Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and subsequently turned it into X, disaffected users have talked about leaving once and for all. Maybe they’d post some about how X has gotten worse to use, how it harbors white supremacists, how it pushes right-wing posts into their feed, or how distasteful they find the fact that Musk has cozied up to Donald Trump. Then they’d leave. Or at least some of them did. For the most part, X has held up as the closest thing to a central platform for political and cultural discourse.

But that may have changed. After Trump’s election victory, more people appear to have gotten serious about leaving. According to Similarweb, a social-media analytics company, the week after the election corresponded with the biggest spike in account deactivations on X since Musk’s takeover of the site. Many of these users have fled to Bluesky: The Twitter-like microblogging platform has added about 10 million new accounts since October.

X has millions of users and can afford to shed some here and there. Many liberal celebrities, journalists, writers, athletes, and artists still use it—but that they’ll continue to do so is not guaranteed. In a sense, this is a victory for conservatives: As the left flees and X loses broader relevance, it becomes a more overtly right-wing site. But the right needs liberals on X. If the platform becomes akin to “alt-tech platforms” such as Gab or Truth Social, this shift would be good for people on the right who want their politics to be affirmed. It may not be as good for persuading people to join their political movement.

The number of people departing X indicates that something is shifting, but raw user numbers have never fully captured the point of what the site was. Twitter’s value proposition was that relatively influential people talked to each other on it. In theory, you could log on to Twitter and see a country singer rib a cable-news anchor, billionaires bloviate, artists talk about media theory, historians get into vicious arguments, and celebrities share vaguely interesting minutiae about their lives. More so than anywhere else, you could see the unvarnished thoughts of the relatively powerful and influential. And anyone, even you, could maybe strike up a conversation with such people. As each wave departs X, the site gradually becomes less valuable to those who stay, prompting a cycle that slowly but surely diminishes X’s relevance.

This is how you get something approaching Gab or Truth Social. They are both platforms with modest but persistent usership that can be useful for conservatives to send messages to their base: Trump owns Truth Social, and has announced many of his Cabinet picks on the site. (As Doug Burgum, his nominee for interior secretary, said earlier this month: “Nothing’s true until you read it on Truth Social.”) But the platforms have little utility to the general public. Gab and Truth Social are rare examples of actual echo chambers, where conservatives can congregate to energize themselves and reinforce their ideology. These are not spaces that mean much to anyone who is not just conservative, but extremely conservative. Normal people do not log on to Gab and Truth Social. These places are for political obsessives whose appetites are not satiated by talk radio and Fox News. They are for open anti-Semites, unabashed swastika-posting neo-Nazis, transphobes, and people who say they want to kill Democrats.  

Of course, if X becomes more explicitly right wing, it will be a far bigger conservative echo chamber than either Gab or Truth Social. Truth Social reportedly had just 70,000 users as of May, and a 2022 study found just 1 percent of American adults get their news from Gab. Still, the right successfully completing a Gab-ification of X doesn’t mean that moderates and everyone to the left of them would have to live on a platform dominated by the right and mainline conservative perspectives. It would just mean that even more people with moderate and liberal sympathies will get disgusted and leave the platform, and that the right will lose the ability to shape wider discourse.

The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has successfully seeded moral panics around critical race theory and DEI hiring practices, has directly pointed to X as a tool that has let him reach a general audience. The reason right-wing politicians and influencers such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens keep posting on it instead of on conservative platforms is because they want what Rufo wants: a chance to push their perspectives into the mainstream. This utility becomes diminished when most of the people looking at X are just other right-wingers who already agree with them. The fringier, vanguard segments of the online right seem to understand this and are trying to follow the libs to Bluesky.

Liberals and the left do not need the right to be online in the way that the right needs liberals and the left. The nature of reactionary politics demands constant confrontations—literal reactions—to the left. People like Rufo would have a substantially harder time trying to influence opinions on a platform without liberals. “Triggering the libs” sounds like a joke, but it is often essential for segments of the right. This explains the popularity of some X accounts with millions of followers, such as Libs of TikTok, whose purpose is to troll liberals.

The more liberals leave X, the less value it offers to the right, both in terms of cultural relevance and in opportunities for trolling. The X exodus won’t happen overnight. Some users might be reluctant to leave because it’s hard to reestablish an audience built up over the years, and network effects will keep X relevant. But it’s not a given that a platform has to last. Old habits die hard, but they can die.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Barack Obama dutifully carried out the peaceful transfer of power. But a large faction of Americans declined to treat Trump as a president with democratic legitimacy. In their telling, he lost the popular vote, urged foreign actors to interfere in the election, broke laws, and transgressed against the unwritten rules of liberal societies. So they fancied themselves members of the “resistance,” or waged lawfare, or urged the invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Immediately after Trump’s inauguration, liberal groups started to push for his impeachment and removal from office.

Now Trump is returning to the White House. But history isn’t quite repeating itself. This time, Trump’s case for democratic legitimacy is far stronger. He won the Electoral College decisively, and he appears likely to win the popular vote. No one believes that a foreign nation was responsible for his victory. Although he still has legal problems stemming from his past actions, no one alleges illegality in this campaign. For all of those reasons and more, a 2016-style resistance to Trump is now untenable. He will begin his term as a normal president.

A small faction of Trump detractors may continue to say that he is illegitimate, because they believe that he should have been convicted during his impeachment, or because they see his attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020 as disqualifying, or because they believe he is a fascist.

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But that approach will be less popular than ever, even among Trump opponents, because an opposition that purports to defend democracy cannot deny legitimacy to such a clear democratic winner; because the original resistance oversold enough of its allegations to diminish its ability to make new ones without proof; because some in the resistance are exhausted from years of obsessive, at times hysterical, focus on Trump; and because unaligned Americans who don’t even like Trump are tired of being browbeaten for not hating him enough.

Maybe voters made a terrible mistake in 2024. But that’s a risk of democracy, so we must live with it. I have strong doubts about Trump’s character, his respect for the Constitution, and his judgment. I worry that his administration will engage in reckless spending and cruelty toward immigrants. Having opposed government overreach and civil-liberties abuses during every presidency I’ve covered, I anticipate having a lot of libertarian objections to Trump in coming years.

Yet a part of me is glad that, if Trump had to win, the results are clear enough to make Resistance 2.0 untenable, because that approach failed to stop Trump the first time around. It deranged many Americans who credulously believed all of the resistance’s claims, and it foreclosed a posture toward Trump that strikes me as more likely to yield good civic results: normal political opposition.

The American system makes effecting radical or reckless change hard.

As a Never Trump voter who thought January 6 was disqualifying but who respects the results of this election, I urge this from fellow Trump skeptics: Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.  

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery. Don’t hesitate to criticize him when he does something bad, but avoid overstatements. They are self-discrediting. And know that new House elections are just two years away. Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose.

Meanwhile, oppose Trump’s bad ideas by drawing on the normal tools Americans use to constrain all presidents. Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration. So be the John Boehner to his Obama. Even if ill intent exists in Trump’s inscrutable mind, his coalition does not wish to end democracy. Some will turn on the president when he merely has trouble fulfilling basic promises.

And in America, power remains dispersed––the left never succeeded in shortsighted efforts to end the filibuster, or to destroy federalism and states’ rights, or to strip the private sector of independence from the state, or to allow the executive branch to define and police alleged misinformation.

Until 2028, normal checks can constrain Trump. Then he will term out. Yes, he will almost certainly do some troubling things in the meantime: impose tariffs that will harm Americans with rising prices or carry out excessive deportations that needlessly harm families and communities. But he has a mandate for some lawful parts of his agenda, including parts that I personally hate.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]

Amid the give-and-take of democratic politics, I hope that Trump will normalize himself too. Through what he says and does, he could reassure voters who regard him as a fascist with dictatorial aspirations, rather than deploying rhetoric—let alone taking actions—that elicit reasonable concern or fear. He may even try reassurance, if only because it would be in his own self-interest.

A Trump who reassures the nation that he will adhere to the law, the Constitution, and basic human decency—and then does so—will inspire a lot less opposition than a Trump who indulges the excesses of his first term and reminds Americans why they rejected his bid in 2020.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump promised on Election Night. He has all the power he needs to make good on that promise, which will require restraining his worst impulses. If he succeeds, he will earn a historical legacy far better than the one he has today. I doubt that he has it in him. Typically, his word is not his bond. But I hope that he proves me wrong.