To defeat Trump, we must defeat what made him possible

Last time, we delayed Trump. This time, our resistance must resemble the country we need to become.

The last time we faced fascism, the old man wrote, the first squints of hope came from the women. Of course.

Like yoga practitioners summoned outside by the sun after a miserable storm, they gathered in the streets the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, reaching out to the sky en masse—against Donald Trump and for themselves. The Women’s March reminded us that we will never be alone. We were, and still are, the majority. We represent the best aspirations of America’s dabbling with democracy.

That dabbling was flawed from the beginning despite, eventually, pioneering a path toward freedom that has made life better for much of the globe. Our commitment to self-rule has always been compromised, built to abet the worst instincts of a white patriarchy that reasserts its brittle, suffocating domination whenever and wherever it gets grubby, sweaty hands on power. Any advances have been met with massive backlashes, determined to claw back what had been gained, and more. But these women said what the best of us have always said, “It ain’t me.”

Now, you would probably understand it if the women are tired.

Tired of Trump. Tired of fighting. Tired of Dobbs. Tired of those in their gender and others who see themselves on the side of their oppressors. Tired of holding it together—to borrow a phrase from Jessica Calaraco’s essential book about how America is the only wealthy nation in the world that conscripts women into acting as our safety net.

That’s why this time, the resistance to Trump—or even the #Resistance to Trump—has to be different.

This is the part of the horror movie when the monster reemerges from the grave with new powers summoned from the flaws of his opponents. But this part of the movie, which generally lasts a few unbearable minutes on film, is life for the next four years, at least. So we’ll do what we have to do. We’ll resist. But, this time, the resistance has to be different. It has to resemble the America we need to become.

It cannot be built, like the rest of America, on the backs of women, especially Black women. It cannot succumb to fantasies of scowling, handsome prosecutors dog-walking Trump into prison, relieving us back into endless brunching. It cannot just be symbolic when strategic non-cooperation will almost certainly be necessary to end this nightmare.

And it cannot just resist Donald Trump. It must also take on and repair everything that made Donald Trump possible.

In “America Goes Rogue,” the second episode of Andrea Pitzer’s podcast Next Comes What that I help produce, Andrea looks back at her two visits to the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that she made in 2015 as she was writing ONE LONG NIGHT, her global history of concentration camps. She draws on her interviews with Mark Fallon, author of UNJUSTIFIABLE MEANS and a high-ranking NCIS official who refused to participate in torture and publicly condemned human rights violations used by the Bush/Cheney administration.

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The episode recalls how Trump’s first electoral win was fueled by his embrace of the roguish tactics America embraced following 9/11. She connects our inability to directly confront and correct the torture that was done in our names to the rogue state status that Fallon says our country has fallen into. And she sees how that status has been reaffirmed by our failures to do anything to rein in the war crimes in Gaza.

Now, let me be clear. I’m not looking to divide us when we must be united. This is an emergency. The monster is back, and he’s pissed. Anyone who stands against Trump is my ally. I’ll defend anyone’s freedom from the MAGA destruction of the Constitution.

But as we prepare to begin this fight with the incredible gift of a bit of time to prepare for what we know is coming, we must not be naive or compromised. We must understand that Donald Trump is only possible because Americans have rejected principles. Self-proclaimed Christians have embraced domination over love. Self-professed conservatives have embraced dictatorship over pretensions of governmental restraint. And America, in general, has rejected our responsibility to advance—or at least not reverse—the cause of human rights.

You may read all that and think, “It ain’t me.” Good. Welcome to the Resistance.