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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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Traditionally, a campaign’s closing argument is supposed to hammer home its main themes. At a rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did exactly that—by once again fantasizing about violence against his perceived enemies.

Describing how his open-air podium was mostly surrounded by bulletproof glass, the former president noted a gap in that protection, and added: “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” And by “fake news,” he meant the members of the press covering his rally.

[Read: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

The crowd whooped and clapped. Many of Trump’s rallies feature a moment’s hate for the journalists in attendance, whom he blames for, among other things, distorting his message, not praising him enough, reflexively favoring Kamala Harris, fact-checking his statements, noticing empty seats, and reporting that people leave his events early.

But journalists are only some of the many “enemies from within” whom Trump has name-checked at his rallies and on his favored social network, Truth Social. He has suggested that Mark Zuckerberg should face “life in prison” if Facebook’s moderation policies penalize right-wingers. He has suggested using the National Guard or the military against “radical-left lunatics” who disrupt the election. He believes people who criticize the Supreme Court “should be put in jail.” A recent post on Truth Social stated that if he wins on Tuesday, Trump would hunt down “lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” who had engaged in what he called “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery.” Just last week, he fantasized in public about his Republican critic Liz Cheney facing gunfire, and he previously promoted a post calling for her to face a “televised military tribunal” for treason. In all, NPR found more than 100 examples of Trump threatening to prosecute or persecute his opponents. One of his recent targets was this magazine.

Does this rhetoric matter to voters? It certainly ought to. Persecuting journalists is what autocrats do—and yet Trump’s many boosters on the right, who claim to care deeply about free speech, seem resolutely unmoved. However, his campaign has tried to clean up today’s offending remarks, something that his team rarely bothers to do. (The most recent major example was after the comedian Tony Hinchliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage” while warming up the crowd at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden last weekend.)

Following today’s speech in Lititz, Team Trump is trying to spin his comments as nothing more than tender concern for the welfare of reporters. “President Trump was brilliantly talking about the two assassination attempts on his own life,” Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesperson, wrote in a statement. (Let’s have a moment to enjoy the self-abasement required to write that brilliantly.) He continued:

The President’s statement about protective glass placement has nothing to do with the Media being harmed, or anything else. It was about threats against him that were spurred on by dangerous rhetoric from Democrats. In fact, President Trump was stating that the Media was in danger, in that they were protecting him and, therefore, were in great danger themselves, and should have had a glass protective shield, also. There can be no other interpretation of what was said. He was actually looking out for their welfare, far more than his own!

The word Orwellian is overused, but come on, Steven Cheung. You expect people to believe this crock? That jaunty final exclamation mark gives the entire statement a whiff of sarcasm, and rightly so. Trump plainly meant that, if he were targeted from a nearby rooftop, he would at least draw some small consolation if a blameless camera operator from a local TV station were taken out first.

The rest of Trump’s speech was the usual minestrone of cheap insults, petty grievances, and bizarre digressions. He repeated a claim that he’d previously made on The Joe Rogan Experience—where he said he wanted to be a “whale psychiatrist”—that offshore wind farms are killing whales. He suggested that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after losing the 2020 election. At times, he appeared to be boring himself, regretting that he had to deliver a stump speech that the audience had probably heard “900 times.”

He took aim at his most-hated Democrats: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “not a smart girl”; Harris was “lazy as hell”; and Adam Schiff had an “enlarged watermelon head.” He complained about “Barack Hussein Obama” and said that because Obama’s wife had criticized him, “I think we’re gonna start having a little fun with Michelle.” Notably, given his other remarks about the media, he also threatened CBS’s broadcast license because, he contended, the network had deceptively edited one of Harris’s answers in her interview with 60 Minutes. (The network denies the allegation.) For those who dismiss Trump’s threats as merely overblown rhetoric, it should be noted that he has also launched a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS in a part of Texas where the sole federal judge is a Republican.

[Read: Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign]

Trump’s current mood might be attributable to his stalled momentum in recent polls and a slump in his odds of victory in betting markets. Accordingly, in Lititz, he added a new name to his list of adversaries: J. Ann Selzer, the widely respected Iowa pollster who has a track record of producing surprising results that are borne out on Election Day. Last night, her poll for The Des Moines Register found that Harris was leading by three points in Iowa, a state that Trump won in 2020 by eight. Last year, when Selzer’s poll correctly showed Trump ahead in the state’s Republican primary campaign, he called her a “very powerful” pollster who had delivered a “big beautiful poll.” In Lititz, however, he described Selzer as “one of my enemies” and lumped her together with the media: “The polls are just as corrupt as some of the writers back there.”

The campaign is coming to an unruly close. Trump’s surrogates are going rogue: Elon Musk has said that his drive for government efficiency would cause “temporary hardship”; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged this weekend to remove fluoride from drinking water; and House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested that Republicans would “probably” repeal the CHIPS Act, which subsidizes U.S. semiconductor production. None of these is a winning message for the Republicans. (Johnson later said he wouldn’t try to kill the bill.)

But the bigger issue is the candidate himself. The more professional elements of the campaign appear to be losing their grip on Trump, who is tired and bored and restless for revenge. Whatever happens on Tuesday, we can say authoritatively that this has been Trump’s darkest campaign yet.