It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it was in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election that the hyper-online concept of the hashtag-resistance began, but it didn’t take long. Legions of people who had either shied away from potentially divisive political conversations (or were easily able to forget their previous opposition to George W. Bush) stylized themselves as freedom fighters in what was sure to be a uniquely toxic era. Mostly, it was a coping mechanism—while anybody can surely admit when pressed that tweeting #resist is not a sincere form of activism, it wasn’t as though it was acting as a substitute for anything other than posting about one’s latest meal. There were inevitable feelings of helplessness, exacerbated by an administration that barely pretended to have interest in governing for those Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton.
There was, and is, an easy counterpoint that can be made from the political left—for as off-putting as Trump’s decorum could be, it wasn’t as though his practical agenda differed dramatically from boilerplate American conservatism. Trump ran on fantastical promises that inevitably did not come to fruition—a pledge to save American jobs in increasingly obsolete industries, a plan lacking even a first step to solve the American opioid crisis, and most infamously, a promise to build a massive wall across the southern border and force Mexico to pay for it. Trump, of course, did not accomplish any of these things, but he did get Congress to pass massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. His first three years were mostly par for the course for a Republican administration: even, in my opinion, his most egregious mistake, a lack of response to Hurricane Maria clearly inspired by his lack of belief that Puerto Rico is not really part of America, did not result in materially less efficient results than the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina. Bush mostly handled things, despite Kanye West’s comments to the contrary, with visible (if performative) empathy, while Trump’s idea of assistance was to throw toilet paper at the displaced like they were throwed rolls at Lambert’s Cafe, but when the end result is ultimately homelessness, small gestures of caring probably don’t matter that much.
From an administrative perspective, the low point of the Trump years was the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. To be clear, there were many factors beyond Trump’s control which were inevitably going to put the United States behind much of the western world in stopping the disease’s spread—stopping the disease relied heavily on individuals looking out for others, and treating the disease relied heavily on a functional health care system, and neither of those things are strengths of America before, during, or after Trump. But ultimately, it was so much worse than it needed to be. And the primary driver for this was that Donald Trump was motivated to win another term as president. A voluntary pause of the economy, which would destroy the metrics by which many undecided voters ultimately make their electoral decisions, was inconceivable.
When it came time to vote in November, most Americans saw an economy which had suffered simultaneously with a much higher mortality rate than the rest of the world. And while Donald Trump received a historic number of votes—more than any candidate prior to 2020 ever had—Joe Biden received even more. More relevantly from a practical perspective, Joe Biden had also won by the Electoral College, the bizarre and absurd but ultimately more significant system by which Americans actually choose their president. It took four days for major television networks to declare a winner, but this was more the result of an unusually high number of mailed ballots (many of which could not legally be counted until polls closed in their respective states) than of the race being particularly close—Biden had defeated Trump by an identical margin to Trump’s 2016 victory in the Electoral College, and it was the largest margin of victory by a candidate in the popular vote since 2008.
In 2016, in the very first election of Donald Trump’s political career, Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, and Trump responded by claiming that the fix was in. Ultimately, nothing came of this—Cruz retained his Iowa victory while Trump eventually ran away with the Republican nomination. By the time of the Trump/Hillary Clinton general election showdown, when asked if he would honor the results win or lose, Trump pledged to accept the election results if he won. Even in the wake of his victory, Trump claimed that he had actually won the 2016 popular vote but that corrupt Democrats had fixed the vote (as much as the Democrats of the 2010s could be questioned for their political acumen, “rigging an election that does not matter rather than the one that does” seems pretty dubious even by their standards). When Donald Trump claimed that the 2020 vote had been fixed, nobody who had paid attention could be surprised—no, he hadn’t done this before, but it was only because he had never needed to do so.
Almost immediately after January 6, 2021, there was a specific brand of norms fetishist that compared what happened at the United States Capitol to 9/11, and let me be very clear—from a perspective of tangible effect, this comparison is downright offensive. Not to diminish the deaths and injuries that occurred on that surreal Wednesday afternoon and evening, but in terms of pure scale, it was not close. It is ultimately an apples and oranges comparison. The real event to which January 6th could be compared reasonably in semi-modern American history is the Watergate scandal, the event which forced the lone resignation in the history of the American presidency. And yet, such a comparison seems offensive in the opposite direction. What Richard Nixon did—helping to cover up espionage committed by his political cronies—was a bad thing. What Donald Trump did was exponentially worse.
The only comparison in American history that seems even remotely close to what Trump did was the outright treason of John Tyler, the former president who served in the Confederate congress. And by the time that happened, John Tyler’s career in American politics was essentially over. Donald Trump is essentially a coin-flip to be the forty-seventh president of the United States. This after, with no tangible evidence and not even particularly compelling anecdotal evidence, Donald Trump not only refused to personally admit that Joe Biden had defeated him, but compelled his most fervent supporters to risk their own lives and freedom. He threatened to withhold critical support to Georgia governor Brian Kemp and secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, extremely conservative politicians by any definition of the word other than “ones with the most fealty specifically, individually, to Donald Trump”, if they couldn’t uncover the 11,780 votes that would have been necessary to make Trump victorious in Georgia. When the violent mob that Trump had incited chanted that Mike Pence, an extraordinarily sycophantic vice president for Trump during the first 99.42% of his term, should be hanged for his refusal to overturn the Electoral College results, Trump agreed with the mob.
Conservative Republicans, in the moment, condemned the violence, even if Donald Trump has proceeded to attempt to gaslight Americans into believing that what they could easily see play out on their televisions was not reality. But if what these Republicans were claiming—that a massive conspiracy had undermined the sincere will of the people in order to install an unelected commander-in-chief to the nation’s highest office—then committing property damage and boldly asserting that we would not stand for such a miscarriage of justice would be entirely justifiable. The problem, of course, is that Joe Biden had won the election. There were rightfully recounts in close states, and they further established that Joe Biden had won. Donald Trump, however, was incapable of admitting that he had lost, just as he had in the 2016 Iowa caucuses and just as he almost surely would have had Hillary Clinton won the Electoral College that November.
That Donald Trump was not convicted in his second impeachment trial, which would have formally prohibited him from holding office ever again, is a definitive example that convicting a president in the Senate is impossible in the modern era without a supermajority holding power. There was some case against voting to convict at Trump’s first impeachment trial; at the second, it was the equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s murder trial if the murders had also been caught on camera. And while all 48 Democrats and two independents (Angus King and Bernie Sanders, both of whom caucus with Democrats) voted to convict, only seven of the fifty Republicans in office voted for conviction. Of the seven, three have since left the Senate, one has announced his retirement at the end of his term, two have yet to face re-election, and only Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has survived into another term. There were grave consequences for many House Republicans who had voted for impeachment—most famously, Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a hyper-conservative politician, lost badly in the 2022 Republican primaries as a consequence of her vote for impeachment.
To be clear, Democrats should not run for office solely on January 6th as a political identity. While I believe in giving credit to the Liz Cheneys and Mitt Romneys of the world for doing the right thing, that doesn’t mean I believe that they should not be competed against for a litany of other reasons. But turning January 6th into the territory of the corniest of #Resistance libs is completely missing the point. This isn’t a matter of Donald Trump tweeting out something crass—this is a matter of Donald Trump outright prioritizing himself over the 81 million-plus people who contributed votes to Joe Biden’s winning 2020 campaign. My senator, noted coward Josh Hawley, should be forced forever to answer for the fact that he objected to recognizing the votes of Americans due to political expedience, and my representative, Ann Wagner, although she gets some modicum of credit for voting to recognize all electoral votes, should forever be forced to wear her “no” vote on Trump’s second impeachment. Only two of the ten Republicans from the 2020 class who voted to impeach Trump survived into a 2022 term; it is appalling that these representatives received such a backlash for doing the right thing while Republicans who catered to Donald Trump, some of whom had the audacity to claim that impeachment inquiries were unnecessary because Donald Trump was clearly done with his political life.
It sucks knowing that if justice is served and Donald Trump once again loses a presidential election, he isn’t going to concede. I am not even going to add a “probably not” caveat—he has proven repeatedly that he will not do this. He is once again going to encourage his supporters to fight the unfair system, and the only thing that might stop us from something on a 1/6/21 scale is that somebody other than Donald Trump will be in charge of dispatching security. But this is the point we’ve reached.
