We’re smarter than that now
I saw a headline yesterday that claimed liberals are being passive about Donald Trump this time around and are rationalizing that it won’t be all that bad. I understand where such an article could come from. After all, we’re not out in the streets marching by the millions this time around. We’re not hanging “RESIST” banners from cranes and such. But I think that’s because we’re smarter and savvier about it this time around.
Last time around we did manage to get our message across clearly by taking a foot stomping approach to Trump’s 2017 inauguration. We made clear to the rest of the general public that we were not going to sit back and let Trump do whatever awful things he wanted. We made clear that we were going to fight him. And fight him we did, though we were often learning on the job about how to fight him.
This time around it’s as if we all know that the foot stomping approach won’t work. For whatever idiotic combination of reasons, a narrow majority of voters chose Trump this time. We’re not going to accomplish anything simply by protesting against the election results this time. We know that we have to show these dummies in the middle that they screwed up, and we have to do it with specifics.
Already we’re loudly pointing out that Trump is going back on his promises to lower prices and quickly end all wars and such. We’re also loudly exposing Trump’s scandalous and unqualified nominees. We’re educating these dummies in the middle about all the specific ways Trump is already blowing it. And it seems to be working, given that his approval rating was already down to the mid-forties by the time he took office at the start of the week, and will likely head even lower as the “honeymoon” period wears off.
So it’s not that we’re being passive or taking this lying down this time. Quite the opposite. We’re simply smarter at how to fight back against Trump than we were last time around. Trump never seems to learn from his experiences. But if we learn from our experiences and evolve accordingly, that gives us the advantage.
