The tone lately among Trump critics has shifted from “it’ll happen here if we don’t do something” to “it’s happening right now” because it’s hard to accept—even now—that the country we grew up in doesn’t care much about any of this. There remains a blind hope that Americans still don’t understand; if we raise our voices louder and dial up the urgency to 11, at last they’ll be roused.
They won’t be, though. They do understand. They don’t care. “The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump,” Sullivan acknowledged in his piece. “They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.” That’s a nice précis of the conclusions I’ve drawn in dozens of editions of this newsletter. Americans will not be roused. All indications are that they’re going to ride this rocket into the ground.
For once, Pete Hegseth is right: This is what the country voted for.
I’m glad to see fellow critics of the president refusing to look for their own excuses to let those voters off the hook morally for the choice they made. “Trump’s great authoritarian insight is that Americans will tolerate a lot more than you might think if they’re properly desensitized to the means and properly inflamed about the ends,” I wrote in June. As right-wingers openly fantasize about a “Bukele-style crackdown on D.C. crime,” ask yourself how much worse that desensitization might get.