When You're Ready

Just keep in mind - when you're ready may be too late.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

The Work Begins Now

It was a defeat. It was a bad defeat.

There will be analyses. There will be explanations and ruminations, even recriminations and confabulations.

This effort is necessary and proper.

And there will be meetings. And panels. And conferences. Some of these will be interesting, some useful, some important.

There will also be a fair amount of wound-licking and navel-gazing. Most of this will be harmless.

If this reads as if I’m preemptively exasperated with some of this activity, don’t take me too seriously, or too literally. I am interested in much of this analysis, I expect to participate in some of it. It is, after all, important to understand the situation we face. As Lincoln said in 1858, after accepting the Republican nomination for Senate in Illinois: “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

We do need, as best we can, to know where we are. We do need to understand, as best we can, whither we are tending.

But we also need to judge what to do, and how to do it. And we need to start acting now.

Trump has won. The Trumpist planning to deploy the federal government on behalf of America First policies abroad and the Project 2025 agenda at home is underway. The efforts to change, even transform, our governing institutions and many others are about to begin.

And so the planning for it has to begin. And not just the planning. The actual organizing, the actual accountability, the actual pushback has to begin as well, even before all the conferences have concluded and the analyses have been agreed upon.

Newly elected presidents who’ve won convincing victories have momentum. But that momentum can also be stalled, blunted, blocked, limited, checked. Even reversed.

This requires organized opposition. This requires figuring out what levers of power are available to limit the damage Trump can do, and to thwart or delay or impede Trump’s plans. It requires Democratic elected officials to be serious about leading different aspects of the opposition. It requires others with institutional help or personal credibility to work with them in myriad ways.

These next couple of months are important. The adversarial work shouldn’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. If Trump as president-elect sails through these next two months unimpeded and unmarked, he’ll take office in a position of great strength. If, on the other hand, there’s effective opposition to his worst appointees, if real obstacles can be put in place ahead of time to his worst policies, if real efforts are organized to protect individuals the Trumpists intend to go after, Trump could start off with much less ability to do damage than one might expect.

Trump and his allies will control the federal government. This is, to say the least, no small thing. But this is a big and diverse country, and it’s a big and complicated government, and there are laws and institutions in place that can’t be steamrolled as easily as they were in Hungary or Venezuela.

There will be efforts—right from the beginning, beginning right now—by the Trumpists to discredit, to intimidate, to weaken their opponents. So the faster the opposition organizes in response the better. It will make things less bad for Ukraine, less bad for immigrants, less bad for civil servants, less bad for domestic dissidents, less bad for our future.

There should be no honeymoon for the Trumpists, no honeymoons for authoritarians.

And if there is to be one, the Trumpist honeymoon should be interrupted and abbreviated as much as possible, in ways that fully accord with legality and propriety. It may seem harsh to root for a honeymoon to end in chaos and tears. But in this case, excessive sentimentality is not our friend.

Let the unsentimental Edmund Burke be our guide: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”