A Sustainable Resistance

It will require both acceptance and a steely resolve to rebuild bigger and better.

When I first learned Wednesday night that an airplane had collided with an Army helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River, my mind turned faster than I care to admit to the question of political accountability. I’m not proud that this is how my brain works now. But I also didn’t create the “when in doubt, cast blame” climate that has come to define American public life. Donald Trump did.

And in this case, at least, the question was perfectly reasonable.

Shit and coincidences both happen. Yes, it had been 16 years since the last commercial airline crash in the United States; but humans and computers and gravity being what they are, that streak was bound to end eventually. The fact that it ended less than two weeks into Donald Trump’s second presidency could have been happenstance.

But not necessarily. Maybe not even likely. We already knew, as I observed late Wednesday night, that Trump had gutted a federal aviation-safety advisory board. We knew he’d forced the resignation of the FAA director for the sin of enforcing rules against Elon Musk and SpaceX. We knew he’d appointed a Fox News personality to run the military and another one to run the Department of Transportation. We knew he’d frozen federal hiring, leaving air-traffic controllers understaffed and overworked, and that he’s made demoralizing civil-service employees a national priority.

Under those circumstances, it would have been more than fair, as a first matter of business Thursday morning, for Democrats to demand to know whether and how Trump’s corruption and malice had created conditions that led to the collision.

It would have been better still if they’d warned of hazard in advance. In anticipation of a tragedy just like this, I encouraged Democrats to admonish their Republican colleagues for confirming unfit, incompetent men to Trump’s administration: You are enabling calamity; when it arrives, we won’t let America forget.

But they didn’t do any of that.

And so, the first adversarial public comment on the collision came from Trump himself, who, without any basis, blamed his predecessors (who are no longer in charge of the government) and the existence of women and minorities in the workplace. Now that, rather than buck-stops-here accountability, is at the center of recriminations, and reeling discourse back to where it should be will be difficult.

The Pod Save America host Jon Favreau lamented, “In the Trump Era, we don’t even get a brief moment to grieve as a nation when tragedy happens. He sees every crisis as a chance to pick a fight with his political enemies. It’s just really sad.”

He’s completely right. It is sad. And it is Trump’s fault. He did this to us. But in the world as it is, decent people are locked in a 24-7 battle with him to shape public opinion, including of the impressionable people whose votes decide elections.

By maintaining decorum (or, more likely, waiting for focus group input) Democrats didn’t convene a dignified public mourning—they ceded to Trump, a repugnant bigot and liar, the power to make first impressions. And because there’s been no systematic effort to warn Republicans or the public that empowering apparatchiks is dangerous to life and health, why wouldn’t unsuspecting Americans wonder if maybe Pete Buttigieg, or his hiring practices, set this disaster in motion?

So here’s the bigger question everyone left of center should be asking themselves: How are we better off today than we would have been if Democrats had weighed in first?

MENDING CHESTERTON’S FENCES

Democrats have mounted a sluggish opposition mostly because their party machinery was built long before the Trump era. The people who’ve thrived in it made their way in a bygone world. Chuck Schumer’s wile is a good fit for the politics of the 1990s and the aughts. His savvy as an operator was once a matter of consensus in both parties.

Today, both he and his party are lost.

But it’s more than just that. They also seem flatfooted for the same reason many critics can’t quite articulate what they’d like to see instead: We’re overwhelmed by vandalism, by the clamor as spiteful people shatter the load-bearing infrastructure of a functioning society.

It’s day 12. The pace of destruction will slow. But there’s probably no way to dislodge Trump and even if his unlikely demise comes to pass, JD Vance is a craven fanatic who’s soft-boiled his brain in the pseudo-intellectual sludge of dictator apologetics. He’s not unhappy about any of this.

So we have years of it ahead of us, and that makes despondency tempting. Republicans know despair is natural. That’s partly why they’re taking so many hammers to so many things. It’s the rawest, most senseless expression of lib-owning as an ethos the world has ever seen.

They don’t understand the many ways they’re making their own future lives harder. Whether we ultimately find that Wednesday’s crash wouldn’t have happened but for Trump’s early decisions, the callous young people now running the government likely never considered that being shitty to strangers and undermining systems they don’t understand might cause planes to fall out of the sky or poisons to leach into water supplies, or…

They are fucking around, and we will all find out; but by the time they find out, the fucking around will be over and, for a long time to come, irreversible.

Those of us who care about other people are paralyzed by mounting crises and the certainty that more await us. Those who helped build what’s now being vandalized are numb.

The only way to carry on under conditions like these is to mourn preemptively. The things that make the country decent are like loved ones taken hostage, or lying in hospice with terminal illness: Still with us, but probably not for long. There’s no getting around grief in a circumstance like that, but there is a small blessing in the ability to process it in advance.

A worthy opposition will of course prevent whatever damage it can, but a sustainable one will have to reach a stage of acceptance, where anger (often impotent anger) gives way quickly to resolve. Loved ones are mortal, but entities can be rebuilt.

To my mind, the correct formula is one Democrats ought to have applied before Wednesday’s tragedy:

1. Warn ominously about the kinds of catastrophes we can expect when a degenerate like Trump fires capable servants and replaces them with compromised amateurs.

2. Mount a rapid public response when those consequences come to pass.

3. Promise, in open and defiant terms, to rebuild quickly once voters run these vandals out of office.

To coin a great man: If you strike us down, we shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. To coin a terrible and insincere one our revenge will be succeeding where you’ve failed.

DEMOCRATS, UN-FETTER-ED

This kind of psychological sturdiness will be psychologically destabilizing to the people in charge. They’ll begin to doubt themselves. But only if they see that their opponents really mean it.

For this reason, a sustainable resistance can’t just challenge Trump or Republicans in Congress. It should also challenge anyone who goes out of their way to gain favor with Trump or prop him up. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos should be reminded daily that they’ve lashed themselves to someone almost certain to leave rubble in his wake. They should fear our long memories.

I’d bet at least one of those three men has read The Fifth Risk. They know that they’re courting armageddon for money. They know the risk of calamity is much higher in term two, with no sober advisers in sight, as Musk himself hollows out the U.S. government like just another business acquisition.

This week, after watching Trump install Pete Hegseth and fire watchdogs and create national chaos with an illegal impoundment, Zuckerberg settled one of Trump’s many frivolous lawsuits for $25 million. Think of it as his ownership stake in whatever carnage awaits America.

Public-facing influencers like Joe Rogan can’t be exempt just because they’re less methodical in their politics. They’ll owe their audiences atonement when the worst comes to pass. And they should never be allowed to outrun their poor judgment.

This kind of determination—to restoration and meting out accountability—has to be internal to the Democratic Party, too. The threat is idle if Republicans can see, as is clear today, that Democrats lack the resolve to do anything ambitious or politically risky.

For this reason, I’d feel better with newer, younger, more voluble Democratic leadership. But I’d content myself if Schumer listened to these impatient governors and figured out how to operate as an effective opposition figure in the Trump era.

Candidate recruitment should filter for spinelessness. That doesn’t mean Democratic voters must open their hearts and wallets to undisciplined hotheads and radicals, but it does mean party leaders should create expectations around rebuilding as an objective. Enacting procedural reforms and institution building must become non-negotiable party commitments, like abortion and health-care rights.

This will be a challenge. There’s no iron rule that says moderates must be cowardly, or that left-wing Democrats must be gung-ho procedural radicals. Bernie Sanders was one of the most prominent filibuster reform skeptics of the last decade; Amy Klobuchar came around before he did.

But these are exceptions to the rule.

It would thus behoove Schumer to confer now with frontline senators like John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, and Elissa Slotkin, to explain what will be expected of them come budget season, and well beyond. If democracy survives this president (as we should always insist it will) and Democrats reap the benefits of a backlash (which seems very likely) they must enter office in 2029 committed to dismantling the kleptocracy quickly.

That will mean firing many people—a purge to match Trump’s; it will mean rehiring people who left government, or enlisting them on a temporary basis to turn over their priceless knowledge; it will mean doing whatever’s necessary to heal the breach of trust between true civil servants and their government—including, most likely, through pay increases. Yes, future Democrats will probably have to vote to give bureaucrats in Washington a significant raise. It will probably mean filibuster abolition and court reform. It will mean lightning-strike rebuilding on the scale of Trump’s lightning-strike destruction. These Democrats will be expected to support the whole endeavor, even if they fear it’ll cost them their jobs.

And it means those Democrats have to start demonstrating a commitment to saving the country today. There is a formula that can sustain the Trump opposition for four years, but it doesn’t work if the Democratic Party organizes itself around a commitment to swaddle its most gun-shy members.

Nobody needs to be blasé about what’s happening. But steeliness and determination are attractive qualities even in swing states. They are forms of resistance all their own.