In 2017, on the first anniversary of Donald Trump being elected president of the United States, I compiled a two-part series, “American Voices,” in which I called upon some very smart people to contribute their thoughts on why it happened, what it means, and how, or if, we survive it.
That was then and this is . . . still then.
Remarkably but not surprisingly, considering the dystopia that a gleeful, vindictive, neither new nor improved Donald Trump promises, their insights hold up well, maybe too well, and I thought it was worth reprinting them. The anger, frustration, and angst that was evident then is back, only it’s worse. Unlike last time, when we could only image the coming horror, we now have little doubt about what’s coming. Some of those in the piece have changed jobs, moved on, retired, untethered themselves from social media, but all of their voices — their hearts and minds and “live eyes,” as Pete Seeger once described such souls — are still palpable and invaluable.
Part One
It was 7:21 p.m. on November 8, 2016. I was leaving the house to do a political podcast with Ziva Branstetter, then-executive editor of The Frontier. The TV was on and as I opened the front door, I looked back and saw that in Florida, with 92 percent of the vote recorded, Trump was up by about 2 percent. The state wasn’t being called because, since the 2000 election, the state is never called.
North Carolina was gone. Virginia was too close.
You could tell.
It’s over.
Not just Florida. All of it.
Donald J. Trump would be president of the United States.
There was supposed to be history. Instead there was cheap wine.
The next day, talking with then-Esquire editor Mark Warren, I mentioned acceptance, will of the people, other pablum. He was furious. "The RESISTANCE," he said—all caps—"begins today."
And so it did.
What follows are some of those national voices in, of, and around the resistance—on this, its first anniversary.
Garrett Epps
American legal scholar, professor of law at the University of Baltimore, contributing editor for The Atlantic (Baltimore, MD)
My feelings on this issue are mixed. In some ways, the "hard-wired" parts of our system are functioning as designed. For example, the dismissal of Comey required the recusal of Sessions under DOJ rules that are written down, and that led to Mueller. The lower courts have been very careful in assessing the legality of apparently popular Trump initiatives like the "travel ban" and the "sanctuary city" crackdown. Trump keeps losing in lower court. On the other hand, the customary parts of the system are showing a lot of strain. For example, the First Amendment protects the right to protest, and it also protects the right of public officials to criticize protest. It does not, as a matter of custom and, to a lesser extent, law, protect the "right" of a powerful official to demand the dismissal of people who protest legally in ways he dislikes. Trump is attempting to change that norm and having some success in chilling the atmosphere of civil liberties in this country. The administration is having some success bending the executive branch to its will. In addition, as it learns from its mistakes, it is liable to become more effective in promulgating policies that seem racist and authoritarian but are less clumsy than the original travel ban and the sanctuary order. The administration is changing the nature of the federal judiciary by a systematic campaign to appoint extreme rightists, who are liable to be receptive to its arguments, not because they are personally pro-Trump, but because their ideology is authoritarian and in favor of executive power. So, the long-term prospects are very troubling.
Dave Barry
Syndicated columnist, Pulitzer Prize winner (Miami, FL)
I see two predominant moods: anger and disgust. The fervently anti-Trump people, who loathe Trump and, increasingly, anybody who voted for him; and the fervently pro-Trump people who are angry that the other side refuses to accept the election result. Neither side talks, or listens, to the other. The disgust also comes from the people in the middle—the majority, I think—who are sick and tired of the relentless vitriol, the politicization of everything, and the feeling that we’re not going to get out of this impasse any time soon.
Robert Bateman
Former career officer and strategist, U.S. Army Infantry; International Security Fellow with New America (Chesapeake Bay)
For a quarter of a century I avoided politics. That was the ethic of my profession. My political neutrality made it easier to focus on my job and to maintain intellectual friendships across the spectrum. This is where the idea of #resist is failing America. The #resistance concept closes doors, emotionally and intellectually, that could lead to unification, and unified these efforts must be to be effective. Today I have friends, former Republicans, who are virulent in their opposition. Openly. In writing. Often. But #resistance throws them off, and thus any concept of unification of an effort in support of a common goal is bifurcated, trifurcated, split into fragments that can make each splinter feel empowered but which have little actual purchase. As a historian, all I can offer is an observation.
Ziva Branstetter
Senior editor at The Center for Investigative Reporting (Emery, CA)
We’d planned a broadcast via Facebook Live for the entire night. I asked my then-20-year-old son, Parker, to help out on election night at The Frontier because I wanted him to experience the excitement of a newsroom during a presidential election. I don’t remember exactly what I said to Parker, who was clearly upset about the results. I stashed away a few bottles of wine for after we wrapped up our coverage, and we also had a half-full bottle of some kind of peach vodka that someone had given us. As the results of the election became clear, I was glad we had alcohol on hand to numb the shock of what had just happened.
As a journalist, of course, I’m not part of the resistance or the opposition to President Trump or his agenda. As a profession, though, journalists certainly did our part to resist Trump’s attempt to make a wide swath of the public doubt our credibility, our commitment to the truth, our motivation, and even the most basic facts as we reported them. Thanks to the work of journalists since last November, there have been hundreds of revelations about conflicts of interest, lies, outrageous behavior, and just plain ineptitude that have contributed to a growing public understanding. Who knows where it will lead? As I often told my reporters through the years, this is a marathon, not a sprint. We all need to lace up our shoes and keep running.
Linda Charnes
Professor of English, Renaissance Studies, and Western European Studies, Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)
On this first anniversary of the resistance, there is a bunkering in. Literally, as some are digging bunkers for the nuclear apocalypse, but also figuratively. Many of us experienced an uncharacteristic magical thinking after November 8th—that someone—anyone—would ride in on a winged horse and nullify the election on the grounds of fraud, roll purging, gerrymandering, Russian interference, rank fraudulence of the orange huckster, his vulgarity, ignorance, and incompetence, his personality disorders, or even the Scotch Tape on the back of his overly-long red tie. But nobody rode in, and with a variety of coping mechanisms, we are now living with the shortening of our telomeres.
The resistance has achieved something wondrous: We’ve tripled the "Five Stages of Grief" to fifteen: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Overeating, Day-Drinking, Bargaining with Pets, Sheer Disbelief (the Director’s Cut), Pathetic Hope, Hedged Despair, Day-Sleeping, Marching, Signing Petitions, Head-Banging, and Mueller Worship. However, we did bump one category from the former Five: Acceptance. We do not accept, and we never will. The prognosis may not be good, but we defy augury because we are progressives. There is a special providence in the fall of an orange albatross. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
Come what may, the rest will not be silence.
John H. Richardson
Journalist, author of "On the Road with the Birthers," "My Father the Spy," and "The Last Abortion Doctor," (New Orleans, Manila, Mexico)
I’ve read all the stuff about Trump supporters being racists or full of nostalgia for a world that never was, and I’m not going to dispute it—there’s truth in it, no doubt—but when I meet a person, I like to try to see the person and not a sociological category. For instance, I met a guy at a gun show who hated Obama for reasons that seemed caught up in racism, but he also had a bi-racial grandchild and doted on her.
As to America in the age of Trump, it’s a horror show. He’s destabilizing our alliances, tearing apart our social fabric (such as it is), and injecting poison into our minds on a daily basis. My take is that the world is coming at us so fast. Globalism and the helplessness we all feel after the financial crash of 2008 revealed without a doubt that the supposedly smart people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. [It] is destabilizing all of us.
In fact, that gives me more sympathy for the classic Republican arguments about small government and states’ rights and even a different perspective on gun rights. The world is out of our control. Maybe it always was. An eco-radical I know says a lot of eco-radicals voted for Trump because they figured he would be the candidate most likely to bring down the system. I tend to agree with the argument that "nihilism" like that is part of what motivated Trump voters—the system is so fucked up, why not just throw a bomb in it. I think we all feel a touch of that, and not without reason, even if liberals such as myself tend to frantically suppress it. Maybe it’s all wrapped up into a ball and half our explanations are wrong, but the intuition is more important than our explanations.
Dahlia Lithwick
Amicus podcast host, reporter on courts and the law for Slate (Brooklyn, NY)
The resistance has both kept me alive in the past year and is slowly killing me. It keeps me alive because it connects me to a vast, sprawling, decentralized machine of outrage and passion—people who remind me every day that this is not normal, not okay, not even imaginable. It’s killing me because, like everyone, I am exhausted and numb, with every day fractionally worse than the day before, and the cruelty of targeting DACA kids, women, Muslims, NFL athletes, immigrants, the poor, and the sick takes a toll. And this all happens as a demonstrably unwell man tweets at us about his ratings and his ego. It is easy to get frustrated with our friends on the left, with their purity tests and their need to be right as opposed to effective.
But there is SUCH power in getting offline and going to rallies, marches, fundraisers, and events in which you see people at their best and not in their social media flatness. If you are at a computer slowly drowning, I think you need to shut it down. Not for "self care" in the check-out mani/pedi sense. But to join something really good and powerful on a street or in a café or your government.
My son tells me his best day of the last year was the night a bunch of moms made soup for Syrian refugees and raised thousands of dollars as a small Syrian kid followed him around the room. The resistance only works if you can find what’s best in one another, and that doesn’t happen refreshing social media or losing your mind at the tweets of a madman. The resistance has been maddening because we are casting about like children for leaders and, more often than not, we are the leaders we are looking for
PART 2
In this, part two of "American Voices," we hear from more of those grappling with a bifurcated America. Like those featured in last issue’s part one, the columnists, historians, songwriters, and lawyers featured here take the divide personally. They’re liberals—they’re progressives, yes, but they’re Americans. And that’s the point.
Since Nov. 8, 2016, they don’t recognize our country.
And Donald Trump doesn’t recognize them.
Bob Kincaid
Co-founder of the Appalachian Community Health Emergency (ACHE) Act of Coal River Mountain Watch (Fayette County, WV)
At the opening of David Lynch’s "Dune," Princess Irulan declares, "A beginning is a very delicate time." That’s what the resistance feels like in Appalachia. Living in the Trumpiest place on Earth, resisting him and all the harm he is doing in my state is like clog-dancing on an eggshell stage. Unlike other places where people may be rousing from their Trumpioid nod, most of my fellow hillbillies remain true to the faith that he will do something, anything, for West Virginia. That, combined with our opioid epidemic, makes the matter of resistance a smidgen more, well, risky. The resistance is, however, very real. The Cult of Coal, Faith of Fracking, and Passion of the Pipelines are totems of Trumpism, and that’s where the Appalachian resistance stands and fights. We may even be better prepared for it. For those of us who know our history, Trump is just another in a century-long parade of funny-talking furriners looking to take what little we have. For us, a year in, the resistance is downright existential.
Jerry Izenberg
Columnist emeritus, The Star-Ledger (Henderson, NV)
Every time I ask myself how Donald Trump got to be president, this voice that lives in the backroads of my mind shouts back two words at me: "George Santayana.’’ It reminds me of the warning of this Spanish-born American philosopher: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I’m 87 years old, and I was born into an era in which hate was finally silent. But it wasn’t that way at all. We were about to live through America’s most frightening time. When I was seven, my grandfather’s tombstone was toppled and mutilated with the addition of a hand-drawn swastika.
As a nine-year-old kid, I sat with my old man in Newark’s Newsreel Theater and watched 18,000 German-American Bund members sympathizing and croaking their hate in Madison Square Garden. I knew about Camp Nordland and Camp Siegfried in my state, where kids my age marched in their Hitler Youth uniforms and their fathers fired rifles. After V-E Day my older cousin told me about the big white buttons a lot of kids in his high school class wore to class the next day: "First the Nazis. Next the Japs. Then the Jews.’’
But we survived it—just as America survived a terrifying depression and a frightening flirtation with evil.
But here we are again.
If we were too naive to see it, Charlottesville awakened the last of us. What do today’s protests mean? Don’t expect a man who thinks the Chinese invented global warming to hurt his business to understand. It’s over for him. It’s just a matter of time.
That’s how America works.
Lylah M. Alphonse
Managing editor for news, U.S. News & World Report (Boston)
A year after businessman Donald Trump’s victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the resistance is energized. Or the resistance is stalled out. Or the resistance is waiting for the opportune moment. Or the resistance has tossed its pink pussy hats into the closet and turned off the TV. Which is to say that the resistance is going strong or petering out, depending on which bubble you were in on Nov. 8, 2016.
Those who were aghast on Election Day were raring to go early on. Much of the media are offering up daily fodder for outrage, and resisters spend a lot of time thrashing former friends, adjusting profile pictures, and posting inspirational (but not always accurate) tidbits on Facebook or reading or writing multi-part rants on Twitter. All that action seems mainly aimed at decrying what Trump is doing, but it may be too soon to see actual change. For those who were elated on Election Day, the resistance may seem to be waning. While one side focuses on Trump’s Tweet-du-jour or spends hours dissecting each press briefing, the other is loudly applauding anything that could be considered an achievement.
Or maybe the state of the resistance one year later is simply this: It’s no longer really about Trump. He is the president, after all; it’s time to let election night go. The media, real and fake, have picked their sides—the media isn’t a monolith—but resisting means rededicating oneself to fact-finding and truth, to recalibrating what’s acceptable in society, to seeking information and not just confirmation. It’s a quieter kind of protest, but it’s one that has room to grow.
William Martin
New York Times bestselling author (Boston)
I didn’t go down to a campaign office and sign up for the resistance. I am just a guy at the center of the political spectrum, neither registered Republican or Democrat. I write historical novels, so I have spent my life studying human nature, so I know hypocrisy. I also know about the separation of fact from opinion, of good research from bought-and-paid-for baloney, of multiple-source news stories from fake news. I also know about trying to see a moment in time through multiple sets of eyes in order to understand it. That’s called empathy, I guess. So maybe I can understand the hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell when he decides to destroy the Constitution in order to save it (see Supreme Court seat, stolen), or of Donald Trump whenever he opens his mouth. We have a president who says or does something every day that needs answering. Otherwise, we give in to what the psychologists call "the normalization of deviance." But the real task, for the organized resistance and for the resistance put up by novelists on Facebook, is to persuade the 40 percent of American people who did not vote last year to recognize, as Obama once said, that elections have consequences. Well, hell yeah, they do. So, you like a free press, a Constitution, Social Security, Medicare, racial equality, clean air, a forward-looking economy, an equitable tax system, dry streets in seacoast cities, a sense of pride in being an American when you go abroad? I could go on, but if you like any of that ... RESIST ... however you can.
Roy Zimmerman
Political satirist, musician (San Francisco)
The 2016 election season was an un-fun roller coaster that ended in a brick wall. But after a period of shock and denial, the resistance kicked in, particularly after the Women’s March. Sometimes I think satire is the most hopeful and heartfelt form of expression, because in calling out the world’s absurdities I’m affirming the real possibility for change.
Jennifer Taub
Professor at Vermont Law School (Northampton, MA)
There will be the other side of this war on truth and decency. Sometimes I imagine that I’m standing there on the other side, looking back at all that has transpired. Mostly how I feel is proud. Proud of all of us who, even through the tears and doubt, kept our spirits up and kept resisting, moving forward, supporting each other, and began building the better world we envision. There will be much work to do on the other side, but we will have each other then, too.
Kathy Bader
Assistant vice provost, Duke University (Washington D.C.)
I’m afraid the world will blow up, dry up, and destroy the lives of my children and grandchildren. I wonder what comes next, and what resistance really means. Last night I watched clips on Sandy Hook and cried to learn of Principle Dawn Hochsprung sending her staff to safety through the back window, then going into the lobby to save her children and face her death. Her husband said, "Where does that come from? She was five-feet, two-inches for god’s sake!" I don’t know where that comes from, but we had better find it. The gunman is in the lobby.
Professor and Department of History head, Oklahoma State University (Stillwater, OK)
The resistance has been both electrifying and infuriating. The solidarity, diversity, and scope of the Women’s March was awe-inspiring. But the vandalism and violence seen in Portland and Berkeley were counterproductive tactics that achieved little beyond providing fuel for Trump’s "both sides" myth. And while it is heartening to see people refusing to respond with apathy to the relentless assault the administration is making on civil liberties, the environment, social welfare programs, and a liberal international order that took a century to build, the cynic in me is not convinced it has done much to stop the juggernaut. Unless people translate that outrage into running for office and voting (and here’s hoping the Supreme Court will provide much-needed help in the form of striking down gerrymandering), we may not see the paradigmatic political shift we need to guard essential precepts of American life, leadership, and equality of opportunity.
James M. Cullen
Managing editor, The Progressive Populist (Manchaca, TX)
The resistance has organized largely on the Internet, with the progressive press helping to identify the targets, and the coalition has racked up a pretty good record in the first year, knocking down three shots at the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, and fighting the Trump administration and Congress to a standstill on the worst of the bad bills. Republicans have been working for more than 80 years to overturn the New Deal’s reforms that regulated capitalism and enabled the recovery from the Great Depression. The resistance will have to keep fighting back by getting the word out whichever way they can. But it was a great first year.
I'm here for Round 3. Just sayin'. ...
With me, it's not depression. It's pure, distilled 99 44/100% anger that ever guard-rail of democracy: the courts, the media, what used to be the Republican Party, the disappearing spine of the Democratic Party-- all of it, has crumpled like a drunk plowed into it at 90 MPH.
Which, come to think of it ...
What Kathy Bader said. Of course, what everyone said. The past near-decade has been exhausting and demoralizing. We are drowning from the firehose. The all-clear has been given for violence against women. I feel like Sisyphus, rolling that fucking rock to no avail.