What Is to Be Done?

Critical comments from one of my subscribers inspire some self-reflection about the state of the country and the work I do at “Notes from the Middleground”

President Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kennedy's wife Cheryl Hines, his family and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch pose after Kennedy was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Oval Office at the White House on February 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The hits just keep on coming.

As Daniel Drezner notes on his Substack, on a single day this past week (Monday), the Trump administration made the following moves seemingly designed to encourage, reward, or excuse political corruption:

• Donald Trump issued an executive order pausing any enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for 180 days and halting any new investigations or prosecutions;

• Trump granted a full pardon to former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of corruption in 2011;

• Trump’s Department of Justice ordered federal prosecutors to drop their case against New York City major Eric Adams, who was being prosecuted for receiving illegal campaign contributions;

• Trump removed the director of the Office of Government Ethics, the independent agency tasked with enforcing ethics rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch;

• The White House fired Cathy Harris, “a Biden-appointed member of the bipartisan Merit Systems Protection Board…. It's an Executive branch agency that ensures other agencies properly remove/discipline employees in accordance with due process protections.”

The following day, the administration issued an executive order empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to continue with mass firings across the executive branch as a preliminary step toward drastically shrinking and reorganizing the federal government. The aim of these changes has little to do with increasing government efficiency and eliminating “waste” and everything to do with centralizing power in the hands of the president.

Meanwhile, at least one judge (so far) has suggested the administration is failing to comply with an order unfreezing grant money—and the White House has responded by claiming that judicial pushback to President Trump’s actions amounts to a “weaponization” of the courts.

So: Things are going badly, and considerably worse than I anticipated prior to the start of the administration. Some of what we’re seeing I considered possible, so not everything has surprised me. But what has surprised me is that so many bad things are being pursued at once on so many fronts—and that the administration has found other awful things to do that never even occurred to me.

The Need for a Fighting Faith

There—I’ve denounced Trump unambivalently. Because I try to practice empathy toward the populist right while also urging caution in formulating criticisms of it, I’m sometimes accused by critics of being a wimp, a bad ally, or worse. My awareness of this line of criticism even inspired me to include an anticipatory line in my previous post about a subset of paying subscribers skipping ahead to the “Comment” button so they could accuse me of capitulation to the right.

My effort to head off such criticism didn’t stop at least one of these readers, Josh Rosenberg (name used with permission), from doing exactly that. Because Rosenberg’s comment was thoughtful and followed by another, broader version of the same critique in another comment, I’ve decided to share his expressions of frustration here, with the remainder of this post serving as a more considered response than the hasty one I dashed off on Monday morning in the comments thread. Here is a condensed version Rosenberg’s initial comment:

I find your attitude way too passive (and this isn’t the first time)…. If you’re not willing to grind society to a halt in response to an attempted authoritarian power grab, then you’ll live under their boot for the rest of your life…. Accepting this as a new normal that we just have to live with while hoping they’ll permit a free and fair election in a few years is delusional appeasement.

And here, a few days later, is the broader comment written from the same general outlook and in the same spirit:

The republic is dying due to fear. The transition to authoritarianism doesn’t follow some immutable law of nature. It happens one personal concession and one cowardly omission at a time. It’s the sum total of the choices citizens make (or avoid making) in gradually allowing fear of a tyrant and his cult to replace the rule of law. It requires our submission at scale.

Here’s how I would summarize this outlook: We need to fight Trump with all we have. He can only succeed in turning himself into a tyrant if we allow him to by embracing cowardice and passivity that amounts to a disgraceful act of pre-submission to dictatorship. My writing unfortunately displays this tendency toward appeasement.