Donald
Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential
election was surprising in a number of ways.
He won every swing state as well as the
popular vote, which a Republican candidate
hadn’t done in two decades. He led his party
to a congressional sweep, with the Republicans
maintaining control of the House of
Representatives and seizing a majority in the
Senate. And he benefited from an unexpectedly
large shift in votes among Latino and
African-American men.
In
2016, when Hilary Clinton won the popular vote
by a significant margin but lost the Electoral
College, anti-Trump forces could plausibly
argue that most of the country opposed the new
president. This time around, a very slim
plurality of voters had no problem putting
back into the White House a convicted felon
who supported efforts to overthrow the results
of the 2020 election.
In
2016, Trump himself was surprised by his own
victory, and his team was ill-prepared to take
power. In 2024, the Trump team is ready to hit
the ground running on day one. It has already
made some of the most extreme choices in U.S.
history for the top positions in U.S.
government: serial rule-breaker Matt Gaetz for
attorney general, conspiracy theorist Tulsi
Gabbard for director of national intelligence,
right-wing TV host Pete Hegseth to head up the
Pentagon, and extremist Stephen Miller to
oversee immigration.
This
time around, the conservative establishment
has a detailed game plan for the
administration—Project 2025—that will guide
Trump and his team. A new conservative
thinktank in Washington, DC, the America First
Policy Institute, will also be shaping the
administration’s agenda.
The
Biden administration is scrambling to preserve
some of the achievements that the Trump team
plans to destroy, particularly
around clean energy.
Federal employees are fearful that they will
lose their jobs in Trump’s promised attacks on
the “deep state.” Prominent anti-Trumpers are
worried about the retribution that the former
and future president has vowed to pursue. A
demoralized Democratic Party is busy trying to
figure out why it lost so badly in the
elections.
The
next four years promise to be chaotic,
vengeful, and dangerous. U.S. democracy is
certainly in peril. The international rule of
law will likely sustain numerous challenges,
as it has already from Russia and Israel. And
the planet itself, thanks to the climate
denier returning to the White House, faces the
prospect of a big step backward.
What
can be done to prevent the new Trump
administration from doing its worst?
At
the global level, many countries will step
into the vacuum created by U.S.
withdrawal—from the Paris agreement, the
effort to supply Ukraine, and various global
human rights institutions. European powers
will likely step up their assistance to
Ukraine if the Trump administration ends all
military support for the besieged country.
Europe, too, will continue to take the lead in
terms of a clean energy transition, but China,
Brazil, and India are also producing a
growing amount of electricity from
renewable sources.
Europe,
however, is divided, with a number of
far-right leaders who are thrilled to have a
U.S. leader like Trump pushing for change from
the outside. And the authoritarian leaders of
other countries—Russia, China, Turkey—will
happily take the U.S. side in eroding human
rights norms and institutions.
Inside
the United States, the greatest resistance
will come from the states. These states
controlled by Democrats—California,
Washington, Massachusetts—are already
preparing to work together to block Trump from
executing his extremist agenda. This
resistance will likely take the form of filing
suits that tangle up the new administration in
court. During Trump’s first term, states
joining together to stymie Trump succeeded
in 94 cases.
Unfortunately, thanks to all of Trump’s
judicial appointees in his first term, these
legal challenges will face longer odds.
States
also have considerable authority to set
policy. For instance, in the wake of the
Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, a
number of states preserved access to abortion
services through court rulings, legislative
policy, or popular referenda.
In
the case of Trump’s determination to proceed
with mass deportations, some Democratic
governors have already said that they will
not allow state
police to assist federal authorities with the
removals. Democrat-led states will do their
best to create islands of sanctuary against
the overreach of federal authorities.
NGOs
and social movements will also mount
resistance. A women’s march in Washington, DC
just after Trump’s inauguration in 2017
demonstrated the depth and breadth of anger at
the new president’s attitudes and proposed
policies toward women. A comparable march
is planned
for January 2025.
In
addition to using the courts to stop or delay
Trump policies, the resistance is organizing
to push the Democratic Party toward economic
populism. Harris lost a lot of working-class
voters. As Maurice Mitchell of the Working
Families Party puts
it,
“Donald Trump has no solutions to address the
needs of working-class people in this country.
And we know that when he tries to implement
his agenda of more tax cuts for billionaires,
gutting health care, deporting millions, and
supporting war crimes with public dollars,
people will rise up.”
The
goal of these progressives is to highlight the
economic costs of Trump’s early moves—mass
deportations, tariffs, corporate tax cuts—to
build momentum to win the 2016 midterm
elections. Resistance will be much easier if
the Democrats control at least one chamber of
Congress.
A
number of key movements exploded during
Trump’s first term: the Sunrise Movement
around climate change began just a couple
months after Trump’s inauguration, #MeToo went
viral in October 2017, #BlackLivesMatter went
global after police killed George Floyd in May
2020. Inevitably, after the despondency of the
election fades and the outrage at Trump’s
actual policies explodes, new
movements will
emerge to mobilize public anger.
The
centrists in the Democratic Party failed in
the last election because they refused to
embrace the kind of economic populism that the
Republicans, traditionally the party of the
rich, began to cultivate under Trump. The
challenge for the Democrats will be to
negotiate between the two progressive parts of
the party—the cultural left and the economic
left. Although these parts often overlap, the
party failed to emphasize the latter in the
last election, which could have appealed to so
many voters who ended up pulling the lever for
Trump because of the rising cost of food and
rent.
In
the seven stages of grief, progressives are
wallowing right now in the first three stages
of shock, denial, and anger. It would be a
mistake to get stuck in the seventh and final
stage of acceptance. When Trump’s policies
begin to bite, the anger will return and, with
it, a new determined resistance.
This
commentary was originally
published
in Hankyoreh.
