I saw a photo yesterday of a sign in front of a church that I think says it all. It read, “This, too, shall pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.”
Yes! It’s going to hurt for a while – no question about it, there is unavoidable darkness ahead – but already cracks are beginning to appear in the MAGA wall. There are concrete reasons for us to hope.
Example: Social media has been flooded with stories of Trump voters who are shocked – shocked! — to learn that Trump’s promises to them are going to cost them a lot of money. They are just coming into the understanding that the tariffs he promises will be nothing more than sales taxes on just about everything they buy, and that he wants to weaken Social Security, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid and abolish Obamacare. These people, mostly uneducated white men, are just coming into the understanding that instead of helping them financially, Trump will seriously hurt them financially.
At this point it becomes personal. When they realize that Trump has lied to them, cheated them just like he cheats people who work for him, when they see their money is flowing into rich people’s pockets, they will revolt – at least, those who have the guts to admit they were wrong will revolt. They will join us – and we will welcome them — as we get over our shock at Trump’s election and organize to turn away this attempt to convert the United States of America into a tyranny
They’re bound to recoil further – all us probably will — when Trump begins to implement the horrors of Project 2025 (see note below). Trump said he’d never heard of Project 2025 but he didn’t support it (?), but we know that’s a lie. His choice for vice president, J.D. Vance, wrote the Introduction for it.
The question is, why are all these people so ignorant?
Most of them get all their news from social media and such right-wing sources as Fox News and News Max, sources that feed their audiences a steady diet of slanted and distorted information. Those sources made it possible for Trump to dupe them into thinking that our envy-of-the-world booming economy is terrible, and that Vice President Kamala Harris is a stupid, crazed extremist who orchestrated a coup against President Joe Biden and doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, while Trump is being unfairly assaulted by those communist-soaked Democrats. He duped them into thinking that Democrats “failed to listen to” or “lost touch” with the middle and working classes .
All of that is outrageously, demonstrably wrong. Virtually every policy that Harris promoted was designed to help the middle class, blue-collar workers, and the working poor. Childcare tax credits, earned income credits for the working poor, lower prescription drug prices, protecting affordable healthcare, increasing the minimum wage, protecting unions and workers’ rights, providing for in-home care for elderly and homebound, subsidizing first-time homebuyers, building affordable housing, student loan forgiveness, prosecuting price gouging, a middle-class tax cut – Harris supported them all.
It’s hard to believe such ignorance exists, isn’t it? But it undeniably does. For example…
- An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts voted for Democrats.
- Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of The Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’ policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.
- Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, who studies focus groups, told NPR, “When I ask voters in focus groups if they think Donald Trump is an authoritarian, the Number One response by far is, ‘What is an authoritarian?’”
- And as Michael Tomasky put it in an article for The New Republic, those right-wing sources made their followers believe that “Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.”
Amazing, huh?
But again, the good news here is that these folks are beginning to see the light. They are beginning to realize they’ve been duped, and, one can hope, once they see it, once they feel it personally, they will rebel. They will join us.
So will those 93 million eligible voters who did not vote. Once they see the damage Trump is doing to our nation, they, too, will join us.
All that, though, is only what appears likely to happen, not what already has happened. But there is some good news there, too. Cracks are appearing in in that MAGA wall. In states all across the country, people who voted for Trump also voted for issues he opposes, including abortion rights, higher minimum wage, paid sick and family leave, and even plans to ban employers from forcing their employees to sit through right-wing or anti-union meetings.
Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York approved state constitutional amendments to protect reproductive liberty. In Missouri, where voters strongly supported Trump, 12 percent of those who voted for him also voted for abortion rights.
North Carolina voters, who gave the state to Trump, also elected Democrats Josh Stein governor, Rachel Hunt lieutenant governor, Jeff Jackson attorney general and Mo Greene top schools official. In addition, North Carolina Democrats broke the GOP supermajority in the state house, which was a top priority.
Other reasons to smile:
Michigan voters elected newcomer Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, to the U.S. Senate.
Nevada reelected Democrat Sen. Jacky Rosen.
Wisconsin Democrats flipped 10 seats in the state Assembly after the state supreme court approved new legislative district lines—setting up Democrats to take control of the state Assembly in 2026.
And, best news of all, Trump favorite Kari Lake lost the Arizona Senate race to Democrat Ruben Gallego.
Finally, many of Trump’s promises will never come to pass. They can’t. There are safeguards built into the Constitution to prevent it, and powerful legal organizations already are lining up to fight him.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for one, is doing magnificent work to challenge every false move Trump and company try to make. As it wrote in a recent message to its supporters, “If Trump has a chance to enact the policies he’s been threatening since he left office in 2020, more families will be separated, more people will die without reproductive health care, and they will weaponize the federal government against protesters and political opponents. We are prepared for this threat. We took legal action against Trump’s administration 434 times when he was first in office, and we will do it again. And we have the playbook to fight back – and win – once again…
“We’re building a firewall for freedom in the states – working with governors, attorneys general, state legislators and local officials to protect our rights from executive overreach, while our national lawyers continue their work in federal courts. And we’re urging President Biden to use his remaining time in office to commute death row sentences, close abusive immigration detention facilities, and put a moratorium on federal agencies’ purchases of our personal data so President Trump can’t weaponize it against us.”
There also are dozens of organizations that already are gearing up to become a drag on this new government.
More about that later. For now, it’s enough that we stay positive abd be there for each other
Then, as the shock wears off in a few days, the resistance will begin. And as the church sign says, this attempt on our freedom “may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.”
(Note: It would take up far too much space to list even an abbreviated list of Project 25 objectives, or President-elect Trump’s promises, but I wrote a column on both last April 15 titled Danger Ahead: Project 2025, that provides a comprehensive list of both their objectives. If you would like to read that blog, click here.)
A FEW RELATED READINGS
provided by the folks at GrowPurpose.com
provided by the folks at GrowPurpose.com
- 11 Democratic Thinkers on What the Party Needs Right Now
- Democrats Need to Fundamentally Rethink Everything
- 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won
- What Can Women Do Now?
- Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Here’s the Plan to Fight Back
Thanks Skip, Like butter on a burn.
Best, Angus Murdoch
Thanks, Skip!
I’m not as clever as Angus, but I’ll try.
Reading “Reasons for Hope” was like a breath of fresh air.
I love that the information was well-stated, concise, and in one place, giving us reason for hope. I do believe that Trump’s walls will crumble, and I, like many others, will join this important “Resistance Movement” peacefully, of course. Until then, let’s advocate for changing the term “uneducated” to “differently educated” so that all will join the movement.
Candice Suggars