties (COP) was held in Berlin, Germany and subsequent COPs have produced targets to curb emissions, appropriate much-needed funds to tackle climate change, and build transparent reporting processes. The U.S. often sets the tone at COP as the country's decisions around climate ambitions and climate finance have a global ripple effect. This year’s conference will be the fifth COP I’ve attended. It’s always been clear to me that youth climate activists and frontline communities are a crucial part of the COP process—pushing governments, like the U.S., which is the world’s largest historical polluter, to create and abide by ambitious targets and to address loss and damage so the planet is livable for all. And it’ll be no different this year, especially with a Trump win. Youth voices at COP represent the needs of the upcoming generations who will have to either assert our rights to a just climate future or figure out how to survive the catastrophic impacts that accompany a warmer planet.

We need all the help we can get. U.S. state and local officials are stepping up, as they did in 2017. A coalition of more than two dozen governors committed to achieving “the Paris agreement’s goal of keeping temperature increases below 1.5°C” as did large coalitions of U.S. mayors, county officials, and business leaders. In fact, I had the honor of being present as an intern for the City of San Antonio when my mayor signed a resolution with his commitment. The bipartisan group consists of governors from Washington state all the way to Puerto Rico who are committed to curbing emissions and accelerating climate action. States like California have also been working with other nations, such as China, to promote climate policy. Even if the U.S., at a national level, fails to act once again, it’s encouraging to see local and global communities committed to multilateral action.

My first COP was under the first Trump administration, and I remember feeling disappointed and embarrassed seeing my country failing to step up and lead on climate action. While everyone else had pavilions, announcements, and a large presence, the U.S. had a small office. Because of all the advantages the U.S. has gained by exploiting other communities, cultures, and nature, the U.S. had and still has so much historical and current responsibility to do better. Seeing national and global leaders reiterate their climate commitments gave me hope then and serves as a reminder today—efforts to tackle the climate crisis will continue regardless of the U.S. election results.

Even if the Trump administration chooses to ignore the importance of investing in our planet, climate change will continue to affect our lives. Attribution studies show human-induced climate change is making heatwaves, like the ones in the Southwest, hotter and more likely, while hurricanes and droughts have become more severe and destructive. Climate change is severely costing the environment and the economy. According to the World Economic Forum, “climate change is costing the world $16 million per hour.”

This horrific and costly reality isn’t inevitable. Phasing out fossil fuels, the biggest contributor to climate change, and investing in a greener and cleaner future for all are the antidotes. This is not the time to give up on climate cooperation, but rather strengthen the commitment to it. We cannot be paralyzed by fear. We’ll be at Baku calling for equitable and funded climate solutions, because if climate multilateralism is in jeopardy, so is our future, and we can’t afford to give up on either.

A political disaster such as what occurred Tuesday gains significance not simply by virtue of who won or lost, but through how the election is interpreted.

This is known as The Lesson of the election.

The Lesson explains what happened and why. It deciphers the public’s mood, values, and thoughts. It attributes credit and blame.

Democrats shouldn’t move to the right if that means giving up on democracy, social justice, civil rights, and equal voting rights.

And therein lies its power. When The Lesson of the election becomes accepted wisdom—when most of the politicians, pundits, and politicians come to believe it—it shapes the future. It determines how parties, candidates, political operatives, and journalists approach future elections.

There are many reasons for what occurred on Tuesday and for what the outcome should teach America—about where the nation is, and about what Democrats should do in the future.

Yet inevitably, one Lesson predominates.

Today, I want to share with you six conventional “lessons” you will hear for Tuesday’s outcome. None is, and none should be considered, The Lesson of the 2024 election.

Then I’ll give you what I consider the real Lesson of the election.

None of These are The Lesson of the 2024 Election:

1. It was a total repudiation of the Democratic Party, a major realignment. Rubbish. Harris would have won had there been a small, less than 1% vote shift in the three main battleground states. The biggest shift from 2020 and 2016 was among Latino men. We don’t know yet whether Latino men will return to the Democrats; if they don’t, they will contribute to a small realignment. But the fact is America elected Trump in 2016, almost reelected him in 2020, and elected him again in 2024. We haven't changed much, at least in terms of whom we vote for.
2. If the Dems want to win in the future, they have to move to the right. They should stop talking about “democracy,” forget “multiculturalism,” and end their focus on women’s rights, transgender rights, immigrant’s rights, voting rights, civil rights, and America’s shameful history of racism and genocide. Instead, push to strengthen families, cut taxes, allow school choice and prayer in public schools, reduce immigration, minimize our obligations abroad, and put America and Americans first. Wrong. Democrats shouldn’t move to the right if that means giving up on democracy, social justice, civil rights, and equal voting rights. While Democrats might reconsider their use of “identity” politics (in which people are viewed primarily through the lenses of race, ethnicity, or gender), Democrats must not lose the moral ideals at the heart of the party and at the core of America.
3. Republicans won because of misinformation and right-wing propaganda. They won over young men because of a vicious alliance between Trump and a vast network of online influencers and podcasts appealing to them. The answer is for Democrats to cultivate an equivalent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built. Partly true. Misinformation and right-wing propaganda did play a role, particularly in reaching young men. But this hardly means progressives and Democrats should fill the information ecosystem with misinformation or left-wing propaganda. Better messaging, yes. Lies and bigotry, no. We should use our power as consumers to boycott X and all advertisers on X and on Fox News, mount defamation and other lawsuits against platforms that foment hate, and push for regulations (at least at the state level for now) requiring that all platforms achieve minimum standards of moderation and decency.
4. Republicans cheated. Trump, Putin, and election deniers at county and precinct levels engaged in a vast conspiracy to suppress votes. I doubt it. Putin tried, but so far there’s no sign that the Kremlin affected any voting process. There is little or no evidence of widespread cheating by Republicans. Dems should not feed further conspiracy theories about fraudulent voting or tallying. For the most part, the system worked smoothly, and we owe a huge debt of gratitude to election workers and state officials in charge of the process.
5. Harris ran a lousy campaign. She wasn’t a good communicator. She fudged and shifted her positions on issues. She was weighed down by Biden and didn’t sufficiently separate herself from him. Untrue. Harris ran an excellent campaign but she only had a little over three months to do it in. She had to introduce herself to the nation (typically a vice president is almost invisible within an administration) at the same time Trump’s antics sucked most of the oxygen out of the political air. She could have been clearer about her proposals and policies but her debate with Trump was the best debate performance I’ve ever witnessed, and her speeches were pitch perfect. Biden may have weighed her down a bit, but his decision to step down was gracious and selfless.
6. Racism and misogyny. Voters were simply not prepared to elect a Black female president. Partly true. Surely racism and misogyny played a role, but bigotry can’t offer a full explanation.

Here’s the Real Lesson of the 2024 Election:

On Tuesday, according to exit polls, Americans voted mainly on the economy—and their votes reflected their class and level of education.

While the economy has improved over the last two years according to standard economic measures, most Americans without college degrees—that’s the majority—have not felt it.

In fact, most Americans without college degrees have not felt much economic improvement for four decades, and their jobs have grown less secure. The real median wage of the bottom 90% is stuck nearly where it was in the early 1990s, even though the economy is more than twice as large.

Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

This has caused many Americans to feel frustrated and angry. Trump gave voice to that anger. Harris did not.

The basic bargain used to be that if you worked hard and played by the rules you’d do better and your children would do even better than you. But since 1980, that bargain has become a sham. The middle class has shrunk.

Why? While Republicans steadily cut taxes on the wealthy, Democrats abandoned the working class.

Democrats embraced NAFTA and lowered tariffs on Chinese goods. They deregulated finance and allowed Wall Street to become a high-stakes gambling casino. They let big corporations become huge, with enough market power to keep prices (and profit margins) high.

They let corporations bust unions (with negligible penalties) and slash payrolls. They bailed out Wall Street when its gambling addiction threatened to blow up the entire economy but never bailed out homeowners who lost everything.

They welcomed big money into their campaigns—and delivered quid pro quos that rigged the market in favor of big corporations and the wealthy.

The Republican Party is worse. It says it’s on the side of the working class but its policies will hurt ordinary workers even more. Trump’s tariffs will drive up prices. His expected retreat from vigorous antitrust enforcement will allow giant corporations to drive up prices further.

If Republicans gain control over the House as well as the Senate, as looks likely, they will extend Trump’s 2017 tax law and add additional tax cuts. As in 2017, these lower taxes will mainly benefit the wealthy and enlarge the national debt, which will give Republicans an excuse to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—their objectives for decades.

Democrats must no longer do the bidding of big corporations and the wealthy. They must instead focus on winning back the working class. They should demand paid family leave, Medicare for all, free public higher education, stronger unions, higher taxes on great wealth, and housing credits that will generate the biggest boom in residential home construction since World War II.

They should also demand that corporations share their profits with their workers. They should call for limits on CEO pay, eliminate all stock buybacks (as was the SEC rule before 1982), and reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credit to particular companies and industries unrelated to the common good).

Democrats need to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of economy’s gains.

In doing this, Democrats need not turn their backs on democracy. Democracy goes hand-in-hand with a fair economy. Only by reducing the power of big money in our politics can America grow the middle class, reward hard work, and reaffirm the basic bargain at the heart of our system.

If the Trump Republicans gain control of the House, as seems likely, they will have complete control of the federal government. That means they will own whatever happens to the economy and will be responsible for whatever happens to America. Notwithstanding all their anti-establishment populist rhetoric, they will become the establishment.

The Democratic Party should use this inflection point to shift ground—from being the party of well-off college graduates, big corporations, “never-Tumpers” like Dick Cheney, and vacuous “centrism”—to an anti-establishment party ready to shake up the system on behalf of the vast majority of Americans.

This is, and should be The Lesson of the 2024 election.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election, but when all the votes are tallied, she may have won the senior vote. If so, she would be the first Democrat to do so since Al Gore did in 2000.

As of September 29, CNN reported that the average poll had Kamala Harris up with seniors by three points. Harris’ strong ratings continued to hold in a poll of likely voters by ABC/Ipsos, released a week later, showed Harris up 51-46%. CNN Exit polling has the two candidates tied with voters over 65, a group Trump won by 7%, and 5%, in 2016 and 2020 respectively.

Senior citizens took a beating over the last year, as the primary conversation about older people was centered on the two older men running for president, especially President Joe Biden. I get it, and was glad Biden stepped aside, but by the time he did there’d been plenty of collateral damage. Mainstream news media and popular culture took potshot after potshot at Biden, and sometimes Trump, with jokes about dementia. One Stephen Colbert bit featured Trump being inaugurated with a stack of Depends instead of a book of scripture.

One group that I think few would think we should more aggressively court, fold in, and organize with are seniors, but that is a self-defeating path if we want to realize significant change down the road.

I learned of Biden stepping down while among a hundred people, almost all seniors, filing into a meeting of a County Board of Supervisors in rural Wisconsin. They were there to protest a plan to privatize their beloved county-owned nursing home that in one form or another had been part of the county for more than a century. So many people showed up that the county had to create an overflow room to accommodate everyone. Then, one by one, older Democrats, Independents, and Republicans took to the podium and expressed their ire at the idea of selling off a venerable community institution that they had all paid into for years or a lifetime. It was a fight for publicly funded and run healthcare, and against privatization, and had cross-partisan appeal.

They were not alone in this fight, as small-town seniors in a handful of counties were doing the same, flooding into county board meetings, marching (or driving their tractors) in local parades, and giving pro-privatization county board members hell every step of the way.

In these meetings and marches, I experienced people, 75, 80, and older, having a third, even fourth, act, building relationships across partisanship, doing things for the first time, and some fighting for what was right with their very last breath. None of these fights to protect public healthcare would be possible if not for the leadership of people over 65. They have time, wisdom, and experience to contribute, and we need every bit of it.

In community organizing circles, there is a dearth of organizing of older working class people. The push has been to get younger. I get it, and over the years have trained hundreds of young organizers to organize younger people. But I would encourage us to think about the role of older people in building movements and a “larger we" that can get us to the other side of this tumultuous period in American history.

For those of us who crave significant change, whether as sweeping as doing away with the Electoral College, or an expansion of Medicare, or a reinstatement of some basic voting rights, It will require more than razor thin majorities coming to an agreement. It will require super majorities of people being in agreement on many things and across many states. If we want big change, we need a lot more people.

In many states older people are the fastest growing age demographic, becoming a higher percentage of the electorate, and will have a lot to say about who wins elections. Between 2010 and 2022, the 65-and-over population grew by 48%.

As swing states have been a hot topic of conversation, here’s how the aging of America is playing out in a few of those. The number of Wisconsinites aged 75 and older is projected to grow by 75% over the next two decades. Michiganders over 85 are the state’s fastest growing age group, and Pennsylvania’s over 65 population is already at more than 2.2 million. That’s a lot of people.

Seniors consistently turn out at the highest rate of any age group. According to the U.S. Census, voter registration numbers for those over 65 to 74 hover at 78%, higher than any other age group.

The organizing I’ve been a part of in Wisconsin has shown not only are seniors engaged, but they are ready to take on fights progressives care about, like protecting public healthcare and fighting back against privatization.

Seniors have united across partisanship to save their public nursing homes. In the spring elections, they took that energy to the ballot box and a number of county board members who led the charge to privatize, including the chairs of two counties, were voted out and replaced by candidates who supported keeping their nursing homes publicly owned. People in the community expanded who was in the fight, and they won.

There’s been a tendency among some progressives to look to narrow who is in, to slice us into smaller groups, and to not work in coalition with people unless we agree on all the things. One group that I think few would think we should more aggressively court, fold in, and organize with are seniors, but that is a self-defeating path if we want to realize significant change down the road.

If we want big things, we need more people. Let’s look to expand, not narrow, who is in, and, considering the fact that older people are becoming a larger percentage of the population, it would seem a major mistake to not place more focus here.

After years of serving as enablers for a faltering U.S. President Joe Biden, Democrats in Congress must finally break away from his leadership—for the sake of their party and the survival of democracy in this country.

Donald Trump, the man whom Gen. Mark Milley called “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country,” does not deserve to have the blue carpet rolled out for him at the White House. Yet such hospitality was key to Biden’s message in his Rose Garden speech on Thursday.

It’s one thing to pledge to “ensure a peaceful and orderly transition,” as Biden did. It’s quite another to proceed as though this is a normal transition and a normal incoming president.

In a word, what the Democratic base has been yearning for—leadership—needs to emerge from the party’s lawmakers who have been tragically willing to go along with the catastrophic political edicts from the Biden White House and the Democratic National Committee.

Instead of rising to the historical moment with clarity about the grave and imminent challenges ahead, Biden opted for ominous silence about the clear and present danger to the republic that America will face beginning Jan. 20, 2025.

To the tens of millions of Americans who are deeply alarmed about the future of this country under a second Trump administration, Biden offered only some of his usual aphorisms, along with vague pep-talk phrases like “setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable.”

When Biden assured the nation that “we’re going to be okay,” the statement failed to live up to his responsibilities as someone who took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

That Constitution is now under dire threat. But you wouldn’t know it from what Biden had to say. Instead, what screamed out were his silences, as though the well-founded and widespread worries about Trump’s fascistic qualities are no longer of great moment.

In effect, Biden began to blaze a post-election trail of conciliation toward the extremist politics of the present-day Republican Party. If congressional Democrats follow along that path, they will compound their grievous error of serving as yes-men and yes-women for Biden’s insistence on running for reelection, until his disastrous debate performance.

A huge looming question now is whether Democrats in office will fold up their tents and retreat—or fight back against the Trump forces that are on the march.

It’s long past time for Democrats on Capitol Hill to stop playing follow-the-leader and start providing actual leadership worthy of their constituents. For one thing, members of Congress should refuse to echo Biden’s post-election rhetoric and instead speak plainly and forcefully about the rough road ahead to protect civil liberties and the rule of law.

In particular, Democrats in the Senate should make full use of the two months ahead. Those who can wield committee gavels before the changeover should hold high-profile hearings to spotlight vital facts about the Trump record, his threats to democracy, and the enormous dangers that the Project 2025 agenda poses.

Looking ahead to next year, Democrats should jettison the standard rhetoric about reaching across the aisle. Voters who elected Democrats will not take kindly to odors of capitulation to the GOP. And in 2026, those who behave as quislings will risk vigorous primary challenges.

In a word, what the Democratic base has been yearning for—leadership—needs to emerge from the party’s lawmakers who have been tragically willing to go along with the catastrophic political edicts from the Biden White House and the Democratic National Committee. What’s past is prologue, but retrospective understanding could help light a fire under elected Democrats who wasted years publicly supporting the idea of Biden running for reelection while privately bemoaning it.

Biden has squandered the immediate post-election period by setting a bad example for Democrats. It’s a pattern that has been integral to the chain of events that led to the very long delay in his departure from the 2024 race and a badly truncated campaign by Vice President Kamala Harris.The futures of the Democratic Party and the nation as a constitutional republic are inextricably intertwined. To be sure, that’s not because of any great virtue to be found within the Democratic Party. The reality is that in the two-party system, the Democrats are the only bulwark against the runaway power of the Trump-MAGA Republican Party—and the transformative agenda so clearly and ominously mapped out by Project 2025.

Right now, huge numbers of Americans are holding their breath, with great trepidation, to see if “the system” can withstand the massive stress test ahead. The Democratic Party has failed to avert this existential crisis for our nation as the vaunted land of the free. To avert irreversible catastrophe, the historic burden now falls on Democrats in elected positions to step up to their responsibilities at last.

Conventional wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump 1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.

And it is indeed true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the U.S.. was wholly guided by the Zionist religious right - the real voice in his ear, either as donors or policymakers.

Under Trump and his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground for the settler movement, with which the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.

Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington.

Consequently, in his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy there; he disenfranchised the Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.

Even more damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump’s sponsorship of the Abraham Accords.

This was—and still is—a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to the wealth of the Gulf.

On October 6, 2023, the day before the Hamas attack, the Palestinian cause was all but dead. The Palestinian struggle for self-determination felt like the baggage of an older generation of Arab leaders, which was being unceremoniously dumped by the new generation.

All the diplomatic talk was of Saudi Arabia’s impending decision to normalise relations with Israel, with the picture of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shaking hands in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dangling as the prize lying just behind the next corner. One more push, and it would be in the bag.

If that charge sheet is not long enough, it could easily be argued that Trump’s second term will be even worse for Palestinians than his first was.

Wildest Impulses

This time around, and with the Republican party projected to have control over both houses of Congress, there will be no adults in the room to correct the president’s wildest impulses.

After all, did Friedman not just publish a book entitled One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in which he argues that the U.S. has a biblical duty to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank?

“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections… Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they are not inconsistent with those of Israel,” Friedman writes.

In allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.

So will Trump 2.0 not simply presage yet more territorial changes, such as the annexation of Area C of the occupied West Bank, the permanent division of Gaza, the return of Israeli settlements to northern Gaza, and the clearing of the border area in southern Lebanon?

All of this could, and no doubt will, come to pass under a second Trump term, with no brakes.

I do not for one second underplay or underestimate the sacrifice in blood that Palestinians have paid so far—the death toll in Gaza could easily be three times higher than the current official figure—or could yet pay for all that is about to come.

But in this column, I will argue that the settler movement, backed by a second Trump term, is in the process of burying any chance that Israel will prevail as an apartheid Jewish minority state in control of all the land from the river to the sea.

Irreversible Consequences

Let me make two points about the situation that existed on October 6, before I go on to deal with the irreversible consequences of everything that has happened since. And make no mistake—they are irreversible.

The first is that in allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the U.S. administration under a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution, but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish state.

The liberal version of this state had been the main vehicle of Israeli expansion, with its salami slices making ever-deeper inroads into historic Palestine. By killing it, the liberal fig leaf dropped from the Zionist project, and the religious Zionist forces who were once regarded as fringe and even as terrorists, such as far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and the Kahanists, became mainstream.

This fundamentally altered the whole project to establish Israel as the dominant state between the river and sea. It suddenly became the only state, and one that was governed by religious fanatics; by people wishing to level the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It became a state governed by the religious dogmas of Jerusalem not by the European Ashkenazi internet geeks and sophisticates of Tel Aviv. Under the first Trump presidency, the rift between these two camps became irreconcilable and fundamentally destabilising.

The second change that the first Trump presidency brought about, or rather completed, took place in Palestinian minds.

A whole generation of Palestinians born after the Oslo Accords came to the conclusion that all political and nonviolent ways of seeking an end to the occupation were blocked; that there was no longer any meaning in recognising Israel, let alone trying to find anyone in it to talk with.

Talking to Israel became a meaningless exercise. The political route was blocked not only inside Palestine, but outside it.

To their eternal shame and discredit, U.S. President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, kept all the “achievements” of the first Trump presidency in place—first and foremost the Abraham Accords.

Biden's Humiliation

Trump’s big boast during his first term of office was that he made all these changes to the status quo of the Palestinian conflict, and the sky did not fall in.

But the sky did fall in on October 7, and everything that Trump and Biden had done before that contributed to the Hamas attack, which provided the same shock to Israel that 9/11 provided to the US.

After the Hamas attack, it was impossible to ignore the Palestinian cause. It moved from the periphery of global human rights causes to the very center.

It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.

But Biden didn’t get it. An instinctive Zionist, he allowed Netanyahu to humiliate him. His first reaction to the Hamas attack was to give Israel everything it wanted, thwarting all international moves at the United Nations for a cease-fire. His second reaction was to draw red lines, which Netanyahu proceeded to ignore.

Biden told Netanyahu not to reoccupy Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Netanyahu did it anyway. Biden told Netanyahu to allow aid trucks into Gaza, and Netanyahu mostly ignored him. Biden told Netanyahu not to invade Lebanon; Netanyahu did it. Biden told Netanyahu not to attack Iranian nuclear and oil facilities, and Netanyahu listened to him—for now at least.

It’s not a scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.

He also emerges as a leader who facilitated genocide. The amount of heavy bombs that the U.S. supplied, and that Israel used against overwhelmingly civilian targets in Gaza and Lebanon, over the past year far outweighs the U.S.’ own use of such bombs during the entire Iraq war.

If the Israeli state has fundamentally changed after October 7, so too has the Palestinian mindset.

The scale of the killing—the official Palestinian death toll from the war has exceeded 43,000, and the real count could be several times higher, with the degree of destruction rendering most of the Gaza Strip uninhabitable—has crossed all red lines for Palestinians, wherever they live.

No Room for Negotiations

From now on, there is no talking or negotiating with a state that does this to your people. The only two votes in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that secured unanimity among Jewish Israeli MKs included legislation to veto a Palestinian state, and a law banning UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.

These two votes alone told Palestinians that they would be deluded to think that a post-Netanyahu government would bring any relief from occupation. In a deeply divided Israel, the only thing that all Jews could agree on were two measures that fundamentally made life impossible for Palestinians, the majority of the population.

In such extreme conditions, there are only two alternatives: to do nothing and die, or to resist and die. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, believe in the latter.

Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.

Consequently, Hamas is at the height of its popularity in areas where the Muslim Brotherhood was on October 6 at its weakest: in the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Walk around Nablus’s old city and ask people who they support. The answer will not be the defunct Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. By a substantial margin, it will be Hamas, a group that is proscribed in the U.K. and other countries as a terrorist organization.

In Jordan, Hamas is praised by the whole population, East Bankers and Palestinians alike, because Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank is seen as an existential threat to the kingdom.

Walk into a Palestinian home for dinner on Friday, and everyone will tell you that this death toll, and the deaths under a second Trump term, are the price to be paid for liberation from occupation.

This generation of Palestinians has shown a degree of fortitude that no previous generation showed. They are not cutting and running, like former President Yasser Arafat’s PLO did when surrounded by Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982.

No one in Gaza is fleeing to Tunisia, and few to Egypt, which is just across the border—and far fewer than Netanyahu intended. Palestinians are not raising the white flag. They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.

'Time for Complete Victory'

This is the answer to those who argue that looking at the long term is all very well, when the short-term duty is simply to survive. There is no short term for Palestinians any more. It’s over. There is nothing left.

The short term means returning to your tent. It means going back to your home in the occupied West Bank, knowing that tomorrow you could be burned out by settlers armed by Ben Gvir. There is no going back. Palestinians have all lost too many family members for surrender to be considered an option.

Viewed from the perspective of a Palestinian farmer clinging to his stony ground in the face of repeated settler attacks in the hills of South Hebron, it’s a toss-up as to whether Kamala Harris as U.S. president would have made any difference. If anything, she could well have been an even weaker influence on Netanyahu than Biden was.

Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.

So we have ended up with Trump once again.

The settler right are popping bottles of champagne in celebration. Speaking in the Knesset, Ben Gvir welcomed Trump’s election victory, saying that “this is the time for sovereignty, this is the time for complete victory”.

Netanyahu is also using this period to clear out the stables in his government by sacking his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

Trump thus has two clear paths when he assumes power next January, assuming that Biden continues to fail to secure a cease-fire in Gaza. He can either carry on where he left off, and continue to allow the U.S. to be led by the nose by the Christian evangelical right, or he can do what he strongly hinted he would do to the Muslim leaders he met in Michigan—which is to stop Netanyahu’s war.

Either path is littered with elephant traps.

Fires of Regional War

Letting Netanyahu and his alliance with Ben Gvir achieve “total victory” would mean, in reality, the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the occupied West Bank, with a huge refugee influx ending up in Jordan—an act that would be seen in Jordan as a cause for war.

It would mean the expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the permanent destruction of southern Lebanon, with the assumed right of Israel to continue bombing Lebanon and Syria.

Each of these actions would lead to more war, which Trump has pledged to stop. Remember that one of the last things Gallant said before he was sacked was that a war in Syria to cut Iran’s supply lines was inevitable.

Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.

Letting Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest fires of a regional war.

Nor would getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel, putting the cherry on top of the cake of the Abraham Accords, make any difference—although I strongly doubt whether Mohammed bin Salman would be stupid enough to do this anymore.

The reality is that such deals have no meaning while Palestine does not have its own state, and while each Arab leader feels the anger of their own population on Palestine.

But forcing Netanyahu to stop the war, in the way a strong Republican president like Ronald Reagan forced Israel stop the bombing of Beirut four decades ago, would also have seismic consequences.

It would stop the religious Zionist project in its tracks. It would feed the growing dissatisfaction within the Israeli army’s high command, who have already signalled they have achieved all they can in Gaza and Lebanon, and are suffering from war fatigue.

Stopping the war would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.

Hope for the future

One year on, there is still no credible project to install a government in Gaza that would allow the withdrawal of Israeli troops. The moment they do, Hamas reemerges. The only government of post-war Gaza that could succeed would be a technocratic government that is agreed with Hamas—and that in itself would represent a huge humiliation for Netanyahu and the army’s vow to crush the resistance movement.

Whatever Trump does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or Washington. It lies with the peoples of Palestine and across the Middle East.

And that is the biggest hope for the future. Never before in U.S. electoral history has Palestine been a factor in turning the youth vote away from the Democratic Party. Henceforth, no Democratic leader wishing to rebuild their coalition can ignore the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim vote.

It may be that as Biden departs, we have seen the party’s last Zionist leader. That in itself is of immense significance for Israel.

The irrational, quixotic, transactional occupant of the White House—the president who insists that his advisers reduce all their analysis to one sheet of A4, which they are lucky he actually reads—will only accelerate the destruction of the status quo in the Middle East that he started in his first term.

With much help from Netanyahu, Trump has already killed the dream of Zionist liberal democracy that lasted for 76 years.

This is some achievement in itself. In a second term, he will only hasten the day the occupation ends.

Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.

Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.

It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive.

This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).

This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.

Scary Issues

Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).

This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of U.S. residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).

With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.

Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, D.C. (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”

Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in The New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

‘Classic Fear Campaign’

Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration, and the economy combined.”

Journalist Erin Reed (PBS “NewsHour,” 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:

The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.

Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in The New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.

‘Alienating Voters’ With ‘Progressive Agenda’

But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with President Joe Biden too long):

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election... It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.

It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision… to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.

More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.

‘Democratic Self-Sabotage’

At The Washington Post, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’ Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Post roundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)

At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).

George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at The Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”

Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of The New York Times‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”

Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars, and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.

But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.

‘Wary and Alienated’

The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:

In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.

She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people, and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.

I guess I’d call the Trump victory an “expected” shock.

In the deepest core of my being, I was unhappy with virtually everything about the election: unhappy with the Kamala Harris campaign and her unrelenting support of Israeli genocide, unhappy with the Democratic Party and its contempt for progressive voters’ values even as the party remained certain it owned their votes. But at a more superficial level. I pretty much thought Harris would win, just because Donald Trump was way-y-y too crazy (”they’re eating the pets!”) to actually be able to reclaim the presidency.

But Trump did it—not simply capturing the “battleground” states and gaining an Electoral College win, as he did in 2016, but apparently winning the overall popular vote. As of Wednesday morning, as I sit here in my expected shock, I see that Trump is ahead of Harris by some 5 million votes, with counting still underway in some states. And, by the way, the Republicans also reclaimed control of the Senate.

There’s an enormous American voting bloc that’s being left out of the country’s pseudo-democratic, two-party electoral system.

The Dems managed to lose to a dancing goofball and outright racist. They lost to the guy whose own former aides have called a loser, a liar, and, yikes, a fascist. How did they manage to do that?

My sense is this: Trump’s appeal to his base was anything but superficial. It may have been a bunch of lies—that he’s a friend of the working class, for instance, even though he’s a pseudo-billionaire under the control of corporate elites—but he spoke to their deepest values. “He promised to close the border, ‘help our country heal,’ and ‘fix everything,’” The New York Times noted.

He continually talked about the enemies he would protect America from—everyone from immigrant murderers and lunatics to liberal billionaires. A good, solid sense of the enemy creates community! And Trump was the community’s spiritual icon: its symbolic soul, the absolute counter to politics-as-usual. He was able to present himself as the protector of everything the MAGA base valued, from fetuses to assault rifles. And he did so while riding in a golf cart. No small feat!

So how did Kamala Harris and the Democrats manage to lose? From my point of view, the reason is glaringly obvious: They failed to stand for much of anything, at least beyond “Trump’s an idiot.” They campaigned as the lesser evil! Vote for us. We’re not nearly as bad as Trump.

The most striking example of this, it seems to me, was Harris’ refusal, or inability, to disconnect herself from the Biden administration’s unwavering commitment to arming Israel. While “too many Palestinians have died,” Israel has “a right to defend itself.” Palestinians—even Palestinian children—were abstractions. So much so that the Dems wouldn’t even allow a Palestinian to speak at the Democratic National Convention. What values were they running on? They were committed to centrist blather. They were committed to their lesser-evilism.

Yet, ironically, the Democrats didn’t even have the endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who congratulated Trump when his victory was declared, telling him: “Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America.”

Not even Netanyahu could tolerate the lesser-evil Democratic centrism.

What if, instead of courting Liz and Dick Cheney and the anti-Trump Republicans (thus utterly diminishing the possibility that they were running on real values), the Harris campaign had reached in the other direction and courted Green-leaning voters, rather than simply dismissing Jill Stein as a spoiler and, beyond that, completely ignoring what she stood for.

What if? What if?

There’s an enormous American voting bloc that’s being left out of the country’s pseudo-democratic, two-party electoral system. Trump’s base can hear their values and fears trumpeted (so to speak) with loud bluster. But progressives allegedly remain on the margins, banned from having actual political traction, at least on the issues of the present moment.

For example, Nick Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and president of the NDN Collective, commented, in an interview with Democracy Now on November 5, while the vote count was still in progress, on a recent apology President Joe Biden made to Native Americans about government-run boarding schools from an earlier era, which sought to eradicate Indigenous culture. Yeah, sorry about that. Yet in the present moment, Biden and the U.S. are complicit in the eradication of Palestinian culture. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that.

So here we are, stuck with Trump’s second term. God knows what this will amount to. Maybe we won’t ever have to (or be allowed to) vote again.

The work ahead of us is enormous. Not only must we prepare to stand up to the Trump agenda and the looming possibility of some form of fascism. We also have to reclaim the Democratic Party and start transforming its values.

It took only hours after a majority of Americans chose to return Donald Trump as a strongman-style president for the first billionaire supplicant to come forward on bended knee. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person on the planet, had already made his intentions clear in the waning days of the 2024 campaign when the influential newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, spiked a long-planned endorsement of rival Kamala Harris at his instruction.

In a rare tweet Wednesday, Bezos—beneficiary of massive federal contracts—laid it on thick. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos posted on X, which is owned by the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

It almost goes without saying that Bezos said nothing Wednesday about the fact that, as owner of the Post, he is also the keeper of a remarkable legacy of watchdog journalism, which defied the White House in 1971 in publishing the secret Pentagon Papers and then produced the investigative reporting that helped bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There was no Bezos pep talk to his journalists that such heroism for democracy would be acted out now. Less than 48 hours after Trump’s election as the 47th president, this kind of silence has been deafening.

From the obsequious Bezos to the end of resistance from everyday folk, we are seeing the once unthinkable: the start of American autocracy.

Although it feels almost normal to flip on CNN and watch talking heads speculate on whom the president-elect is picking for his cabinet, there is nothing normal about the Trump transition, even with a president who’s been elected before. So much has changed since the tumultuous autumn of 2016. This time, America is rolling out a red carpet for a king—one who will, in the ultimate irony, preside over the 250th anniversary of that time when we overthrew a monarchy.

I know that sounds like hyperbole, or what The 51% calls “Trump derangement syndrome.” But the nation already on Wednesday received its first major bit of news—and there are going to be many, many more to come—making it clear that Trump is returning to the White House with stunning absolute powers that none of his 44 predecessors (Grover Cleveland, and now Trump, twice) either possessed or were willing to exercise over the American people.

It came in the form of a revelation from the U.S. Justice Department that special counsel Jack Smith—who aggressively, if too belatedly, brought federal indictments against Trump for the 2020 efforts to overturn the last presidential election that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and for Trump taking highly classified documents—is planning steps that would have the likely impact of ending his cases before Trump takes the oath of office.

Multiple news outlets quoted sources within the Justice Department that Smith is now is active talks about how to “wind down” the two cases against Trump—with the one about classified documents already on life support after a zealously pro-Trump, Trump-appointed lower court judge dismissed the charges for now—before he becomes president again on January 20. It’s not yet clear whether Smith is planning to permanently dismiss the charges or—more likely—put them on some type of hold that would nonetheless make justice nearly impossible, since Trump would be 82 if he leaves office as scheduled in 2029, and there would be questions about the statute of limitations.

Such maneuvers would be in line with the controversial and legally debated Justice Department decision from the Nixon era that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, which already gave any POTUS a unique standing above the law. But remember that Trump was on track to stand trial in the January 6 case this year, if not for the U.S. Supreme Court’s stunning 6-3 ruling earlier this year giving presidents sweeping legal immunity for broadly defined “official acts.”

When Smith does appear before U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to end the case, it will be a triple exclamation point on how a once revolutionary nation turned a president into a king.

Some legal experts are arguing that Smith is playing the horrendous hand that he’s been dealt here, perhaps scrambling to issue an in-depth report about Trump’s alleged wrongdoing before the new president’s MAGA appointees can fire him. I get that, but my nonlawyer gut tells me that Smith should make Trump and his lackeys dismiss the case themselves, as one more reminder that Trump is trashing every last democratic norm we have.

But how 2017-ish of me to even think that. The decision has already been made in all our former watchdog institutions to obey the new authoritarianism in advance. You can hear it in the quiet of an unseasonably warm November breeze.

The dogs of 2016 and 2017 are not barking. There are no people in the streets chanting, “We! Reject! The president-elect!” or carrying “Not My President” signs like eight years ago. Kids aren’t walking out of high school, and college presidents—reflecting the catastrophic erosions of free speech in America that go well beyond Trumpism—are not issuing statements.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote Thursday about the Russian lifestyle of “internal emigration”—turning away from politics to emphasize family or books or gardening or anything else besides the seeming hopelessness of opposing autocracy.

This is exactly what I’m hearing from so many friends and even family here in Greater Philadelphia and on social media. People are leaving Musk’s X in droves, partly to protest the billionaire, but mostly to disengage from politics, at least for now. One boomer woman who threw herself into the so-called Trump Resistance in 2016 wrote me Thursday to say she is done. Protesting Trump, she wrote, “was an utter failure. I’m tired, demoralized, and bitter.”

I don’t blame her, nor would I think of criticizing the many people emphasizing their own mental health over politics at a moment when it’s not even clear what to do next. We are seeing in real time how autocracy happens, by creating hopelessness and despair among the mass of people who once might have fought back. From the obsequious Bezos to the end of resistance from everyday folk, we are seeing the once unthinkable: the start of American autocracy.

I was fortunate Thursday morning to connect with one of the nation’s top experts on authoritarian regimes, the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, whose words—especially, “do not obey in advance”—from his essential On Tyranny are frequently quoted here. I wanted to ask him the question on so many people’s minds since Tuesday: What has history taught us about how to live now?

Snyder told me the most important thing for the moment is to avoid isolation and be around other people. “They want you to be alone,” the historian said of autocratic governments because isolation feeds the sense of powerlessness that allows the regime to do its dirty work unimpeded. “Nobody is going to fix this alone,” Snyder said. “That’s not how this works.”

Second, he suggested: “This is a good time to figure out what you’re good at. Define some little human-sized zone, whether it’s your library or your garden or your trade union. Take something positive that you know and do it.” He also noted that the political feeling of despair in opposing Trump and his MAGA movement doesn’t mean you can’t work for change on the state and local level, where one can still hash out issues with forward-minded politicians.

Snyder then suggested, with a laugh, what he called “a dumb little idea”—except that it wasn’t.

“Take a moment and write down a letter about the things you care about, that you’re willing to take a stand about. Write that down, put it in an envelope, and take it out of your desk as we’re going through these things”—like when Trump takes office in January, or early in his term.

Those of us who opposed Trump, and who were devastated to learn how many of our fellow citizens want to live under his strongman rule, need time to mourn this week’s news. But it’s well worth listening to Snyder’s words about not just living under tyranny, but someday soon finding reasonable ways to confront it. We are going to need each other, whether it’s in the streets or just at the dog park. And you—we—are not alone.

Nearly a month before the November 5 elections, I anticipated that Donald Trump would win and wrote about it in a couple of articles. My “prediction” created some controversy, especially since the polls showed Harris and Trump in a dead heat. Not surprisingly, people have been asking me the last few days how I came out with a call that, to some, had at the time no empirical basis and, to others, was an assault on their political sensibilities.

It’s not really rocket science. Inflation was just running rampant, with over 20 percent cumulative inflation in four years. I went almost every spring to teach in New York for six weeks, and I was shocked to see how high prices had risen since the year before. One could gauge the popular mood in forays to the supermarket, where the joy had gone out of the great American pastime of shopping, and people trudged along the aisles with a grimace on their faces as they stared at food prices that seemed to be escalating weekly.

When one turned on the television, one was assailed with images of migrants coming in droves over the border with Mexico, with border patrol agents shaking their heads. Middle-class people in the Northeast were waking up in shock to find migrants suddenly in their midst, deposited there courtesy of border-state governors who went on televised harangues justifying their acts by saying they wanted to give “blue state people” a taste of of “uncontrolled migration” brought about by Democratic Party policies.

Opportunity and crisis are twins. You can’t get to the new world without overcoming monsters…and there is no guarantee of victory.

Then, especially since October 2023, there were very real fears about the United States being sucked into the expanding war in the Middle East, that the Biden administration had lost control of its Middle East policy to Israel, and that this was triggering domestic unrest that was brought to living rooms nightly by images of campus confrontations and massive arrests. Then in the last few weeks before the vote, with Israel bombing Lebanon and carrying out strategic assassinations in Iran and elsewhere, then bombing Iran itself, there was widespread alarm that Tel Aviv was intent on dragging the United States into active combat and the Biden administration was helplessly looking on.

The overall sense you got talking to ordinary people in the spring was one of loss of control–that the Biden administration had lost control of the economy, of the border, and foreign and defense policy. This sense of no reliable hand at the helm of the ship of state could only deepen in the summer and fall, with Biden’s horrible debate performance and his replacement as presidential candidate by Harris. By early October, it was clear to me that Trump would win not so much because he had a more attractive vision for the future, but because he was able to capitalize on people’s fears about the economy, the border, and war and turn that unease into an active negative force against the Democrats. The 2024 election was largely a vote against Democratic ineptitude, just as the 2020 election was a vote against the chaos of Trump’s first presidency.

The bad news is that the far-right MAGA folks will try to translate this protest vote into an ultra-right program of governance that, if they succeed, will make American-style liberal democracy a thing of the past.

If one agrees with this undoubtedly impressionistic analysis, then two things follow. First, the electoral outcome was determined mainly by a popular reaction to conjunctural factors—inflation, border chaos, and the threat of war. Second, this was not a vote for fascism or authoritarianism, contrary to the panicked reactions of some liberal pundits–though of course, there was a far-right component in the Trump vote.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the far-right MAGA folks will try to translate this protest vote into an ultra-right program of governance that, if they succeed, will make American-style liberal democracy a thing of the past. Fortunately, the people of the United States, flawed though their democracy may be, have a democratic common sense. But that common sense needs good progressive leadership to be brought to the fore and converted into a vigorous political force. And, in this connection, there is another piece of good news: the discredited generation of Democratic Party leaders–the Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, Biden, Harris–with their advocacy of neoliberal policies coupled with promotion of liberal empire, will finally be jettisoned and the decks cleared for the emergence of a new generation of young progressive leaders unfettered by past ideological and policy paradigms.

The great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci had a characterization of the early twentieth century that is also apt for our times: “The old world is dying, and the new is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Opportunity and crisis are twins. You can’t get to the new world without overcoming monsters…and there is no guarantee of victory.

But perfect I am not, and while I anticipated a Trump victory, I did not foresee just how bloody sweeping it would be.

A post from the writer Rebecca Solnit has been going around a number of the group chats I’m in. She writes, “They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I.”

I’ll admit, I felt a lot like giving up the last 48 hours. Part of me expected the results of Tuesday’s election, but they still hit like a body blow. Watching the incredible surge of volunteers over the past few days, including thousands of climate activists who headed out to battleground states to help get out the vote, had left me feeling hopeful heading into the election.

But it wasn’t to be. Running on a message of hate and division, and backed by fossil fuel billionaires and the world’s richest man, Donald Trump won the election in a relative landslide, improving on both his 2016 and 2020 numbers, while making strong inroads with young people, Latinos, and other members of what we’d come to understand as the traditional Democratic base.

So where do we go from here? What’s next for the climate fight?

Lessons From the Election

First, I think it’s worth trying to draw some lessons from the election. The dust is still settling, and there was so much at play in this chaotic process that it’s impossible to point the finger and say that’s the reason that Trump won and Vice President Kamala Harris lost, but I think there are still a few observations we can make about how the race played out.

The biggest one is about the economy. For the past four years, Americans have been struggling with the high cost of everything from groceries to gas prices. Common Dreams readers know the role that corporations played in driving up costs, from Big Oil taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to constrict supply and jack up the price at the pump, to chain grocers like Kroger intentionally keeping prices high to pad their CEO’s pockets. But that message never really got to the majority of Americans. Democrats were skittish about calling out corporate power, and some late in the game messages about “taking on price gouging” rang hollow as a result.

If they want to win elections going forward, Democrats are going to have to do a much better job of calling out corporate power, including Big Oil, and showing the spine necessary to take them on.

I saw this play out first hand. When gas prices first went up in 2021, we sprang into action and launched the Stop The Oil Profiteering campaign to try and push the White House and Democrats to pass a windfall profits tax. We made some headway with progressive members, and the House eventually passed an anti-price gouging bill, but Democratic leadership never really embraced the message. They were more interested in “claiming credit” for when gas prices went down a bit, not realizing that in doing so, they ended up owning the issue. Instead of clearly saying, “These corporations caused the problem,” they ended up with a muddled message about Russian President Vladimir Putin, supply and demand, and global markets.

In that context, it was easy for Trump to just repeat, “Biden is to blame,” on everything from gas to groceries to the lack of affordable housing. He didn’t need a plan to solve the problem, he just needed to show that he was as angry as you were, and that he knew who to fight. If they want to win elections going forward, Democrats are going to have to do a much better job of calling out corporate power, including Big Oil, and showing the spine necessary to take them on.

Second, I think Harris’ run to the center didn’t help her win over the voters she needed for the election. You can see this on any host of policy issues (with her failure to speak more clearly about the genocide in Gaza at the top of the list), but let’s focus on climate and energy. The Harris campaign was clearly nervous that any talk about energy issues would backfire by reminding some Pennsylvania voters that she’d opposed fracking in the past. But this supposed fracking backlash was always more of a media fabrication: Polling from Climate Power showed that when asked about issues that made them less likely to support Vice President Harris, only 3% of likely voters listed fracking—it just wasn’t on people’s radar screens.

Our job is to fight back, while doing everything we can to keep building a clean energy economy that works for all.

On the flip side, huge majorities of both Harris’ base and independent voters support the buildout of more clean energy, something Trump clearly opposes and will work to undermine. There are clean energy jobs at stake in every battleground state and across the country, but the Harris campaign never effectively weaponized the issue and made Trump’s crazy theories about wind turbines and solar panels a liability. Yes, a lot of environmental groups tried to drive this message, but we needed it from the top down and Harris never fully delivered.

The same dynamic played out with Hurricane Helene and Milton. In the days after Helene hit, I remember going through VP Harris’ various social media feeds and being shocked to see that there was hardly any mention of climate change. When I reached out to folks on the campaign, they said that she was focused on pushing back on disinformation about FEMA and supporting recovery efforts, which is important and admirable, but wasn’t really an answer. Again, I imagine that the campaign felt like calling the storms “climate disasters” was somehow too edgy and might turn off some voters. What that left them with was a professorial response—“this problem is very serious”—rather than a powerful, emotional, resonant message. In that vacuum, fake news about $750 checks and Biden intentionally withholding aid landed. They weren’t “true,” but they felt intense and shocking in a way that people were hungry for.

Did any of this prove decisive in the election? Maybe not. Again, there were so many factors at play and the Harris campaign did a lot of things right. But going forward, helping people understand who is really to blame for their economic hardships, and learning how to harness climate disasters and other disruptive events, are going to be crucial for pushing back on Trump and Big Oil’s agenda.

The Fight Ahead

Which brings us to the fight ahead. We don’t know exactly what Trump is going to do on climate and fossil fuels, but if Project 2025 and his campaign rhetoric is any indication, it’s going to be a nightmare. We can expect the Trump administration to not only take a bulldozer to environmental laws and regulations, but do everything they can to weaponize other parts of the government, like the Interior and Department of Energy, to promote fossil fuel development.

Our job is to fight back, while doing everything we can to keep building a clean energy economy that works for all.

First and foremost, that means standing in solidarity with our frontline allies. We know that Black, brown, and Indigenous people are at the forefront of fossil fuel expansion and bear the brunt of pollution and toxic chemicals. We need to push donors to invest more with grassroots groups in these communities and do what we can as activists to support their fights. As our frontline, and especially our Indigenous allies will remind us, they’ve been fighting under an oppressive system of white supremacy all their lives. While the struggle may be more intense over the coming years, it isn’t new, and we’ve got tools and tactics to fight back.

We can ensure that Trump faces massive resistance if he attempts to roll back clean energy programs that are creating jobs and saving consumers money, especially in Republican districts and states that have received the majority of benefits from the IRA.

Second, we need to do everything we can to slow new fossil fuel development. Try as he might, Trump can’t build new fossil fuel projects unilaterally. Remember his campaign promise to build the Keystone XL pipeline? It never happened. We need to do everything we can to stop new projects in their tracks, from going after project financing, to filing lawsuits, to organizing grassroots campaigns that can stop projects on the ground. And remember, this isn’t just a fight for progressives or liberals: Many of these projects go through deeply conservative areas, and there are lots of folks in Trump’s base who may change their opinion on the merits of “drill, baby, drill” when it shows up in their backyard. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us, “the fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.” We may not be able to stop every handout to the fossil fuel industry, but saving even one community from a destructive project is worth the fight. Every pipeline, every fossil fuel export terminal, and every fracking well we can stop matters.

Third, we need our cities, states, and federal allies to play offense. We don’t need to give the fossil fuel industry carte blanche to pursue their planet wrecking agenda. Now is the time to double down on building public support for the lawsuits and investigations that could ultimately hold Big Oil accountable for climate deception. Over 30 cities, states, municipalities, and tribal governments are already suing Big Oil, and I think we’ll see dozens more in the years to come. We can also push more states to follow Vermont’s lead and pass Climate Superfund bills that will force oil and gas companies to pay for climate damages—the biggest one currently on deck is in New York, where pressure is ratcheting up on Gov. Kathy Hochul to act. As fossil fuel CEOs tighten their grip on D.C., we can still get after them from every other corner of the country.

Fourth, let’s make the clean energy buildout unstoppable. The Biden Administration should be doing everything it can to get any remaining funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) out the door before they leave office. In the meantime, we need to start preparing to defend the clean energy programs and projects in our cities, states, and communities. We can ensure that Trump faces massive resistance if he attempts to roll back clean energy programs that are creating jobs and saving consumers money, especially in Republican districts and states that have received the majority of benefits from the IRA. But defense won’t be enough: We also need to create a movement of people all across the country who continue to accelerate the deployment of clean energy. Progress will be decentralized, but it doesn’t need to be derailed—especially if we all get to work.

Fifth, we need to tell a better story about climate and clean energy that connects with everyday people’s lives. There are so many good examples across the movement of groups making these connections: Environmental justice groups are connecting pollution directly to individual health; local clean energy groups are showing people how going solar will reduce electricity bills; mutual aid networks are effectively responding to extreme weather events and helping people connect the dots to climate and fossil fuels. It’s time to double down on all that work and more, while making sure that these narratives are echoed by our political leaders. As I said above, Democrats haven’t done a good job blaming Big Oil for things like inflation and high gas prices—that needs to change if they want to win elections in the future.

Finally, we need the Biden administration to do everything it can on climate before Trump takes office. Get all the money from the IRA out the door. Conclude the Department of Energy’s studies on the impacts of Liquified Natural Gas exports and show they aren’t in the public’s interest. Reject major new export facilities like the CP2 carbon megabomb in Louisiana. Ban drilling on public lands and waters. Set aside new protected areas. Yes, Trump will be able to claw back some of these actions, but in some cases, doing so will require years of legal challenges. I’d rather we keep them busy trying to undo progress than actively doing damage.

It is completely understandable to feel demoralized right now. Take time to let this sink in. Take time to grieve. Support your friends and family to do the same. But remember, as Joan Baez said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” I’ve already felt the small flame of hope inside of me begin to burn brighter as I’ve gotten to plot with friends and colleagues about the fight ahead. The road won’t be easy, but it’s one we’ll walk together. Onwards.

Not that many people know that The Wizard of Oz, one of America’s most-loved films, is based on the arcane economic world of monetary policy. L Frank Baum’s novel is a disguised critique of the folly of the Gold Standard written in the wake of the 1896 election, at a time when America was deeply divided socially and geographically, when enormous power was wielded by a billionaire class, the so-called Robber Barons.

The election centred on whether America should swap the straitjacket of a gold-backed dollar for the looser cardigan of a silver-backed dollar. As gold is less plentiful and more expensive than silver, opting for a silver-backed currency would cause a devaluation that would inject more dollars into the economy, helping the poor.

The yellow bricks of the Yellow Brick Road, represent the gold bars which paved the way to the Emerald City, the city of green – or greenback, the colloquial term for the dollar. Dorothy represents the wholesome daughter of middle America, literally Kansas. The Scarecrow is the put-upon Midwestern farmer American and the Tin Man is the industrial worker.

Politically, the Democrats, in an alliance with a new party called the Popular Party, representing workers, farmers and the lower middle class, wanted a dollar backed by silver, meaning there would be more dollars around. In contrast, the Republicans represented industrialists, Wall Street and the wealthy, the kind of people who wanted to preserve their dollar wealth and maintain the Gold Standard.

With so much at stake and the country so explicitly divided along class lines, the rich opened their wallets and, for the first time, America’s election was truly swung by money. The Republicans won because they raised more cash.

William McKinley, the victorious Republican candidate, received contributions worth more than $16 million (about $600 million in today’s money). McKinley’s chief fundraiser, Mark Hanna, raised more than $6 million by courting corporations with the promise of a big-business-friendly agenda. Hanna is famously quoted as saying: “There are two things that are important in politics: the first is money and I can’t remember the second one”.

And who do you think the Wizard of Oz represented? Why, Mark Hanna the financier, hiding behind the slogans and conspiring against the ordinary American, embodied by the innocent Dorothy.

Whoever pays the money expects favors. Money buys policy. That is and always has been the deal.

The American political scene was set over a century ago. Money matters in American politics, and that adage of the Republicans being for sale while the Democrats are only for rent is no longer strictly accurate.

Today’s Democrats aren’t above a mutually beneficial deal and are in the pockets of big business as much as their opponents. The problem with big money and unrestrained capitalism in politics is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be pointed out, but suffice to say that it is inimical with a properly functioning democracy.

At its core, the promise of democracy is “one man one vote”; but the attraction of capitalism is “one man many votes,” meaning the rich guys get the best things and lots of them, while the poor guy loses out.

Capitalism and democracy are in a constant state of friction. The excesses of capitalism need to be tempered by the equalising nature of democracy; however, too much democracy and redistribution limit the “animal spirits” of capitalism upon which prosperity rests.

Modern western societies are a tug of war between these two alternating ideas where a balance is sought between both; sometimes it’s called social democracy, Christian democracy or centrism but it amounts to the same, a truce.

Unfortunately, the conditions of the truce are influenced by money, which is why big money in elections is problematic. As is the case in any indecent proposal, whoever pays the money expects favors. Money buys policy. That is and always has been the deal. American politics has become the fiefdom of billionaires, the effect of which can only be imagined.

We’ve all seen Elon Musk jumping around Trump’s rally with the physical co-ordination of a homeschooled kid who’s never seen a PE class, but Musk isn’t the only billionaire with a stake in the game. The two US presidential candidates had raised more than $3.8 billion by mid-October. A Financial Times analysis of campaign finance filings found that billionaires have donated at least $695 million, or about 18 per cent of the total. Trump is particularly dependent on US elites, with about a third of his money coming from billionaires compared with about 6 per cent of the funds raised by Harris.

Trump’s finance base is rich but narrow while Harris’s is more broadly based. From January 2023 to mid-October 2024, Joe Biden and Harris outraised Trump ($2.2 billion to Trump’s $1.7 billion). But the rich guys have placed their bets; at least 144 people on the list of 800 US billionaires compiled by Forbes have donated to either candidate.

Billionaires leaning toward Harris may seem incongruous as she often criticizes Trump for being too close to the plutocrats, but there are practical reasons why the ultra-wealthy may favor Harris.

As was the case in 1896, if you are rich you want stability – after all, you are doing well from the status quo. A letter signed by more than a dozen billionaires last month endorsing Harris explained their belief that she will “continue to advance fair and predictable policies that support the rule of law, stability, and a sound business environment”. In contrast, although he might cut their tax bills, Trump represents chaos and commotion, which is never good for business.

No matter whether the money comes from the liberal center or the tear-it-all-down libertarian right, it comes with a price, a sort of pay-to-play cover charge. If you want influence in America you pay for it.

In Europe, strict limits on campaign contributions help curb plutocratic influence. For example, the $1.6 billion Joe Biden spent to win the 2020 presidential election is 70 times more than the sum Emmanuel Macron spent on his 2022 win – despite the fact that the US population is just five times larger than that of France. The total spend across all 12 candidates in the French presidential race was just over €83 million. Germany – a country with more billionaires per head than America – enforces strict donation limits and transparency rules, with caps of €50,000 per donor, reducing the risk of policies favoring an elite few.

No matter whether the money comes from the liberal center or the tear-it-all-down libertarian right, it comes with a price, a sort of pay-to-play cover charge. If you want influence in America you pay for it.

Irish elections are subject to strict spending limits. Candidates running for the Dáil can only spend up to a maximum of €38,900 in a three-seat constituency, €48,600 in a four-seater and €58,350 in a five-seater. These numbers are paltry in the context of US elections, where there are no spending limits. In Ireland, donations from individuals or companies to a party are capped at €2,500 per year, while donations to individual candidates are limited to €1,000 per year.

After the alfresco political bribery of the Charlie Haughey and tribunal years, things are more above board and the days of rich guys buying elections in return for explicit special treatment are long gone. By way of contrast, the clear conflict between capitalism and democracy in America is there for all to see. As they say, the US is “the best democracy money can buy”, and the die was cast in 1896 with the election of William McKinley.

In those final days of the 19th century, with their man in the White House and tariffs erected to protect their businesses, America’s billionaire plutocrats must have felt unassailable. But following McKinley’s assassination by an anarchist in 1901, power moved to his vice-president, Teddy Roosevelt, who would turn on the very plutocrats who had financed his campaigns. Sensing that America yearned for equality after years of division and a decade of rich men lording it over the working man, Roosevelt brought the billionaires to heel, regulating them, taxing them and breaking up their monopolies.

A decade after buying the election, the billionaire class was on the skids, accused by Republican president Roosevelt of “predatory capitalism.” Fortunes turned dramatically. Political power slipped away from the plutocrats just when they thought victory was theirs.

Can history repeat itself? I wouldn’t bet against it.

In the wake of Tuesday’s elections, many Americans are grieving about the fate of our country and the world. We need to take time to deal with those feelings, surround ourselves with people we love, and do things that bring us joy—music, cooking, sports, hiking, travel, whatever. We can accept the reality that Trump and the Republicans won the election, and try to understand why, but we need to eventually translate our anger into action—what organizer Ernie Cortes calls "cold anger" that is strategic.

There will be lots of post-election diagnoses and many reports about what went wrong (and, in a few cases, right) around polling, framing issues, media coverage, voter outreach, registration and turnout, voter suppression, voter preferences and turnout of specific groups (women, youth, African Americans, Latinos, union members, suburbanites) that weakened the Democratic coalition.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. We don’t yet have all the facts about the election—for president, Senate, House, governor races, state legislatures, mayors and city councils, and ballot measures. But we have enough information to examine some of the most important aspects of what happened and why, and to use that information to develop strategies for moving forward, including ways to resist Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy, divide the country, increase human suffering, and build a white supremacist movement with him at the top.

There is a lot to take in.

1. The country is almost evenly divided when it comes to party preference. Trump did not win a landslide like FDR in 1936, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1980, or Obama in 2008. As of Friday morning, Trump has 50.7% of the popular vote compared to 47.7% for Harris. Because millions of California votes haven’t been counted yet, we don’t know if he won the popular vote, because Harris is winning over 57% of California votes. But either way, it will be close, similar to Kennedy’s win over Nixon in 1960 and Gore narrowly winning the popular vote over Bush in 2000 (but losing the Electoral College thanks to the Supreme Court halting the ballot count in Florida). Even so, public opinion polls show that Americans are NOT divided on most key issues. For example, a vast majority think there's too much wealth and income inequality, that rich people and big corporations should pay more in taxes, that the government should do more to protect the environment and consumers, that labor unions are a good thing, that undocumented immigrants deserve a path toward citizenship, that the government should help limit drug prices, that all Americans are entitled to health insurance, that the federal minimum wage should be at least $15 an hour, that same-sex marriage should be legal, that police should not engage in racial profiling, and so on. But public opinion doesn't get translated into policy without politics, and elections are about politics—mobilizing people to vote around issues they care about.

2. Overall voter turnout was significantly lower in this election compared with four years ago. In 2020, 66.4% of eligible voters actually voted. This year, 62.2% of eligible voters cast ballots. Both, however, are considerably higher than the turnout rates in 2008 (61.6%), 2012 (58.6%), and 2016 (60.1%). This is according to the University of Florida Election Lab, which keeps tabs on this.

3. Based on the most recent reports (as of November 7), it appears that the Democrats' turnout efforts were particularly inadequate. In 2020, Trump got 74.2 million votes. This year he is likely to get slightly fewer votes. In 2020, Biden got 81.2 million votes. This year, Harris is likely to get roughly 72 million votes, which is about 9 million fewer votes. That means that lots of people who voted for Biden in 2020 didn't even bother to vote this year. This year’s vote totals may change as more states report the results, but the trend is clear. Both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates got fewer votes this year than four years ago, but the Democratic candidate (Harris) got FAR fewer votes. Some version of this occurred in almost every state.

4. There are many hard truths we have to face if we're to move our country in a better direction. Trump is a fascist, but most Americans are not fascists. Even so, more than half of those who voted, voted for a fascist, mostly over their concerns over the economy, and next most important over immigration. There's no doubt that Trump has an emotional hold on a large number of Americans, who either forgive him for his personal flaws (liar, rapist, felon, grifter, corrupt businessman, etc) or don't think they are actually flaws. Many Americans who are angry about the state of the country or their own circumstances revel in a candidate who focuses on his grievances and promises to solve their problems, even if his often vague policy ideas will make their lives worse. Trump is a unique figure in the history of American politics—a demagogue, the leader of a personality cult, and pathological liar. So it is hard to evaluate this election and compare it with other elections, because doing so tends to normalize what should be causes for outrage. Even so, we can analyze this election to understand how Trump won the White House, and how the Republicans took back the Senate. We don't yet know whether the Republicans will hold onto their House majority.

5. Post-election polls show that the most important issue, by far, was the economy and prices. In the AP post-election survey, 37% of voters thought the economy was "excellent" (7%) or "good" (30%), while 64% of voters thought that the economy was "not so well" (40%) or "poor" (24%). By a margin of 50% to 41%, more Americans think Trump—who inherited his father’s real estate empire and lost billions in bad investments and bankrupt businesses—would be better than Harris at handling the economy. This despite the fact the American economy is currently the best in the world and is improving, that wages are going up faster than prices, and that unemployment is at a record low. Many polls show that most Americans don't give Biden credit for the improving economy. In fact, many blame him for what they perceive as a "bad" economy. Trump kept repeating that the economy is terrible and media let him get away with his lies, as Steve Greenhouse reported for The Guardian. Thirty-nine percent of voters ranked the economy as the most important issue. Among those who said that this was their biggest concern, a large margin (60%) voted for Trump, according to an AP survey. This anomaly showed up in Missouri, where about 58.5% of voters voted for Trump while, at the same time, 58% voted for Proposition A, which will hike the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guarantee paid sick leave. Trump is against raising the federal minimum wage and against paid sick leave, while Harris is for both of them. But obviously many Missourians voted for Trump AND Proposition A.

6. Immigration ranked #2 as a top concern. One-fifth (20%) of voters said that immigration was the most important issue in the election. 88% of those voters voted for Trump. Trump's racist stereotyping and scapegoating of immigrants was effective. This was his most fascist demagogic issue and it worked. It appears that Trump paid no political price for his lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, his lies about immigrants involved in higher crime rates than other Americans, or other lies he used to demonize immigrants. Nor did he pay a price for his failure, in his first term, to build a border wall and get Mexico to pay for it.

7. Abortion ranked #3. Eleven percent of voters said it was the most important issue. Eight-five percent of them voted for Harris. Many people (including me) predicted that abortion would play a major role in getting women to vote and to vote for Harris and other Democrats in light of the Dobbs decision, made possible by Trump's appointments to the Supreme Court and his opposition to abortion. We still don't have all the facts, but it appears that this didn't happen. CNN exit polls found that Harris won female voters’ support by eight points — 53% to 45%. But in 2020, Biden won their women’s support by 15 percentage points, 57% to 42%. A majority (53%) of white women, who accounted for 37% of all voters, voted for Trump. According to the CNN polls, Harris won 92% percent of Black women’s votes, up from Biden’s 90.5%. Although Harris won 61% of Latina women’s votes, this margin was much lower than Biden’s 69% in 2020. Together, Black and Latina women accounted for only 13% of all voters. Quite a few Americans voted for Trump AND voted for state ballot measures in favor of abortion.

8. Why did most of the polls underestimate Trump's support? It has to do to with the so-called "Bradley effect," named for Tom Bradley, Los Angeles’ first African American mayor. In 1982 he lost his campaign for California governor despite having a lead in the polls going into the election. Some voters clearly told pollsters that they were going to vote for Bradley because they didn't want to sound racist. This year, some people who intended to vote for Trump lied to pollsters. They know he's a despicable person and didn't want to say out loud that they were going to vote for him. So they lied. That at least partly explains why most polls underestimated Trump's margins.

9. Harris had three major disadvantages. First, Biden waited too long to drop out and it handicapped Harris. She had 100 days to introduce herself (and her running mate) to the voters. She raised more money than Trump, and there was a groundswell of enthusiasm at the start, but she had too little time to campaign. Second, she was tethered to Biden, who, despite huge successes (especially on the economy) against impossible odds, was extremely unpopular. She didn’t have a good answer to how she would be different from Biden. Third, she’s a Black woman. Since the 1960s, more and more white voters have voted for Black and Hispanic candidates and more male voters have voted for female candidates. As a result, the number of Black, brown, and female elected officials has increased dramatically. That's all good. But we can't discount the reality that Harris' race and gender may have hurt her with quite a few voters. Black and women voters didn't support her at the levels that her campaign expected, and there are still many Americans who won't vote for a Black candidate, or a female candidate, much less at Black female candidate.

10. The Democrats approach to voter outreach and turnout didn’t work. Democrats can’t just helicopter paid organizers and unpaid volunteers into battleground areas a few months before each election. My wife and I canvassed for Democrat George Whitesides in a key battleground House race in northern LA County (Palmdale/Lancaster/Santa Carita), against a Republican incumbent, Mike Garcia. The Whiteside campaign recruited hundreds of volunteers like us. But most of the Whitesides canvassers over those last few weekends were NOT from that district, because there was very little Democratic infrastructure there. We door-knocked homes and apartments of registered Democrats who were low-propensity voters—who had only voted in one or two of the least five election cycles. Most weren't at home or refused to come to the door. We were not their friends, neighbors, or coworkers. We were strangers. Others told me of their similar experiences around the country. For certain we increased turnout to some extent, but that organizing model is inadequate and not a recipe for Democratic success. The result of this strategy results in very uneven outcomes. Turnout in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) was 74%, but only 60% in Philadelphia, according to Mike Elk's Payday Report. If turnout in Philadelphia had been closer to the level in Pittsburgh, Harris would have won Pennsylvania. Democrats and their allies have to build permanent, ongoing social and political organizations in-between elections, that garner trust, mobilize people around issues, and build local leadership. Groups like the Movement Voter Project do this, but they are woefully underfunded, as Jodi Jacobson noted in her article in The Nation, “Grassroots Groups Know How to Win This Campaign – Do They Have What They Need to Pull It Off?”

11. The turnout problem has much to do with the decline of the labor movement over the past 40 years—from 30% of all workers in the early 1970s, to 20% in the 1990s, to 10% today. Biden was the most pro-union president in history. Not a single union endorsed Trump. Union members voted for Harris-Walz by a margin of 57%-39%, according to the AP. That's not bad, but not good enough. Typically, turnout by union members is higher than average turnout. If union membership today was 20% of all workers - 28.8 million members instead of 14.4 million members—and 57% of them voted for Harris—she would have won the White House. Unions used to be the key turnout machine for Democrats. A stronger labor movement would have recruited more members to volunteer, had more money to invest in Democratic campaigns, put more resources into educating their members about why to vote for the pro-worker candidate, even those members who might be gun owners or evangelical Christians. Historian Michael Kazin discusses this in his article “The Decline of Union Hall Politics” in the current issue of Dissent magazine.

12. America's corporate ruling class and its Republican allies spent the past half-century trying to weaken and even destroy the labor movement, and almost succeeded. They did this in part by weakening labor laws and enforcement, in part by engaging in expensive union-busting. It turns out that unions have made a modest comeback in the past few years, but they can't win many workplace victories under current labor laws, which are biased toward corporations, allowing them to engage in illegal union-busting without paying serious penalties. Public opinion is solidly in support of unions. At least 70% of Americans support unions, the highest figure since the mid-1960s, when the Gallup Poll began asking that question. But public opinion doesn't win union elections. Fair labor laws and good organizing do. The Democrats should have enacted labor law reform (then called the Employee Free Choice Act, now called the Protect the Right to Organize Act) when they had the chance under Obama, but they didn't. They are paying for that now. That should be a priority if Democrats ever get a trifecta – the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.

13. Other key organizations within the Democratic coalition—Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the Sierra Club and other environmental groups groups, civil rights groups, immigrant rights groups, community organizing groups, LGBTQ groups—don't have the resources or infrastructure that the labor movement does. If they all worked together to invest in year-round organizing and voter mobilization, that would be better, but the liberal/progressive coalition is still organizationally fragmented.

14. Some people are surprised at Trump's victory because the media kept saying that his campaign operation was in disarray and didn't have a real ground game. But Trump DID have a ground game. It's called the white evangelical Christian movement. Those churches and their social networks mobilized their members for Trump and other Republicans. In 2016 and 2020 they accounted for almost half (45%) of Trump's total vote. According to CNN exit polls, this year white evangelical Christians accounted for 22% of all voters and gave Trump 82% of their votes. That translates into roughly 45% of his total votes, the same as before. It is likely that a significant factor in Trump's increase among Latinos this year was among Hispanic evangelicals and Hispanic-traditional Catholics.

15. The spoilers don't explain the loss. Many of us feared that in an extremely tight presidential election that would be determined by a small number of votes in seven battleground states, the presence of Jill Stein and Cornel West on the ballot could take enough "protest" votes away from Harris to hand Trump a victory. Third party “spoilers” have changed the outcome of presidential elections in the past. In 2000, for example, Ralph Nader diverted enough votes away from Democrat Al Gore to swing the election to George W. Bush. But that didn't happen this year. Trump's margin of victory in each of the seven battleground states was larger than the combined votes for Stein and West.

16. The same is likely true about Arab American voters. In the Arab-majority suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, Harris lost the city to Trump by more than 2,600 votes. Biden beat Trump by more than 17,400 votes in Dearborn. That's more than a 20,000-vote swing that contributed to Trump's triumph in Michigan. Democratic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib received over 9,600 more votes in Dearborn than Harris. Rep. Elissa Slotkin—a Jew and a supporter of Israel—not only won her race for the Michigan Senate seat but also won the most votes in in Dearborn. She won 41.1% of Dearborn votes compared to 39% for her Republican opponents, but lost some votes to the Green Party candidate, who received 14.8% of the Dearborn vote. Trump beat Harris in Michigan by a slim margin of 79,303 votes—49.87% (2,809,720 votes) to 48% (2,728,417). The Arab American vote wasn't enough, on its own, to swing the Michigan electoral votes his way, but it contributed to his victory. More important was the low turnout by Black voters and the shift of some Black voters toward Trump. The same is likely true in Pennsylvania, which has a relatively large Arab American population, but where other factors were more important in Trump's victory.

17. Overall, it appears that foreign policy—including US support for Ukraine and Israel—was not a major factor in this election. Only about four percent of voters ranked foreign policy as a top concern. Even most leftist/progressive voters who declared themselves to be "uncommitted" probably voted for Harris anyway, knowing that things would be much worse for Palestinians, or the prospects for peace in the Middle East, if Trump won the election. Similarly, it doesn't look like Harris lost many votes among young people and liberals upset with her stance on Israel and Palestine. But because Harris got fewer votes than Biden did in 2020, we don't yet know which Biden voters didn't bother to vote this year and whether the Israel/Palestine issue prompted a significant number of people not to cast ballots for Harris or not to vote at all.

18. In many ways, the legacy of the COVID pandemic was a factor in this election. It brought the economy to a standstill, first under Trump, then under Biden. Biden's policies helped bring the economy back, but that's not how most voters see it. Instead, they have short memories and somehow blame Biden for higher prices for gas, food, rent, and other necessities. They forget the devastation that Trump's mishandling of the pandemic caused, including many unnecessary deaths due to his lies about vaccines and his administration's failure to quickly address the public health crisis. In early March 2020, weekly claims for unemployment insurance was about 207,000. Two weeks later, it was ten times that figure. By April, claims reached a high of 6,137,000. Having lost their jobs or working few hours, many Americans could not pay their mortgage or the rent. Biden expanded resources for testing and vaccines, but Trump and his MAGA movement opposed masks and even vaccines, so that, ironically, COVID deaths were higher in Republican areas. Through August 2024, the U.S. had 103 million confirmed cases of COVID and 1.2 million deaths. COVID also had a profound impact on increasing social isolation, with people becoming less connected to family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. That certainly had an impact on voter turnout.

19. What can we expect from a Trump administration? Here are some parts of his agenda that will likely be top priorities:

(a) He will hire more loyalists to run the White House and the agencies, to avoid what happened in his first term, where top aides and cabinet heads, as well as military leaders and his own chief-of-staff, thwarted Trump proposals they knew were illegal or political unwise. Among the new Trump inner circle will be fellow fascist Elon Musk and anti-science whacko Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If the latter is put in charge of health care initiatives, including NIH and/or FDA, watch out!

(b) He will try to persuade Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas (76 years old) and Samuel Alito (75) to retire so he can appoint younger reactionaries to the Supreme Court.

(c) He will fill other federal judgeships with similar reactionaries drawn from a list put together by the right-wing Federalist Society. This only requires Senate approval.

(d) He will begin to deport immigrants, although it is unlikely he can deport all 12 million undocumented immigrants. If he tries, he'll get pushback from major employers who depend on them. Trump's deportation efforts will sow enormous chaos and racism, and could result in violence and certainly violations of basic civil liberties.

(e) If the Republicans retain control of the House, which appears likely, he will weaken federal labor laws and eviscerate the NLRB to stall or reverse the modest but impressive victories by organized labor made during the Biden years.

(f) He will cut Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers.

(g) He will weaken Obamacare to return to allowing insurance companies to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

(h) He will weaken regulations that protect workers, consumers, and community residents from dangerous health, safety, and environmental practices by business. This means cutting budgets and regulations for EPA, FDA, OSHA, NLRB, FTC, CFPB, HUD, and other regulatory agencies.

(i) He will enact even more regressive tax policies by reducing taxes for the super-rich and big business.

(j) He will impose tariffs on imports that will be, in effect, a tax that will cost the typical consumer at least several thousand dollars a year.

(k) He will cut Pell grants and other financial aid for college and cancel all policies to reduce student debt, most of which is born by working class Americans who attended four year public colleges and universities.

(l) He will reduce funds for public transit and investments in green jobs and green industries, cancelling key provisions of one of Biden’s key legislative accomplishments.

(m) He will allow drug companies to dramatically raise prices for prescription medicine, including for drugs like insulin, reversing another Biden achievement.

(n) He will weaken federal laws that ban employment, housing and other forms of discrimination on the basis of race and gender

(o) He will encourage the Supreme Court to allow states to outlaw same-sex marriage

(p) He will preempt states and cities from raising the minimum wage above the federal level ($7.25 since 2009), and may try to preempt them from adopting rent control laws.

(q) He will support a bill to outlaw abortion, even though during the campaign he said it should be left to the states

(r) He will pardon all those who were convicted for the January 6 insurrection.

(s) He will end U.S. aid to Ukraine, guaranteeing Putin a victory.

(t) He will visit Israel to show support for Netanyahu, cut off U.S. funds for the UN relief agency providing aid in Gaza, and encourage the Israeli prime minister to expand Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

(u) He will continue to use the White House as a subsidiary of the Trump family business empire, making profits from people who want favors and who will stay in Trump hotels and resorts and invest in business projects sponsored by his children.

(v) He will continue to rant and rave like a deranged lunatic, encouraging hate groups like the Proud Boys to engage in violence against immigrants, transgender folks, Blacks, Jews, and others.

(w) He will engage in all kinds of acts to diminish our democracy and basic rights regarding free speech, assembly, dissent, unions, surveillance, academic freedom, immigration and deportation, separation of church and state, and others. Rick Perlstein painted a scary scenario about this subject in an article for American Prospect, entitled "What Will You Do?"

20. If the Republicans control the House (as it appears they will as of Friday), Trump will have no guardrails. His policies will cause a great deal of harm and suffering in the first two years of his administration. If so, that will give the Democrats a chance to win a majority of the House in the 2026 mid-terms, checkmating Trump's ability to carry out much his agenda in the third and fourth years of his term.

21. But even without a Republican House, Trump can do a great deal of damage through executive fiat and with a friendly Senate, who will approve his appointments to the Cabinet, regulatory agencies, and the courts. It will be extremely hard for the Democrats to take back the Senate in 2026. The Senate map seems to give Republicans the advantage. The “out” party usually picks up seats in the midterm elections, but the Democrats have a long climb to get to 51 Senate seats in 2026. If am correct, then Trump will have four years of a Republican Senate.

Current Senate

• 51 D (includes independents Sinema, Manchin, Sanders, King)
• 49 R

Republicans flipped at least four Senate seats

No Democrat flipped a Republican Senate seat. But Republicans flipped four Senate seats. GOP challengers defeated incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jon Tester in Nevada. A Republican won the open Senate seat in West Virginia, where Joe Manchin—a Democrat who turned independent—didn’t run for re-election.

Republicans could still flip one more Senate seats, but it is too close to call

The Republicans were unable to flip Democratic-held Senate seats in Wisconsin and Michigan. Both Tammy Baldwin (Wisconsin) and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan) narrowly won their races for the Senate, outperforming Harris. That leaves one hotly-contested Senate race that is still too close to call. As of Friday, with 96% of the votes counted, incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen was ahead of her Republican opponent 47.8% to 46.5%.

The Next Senate

Assuming Rosen holds onto her Nevada Senate seat, the Republicans will have a 53-47 majority starting in January. Going into the 2026 mid-term elections, Democrats will have to hold onto all 47 current seats, and flip four Republican-held seats, to regain a Senate majority. This will be a difficult task, given the number of vulnerable Republicans and Democrats who are up for re-election in 2026.

2026 Senate Elections

Vulnerable Republicans (% of votes in previous race)

• Thom Tillis - NC (48.7%)
• Joni Ernst – Iowa (51.8%)
• Susan Collins – Maine (51%)
• John Cornyn - Texas (53.5%) [although Cruz’s win over Colin Allred with 53.2% of the vote makes a Cornyn win seem highly likely)

Vulnerable Democrats (% of votes in previous race)

• Jon Ossoff – GA (50.6%)
• Tina Smith – Minnesota (48.7%)
• John Hickenlooper – Colorado (53.5%)
• Gary Peters – Michigan (49.9%)
• Ben Ray Lujan – New Mexico (51.7%)

22. There’s lots to discuss about what Democrats, liberals and progressives, should be doing during Trump’s presidency. Massive civil disobedience and protest? General strikes in major cities? Investing in and strengthening an infrastructure of local/state issue-oriented groups to strengthen and expand the organizing base in-between elections? Focus on building movements and winning elections in cities and state legislatures? Lots of lawsuits to stop Trump from pursuing his agenda?

23. We won’t know for four years if this was a realignment election – the beginning of a dramatic change in America’s political direction. Was this a significant shift in Americans’ partisan loyalties or a tribute to Trump’s unique appeal? It is unlikely that any other Republican can pull off what Trump did. Certainly vice-president-elect JD Vance lacks Trump’s charisma. If the Democrats nominate good candidates for president and vice president in 2028, he or she can probably defeat Vance, who will be the presumptive GOP nominee. (It is also possible that Vance could become president earlier if Trump gets seriously ill, enfeebled, or dies before the end of his term). But there will be a lot of damage over the next four years that could make it harder to have a fair election.

24. There are many structural aspects of our political system that tilt the playing field toward big business, the wealthy, conservatives, and Republicans. These include the Electoral College; gerrymandering House seats (with SCOTUS approval); the small-state bias in the Senate; the federalist system (that allows each state to decide who can vote, how, when, and where people register and vote) that reduces turnout, especially among the poor; "balanced," "he said/she said" and "horse race" journalism that gave Trump a platform to spew lies (especially about the economy) and hate, normalized him, and didn't clearly inform Americans about what a Trump presidency would mean for their daily lives; Citizens United and our campaign finance rules that give corporations and the rich undue influence; and our judicial system, which let Trump off the hook with delays instead of convictions and prison. These are serious obstacles. Whether (and when) these can be reformed is a big question. But they should not get in the way of the more immediate need to build a stronger movement for economic and social justice.

25. In the midst of this awful election, there was some GOOD NEWS, including progressive candidates and ballot measures winning against the odds. Among them are Rep. Ruben Gallego’s Senate victory in Arizona and progressive tenant lawyer Ysabel Jurado’s election to the LA City Council. There's plenty of other silver linings from Tuesday's elections, but I'll leave that analysis for another time.

Tuesday’s election results were dire, but now is not the time for progressives to retreat. American society will be best served by a progressive movement that plays strong defense and offense.

Progressives must continue to be vigilant in defending democracy, the rule of law, and the constitutional republic. In order to be most effective on these matters, we should maintain our recent alliance with liberals and conservatives of conscience. On every other matter, we should speak as the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the group whose platform is supported by the vast majority of Democrats.

We must lead in protecting the environment and vulnerable communities, both at home and abroad.

Solidarity with organized labor will be a priority during Trump 2.0. Unions will face a hostile National Labor Relations Board. Vigilance will be required to preserve labor’s recent gains. When there’s a strike or an organizing drive, progressives must have a presence on the picket line, calling Trump’s bluff and exposing his contempt for labor.

Only progressives advocate for time-tested policies and programs that will build the prosperous middle class society that the majority of the country so clearly wants.

The Republican Party is winning elections by attracting the working class away from a Democratic Party dominated by its neoliberal moderate faction. However, the GOP is mainly gaining working class support because Trump gives expression to shared grievances, not because the GOP is proposing policies that will help working people economically.

Only progressives advocate for time-tested policies and programs that will build the prosperous middle class society that the majority of the country so clearly wants. It is incumbent upon progressives to make the case to our fellow Democrats and to the general public that progressive economics should define the Democratic Party agenda going forward.

There should be no equivocation in our messaging, just three simple points:

1. The economic program of moderate Democrats and Republicans (aka neoliberalism) destroyed the American middle class;

2. Trump’s economics have failed to re-build it; and

3. Progressive economic policy created the wealthiest middle class in the history of the world in the years after World War II. It’s time to give progressive economics a try in the 21st century.

So, expect PDA and progressives to respond to Tuesday’s results by being very active and promoting our positions. Indeed, the Democratic Party is clearly in crisis following the election, we need to step up and make the case—for the benefit of the party and, more importantly, the people, the country, and the planet—that progressive policies should define the party going forward.

However, we also need to show humility and do some soul searching. Too often, the left dismisses all criticism out of hand. This must change. We need to accept that conservatives and moderates have effectively misrepresented progressives as extremists, and take action to change this perception. We must re-establish that we are an inclusive political movement that respects everyone’s voice and is fully committed to maximizing freedom and liberty for all Americans.

Progressives are ready to stand up at this challenging moment in our history, confident that our policy agenda suits the needs of 21st century America and provides a pathway out of America’s interminable political crisis.

* * *

On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders shared his thoughts on the results of the election. As usual, he was right on point. Bernie condemned the influence of big money in the Democratic Party, and the party's failure to fight for the working class.

We must step up now and take initiative to bring the Democratic Party into line with Sanders' vision

I also happened to stumble upon James Carville's reflections. Carville correctly diagnoses the leadership void in the Democratic Party and calls for immediate action. Not surprisingly, however, Carville does not suggest a role for progressives in leading the Party forward.

Put the two together, and the course of action for progressives is clear. We cannot hesitate or we will miss our opportunity. Rather, we must step up now and take initiative to bring the Democratic Party into line with Sanders' vision—one which matches the politics of the party's base and has majority support among the general population.

After the 2016 election, Keith Ellison, a great progressive, challenged the Democratic Party leadership and almost won. However, control of the party apparatus remained in the hands of the moderate faction. Fast forward eight years to the present, and that leadership has taken us to the exact same point of failure as in 2016: Donald Trump is president-elect, the Senate and likely the House will be under GOP control.

You have to be willfully ignorant not to understand what this is telling us.

Progressives must challenge for the leadership of the Democratic Party—and we must win.

It’s official. Neoliberal fascism has become mainstream in the United States. This is the only rational conclusion that one can draw from Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election. Indeed, Trump’s historic victory (which includes leading the GOP to a much larger-than-expected Senate majority and potentially in control of the House) has changed the nature of the Republican Party and shifted the center of gravity in U.S. politics in such earth-shattering fashion that it has led to the actual collapse of the Democratic Party.

Neoliberal fascism is now the dominant politico-ideological orientation in the United States and its dire consequences will undoubtedly be felt for years to come both inside the country and across the world. In this context, the formation of a united front against fascism is more important and urgent than ever before.

Under the leadership of Donald Trump, a political movement has been born that encompasses different major coalitions (working-class voters, women [whose share of support for Trump, ironically enough, went up by 2 percentage points from the last election], Christian fundamentalists, minorities [Black, Hispanic, Asian voters] and youth [though largely white and conservative], and the ultra-wealthy) all of whom have been drawn to the “America First” slogan.

As such, the followers of Trump’s movement are apparently enthused by the idea of witnessing the radical restructuring of the federal government (the shrinking of government agencies accompanied by the expansion of the powers of the presidency) and retribution for the great leader’s political enemies; they are apparently in favor of rolling back civil and human rights and in approval of “law and order” politics which includes, among other things, militarizing the police and carrying out a militarist plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and banning sanctuary cities; they are apparently in support of a political agenda that targets climate change and curtails measures that protect the environment; and they are apparently in approval of massive tariffs on all imports as a tool of economic competition and tax cuts to benefit the rich.

The GOP is now Trump’s party, and it is fascistic. It was a fallacy all along on the part of many Democrats to think that MAGA Republicans were a minority within the GOP. Kamala Harris exhibited anything but political savviness by going after wavering Republicans, flip flopping on key issues, and ignoring the needs of working-class people. Thus, as Bernie Sanders aptly put it, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

The Democrats should have learned from the mistakes of Social Democratic parties in Europe, which abandoned working class people and subsequently opened the door to authoritarian populist leaders who promised voters fed up with neoliberal policies a return to a “golden age” of economic independence, national identity and traditional social values. But they didn't because Democrats have become the party of Wall Street and jet-setting celebrities.

The question now facing progressive and radical forces in the US is what to do next. Questions over political identity, vision and strategy ought to dominate public discussions in the weeks and months ahead. A united front against Trump must be formed in order to curtail the scope of his neoliberal fascist plans. As things stand, there are virtually no checks on Trump in his second term. And he cones into office armed with a Supreme Court ruling that grants the president immunity from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office.

Dark times lie ahead. Many of those who voted for Trump will come to regret their choice, but that’s of little consolation now to the rest of society. Now it’s up to the rest of us to become more involved ever more passionately in pedagogical projects and political struggles that would build walls of resistance against a fascist takeover in the US. The fascist threat is real, and the Democratic Party bears much responsibility for democracy’s imminent demise.

The country needs a new vision and new politics. A powerful popular mass political response is urgently needed. It can happen. It must happen. The time to get organized in a much more serious and effective way is now.

As the world absorbs the shockwave of Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, the playbook for his second term, designed by a handful of right-wing extremists, is already underway in Argentina.

Project 2025 is set out in a nearly 900-page ‘Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise,’ produced by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing U.S. think tank, as a ready reckoner for the incoming Trump administration. It details authoritarian tactics that exist in various parts of the world, from attacking public education to dismantling policies to tackle climate change to restricting the rights of women, LGBTIQ+ people, migrants, workers and Black people. But if there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.

“If you have any doubts about how Project 2025 would be implemented, you have to look at what has happened in the last year in Argentina,” human rights lawyer Paula Ávila-Guillén, told me in a thought-provoking interview. She is the executive director of the Women's Equality Center (WEC) which works on communication strategies on reproductive health and justice in Latin America.

I knew what was happening in my country Argentina. A 30% cut in state spending and an eleven percentage point increase in poverty in less than a year don’t go unnoticed – even if you don't live there. Nor do the struggles that family and friends go through in a society already used to economic crashes. Still, Ávila-Guillén’s provocation prompted me to delve into the way Project 2025 is being carried out back home.

When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.

Project 2025 has been spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, but includes an advisory board with more than one hundred other Christian right and far right groups and dozens of former Trump officials.

“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on day one of the next conservative administration,” the Heritage Foundation says on its website to introduce Project 2025.

In the months leading up to election day, as Project 2025’s authoritarian goals were increasingly documented by the press, hate watch groups and trade unions, Trump tried to distance himself from it.

Javier Milei, president of Argentina since December last year and an emerging figurehead of the global far right, has never mentioned Project 2025. But he had been looking to establish ties with the Heritage Foundation since at least 2023, according to documents submitted by a lobbyist to the U.S. Department of Justice.

And a copy of the ‘Mandate for Leadership’ was handed to Milei by Heritage’s executive vice-president Derrick Morgan when the two met in Washington in February for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), according to Argentina’s government website which lists gifts received by the president.

A central goal of Project 2025 is to “dismantle the administrative state” allegedly co-opted by the left or wokism. It entails disbanding federal ministries and agencies, cutting public funding for health, education and welfare, and eliminating programs and resources to combat gender-based violence, discrimination, pollution and climate change.

If there is one country already trying some of Project 2025’s most extreme policies to weaken the state and render the enjoyment of rights obsolete, it is Argentina.

Milei has worked fast in his first ten months in power and has followed this script entirely. The argument for many of his new measures has been the need to lower public spending to balance a lopsided economy, with an annual inflation at 211% and a huge debt owed to the International Monetary Fund. There is nothing wrong with cutting superfluous spending of course, but Milei has gone so much further than anyone might have initially imagined, in what many have dubbed his “chainsaw-style approach” to reducing the size of the state.

“I love being the mole inside the state,”I Milei said in an interview in June. “I'm the one destroying the state from within”.

“I love being the mole inside the state. I'm the one destroying the state from within”
Milei

Milei has made an unprecedented cut to all public spending at close to 30%. He cut investment in education by 40%, denied increases to pensions, cut access to life-saving drugs for cancer patients, defunded the science and technology system and universities, and laid off almost 27,000 public employees.

He closed the public media and froze food distribution to soup kitchens. Now, he’s set to sell-off public companies in the fields of nuclear energy, aviation, fuel, mining, electricity, water, cargo transport, roads and railways.

Milei has eliminated nine ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and the Ministry of Education— something that the Mandate for Leadership mentions and Trump has also spoken about.

He has dismantled all gender policies and defunded services including those for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. Last year, more than 170,000 people accessed these services, while official figures show that a femicide is committed every 35 hours in Argentina. It is now unclear whether anyone will continue to keep track of these statistics.

He also closed the Institute against Discrimination, Racism and Xenophobia, which he called a “sinister body used for ideological persecution.” Project 2025 authors would no doubt be delighted. Their blueprint for Trump goes to great lengths to explain how every diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy, program and fund must be removed.

The ‘Mandate for Leadership’ details the need to assemble an army of loyalists from day one to carry out this task of reducing the state. The Heritage Foundation has a database of some 20,000 people in the U.S. who would make up a transitional staff for Trump. But it would require firing tens of thousands of career civil servants to replace them with people loyal to their ideology and ban public employees’ right to unionise.

Milei is actively persecuting civil servants who don’t follow his mindset. In a letter to the diplomatic corps, he demanded those who don’t align with his foreign policy ideas to “step aside,” specifically referencing his plan to repudiate the UN's Agenda 2030 which governments have signed to combat poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.

Days later, in a statement, he announced a purge: “The executive branch will launch an audit of the career staff of the foreign ministry with the aim of identifying promoters of anti-freedom ideas.”

War on gender

According to Project 2025, the next US president must “remove from every existing rule, regulatory agency, contract, grant, regulation, and federal law the terms sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights.”

Abortion is mentioned 199 times in the document, including proposing a federal ban, increased criminalization, more restrictions on providing care for miscarriages and obstetric emergencies, defunding emergency contraception and strict surveillance systems on people who have abortions or suffer miscarriages.

Heritage also wants to impose its worldview across borders: restore the so-called ‘Mexico City policy,’ which prohibits any U.S. public funding to foreign non-governmental organizations if they include any abortion-related activity—even if they do so with their own funds.

The right to abortion, legalized in 2021 in Argentina, is in danger under Milei. His party introduced a bill to repeal abortion which he’s referred to as “aggravated murder.” He’s also defunded the distribution of abortion pills and contraceptives.

Milei eliminated a program to prevent teenage pregnancy and has not set aside any funds in the 2025 budget for comprehensive sex education—which is mandatory by law and considered essential to prevent child abuse. Instead, authorities hired the Chilean Catholic organization Teen Star, that promotes abstinence, for training teachers in charge of CSE.

Milei banned the use of gender inclusive language in public services, and put a Catholic lawyer, Ursula Basset, in the foreign ministry to review all the country's positions on gender and climate change. At the last Organization of American States (OAS) General Assembly, Basset stymied the negotiations by demanding the removal of “LGBTI people,” “gender,” “tolerance,” “climate change,” and “families” from agreed intergovernmental statements.

“Argentina was the only G20 country to oppose the Ministerial Declaration on Gender Equality,” signed last month in Rio, Ávila-Guillén told me. The disagreement stemmed from the fact that “family care” was defined as work and the term “reproductive rights” was mentioned. Argentina ended up in a more extreme position than Saudi Arabia or Russia.

“At the G20 meeting, Argentina ended up in a more extreme position on gender than Saudi Arabia or Russia”

Respectability and academic tone is just a veneer for hate in Mandate for Leadership. You only need to skim the document to find polarizing language and the construction of an internal enemy. Milei likewise calls his opponents “rats,” “human excrement,” “fucking lefties,” “imbeciles,” or “traitors.”

“The idea that Milei is the most Argentinian thing that could happen to Argentina is ridiculous; he is part of a much bigger agenda, crafted in the U.S. and which is trying to be implemented in different parts of the world,” Ávila-Guillén says.

The lobbyist that connected Milei with the Heritage Foundation last year is Damián Merlo, partner director of Latin America Advisory Group, a company which lobbies in the U.S. on behalf of authoritarian Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. Merlo is close to digital strategist Fernando Cerimedo, who also works for Milei and has done so for the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Cerimedo is currently under investigation in Brazil for his alleged role in the 2022 failed coup attempt led by Bolsonaro against Brazilian president Inácio Lula da Silva.

When Milei took office, he warned the Argentine people that their economic plight might briefly worsen under his harsh measures. This is exactly what millions are now suffering: more poverty and recession.

In the last days of the U.S. election campaign, a similar message was spread by billionaire Elon Musk who put more than $100 million into Trump's campaign, and who would be, according to Trump, his “secretary of cost-cutting.” Such cuts, Musk warned, might cause “temporary hardship,” but they were necessary in the path to “long-term prosperity.”

Prosperity for whom is not clear—but a recipe for hardship, denial of rights and persecution is on display in Argentina, if you can bear to take a look.

As the dust settles over election day, it’s worth reflecting that it’s not only the election results that have been at stake, but the future of the presidency and its powers. Over the course of the first quarter of this century, the American presidency has accumulated ever more power, rendering the office increasingly less constrained by either Congress or the courts. With Donald Trump’s reelection, the slide toward a dangerously empowered president has reached a moment of reckoning, particularly when it comes to foreign affairs and warfare.

Presidential Powers

Throughout American history, presidents have repeatedly sought to increase their powers, nowhere more so than in the context of war. As historian James Patterson has pointed out, “War and the threat of war were major sources of presidential power from the beginning.” Whether it was George Washington’s insistence that he was the one to formulate foreign policy when it came to diplomacy, treaties, and more; Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of complete control over whether or not to attack the Barbary Pirates; James Polk’s decision to take actions which risked war with Mexico; or Abraham Lincoln’s “sweeping assertions of authority” in the Civil War era, executive claims to authority when it comes to matters of foreign relations and warfare have been a persistent feature of American history.

The Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level...

The twentieth century saw a continued rise in the powers of the presidency. As historian Jeremi Suri noted in his book The Impossible Presidency, the four terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt were a transformative moment, essentially multiplying the responsibilities of the president with the ultimate goal of “mak[ing] the national executive the dominant actor in all parts of American life.” The presidents who followed Roosevelt continued to display such enhanced powers, especially when it came to foreign affairs.

As legal scholar Matt Waxman has reminded us, FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, went to war in Korea without congressional authorization. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who did consult with Congress over the need to protect U.S.-allied Pacific coastal islands from possible Chinese aggression and, in his farewell address, warned against “the military-industrial complex,” still believed “that the president had broad powers to engage in covert warfare without specific congressional approval.” In fact, his successor, John F. Kennedy, exercised those powers in a major way in the Bay of Pigs incident. Richard Nixon unilaterally and secretly launched the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, and Ronald Reagan created a secret Central American foreign policy, while arranging the unauthorized transfer of funds and weaponry to the Nicaraguan rebels, the Contras, from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran, despite the fact that such funding was prohibited by an act of Congress, the Boland Amendment.

The Twenty-First Century

Even within the context of repeated presidential acts taken without congressional assent (or often even knowledge) and in defiance of the constitutional checks on the powers of the presidency, the twenty-first century witnessed a major uptick in claims of executive power. In the name of war, this century has seen an astonishing erosion of constraints on that very power, as Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh details in his illuminating new book, The National Security Constitution in the Twenty-First Century.

At the dawn of this century, the attacks of September 11, 2001, led to an instant escalation of presidential power and executive unilateralism. In the name of national security, President George W. Bush issued an order that authorized the indefinite detention of prisoners in what quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror. He also set up an offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and authorized military commissions instead of federal court trials for terrorism suspects captured abroad.

Meanwhile, Congress and the courts consistently deferred to the will of the president when it came to actions taken in the name of that war on terror. One week after the attacks of 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), which undermined its own power in Article I of the Constitution to declare war and weakened its powers of restraint on presidential actions carefully articulated in the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), passed to guard against the very kind of secretive engagement in war that Nixon had unilaterally authorized in the Vietnam era.

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Now, turning their backs on the power given them by the Constitution and the WPR, Congress, with that AUMF, acceded to the expansion of presidential powers and opened the door to the disastrous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere early in this century. The president, it stated, was “authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations, or persons.”

In October 2001, Congress also passed the USA Patriot Act. It included an expansion of presidential power at home in the name of protecting the nation in the war on terror, including authorizing greatly expanded surveillance policies that would come to include, among other things, secret surveillance and searches that took place without evidence of wrongdoing, notably in Muslim communities in this country that were considered inherently suspect in the name of the war on terror.

As a result, when, in January 2009, Barack Obama entered the White House, his administration found itself with a strikingly expanded definition of the powers of the presidency on the table.

Obama’s Presidency

A former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama pledged to overturn some of the Bush administration’s most egregious, extralegal breaches, including the very existence of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility and the use of torture (or what the Bush administration had politely termed “enhanced interrogation techniques”) authorized by executive unilateralism as part of the war on terror. In what became known as “trust me” government, Obama also pledged to reform the excessive surveillance policies implemented in the war on terror. In 2013, David Cole, a civil rights attorney and currently the National Legal Director of the ACLU, credited Obama with making substantial “shifts” toward restraint by formally declaring an end to many of the Bush administration’s “most aggressive assertions of executive power.”

But while Obama did indeed trim some of the most striking excesses of the Bush era, his record of presidential reform fell significantly short. Jameel Jaffer, the founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, for instance, disputed Cole’s claims, citing the Obama administration’s continued reliance on illegal and extralegal policies that Bush’s aggressive actions had already put in play — among them, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, and the military commissions to try prisoners at Guantánamo. In addition, as Jaffer pointed out, the Obama administration frequently relied on the powers granted the presidency in that 2001 AUMF to authorize targeted lethal drone strikes globally, as in the case of the drone-killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, without further congressional authorization, by expanding the definition of “imminence” in order to appear to be complying with the international rule of law.

When it came to such targeted killings — a military tactic introduced under President Bush but greatly expanded during the Obama years for strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen — the president reserved for himself the right to have the final say in authorizing such strikes. As the New York Times reported at the time, “Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary, and the president’s own deep reserve.”

Although he served as legal adviser to the Department of State in the Obama administration, in his warnings about the perils posed by the slide towards unilateral presidential powers, Harold Hongju Kou concedes that the president could have done more to curtail the Bush era enhancement of the powers of the president. “[T]he cautious Obama administration,” he writes, “succeeded in swinging the national security pendulum only part of the way back” to restraint on executive power via the courts and Congress. While the “cascade of illegality” that defined the Bush era’s war on terror was indeed somewhat addressed by Obama, it remained, Koh reminds us, “undercorrected” — including not seeking “stronger accountability for past acts of CIA torture, and the stubborn continuation of a Guantanamo detention policy.”

While President Obama adhered more closely to restraints on presidential power than his predecessor, his administration did not make the kinds of structural and procedural changes necessary to deter future presidents from following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, as we were soon to learn, since, as Koh points out, enhanced unilateral presidential and executive powers would be “sharply re-intensified” under Donald Trump.

The Trump Years

Indeed, the first Trump presidency vastly accelerated the claims of expanded presidential power. Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, lawyers who worked in the Bush and Obama administrations, respectively, served, as they put it, “very different presidents” and hold “different political outlooks.” Yet they agree that the Trump administration took unchecked presidential authority to a new level. In their 2020 book, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, they contended that “Donald Trump operated the presidency in ways that reveal its vulnerability to dangerous excesses of authority and dangerous weaknesses in accountability.”

And as they make all too clear, the stakes were (and remain) high. “The often-feckless Trump,” they wrote, “also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump — but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect.” And with the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the immunity of Donald Trump for acts taken while in the Oval Office, the shackles that once tied presidential acts in wartime to Congressional authorization are arguably now fully off the table, should a president be determined to act on his or her own say-so. (As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, the ruling “will have disastrous consequences for the presidency and for our democracy,” arguing that it will, in essence, “let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends.”)

The Biden Years

When it comes to recognizing limits on presidential powers, President Biden has had a distinctly mixed record. He immediately withdrew Trump’s executive order known as “the Muslim ban,” set out to close Guantánamo (but has not yet succeeded in doing so), rejoined the Paris climate accord, and revived international ties around the world that had been disrupted by Trump. And yet, that quintessential institutionalist, who prided himself on his ability to work with Congress, nonetheless veered in the direction of presidential unilateralism in the conduct of foreign affairs.

As Professor Koh put it: “In foreign affairs, even the longtime senator Joe Biden — who widely proclaims his love of the Senate — now operates almost entirely by executive fiat,” including a reliance on “classified policy memoranda, with minimal congressional oversight.” Overall, in fact, Biden issued more executive orders than any president since Richard Nixon. Though Biden wisely relied upon an interagency group of lawyers to advise him on national security decisions, following their advice, he issued “nonbinding political agreements, memoranda of understanding, joint communiques, and occasionally ‘executive agreements plus,’” just as Obama had done on the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear deal, relying on “preexisting legislative frameworks” rather than new Congressional authorizations. When it came to the war in Ukraine, Biden leaned heavily on “the coordinated use of sanctions, enhanced almost weekly post-invasion.” Most of those sanctions were set, as Koh also points out, “by executive orders and regulatory decrees,” rather than in consultation with Congress.

Our Future

A second Trump presidency will undoubtedly take unilateral presidential powers to a new level. After all, he already indicated that he might withdraw the U.S. from NATO and end support for Ukraine. Nor is Trump likely to be deterred by Congress. Reporting on Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page prescription for a second Trump presidency, written primarily by former office holders in the first Trump administration, New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman reported that Trump “and his associates” plan to “increase the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House.”

In particular, Project 2025’s stance on nuclear weapons is a reminder of just how dangerous a president who refused to be restrained by law or precedent will be. After all, in his first term in office, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on that country, leading its leaders to increase its nuclear capacity. Meanwhile, the march toward nuclear confrontation has accelerated worldwide. In response, Project 2025 argues for ramping up America’s nuclear arsenal yet more. “[T]he United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal,” the treatise declared, in order to “deter Russia and China simultaneously,” adding that the U.S. needs to “develop a nuclear arsenal with the size, sophistication, and tailoring — including new capabilities at the theater level — to ensure that there is no circumstance in which America is exposed to serious nuclear coercion.”

Consider all of that a frightening vision of our now all-too-imminent future: a president freed from the restraints of the constitution, unchecked by Congress or the courts — or by his cabinet advisors. In the words of MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Project 2025 has set the stage for Donald Trump to be the very opposite of what this country’s founders intended, “a king,” surrounded not by “groups of qualified experts” but by “unblinking yes-men.”

(Dis)Trust in the Presidency

The growing power of the presidency has been taking place in plain view, as unilateral powers have accumulated decade after decade in the Oval Office, while the recent choice of president has also become a grim choice about the nature and powers of the presidency itself. Notably, the rise in executive powers has coincided with a creeping distrust of government in this country. Since the early 1960s, when nearly 80% of Americans said they trusted government “most of the time,” the public’s faith in this country’s federal government hovers at just over 20%, according to the Pew Research Center. And no wonder. When the office of the president refuses to accept the checks and balances that underlie the democratic system, the country’s trust in negotiated, reasonable, and restrained outcomes understandably falls away.

Sadly, in this era, the benefits of restoring the very notion of checks and balances that birthed the nation have come to seem ever more like a quaint dream.