The Donald Trump who campaigned in 2024 would not have won in 2016. It’s not just that his rhetoric is more serrated now than it was then; it’s that he has a record of illicit behavior today that he didn’t have then.

Trump wasn’t a felon eight years ago; he is now. He wasn’t an adjudicated sexual abuser then; he is now. He hadn’t yet encouraged civic violence to overturn an election or encouraged a mob to hang his vice president. He hadn’t yet called people who stormed the Capitol “great patriots” or closed his campaign talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer. He hadn’t extorted an ally to dig up dirt on his political opponent or been labeled a “fascist to the core” by his former top military adviser.

But America is different now than it was at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump isn’t only winning politically; he is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores. More than any other person in the country, Trump—who won more than 75 million votes—can purport to embody the American ethic. He’s right to have claimed a mandate on the night of his victory; he has one, at least for now. He can also count on his supporters to excuse anything he does in the future, just as they have excused everything he has done in the past.

It’s little surprise, then, that many critics of Trump are weary and despondent. On Sunday, my wife and I spoke with a woman whose ex-husband abused her; as we talked, she broke into tears, wounded and stunned that Americans had voted for a man who was himself a well-known abuser. The day before, I had received a text from a friend who works as a family therapist. She had spent the past few evenings, she wrote, “with female victims of sexual abuse by powerful and wealthy men. Hearing their heartbreak and re-traumatizing because we just elected a president who bragged about assaulting women because he can, and then found guilty by a jury of his peers for doing just that. And then they see their family and neighbors celebrate a victory.”

The preliminary data show that Trump won the support of about 80 percent of white evangelicals. “How can I ever walk into an evangelical church again?” one person who has long been a part of the evangelical world asked me a few days ago.

[McKay Coppins: Triumph of the cynics]

I’ve heard from friends who feel as though their life’s work is shattering before their eyes. Others who have been critical of Trump are considering leaving the public arena. They are asking themselves why they should continue to speak out against Trump’s moral transgressions for the next four years when it didn’t make any difference the past four (or eight) years. It’s not worth the hassle, they’ve concluded: the unrelenting attacks, the death threats, or the significant financial costs.

So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.

And even those who resolve to stay in the public arena will be tempted to mute themselves when Trump acts maliciously. We tried that for years, they’ll tell themselves, and it was like shooting BBs against a brick wall. It’s time to do something else.

I understand that impulse. For those who have borne the brunt of hate, withdrawing from the fight and moving on to other things is an understandable choice. For everything there is a season. Yet I cannot help but fear, too, that Trump will ultimately win by wearing down his opposition, as his brutal ethic slowly becomes normalized.

So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?

First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.

Second, we need to guard our souls. The challenge for Trump critics is to call Trump out when he acts cruelly and unjustly without becoming embittered, cynical, or fatalistic ourselves. People will need time to process what it means that Americans elected a man of borderless corruption and sociopathic tendencies. But we shouldn’t add to the ranks of those who seem purposeless without an enemy to target, without a culture war to fight. We should acknowledge when Trump does the right thing, or when he rises above his past. And even if he doesn’t, unsparing and warranted condemnation of Trump and MAGA world shouldn’t descend into hate. There’s quite enough of that already.

In his book Civility, the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter wrote, “The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not in his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”

Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious.   

My view aligns with that of my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch, who told me that “this election mainly reaffirms voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment—not only in the U.S. but also abroad (Japan/Germany). In 2020, Biden and the Democrats were the vehicle to punish the incumbent party; in 2016 and again in 2024, Trump and the Republicans were the vehicle. Wash, rinse, repeat.” But that doesn’t mean that a party defeated in two of the previous three presidential elections by Trump, one of the most unpopular and broadly reviled figures to ever win the presidency, doesn’t have to make significant changes.

There is precedent—in the Democratic Party, which suffered titanic defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and in the British Labour Party, which was decimated in the 1980s and the early ’90s. In both cases, the parties engaged in the hard work of ideological renovation and produced candidates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who put in place a new intellectual framework that connected their parties to a public they had alienated. They confronted old attitudes, changed the way their parties thought, and found ways to signal that change to the public. Both won dominant victories. The situation today is, of course, different from the one Clinton and Blair faced; the point is that the Democratic Party has to be open to change, willing to reject the most radical voices within its coalition, and able to find ways to better connect to non-elites. The will to change needs to precede an agenda of change.

Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.

I anticipate that Trump’s victory will inflict consequential harm on our country, and some of it may be irreparable. But it’s also possible that the concerns I have had about Trump, which were realized in his first term, don’t come to pass in his second term. And even if they do, America will emerge significantly weakened but not broken. Low moments need not be permanent moments.

[Rogé Karma: The two Donald Trumps]

The Trump era will eventually end. Opportunities will arise, including unexpected ones, and maybe even a few favorable inflection points. It’s important to have infrastructure and ideas in place when they do. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me, “We have to think about America’s challenges and opportunities in ways that reach beyond that point. Engagement in public life and public policy has to be about those challenges and opportunities, about the country we love, more than any particular politician, good or bad.”  

It's important, too, that we draw boundaries where we can. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, but neither should we obsess over him. We must do what we can to keep him from invading sacred spaces. Intense feelings about politics in general, and Trump in particular, have divided families and split churches. We need to find ways to heal divisions without giving up on what the theologian Thomas Merton described as cutting through “great tangled knots of lies.” It’s a difficult balance to achieve.

Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood. The great Czech playwright (and later president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace, wrote that hope isn’t detached from circumstances, but neither is it prisoner to circumstances. The kind of hope he had in mind is experienced “above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a dimension of soul, he said, “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, according to Havel; it is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope properly understood keeps us above water; it urges us to do good works, even in hard times.

In June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy undertook a five-day trip to South Africa during the worst years of apartheid. In the course of his trip, he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at the University of Cape Town.

During his address, he spoke about the need to “recognize the full human equality of all of our people—before God, before the law, and in the councils of government.” He acknowledged the “wide and tragic gaps” between great ideals and reality, including in America, with our ideals constantly recalling us to our duties. Speaking to young people in particular, he warned about “the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.” Kennedy urged people to have the moral courage to enter the conflict, to fight for their ideals. And using words that would later be engraved on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery, he said this:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.  

No figure of Kennedy’s stature had ever visited South Africa to make the case against institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. The trip had an electric effect, especially on Black South Africans, giving them hope that they were not alone, that the outside world knew and cared about their struggle for equality. “He made us feel, more than ever, that it was worthwhile, despite our great difficulties, for us to fight for the things we believed in,” one Black journalist wrote of Kennedy; “that justice, freedom and equality for all men are things we should strive for so that our children should have a better life.”

Pressure from both within and outside South Africa eventually resulted in the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned at Robben Island during Kennedy’s visit because of his anti-apartheid efforts, was elected the first Black president of South Africa.

There is a timelessness to what Kennedy said in Cape Town three generations ago. Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters. That was true in South Africa in the 1960s. It is true in America today.

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A note from Tom:

As we were about to publish this newsletter, Donald Trump announced that he has asked the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a military veteran who has no experience in leading large organizations and no serious background as a senior leader in national-security affairs, to be his secretary of defense. This is exactly the kind of unqualified nomination that I was warning could be looming after this first group of nominees were announced—and it explains why Trump is determined to bypass the U.S. Senate to get some of his nominees confirmed. I will have more to say about Hegseth soon.

So far, the new Trump administration has a chief of staff, a “border czar,” and a national security adviser; all three are White House positions controlled by the president. Donald Trump has also reportedly named six people to senior positions that require Senate confirmation: secretary of state, United Nations ambassador, secretary of homeland security, secretary of defense, CIA director, and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (He has also chosen an ambassador to Israel.) His first picks are neither very surprising nor very impressive, but this is only the beginning.

His co–campaign manager Susie Wiles will make White House history by becoming the first female chief of staff. People around Trump seem relieved at this appointment, but she’ll likely be saddled with Stephen Miller as a deputy, which could get interesting because Miller apparently has a tendency to get out of his lane. (According to a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Bender, Miller attended a tense meeting that included Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As the nation’s leaders debated what to do, Miller interjected and said that America’s major cities had been turned into war zones. General Milley, Bender writes, turned to Miller, pointed at him, and said: “Shut the fuck up, Stephen.”)

The rest of the appointments are unsurprising, given the limited pool of Republicans willing to serve in another Trump administration. (Some Trump loyalists such as Senator Tom Cotton have reportedly declined a role in the administration, likely protecting their future for the 2028 GOP race to succeed Trump.) Marco Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees in the Senate, was a reasonable choice among the Trump coterie to become America’s top diplomat as secretary of state.

Likewise, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida is a reasonable choice for national security adviser—but again, that’s in the context of the now-smaller universe of national-security conservatives in politics or academia willing to work for Trump at this point. He is a veteran, and like Rubio, he has served on relevant committees in Congress, including Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Waltz may be a credible voice on national security, but he was also a 2020 election denier. He pledged to oppose certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win and signed on to an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election. He changed his mind—but only after the events of January 6.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, meanwhile, was bound to be rewarded for her loyalty. Although Vice President–elect J. D. Vance took the gold in the race to replace the disowned Mike Pence, Stefanik was a comer even by the standards of the sycophantic circle around Trump, and so she’ll head to the United Nations, a low-priority post for Trump and a GOP that has little use for the institution. A former member of Congress from New York, Lee Zeldin (who was defeated in the 2022 New York governor’s race) will head up the EPA, another institution hated by MAGA Republicans, thus making Zeldin’s weak—or strong, depending on your view—legislative record on environmental issues a good fit for this administration.

This afternoon, Trump announced that John Ratcliffe will serve as CIA director. Ratcliffe previously served as director of national intelligence and will now be in a post that is functionally subordinate to his old job. Ratcliffe is a reliable partisan but an unreliable intelligence chief. The most baffling move Trump has made so far is the appointment of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Noem served four terms in Congress and is in her second as governor. She has very little relevant experience, especially as a government executive. (South Dakota might be a big place, but it’s a small state; DHS has more than 260,000 employees, making it a bit more than a quarter the size of the entire population of Noem’s home state.) DHS is a giant glob of a department—one I have long argued should never have existed in the first place and should be abolished—that has seeped across the jurisdictional lines of multiple institutions and, unlike some other Cabinet posts, requires someone with serious leadership chops.

DHS will also be central to some of Trump’s most abominable plans regarding undocumented immigrants—and, potentially, against others the president-elect views as “enemies from within.” (The “border czar” Trump has named, Tom Homan, once falsely implied that some California wildfires were worsened by an undocumented immigrant.) In that light, Noem is perfect: She is inexperienced but loyal, a political lightweight with no independent base of support or particularly long experience in Washington, and she can be counted on to do what she’s told. She will be no John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen, her confirmed predecessors at DHS, both of whom were on occasion willing to speak up, even if ineffectively.

This first passel of nominees should gain Senate confirmation easily, especially Rubio. (Sitting members of the chamber usually have an easier time, as do people who have close associations with the Senate.) And given Trump’s history and proclivity for mercurial and humiliating firings, few of them are likely to be very long in their post, and are probably better than the people who will later replace them.

But that in itself raises a troubling question. If Trump intends to nominate these kinds of fellow Republicans, why is he insistent that the new Senate allow him to make recess appointments?

For those of you who do not follow the arcana of American government, Article II of the Constitution includes a provision by which the president can make appointments on his own if the Senate is in recess and therefore unable to meet. The Founders didn’t think this was a controversial provision; sometimes, presidents need to keep the government running (by choosing, say, an ambassador) even when the Senate might not be around—a real problem in the days when convening the Senate could take weeks of travel. Such appointments last until the end of the next legislative session.

For obvious reasons, the Senate itself was never a big fan of a device—one that presidents routinely used—that circumvents constitutional authority to confirm executive appointments, especially once the practice got out of hand. (Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, George W. Bush made 171, and Barack Obama made 32.) The Senate’s response was basically to be wilier about not declaring itself in recess even when there’s no one around, and when President Obama tried to push through some of these appointments in 2012, the Supreme Court sided with the Senate.

Now Trump wants to bring back the practice. The obvious inference to draw here is that after some fairly uncontroversial nominations, he intends to nominate people who couldn’t be confirmed even in a supine and obedient Republican Senate. Perhaps this is too clever, but I am concerned that this first pass is a head fake, in which Trump nominates people he knows are controversial (such as Zeldin) but who are still confirmable, and then sends far worse candidates forward for even more important posts. Kash Patel—a man who is dangerous precisely because his only interest is serving Trump, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro has reported—keeps bubbling up for various intelligence posts.

“Ambassador Elise Stefanik” and “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin” might not be great ideas, but they are not immediate threats to U.S. national security or American democracy. “CIA Director John Ratcliffe,” by contrast, is cause for serious concern. If Trump is serious about his authoritarian plans—the ones he announced at every campaign stop—then he’ll need the rest of the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department all under firm control.

Those are the next nominations to watch.

Related:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll. (From 2018)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The HR-ification of the Democratic Party Anne Applebaum: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine. Genetic discrimination is coming for us all.

Today’s News

The judge in Trump’s hush-money criminal case delayed his decision on whether Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies should be overturned after his reelection. A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Louisiana law that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, calling the legislation “unconstitutional on its face.” Louisiana’s attorney general said that she will appeal the ruling. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation. An independent review found that he failed to sufficiently report the late barrister John Smyth, who ran Christian summer camps and abused more than 100 boys and young men, according to the review.

Evening Read

Illustration by Mark Pernice

AI Can Save Humanity—Or End It

By Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie

The world’s strongest nation might no longer be the one with the most Albert Einsteins and J. Robert Oppenheimers. Instead, the world’s strongest nations will be those that can bring AI to its fullest potential.

But with that potential comes tremendous danger. No existing innovation can come close to what AI might soon achieve: intelligence that is greater than that of any human on the planet. Might the last polymathic invention—namely computing, which amplified the power of the human mind in a way fundamentally different from any previous machine—be remembered for replacing its own inventors?

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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