In the first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, two moments have stood out for their appeals to a kind of “resistance”-era optimism. One was Bishop Mariann Budde’s sermon, at the Washington National Cathedral, calling for Trump to “have mercy” on immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. children—a sermon she gave with Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance sitting in the front row. The other was Representative Brad Sherman’s defense of FEMA—a federal agency that Trump has suggested he might shutter—during a televised roundtable with other California leaders and Trump. “When you have a disaster this size,” Sherman said of the recent fires in Los Angeles, “you need to be able to deploy thousands of people, which [FEMA’s] been able to do.” Both Budde’s and Sherman’s statements sought to persuade the President to look past his politics of vengeance and embrace key tenets of a liberal democracy—pluralism and rational thinking, in this case—when governing the country he’d been elected to lead. The comedian Dave Chapelle echoed this sentiment in a recent “Saturday Night Live” monologue, pleading for Trump to “have empathy for displaced people, whether they’re in the Palisades or Palestine.”
In 2025, it requires an impressive amount of mental gymnastics to believe that Trump would be interested in empathy. After Budde’s sermon, the President posted on Truth Social that the bishop was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart,” in addition to being “not very good at her job!” (The Republican congressman and Internet troll Mike Collins wrote on X that Budde, who was born in New Jersey, should be “added to the deportation list.”) Sherman, on the other hand, was denigrated on the spot. “You haven’t gotten very much done with FEMA,” Trump said, interrupting him. “If you can put that genius of yours to work on getting a permit, you’ll be doing much better than some of the other things you’ve said, O.K.?”
Amid the “shock and awe” of Trump’s return to the White House, Budde’s and Sherman’s displays of resistance felt small and collapsible, barely big enough to accommodate hope. If Trump’s first Presidency was characterized by widespread revolt, his second term has so far been defined by the lack of dissidence. On the day after Trump’s first Inauguration, in 2017, about half a million people flooded Washington, D.C., in protest, donning pink pussy hats and chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” Millions of protesters, from Roanoke, Virginia, to Auckland, New Zealand, joined in the global Women’s March, championing messages of equality and collective action. But come 2025, on a day so cold Trump’s Inauguration had to be moved indoors, this purposeful, pointed crisis energy was in short supply. What was it that democracy looked like, again? The outgoing President, Joe Biden, after years of warning us against Trump’s dangerous plots and deranged pathologies, warmly greeted the forty-seventh President atop the White House steps. “Welcome home,” he said.
In 2016, Trump’s Electoral College defeat of Hillary Clinton seemed as if it could be written off as an aberration. Apart from Trump losing the popular ballot by about three million votes, his victory was marred by comical levels of scandal. There were claims of Russian interference. Hillary Clinton’s leaked e-mails dominated news coverage, becoming a pet obsession of the right. Fervently believed conservative fictions, including “Pizzagate,” evolved into perceived facts. Establishing both a cultural and a political resistance to the Trump Administration thus became a project of urgent importance. Funding for groups like the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood soared during Trump’s first term. Airport protests over the President’s Muslim ban generated activist momentum and a flurry of legal challenges. Celebrities from Rihanna to Jessica Chastain posted social-media denouncements of Trump, and #Resistance edicts abounded across late-night shows and awards-acceptance speeches. The #MeToo movement, uncoincidentally, arose early in this era; after George Floyd’s murder, in 2020, Black Lives Matter protests blanketed the country. Unrest and civic responsibility were in the air, as was the collective belief that members of the public could challenge injustice wherever it appeared, and win. When Trump ran for reëlection, defeating him became an existential imperative for Democrats. If he lost, the U.S. could reconstitute itself around the progressive neoliberalism that had dominated American politics since the nineteen-seventies, or so the reasoning went, and then begin to engage in more progressive ideas, in time. First, the country had to return to baseline.
This magical thinking helps explain why the Democratic Party experienced such a wave of enthusiasm during Trump’s first term. Senators Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Chris Murphy became household names after mike-drop moments at Senate confirmation hearings for prospective Cabinet members and Supreme Court Justices and during the inquiries into Russian election interference. An alliance between liberals, leftists, and centrists cemented—an all-hands-on-deck approach would be needed to defeat Trump. His Presidency would certainly be dangerous, but at least the U.S. still had a strong system of checks and balances to curb executive power and eliminate bad actors from doing their worst. In 2018, the Democrats regained control of the House during the midterm elections, and calls for Trump’s impeachment became less symbolic. When campaigning for the Democratic Presidential primaries began in 2019, dozens of contenders declared their candidacy. Debates had to be divided into two nights, to give everyone a fair shake. Voters could choose between the democratic-socialist platform of Bernie Sanders, the Obama-era comfort of Joe Biden, the tough-on-crime charisma of Kamala Harris, the invigorating youth of Pete Buttigieg, or the billionaire élitism of Michael Bloomberg. If anything, such options indicated a robust diversity within the Democratic Party, one that could be perceived, charitably, as essential to the health of democracy.
Although Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election initially served as a referendum on the resistance’s success—“I promise you this,” Biden tweeted days before his victory, “I’ll end Donald Trump’s chaos and end this crisis”—it now appears to be a historical precursor exposing the resistance as a largely ineffective endeavor. Trump expanded his popular-vote totals in both elections following 2016, despite running on an increasingly hostile and divisive platform. Once promising counter-efforts ultimately led to a litany of failures: Robert Mueller’s special counsel could not establish coördinated collusion between Trump’s 2016 campaign and the Russian government; Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite widespread opposition from Democrats; Trump’s two impeachments led to as many acquittals in the Senate. Tellingly, public rejections of MAGA have also waned, with celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Snoop Dogg tacitly supporting Trump’s reëlection. In 2017, designers including Marc Jacobs and Sophie Theallet declined to dress First Lady Melania Trump; in 2025, there were no equivalent declarations. Fox News continues to boast many of the country’s highest-rated cable news television programs. Joe Rogan, the host of one of the world’s most popular podcasts, has gone from labelling Trump an “existential threat to democracy” to becoming a symbol of MAGAdom, with his show now a haven for Trump-adjacent ideologues and tech executives, and even Trump himself.
Rogan’s descent into far-right politics is instructive for understanding the diminished cultural resistance to Trump. The comedian and U.F.C. commentator had once come across as an anti-establishment social progressive—he endorsed Sanders for President in 2020—but now he presents himself as having penetrated the lies of the Democratic deep state. His once goofy interest in alien and moon-landing conspiracy theories quickly led to his identifying conspiracies everywhere: immigrants were being bused from blue to red states to swing the electorate in favor of Democrats; eating a beef-only diet could cure arthritis; the care given to transgender children was unethical in a “Dr. Frankenstein sort of way.” His dalliances with the psychedelic drug DMT and his experiments with holistic treatment modalities have mushroomed into anti-vax rhetoric and aggressive scientific skepticism. Establishment Democrats, as he sees it, mask their deceptions with self-righteousness while Trump tells it like it is, exposing the web of lies Rogan suddenly saw in everything.
Rogan wasn’t alone in travelling from progressivism to Trumpism. In a recent podcast appearance, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained why some residents of her New York City district had voted for both her and Trump in the last election: “They see two people that are fundamentally anti-establishment, two people that do not respect a rule if the rule does not lead to an outcome.” Trump’s 2016 electoral victory may have seemed like a fluke, but his reëlection eight years later was a definitive rejection of establishment politics. While Democrats cling to norms and rules, bureaucratic processes and Old World etiquette, the Republican Party, now almost entirely populated by Trump cronies and loyalists, promotes a vision of government unbeholden to legality or due process. In the weeks before the election, former President Barack Obama gave moral sermons and philosophical treatises on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign, his speeches suggesting that politics still existed in a social atmosphere of contemplation and debate. Trump, meanwhile, stormed his rally stages with the certainty of a savior, portraying the world as a war-torn hellhole that only he could fix.
How is one to engage in contemplation and debate anymore, anyway? Information is now chiefly disseminated and consumed in short, brain-scrambling bursts across social-media platforms that are owned and operated by tech billionaires, many of whom attended Trump’s Inauguration. In keeping with its fealty to formalism, the Democratic establishment has failed to grasp that social media is no longer a vessel for sharing reductive moralisms but, rather, a “communicative sensation-stimulus matrix,” with its own hierarchies of fluency, as the late writer and academic Mark Fisher wrote. Concepts that can steal your attention for twenty seconds or less are the dominant currency of the attention economy, and Trump weaponizes this currency better than anyone. On some level, any revamped resistance effort to his Presidency must exist within the matrix that Fisher described.
It’s not just a matter of reëvaluating how to engage with these platforms; it’s the messages themselves that need reëvaluating, as well as the messengers who deliver them. The resistance to Trump 1.0 was defined by moral clarity and self-righteousness, virtues not consistently embodied by those doing the preaching. How could the Democrats be the party of peace and justice when Obama oversaw ten times as many drone strikes as his predecessor, George W. Bush? How could Joe Biden and Kamala Harris convince us of their decency and ethical fortitude when their Administration wouldn’t even allow a Palestinian American to speak at the Democratic National Convention? And how could the Democrats, in good faith, castigate Trump’s fealty to big-money interests when they courted “good billionaires” and accepted millions of dollars in corporate donations? As the British scholar David Harvey wrote, in 2005, the Democratic Party cannot “easily pursue an anti-capitalist or anti-corporate political line without totally severing its connections with powerful financial interests.” If the cultural resistance to Trump has in fact fallen into disrepair, these contradictions can be credited as catalysts.
At the Grammy Awards on Sunday night, echoes of the old resistance reverberated around Crypto.com Arena, in Los Angeles. In her acceptance speech for Best Latin Pop Album, Shakira dedicated her trophy to “my immigrant brothers and sisters,” whom she vowed to “always fight” alongside. Chappell Roan advocated for improved health-care access for developing artists and championed trans rights, and Alicia Keys proclaimed that “D.E.I. is not a threat, it’s a gift.” As meaningful as these messages are in theory, the Trump era has shown that they are only so effective in swaying people and may even be counterproductive to achieving actionable progressive goals. Resistance, after all, is implicitly reactive; it does not construct or generate but, instead, exists in opposition to a constructive or generative force. Rather than generate a cross-coalitionist vision for the country, the broader left, by and large, has spent the past decade in a perpetual state of reactivity. “We’re not going to go after every single issue,” Senator Chuck Schumer recently told the Times. “We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights.” Yet the resistance to Trump’s first term clearly demonstrated that lying down on the tracks was not in itself a suitable plan for winning elections and enacting large-scale social and political change. Eventually, the Democrats will need to build train tracks of their own. ♦
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