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In the almost three weeks since his victory in the presidential election, Donald Trump has more or less completed nominations for his Cabinet, and he and his surrogates have made a flurry of announcements. The president-elect and his team have spent much of November baiting and trolling their opponents while throwing red meat to the MAGA faithful. (Trump, for example, has appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to a nonexistent “Department of Government Efficiency,” an office whose acronym is a play on a jokey crypto currency.) And though some of Trump’s nominees have been relatively reasonable choices, in recent days Trump has put forward a handful of manifestly unqualified and even dangerous picks, reiterated his grandiose plans for his first days in office, and promised to punish his enemies.

We’ve seen this before. As I warned this past April, stunning his opponents with more outrages than they can handle is a classic Trump tactic:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil … Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

Neither the voters nor the members of the U.S. Senate, however, should fall for it this time. Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University has written that the most important way to resist a rising authoritarian regime is not to “obey in advance”—that is, changing our behavior in ways we think might conform to the demands of the new ruling group. That’s good advice, but I might add a corollary here: People should not panic and exhaust themselves in advance, either.

In practice, this means setting priorities—mine are the preservation of democracy and national security—and conserving mental energy and political effort to concentrate on those issues and Trump’s plans for them. It’s important to bear in mind as well that Trump will not take the oath of office for another two months. (Such oaths do not matter to him, but he cannot grab the machinery of government without it.) If citizens and their representatives react to every moment of trollery over the coming weeks, they will be exhausted by Inauguration Day.

Trump will now dominate the news cycle almost every day with some new smoke bomb that is meant to distract from his attempts to stock the government with a strange conglomeration of nihilistic opportunists and self-styled revolutionaries. He will propose plans that he has no real hope of accomplishing quickly, while trying to build an aura of inevitability and omnipotence around himself. (His vow to begin mass deportations on his first day, for example, is a logistical impossibility, unless by mass he means “slightly more than usual.” He may be able to set in motion some sort of planning on day one, but he has no way to execute a large-scale operation yet, and it will be some time before he has anywhere to put so many people marked for deportation.)

The attempt to build Trump into some kind of unstoppable political kaiju is nonsense, as the hapless Matt Gaetz just found out. For all of Trump’s bullying and bluster, Gaetz’s nomination bid was over in a matter of days. Two of Trump’s other nominations—Pete Hegseth for defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence—might be in similar trouble as various Republicans begin to show doubts about them.

Senator James Risch, for example, a hard-right conservative from deep-red Idaho and the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declined over the weekend to offer the kind of ritualistic support for Hegseth and Gabbard that Trump expects from the GOP. “Ask me this question again after the hearings,” Risch said on Saturday. “These appointments by the president are constrained by the advice and consent of the Senate. The Senate takes that seriously, and we vet these.”

What Risch seems to be saying—at least I hope, anyway—is that it’s all fun and games until national security is involved, and then people have to get serious about what’s at stake. The Senate isn’t a Trump rally, and the Defense Department isn’t a backdrop for a segment on Fox & Friends.

Similar thinking may have led to Scott Bessent as Trump’s nominee to run the Treasury. Bessent would have been an ordinary pick in any other administration, but in Trump World, it’s noteworthy that a standard-issue hedge-fund leader—and a man who once worked for George Soros, of all people—just edged out the more radical Trump loyalist Howard Lutnick, who has been relegated to Commerce, a far less powerful department. Culture warring, it seems, matters less to some of Team Trump when real money is involved.

None of this is a case for complacency. Hegseth and Gabbard could still end up winning confirmation. The anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could take over at the Department of Health and Human Services. Meanwhile, reports have also emerged that Trump may move Kash Patel—the very embodiment of the mercenary loyalist who will execute any and every Trump order—into a senior job at the FBI or the Department of Justice, a move that would raise urgent questions about American civil liberties.

But Trump cannot simply will things into existence. Yes, “the people have spoken,” but it was a narrow win, and Trump again seems to have fallen short of gaining 50 percent of the popular vote. Just as Democrats have had to learn that running up big margins in California does not win the presidency, Republicans are finding yet again that electoral votes are not the same thing as a popular mandate. The Senate Republican conference is rife with cowards, but only a small handful of principled GOP senators are needed to stop some of Trump’s worst nominees.

The other reality is that Trump has already accomplished the one thing he really cared about: staying out of jail. Today, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to dismiss the January 6–related case against him. So be it; if enough voters have decided they can live with a convicted felon in the White House, there’s nothing the rest of us can do about that.

But Trump returning to office does not mean he can rule by fiat. If his opponents react to every piece of bait he throws in front of them, they will lose their bearings. And even some of Trump’s voters—at least those outside the MAGA personality cult—might not have expected this kind of irresponsible trolling. If these Republican voters want to hold Trump accountable for the promises he made to them during the campaign, they’ll have to keep their heads rather than get caught up in Trump’s daily dramas.

Allow me to add one piece of personal advice for the upcoming holiday: None of the things Trump is trying to do will happen before the end of the week. So for Thanksgiving, give yourself a break. Remember the great privilege and blessing it is to be an American, and have faith in the American Constitution and the freedoms safeguarded within it. If your Uncle Ned shows up and still wants to argue about how the election was stolen from Trump four years ago, my advice is the same as it’s been for every holiday: Tell him he’s wrong, that you love him anyway, that you’re not having this conversation today, and to pass the potatoes.

Related:

Pam Bondi’s comeback Another theory of the Trump movement

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Revenge of the COVID contrarians The end of the quest for justice for January 6 Caitlin Flanagan on the Democrats’ billionaire mistake

Today’s News

Special Counsel Jack Smith filed motions to drop the federal election-subversion and classified-documents cases against Trump, citing a Justice Department rule against prosecuting sitting presidents. A California judge delayed the resentencing date for Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers imprisoned for killing their parents in 1989, to give the new Los Angeles County district attorney more time to review the case. The Israeli cabinet will vote tomorrow on a proposed cease-fire deal with Hezbollah, which is expected to pass, according to a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli ambassador to the U.S. said on Israeli Army Radio that an agreement could be reached “within days” but that there remain “points to finalize.”

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Climate negotiations at COP29 ended in a $300 billion deal that mostly showed how far the world is from facing climate change’s real dangers, Zoë Schlanger argues. The Wonder Reader: One of the most humbling parts of being alive is realizing that you might need to reconsider some long-held habits, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Everyone Agrees Americans Aren’t Healthy

By Nicholas Florko

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrong about a lot of things in public health. Vaccines don’t cause autism. Raw milk is more dangerous than pasteurized milk. And cellphones haven’t been shown to cause brain cancer. But the basic idea behind his effort to “Make America Healthy Again” is correct: America is not healthy, and our current system has not fixed the problem.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“Dear Therapist”: No one wants to host my in-laws for the holidays. The right has a Bluesky problem. The leak scandal roiling Israel What the broligarchs want from Trump

Culture Break

Everett

Watch. Every generation has an Oz story, but Wicked is the retelling that best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing, Allegra Rosenberg writes.

Try out. Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise—they’re also a ridiculous, perfect way to make friends, Mikala Jamison writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I often tell people to unplug from the news. (Hey, I get paid to have opinions about national events, and yet I make sure to stop watching the news now and then too.) If you’d like a break that will not only get you off the doom treadmill but refresh and recharge you, allow me to suggest binge-watching the new Ted Danson series on Netflix, A Man on the Inside. It’s charming and funny, and it might bring a tear to your eye in between some laughs.

Danson plays a recently widowed retired professor who takes a job with a private investigator as the “inside man” at a senior-citizen residence in San Francisco. (As someone who watched the debut of Cheers 42 years ago, I feel like I’ve been growing old along with Danson through his many shows, and this might be his best role.) He’s tracking down a theft, but the crime isn’t all that interesting, nor is it really the point of the show: Rather, A Man on the Inside is about family, friends, love, and death.

My wife and I sometimes found the show almost too hard to watch, because we have both had parents in assisted living and memory-care settings. But A Man on the Inside never hurts—it has too much compassion (and gentle, well-placed humor) to let aging become caricatured as nothing but tragedy and loss. It is a show for and about families, just when we need something we can all watch over the holidays.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.

Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing “conservative” about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of “the Squad” and see what happens.

Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects. The activist bases of both Democrats and Republicans like the idea of expanding executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. Both see American foreign policy in past decades as a tale of unremitting folly, best resolved by leaving the world to its own devices. Both brood over fears and resentments, and shun those who do not share their deepest prejudices.

[David Frum: A good country’s bad choice]

What is worse is the extent to which the MAGA- and progressive-activist worlds are more interested in destroying institutions than building them. Both denounce necessary parts of government (the Department of Justice on the one hand, police departments on the other); seek to enforce speech codes; threaten to drive those they consider their enemies from public life; and pursue justice (as they understand it) in a spirit of reckless self-righteousness using prosecution as a form of retribution. Neither group of wreckers, for example, would really like to see, let alone help rebuild, the great universities as politically neutral oases of education rather than incubators of their own partisans.

To call those made politically homeless by the rise of Donald Trump “conservatives” no longer makes sense. To be a conservative is to want to slow down or stop change and preserve institutions and practices as they are, or to enable them to evolve slowly. But in recent decades, so much damage has been inflicted on norms of public speech and conduct that it is not enough to slow the progress of political decay. To the extent that the plain meaning of the word conservatism is indeed a commitment to preservation, that battle has been lost, and on multiple fronts.

We certainly are not “progressives” either. We do not believe that progress is inevitable (and can be accelerated), or that history bends in a certain direction. Being on the right side of history is a phrase that sends chills down the spines of those of us who have a somewhat dark view of human nature. The notion that the arc of history bends inexorably toward justice died for many of us in the middle of the 20th century. Moreover, the modern progressive temper, with its insistence on orthodoxies on such specifics as pronouns and a rigid and all-encompassing categorization of oppressors and victims, is intolerable for many of us.

What we are is a kind of old-fashioned liberal—a point recently made by the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Liberal is not an entirely satisfactory term, but given the impoverishment of today’s political vocabulary, it will have to do.

What does being a liberal mean, particularly in a second Trump term, when politics has become coarse and brutal and the partisan divide seems uncrossable?

It begins with a commitment to the notion of “freedom”—that is, a freedom that most suits human nature at its finest and requires not only the legal protection to express itself but a set of internal restraints based on qualities now in short supply: prudent good judgment, the ability to empathize, the desire to avoid unnecessary hurt, a large measure of tolerance for disagreement, an awareness that error awaits all of us. We agree with Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued in Democracy in America, that it is mœurs—mores or habits of belief or norms—and not laws alone that keep America free.

If this does not sound like a partisan political agenda, that is because it is not. It is, rather, a temperament, a set of dispositions rooted in beliefs about the challenges and promise of free self-government. It is an assertion of the primacy of those deeper values over the urgency of any specific political program, and reflects a belief that, ultimately, they matter more.

Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose early-19th-century writings shaped the idea of a liberal education, famously captured these qualities in his description of the product of such an education:

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out loud. He has too much good sense to be affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injury … He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to bereavement, because it is irreparable, and to death, because it is his destiny. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too clear-headed to be unjust … He knows the weakness of human reason as well as its strength, its province and its limits.

These qualities will, no doubt, seem otherworldly to many. They are not the stuff of which a vigorous political party will be built; they are easily mocked and impossible to tweet. They are more the stuff of statesmanship than politics. They will satisfy neither of our political parties, and certainly none of their bigoted partisans. They will not, at least in the short run, capture the imagination of the American people. They are probably not the winning creed of a political movement that can capture the presidency in 2028, or secure majorities in the House or Senate.

[Caitlin Flanagan: The Democrats’ billionaire mistake]

But principled liberals of the modern American type can exercise influence if they are patient, willing to argue, and, above all, if they do not give up. We can write and speak, attempt to persuade, and engage. Our influence, to the extent that we have it, will be felt in the long term and indirectly. It may be felt most, and is most urgently needed, in the field of education, beginning in the early years when young people acquire the instincts and historical knowledge that can make them thoughtful citizens. It is a long-term project, but that is nothing new: The struggle to eliminate formal discrimination on the basis of race and religion in public life took a very long time as well.

True liberals are short-term pessimists, because they understand the dark side of human nature, but long-run optimists about human potential, which is why they believe in freedom. At this troubled moment, we should neither run from the public square nor chant jeremiads while shaking our fists at the heavens. We need to be the anti-hysterics, the unflappable skeptics, the persistent advocates for the best of the old values and practices in new conditions. We need to persistently make our case.

Nor is this a matter of argument only. We need to be the ones who not only articulate but embody certain standards of behavior and thought. We may need the courage that the first editor of this magazine described as the willingness to “dare to be, in the right with two or three.” For sure, we should follow the motto that he coined for The Atlantic and be “of no party or clique.” If that means journeying in a political wilderness for a while, well, there are precedents for that. Besides, those who travel with us will be good company—and may be considerably more numerous than we now think.