Itemoids

Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Senate Exists for a Reason

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2024 › 11 › the-senate-exists-for-a-reason › 680702

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As president-elect, Donald Trump has the right to name the people he wants in his Cabinet. Some of Trump’s nominations, such as Senator Marco Rubio to lead the State Department, are completely ordinary. A few are ideological red meat for Republicans. Others are gifts to Trump loyalists.

Four of these nominees, however, are dangerous to the security of the United States and to the well-being of its people: Pete Hegseth (Defense), Tulsi Gabbard (Office of the Director of National Intelligence), Matt Gaetz (Justice), and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Health and Human Services). The Senate must turn back these nominations, and do so en bloc.

The Gaetz and Kennedy nominations are apparently already in trouble, and more than enough has been written about them. Gaetz is an accused sexual predator (he has long denied the allegations); ironically, he is the least dangerous of this pack. Yes, as attorney general he would green-light every raving demand from MAGA world for investigations into Trump’s enemies, but in a strange blessing, he is also likely to be completely incompetent. The Department of Justice, as Trump himself learned during his first term, is packed to the rafters with very sharp lawyers who would almost certainly jam up any of Gaetz’s unconstitutional orders. Gaetz’s tenure at Justice would be a national humiliation and destructive to the rule of law, but it would also likely be very short.

The RFK Jr. nomination is, in a word, pathetic. Most of his views are little more than pure anti-science kookery, and if he is confirmed, Americans—and especially their children—will be in peril from this anti-vaccine crusader. But he would be a danger to the health of individual Americans (especially those who watch too much TV and spend too much time on the internet) rather than to the continued existence of the United States.

Which brings me to Gabbard and Hegseth.

Tulsi Gabbard, as I wrote last week, is unqualified for the job of DNI, but she is also a security risk: I have held security clearances for most of my adult life, and had I worked in any federal office next to her, I would have had no compunction about raising her as an “insider threat” because of her political views and her shady international connections. (As a member of Congress in 2017, she held meetings with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad outside of U.S. government channels—an obvious problem for anyone seeking a senior role in national security.)

Gaetz, Kennedy, and Gabbard are terrible choices. The Hegseth nomination, however, is easily the most dangerous and irresponsible of all of Trump’s picks. (Gabbard is a significant hazard, but she would not have a gigantic army at her disposal, and she would not be involved with the control of nuclear weapons.) Like the other three in this group, Hegseth is shockingly unqualified for the job he’s been asked to take, but in this case, the Senate is faced with a proposal to place a TV talking head at the top of the Pentagon and insert him into the nuclear chain of command.

Hegseth has made personal choices that make him unfit to lead the DOD, including his extramarital affairs (which apparently helped tank his chances to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs in Trump’s first administration) and a payoff to a woman who claimed that he’d sexually assaulted her. He denies the assault allegation, but in any case, adultery is a criminal violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can be a career-ending mistake for a member of the armed forces.

I will leave aside whether Hegseth’s tattoos identify him as a white supremacist. Hegseth denies the claim. But some of Hegseth’s ink is popular with extremists; that’s why one of his own military comrades reported him as an insider threat in the first place—and not, as Hegseth and some whining conservatives claim, because he is being persecuted as a Christian. I knew many people in federal service with patriotic tattoos. (I have one myself, and no, it’s none of your business where it is.) I am also a Christian who wears a cross—one that I had blessed in a church—every day. That’s not what any of this is about.

Hegseth’s defenders seem unable to understand that neither Hegseth nor anyone else has a right to be the secretary of defense: If the nominee made choices earlier in life that would now undermine his effectiveness in the job, then that’s his problem, not the Pentagon’s. But even if Hegseth were not an example of a sexist, MAGA-bro culture—his statements about women in the military are particularly noxious—the Senate is still faced with the problem that he’s utterly unqualified.

A former Army major, he has no serious background in national-security or defense issues beyond his military service. (And how that service ended is apparently now a matter of some dispute.) He has not worked anywhere in the defense world: not in any of its agencies, not with any of its industries, not with any of its workforce in any capacity. He has never managed anything of any significant size.

Not only would he be incapable of administering America’s largest government department, but he’d also be in a position of terrifying responsibility for which he is unprepared. Imagine an international crisis, perhaps only a year or two from now. President Trump is facing a situation that could be rife with danger to the United States and our allies—perhaps even one that involves nuclear threats. At this dire moment, Trump turns to …

Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard?

The Senate must do everything in its constitutional power to stop this. Trump won the election, but no president has an absolute right to his Cabinet nominations: The Constitution requires the Senate to consent to those nominations. Trump has already warned that if the Senate balks, he will subvert this process by using “recess appointments,” in effect a demand that the Senate take a walk and let Trump do whatever he wants—to consent, in other words, to autocracy.

Incoming Majority Leader John Thune and others who still might care about their duty to the nation have time to go to Trump, right now, and tell him that these four nominations are DOA. They could tell Trump that it is in his own interest—the only interest he recognizes—not to risk multiple defeats. And if the Senate folds and decides to take these up one at a time, Trump will wear them down, likely accepting that Gaetz must be a Succession-style “blood sacrifice,” in return for which Trump gets everyone else. For Thune—who, one assumes, does not wish to begin his tenure as a statelier version of Senator Tommy Tuberville, the MAGA obstructionist who held up military promotions for months—accepting such a deal would be a huge strategic error.

Whomever Trump nominates as replacements will likely be dangerous in their own way. But these four nominees have to be stopped—and right now.

Related:

The thing that binds Gabbard, Gaetz, and Hegseth to Trump The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

He was the world’s longest-held death-row inmate. He was also innocent. How Trump could make Congress go away for a while Thomas Chatterton Williams: Is wokeness one big power grab? Europe braces for Trump.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden authorized Ukraine yesterday to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes inside Russia, according to U.S. officials. Russia said today that the decision would escalate international tensions and add “fuel to the fire” of the war. Trump confirmed on Truth Social that his administration is planning to declare a national emergency and enlist the military to carry out a mass-deportation program targeting undocumented immigrants. Trump picked Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission and a Project 2025 contributor, to lead the FCC.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Learning where famous musicians sleep and what they eat can feel like finally glimpsing the unknowable, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Justin Chung for The Atlantic

How Jimmy O. Yang Became a Main Character

By Shirley Li

Jimmy O. Yang had been trying to make it as an actor for years—cobbling together bit parts in network sitcoms, auditioning for nameless roles such as “Chinese Teenager #1”—when he was cast in a new HBO series. The show, Silicon Valley, was a comedy about a group of programmers at a Bay Area start-up incubator; his character, Jian-Yang, was an app developer who spoke in broken English.

It was a small guest role, but he saw it as an opportunity.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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SNL Isn’t Bothering With Civility Anymore

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2024 › 11 › saturday-night-live-bill-burr-post-election › 680614

Voters gave America’s rudest man permission to return to the White House; what else have they given permission to? Michael Che has one idea. “So y’all gonna let a man with 34 felonies lead the free world and be the president of the United States?” he asked during last night’s “Weekend Update.” “That’s it. I’m listening to R. Kelly again.”

The joke captured a feeling that’s been circulating in America ever since last Tuesday’s election: silver-lining nihilism, a relief that we can stop trying to be good. Kamala Harris lost probably because of the economy, but the Republican campaign did effectively leverage widespread exhaustion with identity politics, inclusive speech, and perhaps even civility itself. Some of Trump’s supporters have celebrated by crowing vileness such as “Your body, my choice.” Some of Harris’s fans have openly denigrated the minorities who voted for Trump.

Eesh. But if this is, as my colleague Thomas Chatterton Williams posted on X, the “post-woke era,” then perhaps at least comedy—the entertainment form that’s grouched the most about progressive piety—will be funnier now. Maybe someone will channel the spirit of Joan Rivers in her prime, turning nastiness into a high art. But judging from last night’s SNL, we will not be so lucky.

The episode’s host, the comedian Bill Burr, seemed well positioned to interpret Trump’s win. With his Boston accent and stubbled beard, he has long drawn upon his white-working-class bona fides to critique both sides of the partisan divide. When he hosted SNL shortly before the 2020 presidential election, he mocked wokeness in a somewhat sneaky way: By accusing white women and gay people of hijacking the posture of oppression from people of color, he in effect co-opted the logic of intersectionality to call out its own excesses. Whether you were offended or amused by his monologue, it at least had a point.

Last night, however, Burr just seemed ornery. He opened with a promise to avoid talking about the election, and then said he’d just gotten over the flu. When you’re sick, he observed, you lie awake “just going through this Rolodex of people that coughed on you. Sniffled near ya. Walked by an Asian or something.” Smattered chuckles. “You try to fight it. You’re like, ‘They say on the internet that’s where all the disease comes from.’” Almost no laughs.

Eventually he got to the election. “All right, ladies you’re oh-and-two against this guy,” he said, referring to Harris’s and Hillary Clinton’s losses to Trump. “Ladies, enough with the pantsuit, okay? It’s not working. Stop trying to have respect for yourselves. You don’t win the office, like, on policy, you know? You gotta whore it up a little.” He added, “I know a lot of ugly women—feminists, I mean—don’t want to hear this message.”

Maybe in those oh-so-woke times a week ago, I’d feel compelled to spell out how repeating stereotypes about Asian people and reducing women to their looks effectively makes life harder for Asian people and women. Other pundits would have then defended Burr on the grounds that he’s mocking his own racism and America’s sexism. Let’s skip all that and agree that Burr’s attempt to push the line of acceptability led him to bomb in a way that was horrible to watch. He created the same sucking feeling that Tony Hinchcliffe did when he made an arena of MAGAs groan at the idea that Puerto Rico is floating garbage. There’s no wit, no passion, no aha to this kind of comedy. It’s just guys flailing about for a reaction.

To be fair, Burr might have just been tired. This election cycle “took forever,” even though most voters made up their mind long ago, he complained. Their choices were two “polar opposite” candidates: “It’s like, ‘Let’s see. What does the orange bigot have to say? How about the real-estate agent that speaks through her nose?’”  (“Orange bigot”—is this The View in 2015?)

The rest of the episode was a bit better than the monologue. Burr’s presence pushed the writers to focus on sketches about masculinity, an apt subject given the role that male voters played in the election. A segment in which young guys tried to get their dads to open up about their feelings by talking about sports and cars was oddly touching. A bit featuring a self-pitying bro at group therapy was amusingly deranged. In the edgiest sketch, Burr played a fire fighter with a fetish involving children’s cartoons, leading SNL to air an image of the dad from Bluey in a ball gag. Was this post-woke Hollywood vulgarity or what comedy’s always been—the search for surprise?

The truth that SNL and the culture at large must now wrestle with is this: Trump may be back in office after four years away, but the world only turns forward. Wokeness has not been some fad; it hasn’t even been a movement that can be defeated. It’s been, as the term itself implies, an awakening—reshaping how people think about the relationship between the words they use and the society they live in. The case it made was so persuasive that it altered the English language likely forever. It also spread shame and overreached in a way that created backlash—but that backlash will cause cultural changes that build off what we just lived through, not reverse it entirely. The way to fully get back to a pre-woke time would be through actual Orwellian fascism.  

SNL isn’t counting that possibility out. Last night opened with the cast members speaking to the camera, telling Trump that they’d supported him all along, that they shouldn’t be on an enemies list, and that they’ll help him hunt down any colleagues who voted for Harris. Their tone was light but the satire was dark, highlighting the way that leaders—in politics, media, and business—who were once critical of Trump have taken to flattering him out of fear of retribution. The sketch anticipated a future that would make recent speech wars look quaint. But for now, as for long before, we can say what we want to say, not only what we think we should say.

Democrats Deserved to Lose

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 11 › election-2024-liberal-loss › 680591

By electing Donald Trump again, the American electorate has made a bad decision, one that will expose our country to unreasonable risks in areas from foreign policy to public health. Fiscal policy will get worse—budget deficits will become even larger, keeping interest rates high, and programs that provide health care to the poor and elderly are likely to be trimmed back to finance tax cuts for rich people. Abortion rights are likely to be further restricted by a hostile administration that uses the powers of the FDA and the Department of Justice to make abortion harder to provide. And we’ll have another four years under Trump’s exhausting, mercurial, and divisive leadership, making our politics nastier and stupider.

I wish the election had gone the other way. I am annoyed. That said, when Trump won eight years ago, I was much more than annoyed. I was really upset and shocked. This time is different, because Americans have been through this before, and I expect we’ll get through it again. But it’s also different because there’s a big part of me that feels Democrats deserved to lose this election, even if Trump did not deserve to win it.

I write this from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, which doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because building a subway line here costs four times as much per mile as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system—the other day, I was on a bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot.” And even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense), they don’t do much about these disturbances, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep troubled people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at pharmacies is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place—that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the “wokest” legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure that people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever.

[Read: The ‘stop the steal’ movement isn’t letting up]

Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under a state-court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes building anything very hard—and visiting here is really expensive, too, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council made building new hotels functionally illegal. And as a result of all of this, New York is shedding population—the state will probably lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where building housing and growing the economy is still possible.

Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal-rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of brain-dead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: They pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life.

I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “Can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post–George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch to change all this (or even burn it all down), it didn’t fall flat.

Right before Election Day, Ross Douthat wrote a column for The New York Times that left me quite uneasy. It was about the campaign signs he was seeing all over New Haven that read Harris-Walz 2024: Obviously. Douthat started with a point that’s almost tautological: Because the election appeared close, by definition neither candidate was the obvious choice. And he looked at why the decision would not be obvious to so many voters, writing:

Let’s take one last survey of why some waverers might not yet be sold on Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, by returning to where this all began: The world of 2016, when Americans normally disinclined to vote for liberals were first informed that there was no other reasonable choice … the promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence than Trump and his hangers-on.

Many voters believe these promises were broken. Of course, the most politically significant aspect of the instability has been post-COVID inflation—a global problem that has taken out incumbent governments of the right and left all over the world. Inflation is mostly not Democrats’ fault, though they did exacerbate it by overstimulating the economy with the American Rescue Plan, and then they failed to focus early enough on inflation as the key economic problem of this administration.

To be precise, the ARP, passed in early 2021, constituted an unnecessary $2 trillion stimulus that mostly produced inflation rather than real GDP growth. Then, throughout 2022, even as inflation started to bite, Democrats were still looking for every way they could find to spend as much money as possible to satisfy interest-group constituencies. Even the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to reduce inflation by reducing the deficit, is currently increasing the deficit by tens of billions of dollars a year and, if left unchanged, will continue to do so through 2027. The deficit reduction does not begin until 2028, far too late to be politically relevant for Joe Biden’s Democrats.

The other big destabilizer is the migrant crisis, which was born out of this administration’s fecklessness—Biden rapidly reversing Trump’s immigration executive orders upon entering office without any plan for controlling the border and apparently without realizing that migrants are smart, and will be more likely to come if you make clear that coming very likely means they will get to stay. (A failure to consider incentives is a running theme when Democrats fail.) Democrats did not pivot to enforcement until far too late—and not until after Texas Governor Greg Abbott made the crisis a blue-state issue by bussing migrants here en masse to fill Democrats’ hotels and consume Democratic budgets.

On the “insanity” front, Douthat cites the political movement in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, responses to COVID, and trans-youth medicine—all areas where liberals’ moral fervor has caused them to lose sight of whether the ideologically driven courses they had taken were actually producing the intended positive effects. Democrats know they paid a price for “Defund the police” and they have mostly learned their lesson, or at least they will now, because several high-profile “progressive” prosecutors lost their blue-city posts this week. On the COVID restrictions, Democrats have not really reckoned with how off-putting a lot of the busybody moralizing was, but this issue will likely simply fade with time.

As for trans issues, I have been skeptical about their political salience—although I don’t believe that Lia Thomas belonged on the Penn women’s swim team, I also can’t imagine casting a vote based on my views about that story. But Kamala Harris’s 2019 declaration to the ACLU that she would have the government pay for gender-affirming surgeries for prisoners and people held in immigration detention became a major attack line against her in this campaign. That’s because it highlights several problems with the party’s image all at once: Here was the Democratic nominee, bowing to pressure from interest groups to look for ways to spend your tax dollars on the most bespoke concern of a criminal, or of a noncitizen who isn’t even supposed to be here, before thinking about you and your interests. But the truly grim irony about the political cost of this promise is that, of course, the federal government that only got seven electric-vehicle-charging stations built in two years has performed zero transgender surgeries on detained migrants. That’s the Democrats in a nutshell: the party that promises trans surgeries for undocumented immigrants but doesn’t deliver them.

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

And all of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues that have dominated this campaign has fallen so flat. The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs”—all of the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you. In some cases, they have a clear track record to run on: The Affordable Care Act has gotten more popular over time, and the expanded subsidies that reduce the premiums most Americans pay to buy individual plans on the exchanges have increased enrollment. But mostly, I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they have tried to do a zillion different things and done them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act. They instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services.

Although I think Harris should have picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate, I don’t think choosing him would have changed the outcome. But Shapiro is a popular swing-state governor who will be a front-runner for the 2028 nomination. And Shapiro’s signature policy achievement is rebuilding a highway underpass. There is a lesson here: When government focuses on its core responsibilities and delivers on them quickly, efficiently, and with a laser focus on making sure people can go about their lives as normal, the voters reward that. You don’t need a grand vision; you need to execute.

Winning the next federal election is important. For that reason, it is important that Democrats get the voters to believe they deserve to win that election. They have two years to work on it before the midterms.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

The Cumulative Toll of Democrats’ Delusions

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 11 › democrats-lost-voters-ritchie-torres › 680599

Representative Ritchie Torres, a New York Democrat, cut me off before I even finished my question: Congressman, were you— “Surprised? No, I was not surprised,” Torres, who represents a poor and working-class district in the Bronx, told me. “Much of my side in politics, and much of the media, was in a state of self-deception. We confused analysis with wishful thinking.”

Which is to say, too many in Torres’s party assumed that they were heralds of virtue and endangered democratic values and that Americans would not, as a despairing New York Times columnist put it this week, vote for an “authoritarian grotesquerie.”

This, Torres argued, was purest delusion. Inflation and steeply rising rates on credit cards, car loans, and mortgages may not have been President Joe Biden’s fault, but they buffeted Americans. The immigration system was broken, and migrants swamped shelters in big cities. There’s no need to assume—as some commentators have after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory Tuesday—that the United States has a uniquely fallen electorate; across the globe, voters have tossed out governments on the left and right over the disruptions of the past five years. “A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance and felt they were worse off,” Torres said; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “was not responsible for the inflation, but objectively, that was a near-insurmountable disadvantage.”

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

Torres pointed as well to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly championed cultural causes and chanted slogans that turned off rank-and-file Democrats across many demographics. “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”

The result is the reality that Americans woke up to on Wednesday. The overwhelming majority of counties in the nation, even some of the bluest of blue, had shifted rightward. The Republicans had broken down the door to the Democrats’ house and were sitting in the living room drinking its beer (or wine, as the case might be). On the day after the election, I clicked through a digital election-results map of New Jersey. Biden in 2020 took New Jersey, a Democratic Party bastion, by nearly 16 percentage points over Trump; Harris won the state by a more parsimonious five points. Everywhere, Republicans sanded down Democratic margins. In the state’s northeast corner, across from New York City, Biden had taken prosperous Bergen County by 16 percentage points in 2020; Harris took the same county by three points. Far to the south, in Atlantic County, which includes the deteriorating casino capital of Atlantic City, Biden had won by seven points; Trump took it by four points.

Torres emphasized that in his view, Harris ran a vigorous and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not discern many missteps. Although she sometimes tossed up clouds of vagueness when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided mouthing the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign. But she could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bludgeoned her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to champion state-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.

In recent election cycles, Democrats have invested much hope that “people of color”—the widely varied and disparate peoples long imagined to be a monolith—would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and rearrange American politics.

Politics, alas, is more complex than simply arranging virtuous ethnic and racial voting blocs, and Trump’s gains this year among nonwhite voters are part of a longer trend. Four years ago, even as Biden triumphed, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposition that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.

For some anti-Trump and progressive commentators, the leakage of Latino, Black, and Asian voters from the Democratic column this year registered as a shock, even a betrayal. This week, the MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough and his guest, the Reverend Al Sharpton, both upset with Trump’s triumph, suggested that Harris’s race and gender worked against her. “A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates,” Scarborough opined; Black men, Sharpton said, are among “the most sexist” people.

To accept such stereotypes requires ignoring piles of contrary evidence. In 2008 and again in 2012, to cite an example, Hispanic voters up and down the Rio Grande Valley in Texas delivered huge electoral margins to President Barack Obama, who is Black. Many millions of Black men, nearly 80 percent of those who cast a ballot, exit polls suggest, voted for Harris this past Tuesday.

Black and Latino voters are not the only demographics drawing blame for Trump’s victory. Some commentators have pointed an accusatory finger at white women, suggesting they bear a group guilt for selling out women’s rights. This fails as a matter of fact. Nearly half of white women voted for Harris. But more to the point, telling people how to think and not to think is toxic in politics. Yet many liberal commentators seem unable to help themselves.

A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters deeply dislike being labeled Latinx, a gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term also came into use by Democratic politicians eager to establish their bona fides with progressive activists. Alas, voters liked it not so much.

[Josh Barro: Democrats deserved to lose]

This problem seems easily remedied: Refer to voters by the term they prefer—Latino, say, or Hispanic. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities.”

Professors might heed the words of Representative Ruben Gallego, a Latino Democrat who is currently wrapped in a tight race for a Senate seat in Arizona. Four years ago, I spoke with him about identity politics in his party. A progressive, Gallego is a favorite of Latino activists, who flock from California to work on his campaigns. He told me that he appreciated their help but warned them that if they used the word Latinx when talking to his Latino constituents, he would load them onto the next bus back to Los Angeles.

“It’s just important that white liberals don’t impose their thoughts and policies on us,” he told me.

And nonwhite liberals too, he might have added.

Having lost twice to Trump in three election cycles, and this time watching Republicans reclaim control of the Senate, Democrats might do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans whom they claim to want to represent. This need not entail a turn away from populist economics so much as remaining clear-eyed about self-righteous rhetoric and millennialist demands.

The party might pay some heed to Torres, the Bronx representative. A veteran of political wars, he is a progressive Democrat on economic issues and has taken much grief of late from left activists for his vigorous support of Israel. He noted in our conversation that he is strongly in favor of immigration, and his majority-Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his aid.

But he recognizes that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, now seeks to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot just assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”

In an election year that fell decisively, disastrously short of utopian for Democrats, such advice registers as entirely practical.

The Democrats Need an Honest Conversation on Gender Identity

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 11 › democrats-dishonest-gender-conversation-2024-election › 680604

One of the mysteries of this election is how the Democrats approached polling day with a set of policies on gender identity that they were neither proud to champion—nor prepared to disown.

Although most Americans agree that transgender people should not face discrimination in housing and employment, there is nowhere near the same level of support for allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports—which is why Donald Trump kept bringing up the issue. His campaign also barraged swing-state voters and sports fans with ads reminding them that Kamala Harris had previously supported taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners. The commercials were effective: The New York Times reported that Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that one ad “shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor after viewers watched it.” The Harris campaign mostly avoided the subject.

Since the election, reports of dissent from this strategy have begun to trickle out. Bill Clinton reportedly raised the alarm about letting the attacks go unanswered, but was ignored. After Harris’s loss, Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts went on the record with his concerns. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the Times. The recriminations go as far as the White House, where allies of Joe Biden told my colleague Franklin Foer that the current president would have countered Trump’s ads more aggressively, and “clearly rejected the idea of trans women competing in women’s sports.”

One problem: Biden’s administration has long pushed the new orthodoxy on gender, without ever really explaining to the American people why it matters—or, more crucially, what it actually involves. His officials have advocated for removing lower age limits for gender surgeries for minors, and in January 2022, his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, refused to define the word woman, telling Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, “I’m not a biologist.”

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

On sports—an issue seized on by the Trump campaign—Biden’s White House has consistently prioritized gender identity over sex. Last year, the Department of Education proposed regulations establishing “that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are.” Schools were, however, allowed to limit participation in specific situations. (In April, with the election looming, this part of the Title IX revision was put on hold.) Harris went into the campaign tied to the Biden administration’s positions, and did not have the courage, or strategic sense, to reject them publicly. Nor did she defend them.  

The fundamental issue is that athletes who have gone through male puberty are typically stronger and faster than biological females. Rather than contend with that fact, many on the left have retreated to a comfort zone of claiming that opposition to trans women in women’s sports is driven principally by transphobia. But it isn’t: When trans men or nonbinary people who were born female have competed in women’s sports against other biological females, no one has objected. The same season that Lia Thomas, a trans woman, caused controversy by swimming in the women’s division, a trans man named Iszac Henig did so without any protests. (He was not taking testosterone and so did not have an unfair advantage.) Yet even talking about this issue in language that regular Americans can understand is difficult: On CNN Friday, when the conservative political strategist Shermichael Singleton said that “there are a lot of families out there who don’t believe that boys should play girls’ sports,” he was immediately shouted down by another panelist, Jay Michaelson, who said that the word boy was a “slur,” and he “was not going to listen to transphobia at this table.” The moderator, Abby Phillips, also rebuked Singleton, telling him to “talk about this in a way that is respectful.”

A few Democrats, such as Colin Allred, a Senate candidate in Texas, attempted to counter Republicans’ ads by forcefully supporting women’s right to compete in single-sex sports—and not only lost their races anyway, but were attacked from the left for doing so. In states such as Texas and Missouri, the political right is surveilling and threatening to prosecute parents whose children seek medical treatments for gender dysphoria, or restricting transgender adults’ access to Medicaid. In this climate, activists believe, the Democrats should not further jeopardize the rights of a vulnerable minority by legitimizing voters’ concerns. “Please do not blame trans issues or trans people for why we lost,” Sam Alleman, the Harris campaign’s LBGTQ-engagement director, wrote on X. “Trans folks have been and are going to be a primary target of Project 2025 and need us to have their backs now more than ever.”

During the race, many journalists wrote about the ubiquity—and the grimness—of the Trump ads on trans issues, notably Semafor’s David Weigel. But at the time, I was surprised how dismissive many commentators were about their potential effect, given the enormous sums of money involved. My theory was that these ads tapped into a larger concern about Democrats: that they were elitists who ruled by fiat, declined to defend their unpopular positions, and treated skeptics as bigots. Gender might not have been high on voters’ list of concerns, but immigration and the border were—and all the same criticisms of Democratic messaging apply to those subjects, too.

Not wishing to engage in a losing issue, Harris eventually noted blandly that the Democrats were following the law on providing medical care to inmates, as Trump had done during his own time in office. On the integrity of women’s sports, she said nothing.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

How did we get here? At the end of Barack Obama’s second term, gay marriage was extended to all 50 states, an achievement for which LGBTQ groups had spent decades campaigning. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County found that, in the words of conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, “an employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” Those advances meant that activist organizations, with large staffs and existing donor networks, had to go looking for the next big progressive cause. Since Trump came to power, they have stayed relevant and well funded by taking maximalist positions on gender—partly in reaction to divisive red-state laws, such as complete bans on gender medicine for minors. The ACLU, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, and other similar groups have done so safe in the knowledge that they answer to their (mostly wealthy, well-educated) donors, rather than a more diverse and skeptical electorate. “The fundamental lesson I hope Dem politicians take from this election is that they should not adopt positions unless they can defend them, honestly, in a one-on-one conversation with the median American voter, who is a white, non-college 50-yr-old living in a small-city suburb,” the author (and Atlantic contributing writer) James Surowiecki argued last week on X.

Even now, though, many Democrats are reluctant to discuss the party’s positions on trans issues. The day after Moulton made his comments, his campaign manager resigned in protest, and the Massachusetts state-party chair weighed in to say that they “do not represent the broad view of our party.” But Moulton did not back down, saying in a statement that although he had been accused of failing “the unspoken Democratic Party purity test,” he was committed to defending the rights of all Americans. “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chair of the Texas Democrats, faced a similar backlash. He initially told reporters, “There’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” but he quickly walked back the comments. “I extend my sincerest apologies to those I hurt with my comments today,” Hinojosa said. “In frustration over the GOP’s lies to incite hate for trans communities, I failed to communicate my thoughts with care and clarity.” (On Friday, he resigned, citing the party’s “devastating” election results in the state.)

The tragedy of this subject is that compromise positions are available that would please most voters, and would stop a wider backlash against gender nonconformity that manifests as punitive laws in red states. America is a more open-minded country than its toughest critics believe—the latest research shows that about as many people believe that society has not gone far enough in accepting trans people as think that it has gone too far. Delaware has just elected the first transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride. But most voters think that biological sex is real, and that it matters in law and policy. Instructing them to believe otherwise, and not to ask any questions, is a doomed strategy. By shedding their most extreme positions, the Democrats will be better placed to defend transgender Americans who want to live their lives in peace.

Trump Wins Not Just the White House but His Freedom

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 11 › trump-wins-not-just-white-house-his-freedom › 680582

Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday was not just an electoral success but a triumph over the legal system. In the years since reluctantly leaving office in 2021, he has been dogged by four separate criminal prosecutions for his various abuses of power before, during, and after his first term as president. Securing a second term was the simplest way to bring these prosecutions to an end, and now his path to doing so is clear—mostly.

That the country is even facing these questions is evidence of the novel—and frightening—position it now finds itself in. Trump has made history as the first person ever to be elected president with a felony record, having been convicted by a New York jury in May, but not yet sentenced. Additionally, he has been indicted in three other cases in both state and federal court, though these cases have not yet made it to trial, and now may never. An apparent majority of American voters decided that these charges, the bulk of which speak directly to Trump’s willingness to abuse the powers of the presidency and his refusal to acknowledge that the law might apply to him, were not disqualifying when they made their selection for the nation’s highest office. And now, because of their decision, Trump has won the impunity he so craved.

The federal cases are done for. The day after the election, reports began to surface that Special Counsel Jack Smith was already in conversation with the Justice Department about bringing his two prosecutions of Trump—one over his hoarding of classified documents, and one over his efforts to unlawfully hold on to power following the 2020 election—to an end before Trump swears the oath of office for a second time on January 20. If for any reason that doesn’t happen, Trump can simply order those cases dismissed—the Department of Justice answers to the president, after all. The state cases, over which Trump has no such power, are somewhat more of a puzzle. In no instance, however, is the answer satisfying for anyone who cares about seeing Trump brought to justice.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Treat Trump like a normal president]

Both of Smith’s cases had already been seriously weakened—particularly the charges concerning the classified documents. That case should have been the most straightforward. Trump appears to have blatantly ignored the law in taking classified materials with him after leaving office, and then refusing to hand that material back to the federal government when the FBI came knocking. But Smith got extremely unlucky when the case was randomly assigned to  the Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, who has been hamstringing the prosecution ever since with absurd delay after absurd delay. In July, she capped this off by dismissing the charges altogether, on the legally dubious grounds that Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed. Smith has appealed, leaving the documents case in limbo while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit weighs the arguments.

The other federal case concerns the president-elect’s failed attempt to unlawfully hold on to power after his loss in 2020. In court in Washington, D.C., prosecutors were stopped in their tracks for months while the Supreme Court considered what sort of presidential acts are immune from criminal prosecution. In July, the Court ruled that presidents enjoy extensive immunity for so-called official conduct. Following that, Judge Tanya Chutkan was tasked with figuring out which aspects of the charges might be salvageable, as Trump argued that the entire prosecution should be dismissed because of his newfound immunity. Smith has used the resulting back-and-forth as an opportunity to release material capturing Trump’s culpability: Most damningly, a filing by Smith states that when Trump was alerted on January 6 that a mob of rioters had broken into the Capitol and that then–Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger, he responded, “So what?”

Now, with Trump poised to reenter the Oval Office, the January 6 case will never make it to trial, and the Florida prosecution of Trump will never be resurrected. The only question is what precise sequence of events will lead to that outcome. Smith may be aiming to have both cases dismissed before Trump once again resumes the presidency, “to comply with long-standing department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted,” NBC first reported. The reasoning behind Smith’s reported conversations with the Justice Department is not entirely clear: Is the thinking that a trial will never come to pass, so it’s better to simply wind things down now? Or is it that the Justice Department’s prohibition on prosecuting a sitting president somehow also forbids moving forward with a prosecution of a president-elect?

Either way, this approach looks a lot like admitting defeat. The alternative would be for Smith to fight to the end and keep moving forward with the cases until Trump takes office, daring the new president to shut them down.

Such a confrontation could play out in a number of ways. Trump declared in October that he would “fire Smith in two seconds” after coming into office. He could make good on that threat and then order the Justice Department to drop the cases. Or he might even take the constitutionally untested step of pardoning himself. Whatever option he chooses, forcing him to take such a step would make obvious the magnitude and impropriety of Trump’s actions: a president abusing his authority to evade criminal accountability for his own wrongdoing. For all of Trump’s battles with the law, he has never tried to so directly quash a case against himself, even during the Mueller investigation. No president ever has.

When Richard Nixon tried to suppress the Watergate investigation, in 1973, setting in motion a series of Justice Department resignations during the “Saturday Night Massacre” until he managed to dismiss Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, the ensuing political inferno ultimately led to the end of Nixon’s presidency. There is not the slightest possibility that a dismissal of Smith and of the cases against Trump would have the same outcome—the erosion of political norms over the course of the first Trump presidency has seen to that. But there is still some power in letting Trump write himself into history this way.

The counterpoint, such as there is one, is that winding these cases down before Trump enters office might allow for a fuller public accounting of what exactly the once and future president has done. The Justice Department regulations under which Smith operates provide that, upon completing an investigation, the special counsel must provide a report of his work to the attorney general—who may “determine that public release of these reports would be in the public interest.” That’s the provision under which Robert Mueller wrote his famous report. But the Mueller report was delayed in its release thanks to political chicanery by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr—and likewise, there’s no guarantee that a Trump-selected attorney general or acting attorney general would lift a finger to release any Smith report. If Smith wraps up under the Biden administration, in contrast, it’s far more likely that the special counsel might be able to release a final accounting of Trump’s deeds to the public.

[Arash Azizi: Don’t give up on America]

The twist, of course, is that it’s hard to imagine that the same public that just elected this man to the presidency would care. At this point, it’s a truism to say that the legal system is not designed to deal with a criminal president or former president, and that the only solution was a political one—to vote him out. Well so much for that, too. What’s more, Trump will enjoy even greater impunity during his second term, thanks to wording in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling that seems to sharply limit the ability of any future special counsel to investigate a sitting president—if, that is, the special-counsel system survives Cannon’s ruling.

So that’s it for the federal cases. The state prosecutions represent a somewhat more complicated problem, simply because there’s no easy way for Trump to cleanly do away with them. The president has no authority over state criminal cases. Still, the prognosis is not much better.

In Georgia, the ungainly Fulton County prosecution of Trump and 18 other co-defendants for their effort to steal the 2020 election has been stalled since this summer, following a baffling scandal over the personal conduct of District Attorney Fani Willis. This July, a judge placed the case on hold while Trump pursued Willis’s disqualification from the prosecution—a matter that will come before the Georgia Court of Appeals in early December. If that court agrees that Willis is disqualified, another Georgia prosecutor would be appointed to the case, and would have the option of continuing to pursue the prosecution or dropping it entirely. That may be the end of the case right there.

If Willis survives the litigation, or if her replacement decides to move forward, whoever is leading the case will immediately run into two interrelated problems. The first is the very same Supreme Court immunity decision that has bogged down the federal case. Although that ruling directly concerned the federal charges against Trump over January 6, the conduct at issue in the Georgia indictment is substantially similar, and Trump would have strong arguments that the Court’s decision rules out some or all of the Georgia prosecution. The second problem is that, as the Justice Department has long held and as the immunity decision recognizes, there can be no criminal prosecution—even at the state level—of a sitting president. Trump would have no power to get rid of the case, but state prosecutors couldn’t proceed with it, either.

What then? Might prosecutors seek to somehow place the case on ice and unthaw it when Trump leaves office in 2028? “I think we are in an entirely uncharted territory,” Anthony Michael Kreis of Georgia State University College of Law, who has been following the Fulton County case closely, told me.

That leaves the New York case, in which Trump was already convicted on 34 felony counts in May. That verdict, which involved conduct unrelated to Trump’s official duties as president, should have been safe from the Supreme Court’s interference, but the Court contrived to meddle in the prosecution by inventing a bizarre rule largely prohibiting prosecutors from introducing evidence of official presidential acts, even when prosecuting unshielded private conduct. Trump immediately seized on this to argue that the verdict should be thrown out. As a result, his New York sentencing was delayed until after the election—it is now scheduled for November 26—and Justice Juan Merchan is set to rule on Trump’s immunity motion this coming Tuesday, exactly a week after the election.

Merchan once again finds himself in the unenviable situation of trying to work through how the law ought to apply to a particularly sui generis defendant. If the judge decides against tossing out the verdict and moves forward with sentencing, Trump’s defense lawyers may argue that sentencing should be put on hold until after Trump’s presidency. They could also seek to appeal any adverse immunity ruling in New York state courts and up to a potentially friendly Supreme Court. Trying to sort through what happens next requires traveling down the twists and turns of any number of fractals, but the bottom line is that the far-fetched scenario of a president being sworn in from the inside of a New York prison cell—always unlikely—is not going to occur.

All of this places Merchan in a very strange position. “Obviously the court is trying to proceed as if this is any other case, but it really isn’t,” Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and a professor at New York Law School, told me. But, she said of the New York case and the other Trump prosecutions, “from a perspective of the rule of law, it’s really important to follow it through to the end—even if in the end, it fizzles out.”

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

Besides Trump, other defendants who participated in his various schemes now have new hope of reprieve. Across the country, state cases outside the president’s control are moving forward against people involved in the 2020 fake-electors plot. Will the new administration attempt to leverage threats or political pressure to push state prosecutors to drop these charges? In Florida, Trump has two co-defendants, men who allegedly helped him hide classified documents from the FBI. Will he pardon them as well? What will happen to the five unindicted co-conspirators whom Jack Smith lists as aiding Trump’s unlawful effort to hold on to power in 2020—might Smith recommend charges against them as well, perhaps forcing Trump to pardon them? Or will they slip away?

And then there are the other January 6 defendants—the people who broke into the Capitol on Trump’s command, and whom he has repeatedly indicated he will pardon upon retaking office. Already, one defendant, Christopher Carnell, has unsuccessfully asked for his federal case to be halted, because he is “expecting to be relieved of the criminal prosecution that he is currently facing when the new administration takes office.” Lawyers for another defendant, Jaimee Avery, put the matter even more plainly in asking to delay her sentencing until after the inauguration: “It would create a gross disparity for Ms. Avery to spend even a day in jail when the man who played a pivotal role in organizing and instigating the events of January 6 will now never face consequences for his role in it.”

Legal arguments aside, they have a point. What moral logic is there to punishing rioters when American voters have decided to grant the instigator of the riot a free pass?

Treat Trump Like a Normal President

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 11 › trump-normal-popular-vote › 680578

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.

[Read: What can women do now?]

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.