Robert Reich: What Will You Do? – OpEd

Many of you are still in shock about what happened a week ago today. Some of you don’t even want to read a newspaper or hear the news. 

I get it. 

A few of you are coping with the catastrophe by minimizing or denying it. Several friends assure me that a second Trump term won’t be much different from the first and that the checks and balances in our system will continue to constrain him. 

This is wishful and dangerous thinking. 

Trump and his Republican lapdogs will almost certainly win the House, which means that starting January 20, they will take full control of the federal government — both chambers of Congress as well as the presidency. 

The Republicans soon to be in control of Congress are more MAGA, less principled, and more intimidated by Trump than the Republicans who had control when Trump took office in 2017. There are no Liz Cheneys in the House, no Mitt Romneys in the Senate. Republican senators seeking to become the majority leader are already competing to please Trump, promising immediate confirmation of his appointments. 

The Republican Party as a whole has now been effectively purged of people willing to stand up to Trump. 

Trump already has effective control of the Supreme Court, a majority of whom have ruled that he (or any president) is presumptively immune from criminal liability for whatever he chooses to do.

This time, moreover, there won’t be people in the administration to stop him. Trump learned from his first term about the importance of surrounding himself with lackeys who will do whatever he wishes. 

His early picks (Susie Wiles as chief of staff, Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, Thomas Homan as border czar, Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, Elise Stefanik as ambassador to the U.N., and Michael Walz as national security advisor) have only one thing in common and it’s not their expertise. It’s their unblinking loyalty to Trump. 

Don’t get me started about Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who has turned his X platform into a swamp of Trump lies and propaganda, and now seems joined at the hip to Trump — appearing wherever Trump is. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a nut job. 

And unlike Trump’s first term, the president-elect is now backed by a network of dangerous extremists — including those who have been imprisoned for their part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, whom Trump has suggested he’ll pardon. They will feel emboldened to carry out what they understand to be Trump’s wishes. 

Finally, also unlike before his first term, Trump has explicitly told us what he plans to do and already has people working on getting it done starting January 20: mass deportations, prosecution of his political enemies, the use of the military against U.S. citizens, the purging of the civil service across the government and substitution of Trump loyalists, and a promise to play politics with disasters. 

Project 2025, which was written by more than 140 people who served under Trump the first time around, including several of his former Cabinet secretaries, explicitly calls for “abortion surveillance” and the stripping from Americans of reproductive freedom (page 455). 

It also calls for jailing teachers and librarians over banned books (page 5), gutting of overtime pay rules (pages 587 and 592), and prioritizing “married men and women” over other types of families (page 489). 

To enforce these attacks on our rights, Project 2025 would use the Justice Department to prosecute district attorneys Trump disagrees with, invoke the Insurrection Act to shut down protests, and mobilize red-state national guard units against blue states that resist his authoritarian agenda.

In sum, my friends, we are facing a catastrophe far worse than what occurred in Trump’s first term of office. The meager guardrails that existed then will be gone.

We must not avert our eyes from this calamity, or minimize it, or throw up our hands in despair or retreat. 

We must prepare to fight it. 

But how? Let me ask you: If this were Germany in 1933, what actions would you take? How different will this be from Germany in 1933?

I put this question to some of you last Wednesday during my weekly Office Hours. Forty percent said your most important goal will be to protect those in harm’s way, and 34 percent said it will be to organize and mobilize politically. Of the remainder, 9 percent said it will be to resist with civil disobedience. (Others had additional or different ideas.)

Obviously, none of these alternatives is exclusive. We must consider all, and many others. 

Protecting the vulnerable and preserving our rights and liberties will require a great deal of hard work by people who believe in our Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law. The work includes: 

• Monitoring Trump and his government — despite the disinformation, propaganda, and lies we’ll be receiving — and disseminating the truth.
• Maintaining a watch over the people and institutions we value.
• Being ready to sound the alarm in our communities and networks when those people and institutions are under assault. 
• Organizing and mobilizing nonviolent resistance to such assaults. 
• Using civil disobedience wherever possible. 
• Litigating through state and federal courts where possible.
• Speaking out against malicious lies like those that spread during the election by Elon Musk on his propaganda machine X and against vicious lies amplified on other MAGA mouthpieces. 
• Using our economic muscle to boycott corporations that support Trump, Musk, and other centers of MAGA power. 

And much more. 

It will be up to us — the American people who still cherish democracy — to protect and preserve our system of self-government.

As difficult as it is to fully accept what we are up against, the first step is to acknowledge it.

• This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack