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.

In the final weeks of Kamala Harris’s campaign for president, her supporters have taken on a harrowing task: sorting out the thorny entanglements of politics and marriage. In late September, NBC reported that a viral trend of stochastic vote whipping saw women affixing stickers and sticky notes to places other women are likely to encounter privately: women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and the backs of tampon boxes. They all contained an appeal for the Harris-Walz ticket: “Woman to woman,” one read: “No one sees your vote at the polls! Vote for the women and girls you love!” Intimate little letters, meant to be read in secret with the promise of secrecy. Unlike typical campaign-season material, they arrive as whispers between friends.

But a new pro-Harris ad recently took the private movement public. Last month, the progressive evangelical group Vote Common Good produced a Harris-Walz video featuring Julia Roberts as narrator, saying: “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.” A woman is seen parting from her male partner to mark her ballot—and over the partition locks eyes with a second woman, about her age, who sends her a knowing smile. The first woman casts her vote for Harris and then reunites with her husband (a conservative, we gather, based on his patriotic hat) and assures him she made the right choice. She shares a private glance with the second woman as the two pat on their I Voted stickers. Last week, the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump PAC, tweeted a video along the same lines: Canny wife assures husband she’ll vote for Donald Trump, then catches the eye of a young woman voting for Harris and does the same.  

These invitations to quiet rebellion tend to lack a substantive pitch, though some of the grassroots messages allude to abortion rights. The point seems to be not persuading conservative women, but rather providing permission to women who are privately liberal to vote for Harris. In this micro-campaign, Democrats are guessing that some nominally conservative married women would vote for Harris so long as they were certain their vote would be kept secret. If they’re right, they have unearthed a new source of liberal votes formerly presumed lost to the left. But that’s a big if.

[Read: What the Kamala Harris doubters do not understand]

Conservatives have been predictably outraged by this narrative. “If I found out [my wife] was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” the Fox host Jesse Watters seethed on air. “I think it’s so gross,” the right-wing activist and commentator Charlie Kirk told Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM talk show. “I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.” It is unsurprising that the same political faction obsessed with cuckoldry would see the ad through that particular lens. Watters and Kirk appear to have been provoked by the same themes: Implications of secrecy between spouses and domestic pluralism both undermine the right-wing preference for families as traditionally unified under the authority of a father. That, more than the specific candidates in play, seemed to account for much of the conservative backlash.  

The electoral prospects matter too, and both sides have the same interest in the votes of America’s tens of millions of married women. In this respect, conservatives have a historical advantage. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey of the 2016 electorate found that about half of validated voters (both men and women) were married, and that a majority of them—55 percent—supported Trump. After the 2020 presidential election, the American Enterprise Institute issued a report stating that 52 percent of married women had voted for Trump, compared with 56 percent of married men and 37 percent of unmarried women.

Again, what backers of Harris’s campaign seem to hope is that some of these married women are in fact quietly liberal, or at least liberal enough to vote for Harris against Trump. And there is a bit of evidence to that effect. A YouGov poll conducted at the end of October found that one in eight women have voted differently from their partners in secret. This is perhaps why CNN recently noted the rise of a Facebook group devoted to “wives of the deplorables,” who discuss their gradual alienation from their MAGA spouses. Prompted to describe how they came to oppose their husband’s politics in New York magazine, four women offered similar stories: Their marriage hadn’t been especially political in the beginning, but then their partner had been radicalized by right-wing media orbiting Trump. These anecdotes tease a broader phenomenon of women voters who find themselves at odds with their male partner.

The likelier scenario may be that women who have previously voted Republican are simply conservative. Marriage itself is associated with conservative politics. Right-leaning pundits speculate that a difference in values between the married and unmarried explains the gap. “We know that marriage is simply a higher priority for people with a more conservative worldview,” Peyton Roth and Brad Wilcox wrote for AEI, adding that “marriage may push men and women to the right.” An analysis of American and Australian voting patterns published in 2019 suggested that married white women lack a sense of “gender-linked fate,” or the notion that their fortunes are tied to those of their sex. The researchers pointed out that only 18 percent of married white women reported a sense of gender-linked fate, compared with 38 percent of single white women and 30 percent of divorced white women. “Women become more conservative and see themselves as less connected to other women over the duration of the marriage,” they concluded.

This micro-effort to get married women to support Harris is obviously  part of a much larger campaign for these voters. Whether this reaches dozens or thousands of women is unknowable, but in an election that could be decided by minuscule margins, a secret Harris-supporting wife is a reasonable target. Traditional matrimonial advice may hold that no secrets should exist between spouses, but perhaps the interests of democracy preempt the interests of domestic harmony. All is fair in love—and the voting booth.