Resistance (At All Costs)

Some say there are five stages of grief; some seven. For the Resistance—those unhappy Americans so bitterly opposed to the election of Donald J. Trump—there were only ever two: denial and anger. It’s been an epic psychological fail, one with grave consequences for the country.

The denial stage was at least short-lived. I witnessed its immediate form at the election party I hosted at my Virginia home that November 8, 2016. I love anyone who loves politics (and a good party), so we played host to guests of every political persuasion: Clinton supporters, Trump supporters, and even one poor soul still pining for Ron Paul. I was busy flitting inside for drinks, outside to where we’d erected a TV projection screen, and back to my computer to compare notes with WSJ colleagues about what had become a surprisingly tight race. On one such run I suddenly noticed small groups of Trump supporters staring avidly at the screen. I noticed an equal number of Clinton supporters drifting—dazedly, confusedly—toward cars. It was around midnight, and reality had hit: Hillary Clinton could not win. “President Trump,” murmured one Clinton supporter as I wished her safe travels. “It’s inconceivable. It can’t happen.”

It did happen, and for the most part, denial faded. The more radical anti-Trumpers would, of course, continue to deny Trump’s legitimacy. Some rolled out the left’s favorite complaint: the Electoral College. Trump had lost the majority vote, they said, and therefore Hillary should be president. Tell that to the Founders. Days and weeks after the inauguration, anti-Trumpers would seize on a yet more explosive argument for why Trump was not lawful: He had colluded with Russians to “steal” the election. But that conspiracy came later.

At the time, most Americans just geared up for the Trump inauguration. On one side was the Trump base, wild with joy that their candidate had proven the media and elites decidedly wrong. In the middle, a crucial number of voters who had pulled the lever for Trump, albeit reluctantly, and only because they would not tolerate another President Clinton. Also in the middle, Clinton supporters who were disappointed—but not unhinged—by the result. And finally, on the other end, a solid mass of Trump haters who had already decreed the president-elect a racist and a dictator, and who in a few short days of Trump’s election would become, officially, “the Resistance.”

They were fueled by that second stage, anger, and it was something to behold. Within hours of Clinton’s concession, anti-Trumpers had taken over the streets, engaged in candlelight vigils, marches, riots. Crowds seethed around the Trump Tower in downtown Chicago. Demonstrations broke out in every major U.S. city, from Los Angeles to Dallas to Minneapolis to New York. People wept. People wailed. Anti-Trump protestors in Oakland, California, threw Molotov cocktails and M-80 firecrackers at police. Angry individuals hoisted banners that read “Time to Revolt” or “Make America Smart Again.” Portland, Oregon, protestors took over the city for most of a week, blocking highways, delaying buses, vandalizing businesses and cars. One anarchist justified the violence to The Oregonian by explaining that no one should expect “black youth” to be “peaceful” when “Nazis are going to kill them.” Twitter was besieged with hashtags: #nevermypresident; #notmypresident; #StillWithHer. Cornell students gathered for a “cry-in.” The University of Kansas urged students to make use of therapy dogs. The University of Michigan comforted distraught students with coloring books and Play-Doh.

The nation’s liberal punditocracy meanwhile took to their computers. A rare few approached the task with almost touching normality. Eric Frazier, a self-described progressive editor for the Charlotte Observer, described his disappointment with the results, but suggested folks “move on.” “Congratulate a Trump supporter,” he said, and “accept defeat.” There were “rational reasons why Hillary Clinton lost,” including that the “economic pain” of Trump’s “rural, white blue-collar base is very real.” “Remember,” he wrote, “it wasn’t going to be the end of the world no matter who won.”

Few agreed. Timothy Egan of the New York Times explained in his post-election column that he hadn’t “felt this way since the nuns told our second-grade class that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.” The New Yorker’s David Remnick penned a piece titled “Presidential Election 2016: An American Tragedy,” in which he decried the triumph of “nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny and racism,” and, of course, brought up George Orwell. “It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety,” he lamented. Paul Krugman, the NYT’s reliably incorrect economist, offered his own apocalyptic prediction. “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

Krugman’s prediction turned out to be among the least hysterical. Trump critics declared an end to democracy as we knew it, under an administration primed to commit every manner of crime, abuse, and offense. No claim was too wild. Trump would strip women, the LGBT community, and voters in general of their rights. He’d deport the Dreamers and block liberal groups from providing any women’s services. Progressives predicted Trump would encourage reprisals against Muslim citizens.

Rolling Stone quoted an anonymous “prominent rights leader” explaining that Trump would probably use “surveillance power to go after critics.” The same piece quoted ACLU executive director Anthony Romero bracing for a “full-blown ‘civil liberties crisis.’” Other outlets suggested Trump already had a “secret enemies list,” à la Nixon, and that he’d turn the state on those targets. Not a day passed when Trump was not compared to Hitler, a fascist, a monster, or a bigot. Columnists further fanned fears by noting that there was no “check” on the budding autocrat. As Egan explained in his initial post-election column: “Those who think Trump can be contained, or trained by seasoned K street hacks to act reasonable, are deluding themselves.…The Republicans will control everything, including the Supreme Court. Washington is theirs, with minimal checks and balances.”

These warnings didn’t fade. As recently as June 2019, presidential candidate Joe Biden in Iowa explained that Trump “poses three fundamental threats to America” and that one of these was to our “democracy.” “Everywhere you turn, Trump is tearing down the guardrails of democracy,” said Uncle Joe. “We’re at a moment when we need to reset constitutional norms in this country.”

People didn’t like Trump the man, true. It was outrageous to the left that the real estate baron they had written off as a joke and an imbecile had won, and had done so by appealing to the very fly-over America the elite holds in such contempt. Add to this Donald J. Trump’s almost unparalleled ability to infuriate his opponents. It isn’t just his blunt, impolitic style. Over the decades, the press and liberal elites had grown accustomed to setting the rules of the game, scolding Republicans who failed to play by them, and accepting the ensuing apologies. Trump, infuriatingly, refused to play.

But what few on the left or in the media would acknowledge is that this anger also came from something completely aside from Trump. It was a seething fury over losing in general—in particular over losing such a consequential election.

Every presidential election matters—but some matter more. The 2016 election mattered lots, coming as it did after eight years of Barack Obama’s experiment with liberal government. The 44th president had proven one of the more radical in modern history, relentlessly pushing to expand the size of federal government, regulate or take over private industry, and stock the courts with activist judges. A Republican Congress had nonetheless forced him to do much of this via regulation and executive order—all of which could be undone.

Democrats had soaring ambitions for a Hillary Clinton presidency. She would cement Obama’s gains and put the nation irrevocably on a path to progressive enlightenment. Obama had given the federal government sweeping new control over private health care; Clinton would use anger over the resulting soaring prices to pivot to true, government-run care. Obama erected a hulking new bureaucracy to micromanage the energy and finance sectors; Clinton would cement those regulations for eight more years, making it impossible for Republicans to dismantle them. Obama raised taxes on the wealthy; Clinton would make that the new norm and continue to grow the size of government. A Clinton administration would protect Obama’s legally dubious moves: the Paris Climate Accord, his executive immigration orders, his crackdown on religious freedom. And the granddaddy of ambitions? The Supreme Court was finally, tantalizingly up for grabs. A Republican Senate had blocked Obama from putting his nominee, Merrick Garland, in the seat of the recently deceased Antonin Scalia. Clinton would see that nomination through. For the first time since Nixon, there would be five reliably liberal justices on the Court, potentially more if another conservative retired or died during a Clinton presidency.

Trump’s victory demolished this dream. And the left’s rage was against everyone and everything. It was furious at its own side—that the party had been so foolish as to settle for its heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, and close its eyes to her failures and baggage. A growing and ascendant progressive wing of the party was still angry that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the primary against its favorite, Bernie Sanders.

It was furious with Republicans overall—particularly that the GOP had blocked Obama from doing more in his time in office. “Dear people who spent eight years demonizing Obama at every turn and are now tweeting me to ‘give Trump a chance’ on day 1: Trust is earned,” declared American actor Seth MacFarlane. Democrats raged over the Garland nomination, throwing it out as an immediate reason for why the party should deny Trump cooperation on anything.

The left was furious at any group or body that it felt might have played a role in allowing Trump to happen. That included pollsters, who had misgauged the depth of Trump support and led Clinton into false security; the FBI, which had briefly reopened the probe into Clinton’s private server right before the election, potentially depressing her turnout; women, for the crime of supposedly voting against their own self-interest; and, of course, the media, for giving Trump so much air time. Anti-Trumpers poured particular venom on CBS executive chairman and CEO Les Moonves, who during the campaign bluntly celebrated Trump’s effect on TV income and ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” he told a conference in February 2016.

And the rage only increased as the election results sank in. It suddenly crystallized for Democrats not just that they’d lost, but just how true it was that Trump wasn’t the typical Republican president. Republicans always run on lower taxes, fewer regulations, and smaller government. But the left and the media had become good over past decades at browbeating Republican candidates and presidents out of a truly conservative agenda. They’d barrage them with criticism in sensitive policy areas like the environment, or health care, or poverty programs, and the GOP would step back. Republican leaders changed things, but only slowly and around the edges.

Trump, Democrats realized in horror, really didn’t give a toss what anyone thought of him. Moreover, he seemed to care deeply about fulfilling his campaign promises. The Paris Climate Accord? Gone. All those climate-change rules? Gone. Obamacare? Trump would repeal it, if at all possible. The judiciary? Candidate Trump’s 2016 list of potential Supreme Court nominees included an all-star roster of textualist jurists and thinkers. And as the NYT’s Egan morosely pointed out, Trump had also carried to victory a Republican House and Senate. He had the allies to pass his agenda. Democrats hadn’t just lost their fairy-tale castle in the sky; they’d landed a dragon.

The left’s hatred of Trump the man combined with its fury over its loss to create an epic level of rage. We have no way of knowing whether this anger has any equal in history. What we do know is that history had never before provided the twenty-first-century tools that would allow this fury to explode and grow and endure. Social media gives Trump critics the ability to immediately organize and to perpetuate a state of permanent anti-Trump outrage. Twenty-four-hour cable stations, flanked by hundreds of Internet outlets, seize on every accusation—collusion, corruption, incompetence—and stoke and push the charges into every home, transforming “news” into a new form of political takedown.

And within days, the anger turned into a formal, committed movement. Indeed, the speed with which the idea of resisting Trump morphed into an official “Resistance” movement was remarkable. At first, it was just liberal polemicists decrying the election results. New York Times columnist Charles Blow, in a November 10 column titled “America Elects a Bigot,” lamented that America had chosen a man who “appeared in pornos” and “boasted of assaulting women.” He concluded: “I respect the presidency; I do not respect this president-elect. I cannot. Count me among the resistance.”

Perhaps the first post-election formalization of the term came with a viral video from liberal personality Keith Olbermann, via GQ’s website. He predicted: “At some juncture soon there will be the resistance. Those of us who warned against and pleaded against and fought against this madness will find avenues for dissent, which will have enough support to at least impede this monster.” He added his own twist on Churchill (with no apologies to the conservative hero): “We shall fight online. We shall fight in the press and on television. We shall fight on the street corners of public opinion. We shall never surrender.” Within a week of the election, the San Francisco Chronicle’s political writer, Joe Garofoli, had given the word a capital “R.” He called on Americans to “unfurl out of the fetal position, stop moaning to your Facebook friends, and do something positive if you’re seething or freaked out or scared by the prospect of President-elect Donald Trump.” What would that be? Garafoli explained: “Organizers are urging anti-Trumpers to join the Resistance.”

Join they did. By Inauguration Day, that Resistance was fully organized. And it was on that day that it became clear that the Resistance was something all its own and particularly corrosive to democracy.

I’d agreed on Inauguration Day to provide commentary for CBS News, which involved getting across D.C. in a car. That meant picking our way through the inaugural crowds. I saw plenty of concerned citizens calmly walking with anti-Trump signs. They were engaging in the kind of peaceful political protest that is a hallmark of American society and of which we should generally be proud.

But I also saw people smashing car windows, racing in mobs after anyone in a MAGA hat, screaming taunts and insults at the media. They were the folks already holding the “Impeach” signs and promising they would not stop until Trump was forcibly removed from office. The claims of illegitimacy, the scorched-earth tactics—that’s the official Resistance.

And that is why it is so important to make distinctions. Here’s an important one: Not everyone who passionately dislikes Trump is part of the radical Resistance. Plenty of average Americans don’t want this president and are committed to seeing him leave office. But they want to see that happen via the ballot box in 2020; they are not willing to break all the rules to get an earlier result.

Contrast the tactics of the Resistance, for instance, to its putative forbearer—the Never Trump movement. Trump had faced down his own GOP mutiny in the months leading to and following his nomination. The Never Trumpers counted among their ranks every type of conservative: grassroots activists, pundits, faith leaders, politicians, former Republican officials. And Trump had given each of them an ostensible reason to oppose his nomination.

In the course of a year’s campaign, the real estate mogul had deployed some shocking language and behavior. He’d mocked a disabled reporter. He’d taunted his primary rivals—making fun of Carly Fiorina’s face, calling Jeb Bush “dumb as a rock,” and ridiculing the size of Marco Rubio’s ears. Some voters—many who’d watched Trump in his reality TV days—wrote it off as Trump-shtick. Others found it refreshing, an antidote to too-polished politicians. But for many Republicans, it was a mark on his character.

He’d rattled a number of Republicans with his policy proposals, particularly the biggies of trade and immigration. The GOP had long hailed itself the free-trade party. Trump, while claiming to be a free-trader, railed against pacts that he claimed were a continued “rape of our country.” Republican leaders for years had pushed for a grand immigration bargain and a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. Trump came down on the side of local officials and base voters who instead wanted more border security, and he promised to build a “great wall.”