Our Nation Has Been Making Progress. It's Trump Who Is the 'Resistance'
The president-elect and his “manoverse” want to reverse many of the long-term societal changes that make our country truly great.
During Donald Trump’s first presidency, his staunch political opponents became known as “the resistance.” The label will doubtless return during his second term.
But that gets the action-reaction dynamic backward. If you step back from immediate political skirmishes, a moment’s reflection makes clear: it’s Trump himself who leads a movement of resistance.
What Trump and his allies resist are the giant waves of cultural, economic, and governmental change that have reshaped the United States and the world in recent decades. The intensity of their grievances doesn’t lessen the futility of trying to recreate the past – even with control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court.
What the MAGA World Resists
The components of Trump’s coalition – composed disproportionately of whites, men, evangelical Christians, and blue-collar workers – don’t hide their complaints against the 21st century.
They resist the rising autonomy, power, and occupational status of women. Their bro-culture edge comes through in, among other things, a shrugging response to allegations of sexual misconduct by Trump and his appointees, opposition to abortion, and calls to remove women from the combat roles they’ve been allowed to perform for the last eight years.
They resist efforts to redress imbalances that America’s original sin left behind. They disdain Vice President Kamala Harris as a “diversity, equity and inclusion” politician, scorn calls for reforms to reduce violence by police, and oppose once-robust protections in the 1965 Voting Rights Act while baselessly crying fraud about election results in majority-black cities. (Nine years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department sued the Trump family company for discriminating against Black people in apartment rentals.)
They chafe at the knowledge-based economy that technological advances have produced, which decreases the market value of blue-collar brawn and increases the competition men face from women with higher levels of educational attainment. They resist the decline of religiosity in American life and the changing sexual mores that have made marriage equality commonplace and gender identity a prominent new subject of political debate.
They resist globalization, which has reshaped patterns of economic activity and migration. It has also helped change the composition of our population, shrinking the share of white Christians roughly in half to just over 40%.
In an increasingly complex world, they resist the role of science and expertise of all kinds. That once found expression in refusing to accept that tobacco causes cancer; now, it seeks to deny the reality of climate change.
Vaccinations developed by medical science have produced astonishing progress in diminishing illness and death from once-ubiquitous diseases such as polio, smallpox, and measles. Resistance to vaccine mandates won a Trump Cabinet post for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who once falsely speculated the COVID-19 virus might have been engineered to spare the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews.
Important parts of Trump’s coalition, though not Trump himself, still resist the monuments of the New Deal and the Great Society. Wealthy MAGA donors cast government spending levels as a crisis requiring dramatic action. Their unstated, underlying beef is the Social Security and Medicare programs for our swelling elderly population. The president-elect insists he doesn’t want to cut them; Republican leaders in Congress do.
They resist democracy when they lose, as Trump demonstrated by lying about his 2020 election defeat and inciting the violent Jan. 6 insurrection. They resist the rule of law when it constrains them. The Supreme Court itself, stacked with Trump appointees, has encouraged his law-breaking by conferring immunity for his “official acts.”
They resist facts that interfere with the alternative reality they construct out of fears, prejudices, and political self-interest.
So, it’s not true that Haitian immigrants have been eating the pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio. Trump didn’t win a historic landslide last month. He hasn’t secured our southern border with a single phone call to the Mexican president two months before taking office.
They’ll say it anyway, repeatedly. Many will believe them despite reports to the contrary – or even because of those reports – from what they dismiss as the “fake news.”
Will Trump’s ‘Manoverse’ Succeed?
In a post-COVID era marked by persistent, widespread discontent with the way things are, resistance works well politically. Incumbent parties around the world have taken a beating in recent elections, as Democrats did last month. Trump and fellow Republicans are well-positioned to make an impact for the next two years.
Will those changes work well politically in the short term?
During the first Trump presidency, his tax cut, attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and erratic behavior proved unpopular. That cost Republicans control of the House in 2018, and of the House, Senate, and White House in 2020.
It’s hard to see how deporting millions of people, raising prices by imposing tariffs, targeting political enemies for legal harassment, and smashing a sledgehammer into the federal health, finance, justice, and defense bureaucracies will leave Republicans better off this time. Perhaps Trump’s authoritarian movement will weaken the expected democratic backlash in the 2026 mid-term elections.
But can Trump and his “manoverse” meaningfully reverse the long-term societal changes that most aggravate them, from higher status for women to shifting labor markets to the turn away from religion? They might as well try to hold back the tide.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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I'm going to keep reminding folks that the slate of cabinet nominees is not a done deal for confirnation. Not by a long shot. We have just about 6 weeks to put pressure on legislators to (1) not allow recess appointments to happen under any circumstances and (2) fully vet nominees and reject any who are known to have behaved in ways that are abusive, violent and/or discriminatory.
We the People have a collective voice and it works when we use it. I gathered a bunch of resources here to help folks speak out. https://bit.ly/StopRecessAppts
It's up to us to say "this far and no farther." Democrats are just as responsible for getting us into this mess as the other party. Time to speak out!