Trump must pay a cost for everything

Nominating the wife/partner of a reputed sex trafficker to lead the Department of Education is an outrage. And outrage is what we must build on.

Only yesterday, it seemed impossible to appoint a worse Secretary of Education than Betsy DeVos.

Betsy’s only qualification for the job was a lifetime of trying to destroy public schools by flooding our campaign finance system with the spoils of her inherited and absorbed wealth. Terrible, right? But at least she wasn’t implicated in charges of ‘Abuse, Grooming, Drugs, and Sexual Coercion’ of WWE ring boys. The same cannot be said for Linda McMahon, Trump’s next nominee to be Secretary of Education.

Abraham Josie Riseman—authoress of RINGMASTER, the definitive book on Linda’s husband and lifelong business partner Vince McMahon, who is currently facing credible and horrifying allegations of sex trafficking—offered an excerpt from her book to illuminate how “Linda treats kids.”

Now, the temptation here is to sigh and say, “Just another terrible Trump thing. We’re doomed to that, climate change, and generative AI for the rest of our lives. What can we do about it? Let’s get back to Tiger King and Wordle. Is the Times tech team still on strike?”

And that would be exactly how we assist Trump, oppressing us and our families for as long as he is capable of doing so. Clearly, we must not do that.

But what do we do instead? We are still figuring that out together.

But we know one thing for sure: whatever we do, we cannot lose our sense of outrage. It all starts with outrage. Linda McMahon, who is directly associated with a man who has credibly been accused of the exact kinds of crimes and horrors against children and women that the Right projects on their perceived enemies for political gain, should not even allowed near a school—let alone be in charge of guiding our nation’s educational system.

In “How We Survive This Mess” the first episode of Andrea Pitzer’s new podcast Next Comes What, which I produce, includes several suggestions for building on outrage.

This begins with contacting our Senators to oppose this nomination and the hideous nominations of Matt Gaetz, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, and others. And we also need to encourage our Senators to stand strong for the Constitution and the Senate’s role in confirming those who are set to lead critical parts of the federal government.

Yes, Trump plans to end the Senate’s key role in this process and may have the help of a quisling Republican Party as he strives to seize power that isn’t his. And when he does, we must figure out how to make him pay a cost for that. And will likely involve encouraging the divisions on the right where a few conservatives who’ve read the Constitution recognize this power grab as an “abomination.”

None of this will be perfect and clean. But it also cannot just be symbolic. We cannot indulge in fan fiction or fantasies about how this will resolve, thanks to one handsome scowling prosecutor.

I had a religious experience listening to Daniel Hunter on the Anti Authoritarian podcast. He offers a roadmap with a clear goal: building the will of the American public toward non-cooperation.

  No non-cooperation at this stage will be mass. It'll be small numbers to begin with, but as we get more people to join, that's when it starts to be a threat to the system at a larger and larger level. And so the idea is for, for those of us who aren't excited about non cooperation right now because we don't see it, just hang on, hold out for it.

Because we have to foreshadow what's coming the strategy almost every authoritarian who's ever been gotten rid of across the country I think there's across the globe. Excuse me. There's really two major ways of doing it One is you vote him out an option for us. I mean in our case, maybe maybe he'll leave in four years And so that you know that that option is available to us.

Maybe MAGA will be voted out in four years Uh, and the second strategy is they're forced out through non cooperation. Uh, that's the, the other major successful strategy, uh, to kick out authoritarians that other people have shown around the globe.

With every fight, with every outrage we oppose, we will exact some costs. And those costs will build the will for non-cooperation, both in others and ourselves. And that may be the only way out of this mess.