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.

The Donald Trump who campaigned in 2024 would not have won in 2016. It’s not just that his rhetoric is more serrated now than it was then; it’s that he has a record of illicit behavior today that he didn’t have then.

Trump wasn’t a felon eight years ago; he is now. He wasn’t an adjudicated sexual abuser then; he is now. He hadn’t yet encouraged civic violence to overturn an election or encouraged a mob to hang his vice president. He hadn’t yet called people who stormed the Capitol “great patriots” or closed his campaign talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer. He hadn’t extorted an ally to dig up dirt on his political opponent or been labeled a “fascist to the core” by his former top military adviser.

But America is different now than it was at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump isn’t only winning politically; he is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores. More than any other person in the country, Trump—who won more than 75 million votes—can purport to embody the American ethic. He’s right to have claimed a mandate on the night of his victory; he has one, at least for now. He can also count on his supporters to excuse anything he does in the future, just as they have excused everything he has done in the past.

It’s little surprise, then, that many critics of Trump are weary and despondent. On Sunday, my wife and I spoke with a woman whose ex-husband abused her; as we talked, she broke into tears, wounded and stunned that Americans had voted for a man who was himself a well-known abuser. The day before, I had received a text from a friend who works as a family therapist. She had spent the past few evenings, she wrote, “with female victims of sexual abuse by powerful and wealthy men. Hearing their heartbreak and re-traumatizing because we just elected a president who bragged about assaulting women because he can, and then found guilty by a jury of his peers for doing just that. And then they see their family and neighbors celebrate a victory.”

The preliminary data show that Trump won the support of about 80 percent of white evangelicals. “How can I ever walk into an evangelical church again?” one person who has long been a part of the evangelical world asked me a few days ago.

[McKay Coppins: Triumph of the cynics]

I’ve heard from friends who feel as though their life’s work is shattering before their eyes. Others who have been critical of Trump are considering leaving the public arena. They are asking themselves why they should continue to speak out against Trump’s moral transgressions for the next four years when it didn’t make any difference the past four (or eight) years. It’s not worth the hassle, they’ve concluded: the unrelenting attacks, the death threats, or the significant financial costs.

So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.

And even those who resolve to stay in the public arena will be tempted to mute themselves when Trump acts maliciously. We tried that for years, they’ll tell themselves, and it was like shooting BBs against a brick wall. It’s time to do something else.

I understand that impulse. For those who have borne the brunt of hate, withdrawing from the fight and moving on to other things is an understandable choice. For everything there is a season. Yet I cannot help but fear, too, that Trump will ultimately win by wearing down his opposition, as his brutal ethic slowly becomes normalized.

So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?

First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.

Second, we need to guard our souls. The challenge for Trump critics is to call Trump out when he acts cruelly and unjustly without becoming embittered, cynical, or fatalistic ourselves. People will need time to process what it means that Americans elected a man of borderless corruption and sociopathic tendencies. But we shouldn’t add to the ranks of those who seem purposeless without an enemy to target, without a culture war to fight. We should acknowledge when Trump does the right thing, or when he rises above his past. And even if he doesn’t, unsparing and warranted condemnation of Trump and MAGA world shouldn’t descend into hate. There’s quite enough of that already.

In his book Civility, the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter wrote, “The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not in his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”

Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious.   

My view aligns with that of my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch, who told me that “this election mainly reaffirms voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment—not only in the U.S. but also abroad (Japan/Germany). In 2020, Biden and the Democrats were the vehicle to punish the incumbent party; in 2016 and again in 2024, Trump and the Republicans were the vehicle. Wash, rinse, repeat.” But that doesn’t mean that a party defeated in two of the previous three presidential elections by Trump, one of the most unpopular and broadly reviled figures to ever win the presidency, doesn’t have to make significant changes.

There is precedent—in the Democratic Party, which suffered titanic defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and in the British Labour Party, which was decimated in the 1980s and the early ’90s. In both cases, the parties engaged in the hard work of ideological renovation and produced candidates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who put in place a new intellectual framework that connected their parties to a public they had alienated. They confronted old attitudes, changed the way their parties thought, and found ways to signal that change to the public. Both won dominant victories. The situation today is, of course, different from the one Clinton and Blair faced; the point is that the Democratic Party has to be open to change, willing to reject the most radical voices within its coalition, and able to find ways to better connect to non-elites. The will to change needs to precede an agenda of change.

Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.

I anticipate that Trump’s victory will inflict consequential harm on our country, and some of it may be irreparable. But it’s also possible that the concerns I have had about Trump, which were realized in his first term, don’t come to pass in his second term. And even if they do, America will emerge significantly weakened but not broken. Low moments need not be permanent moments.

[Rogé Karma: The two Donald Trumps]

The Trump era will eventually end. Opportunities will arise, including unexpected ones, and maybe even a few favorable inflection points. It’s important to have infrastructure and ideas in place when they do. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me, “We have to think about America’s challenges and opportunities in ways that reach beyond that point. Engagement in public life and public policy has to be about those challenges and opportunities, about the country we love, more than any particular politician, good or bad.”  

It's important, too, that we draw boundaries where we can. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, but neither should we obsess over him. We must do what we can to keep him from invading sacred spaces. Intense feelings about politics in general, and Trump in particular, have divided families and split churches. We need to find ways to heal divisions without giving up on what the theologian Thomas Merton described as cutting through “great tangled knots of lies.” It’s a difficult balance to achieve.

Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood. The great Czech playwright (and later president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace, wrote that hope isn’t detached from circumstances, but neither is it prisoner to circumstances. The kind of hope he had in mind is experienced “above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a dimension of soul, he said, “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, according to Havel; it is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope properly understood keeps us above water; it urges us to do good works, even in hard times.

In June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy undertook a five-day trip to South Africa during the worst years of apartheid. In the course of his trip, he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at the University of Cape Town.

During his address, he spoke about the need to “recognize the full human equality of all of our people—before God, before the law, and in the councils of government.” He acknowledged the “wide and tragic gaps” between great ideals and reality, including in America, with our ideals constantly recalling us to our duties. Speaking to young people in particular, he warned about “the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.” Kennedy urged people to have the moral courage to enter the conflict, to fight for their ideals. And using words that would later be engraved on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery, he said this:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.  

No figure of Kennedy’s stature had ever visited South Africa to make the case against institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. The trip had an electric effect, especially on Black South Africans, giving them hope that they were not alone, that the outside world knew and cared about their struggle for equality. “He made us feel, more than ever, that it was worthwhile, despite our great difficulties, for us to fight for the things we believed in,” one Black journalist wrote of Kennedy; “that justice, freedom and equality for all men are things we should strive for so that our children should have a better life.”

Pressure from both within and outside South Africa eventually resulted in the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned at Robben Island during Kennedy’s visit because of his anti-apartheid efforts, was elected the first Black president of South Africa.

There is a timelessness to what Kennedy said in Cape Town three generations ago. Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters. That was true in South Africa in the 1960s. It is true in America today.