We can oppose Trump without losing our minds

A reaction to the results of Nov. 5 is setting in that will do us no favors: Trump (bad), Trump’s people (worse), Trump’s actions (awful, by definition). Therefore, we should oppose everything Trumpian, and devil take the details. This is a mistake.

A few nights ago, I was on a call convened by a respected epidemiologist, whom I know slightly. It was for people in the public health universe, which I am, and was attended by 100 early logins with another 900 frustrated parties stuck in the waiting room for technical reasons.

We were well into the first 20 minutes of the ad hoc meeting, hearing about a survey in which potential participants listed their areas of expertise and interest. We then had a discussion of what working groups to form and how to sign up as volunteers or to take on leadership roles.

But something was missing. No one told us why we were there.

One obvious answer is that people are worried about what the Trump II experience is going to mean for public health. Fair enough. In fact, there were hints in the chat and in some passing comments about the need to protect “Science” and the potential dangers for the health of our people represented by certain Trump nominees.

But no one felt the need to lay out in even the vaguest general terms any guiding principles shared by those present and by the organization that clearly is intended to emerge from this assembly. That means we were assumed to share a set of foundational, core beliefs [see above]: that Trump and Trumpism are profoundly bad and dangerous things, that this is evident on its face, and that no precision is required to start the motors running for resistance.

I did make a feeble attempt to raise this question and was told that the convening alarm was not just about Trump and his appointees and that “policy” issues will be developed in due course. Others said that the details will emerge “from below” as the working groups take hold. I appreciate the spirit and await more information.

That said, I find the exercise, so far, completely lacking in nuance and, by implication, lacking any critical distance from the pre-Trump state of affairs. Now, I have been paying attention to the statements of the Trump nominees. While I certainly shake my head with my public health colleagues at much of what I hear, these figures also issue critiques that echo the forgotten cries of the Bernie campaigns: regulatory capture of federal agencies by the industries they monitor; horrible food choices foisted on the unsuspecting; and yes, brute censorship of non-mainstream views in the name of “misinformation” suppression.

A new advocacy body that starts out without the merest recognition that there are points of agreement even with the most crackpot of Trump’s hangers-on is hamstringing itself. After all, the RFK Jr. confirmation hearings are going to be a unique opportunity to air not just Kennedy’s vaccine views but also his denunciations of nefarious pharmaceutical and Big Ag practices. Shouldn’t we welcome that and look for ways to boost his timely messages? The Manichean view of the present (bad because Trump) versus the past (imperfect but basically sound) is far too cozy.

The cards are stacked against Kennedy and anyone else who actually tries to confront corporate interests and their armies of lobbyists, especially given Trump’s well-known affinity for the rich and powerful. The most likely outcome of all the stir around the incoming president’s unusual nominees is that they will be outmaneuvered by their respective bureaucracies and eventually dumped by The Donald shortly after they annoy one of his golf buddies. Do we want to pitch into that process by denouncing them all in advance?

The quick defenestration of Matt Gaetz as a possible Attorney General is a good example of a lost opportunity. Whatever Gaetz’s faults, he was good on censorship, good on antitrust, and openly called for former A-G Bill Barr to be sharply questioned on the Epstein “suicide.” He was quickly burned by a dubious accusation of sex crimes (for which there is to date zero evidence), which most of my Democrat friends nonetheless believe, because Trump. No one asked why the Republican establishment hates Matt Gaetz or what they wanted to avoid.

I don’t diminish the real dangers represented by the Trumpian zealots’ slash-and-burn approach to government. Civil service protections date back to the Garfield-Arthur Administrations of the 1880s and have shielded Federal employees from partisan hackery for many decades. Trump wants to further consolidate executive powers, which should alarm us all—which it mostly did not while Democrat presidents wielded them.

That said, the Federal bureaucracy was fully mobilized to undermine Trump’s first presidency with the bogus Russiagate conspiracy, a far worse attempt to subvert democracy than Watergate and for which hardly anyone has paid a price. Trump has good reason to want to bring it back under control and clip the wings of the secret societies that populate the CIA, FBI, DoJ, and who knows what other mysterious three-letter outfits.

Trump is wacko, a loose cannon, undisciplined, erratic, and a disagreeable human being. He was also the choice of the majority of voters, and in a democracy that means he gets to make policy. Refusing to engage with that fact will condemn critics to the upper-middle-class wilderness that the Democratic Party now represents, all the more easily ignored by the struggling citizens who brought him back to power. We need to get over ourselves and the partisan obsession with Trump’s innate horribleness, which only discredits us in the eyes of his followers who, like it or not, must be our interlocutors.