THE NEW YORK TIMES ED BOARD CALLS FOR ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISM WHILE TONE-POLICING ANTI-TRUMP ACTIVISTS

I had fairly high hopes for this New York Times editorial, published under the headline "Fight Like Our Democracy Depends on It." The opening paragraphs strike the right notes, more or less:

The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.

Mr. Trump has the potential to do far more harm in the remainder of his term. If he continues down this path and Congress and the courts fail to stop him, it could fundamentally alter the character of American government. Future presidents, seeking to either continue or undo his policies, will be tempted to pursue a similarly unbound approach, in which they use the powers of the federal government to silence critics and reward allies.

I think the character of American government has already been fundamentally altered, though the changes might still be reversible. I'm not certain that we'll have future presidents elected in the normal manner. Obviously, we need to keep fighting, in order to minimize the damage Trump and his allies are doing.

The Times ed board agrees on the need to fight, but a couple of paragraphs in, we're told that the fighting needs to be done in a very particular way:

The patriotic response to today’s threat is to oppose Mr. Trump. But it is to do so soberly and strategically, not reflexively or performatively.

What does this mean? It means that the house is burning down, but some of us are using the wrong tone to yell "Fire!"

Given the threat that Mr. Trump presents, we understand the urge to speak out in maximalist ways about almost everything he does. It can feel emotionally satisfying, and simply like the right thing to do, during dark times. But the stakes are too high to prioritize emotion over effectiveness. The best way to support American democracy is to build the largest possible coalition to defend it. It is to call out all Mr. Trump’s constitutional violations while diligently avoiding exaggeration about what qualifies as a violation. Liberals who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies risk sending conservatives back into Mr. Trump’s camp.

I agree that Trump should also be opposed by people who aren't on the left. It would be nice to have

a coalition of Americans who disagree about many other subjects — who span conservative and progressive, internationalist and isolationist, religious and secular, business-friendly and labor-friendly, pro-immigration and restrictionist, laissez-faire and pro-government, pro-life and pro-choice — yet who believe that these subjects must be decided through democratic debate and constitutional processes rather than the dictates of a single man.

But that doesn't mean that every person in the coalition has to avoid pronouncements or tactics that some other members of the coalition reject. Everyone doesn't have to agree on everything. If you don't like what one individual or group is doing to oppose Trump, be an adult and simply decline to participate, while continuing to endorse the words and deeds you agree with.

I'll give a real-world example from right now: In March and April, I attended several demonstrations at the Tesla dealership in downtown Manhattan. At two of these demonstrations, some attendees entered the dealership and sat in until they were arrested. The rest of us stayed outside. We marched and chanted and waved signs. We kept it legal.

But we also didn't say, "You arrestees are preventing us from building the broadest possible anti-Elon Musk coalition! We must reject your actions categorically!" Why would we do that?

Most anti-Musk protesters haven't vandalized a car or burned a charging station. Personally I wouldn't, and I think if you do something like that, you should expect legal consequences. (The consequences ought to conform to existing laws, of course -- none of this We don't like you, so we're sending you to an overseas torture prison without a trial brutality that our president and attorney general seem to favor.) But I can't help wondering if the vandals have been the most effective anti-Musk activists.

Whatever is happening, it's clear that we helped turn public opinion against Musk without scrubbing the anti-Musk movement to make it safe for moderates and conservatives. As a result of what we've done, I'm sure many Americans think, I'm against vandalism, but Elon really is an asshole, and what right does he have to all my personal data?

It seems to me that the Times ed board is tone-policing the anti-Trump movement for a couple of reasons.

First, it wants to blame progressives for the establishment's failure to constrain Trump. A year from now, if there are tanks in the streets, the ed board will say it's the fault of those dirty hippies "who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies." No blame will accrue to the establishmentarians themselves.

And second, if Trump's opponents succeed, the ed board doesn't want the next government to be in a position to give Americans truly progressive change. Heaven forbid we should have a successful anti-Trump movement and then demand a reversal of ever-widening economic inequality. Heaven forbid we tax the rich.

The Times ed board wants Trump to be thwarted, but only if he's thwarted in a way that restores the pre-Trump status quo. The ed board wants the broadest possible coalition, but maybe not so broad as to include Trump's fiercest critics, and if they insist on participating, they should have as little power as possible.

WE'RE ALL LOOKING FOR THE GUYS WHO FAILED TO STOP THIS

Against my better judgment, I decided to read this discussion -- Patrick Healy of The New York Times interviewing op-ed columnists Maureen Dowd and Carlos Lozada. At one point, Healy asks about the mood in Washington as large parts of the federal government are being dismantled.

Healy: ... I want to ask: You’ve both worked in Washington for decades; you know the way the bureaucracy resisted and even thwarted Trump at times in his first term, and the way Congress and the courts have slowed down or even stopped presidents before. So I have to ask: Has the fight gone out of Washington? Has the deep state and the Democrats and the courts lost their moxie or their creativity to resist? Because I keep hearing people telling me what a gloomy, depressed place D.C. is now, as if DOGE and Trump have just laid siege in 100 days and the fight has just been leached out of the town. What happened?

Dowd speaks first, and says something that infuriates me:

Dowd: Well, I’m a Washington native and I can sort of understand why everyone is reeling, because nothing like this has ever happened in Washington. Washington was a very stable place, no matter whether it was Republican or Democrat. And then to have this wolf pack of DOGE kids coming in and either muscling their way into agencies or sneaking into agencies and getting hold of sensitive taxpayers’ information was something we couldn’t have conceived of happening. A president letting that happen with no rules about disclosure or what would be private. The Civil Service is gutted now, and all the programs around the world that gave America its reputation for generosity and idealism, and it was done very quickly, and it’s very hard for people to understand how to fight that.

I've added bold at the end for emphasis because I was shouting at my laptop when I read those words. What does Dowd mean, "it’s very hard for people to understand how to fight that"? It's not hard at all. You pass laws preventing the president from doing it. You send a bipartisan congressional delegation to the White House telling the president he's over the line and there will be pushback, up to and including impeachment. You hold hearings. You subpoena records. You fight by fighting.

What I'm describing, of course, is not something that could actually happen in the real world. But it should be obvious to everyone watching this unfold that it could happen if Republicans placed devotion to our country and the rule of law over loyalty to their party. And as a result, every observer should recognize that the Republican Party is rotten to the core, because every Republican in Congress has made a conscious decision to stand by and allow our system to be dismantled, because there's partisan advantage in doing that.

I'm saying something obvious, but apparently it's not obvious to anyone in the conversation. Healy speculates that "the deep state and the Democrats and the courts lost their moxie" (emphasis added again), as if Republicans in Congress have no agency, and Lozada goes on to talk about "Congress" as an undifferentiated mass:

Lozada: ... There was this sense that Washington would endure. Administrations come and go, but civil servants, public servants keep doing their work. And part of that is DOGE. Part of that is also the abdication of Congress’s own powers of oversight. It’s not just that Trump is doing these things that are affecting the livelihoods and the life work and missions of civil servants, of D.O.J. lawyers and of N.I.H. scientists, but it’s also the sense that it seems like nothing can stop it. It seems like no one is doing anything about it. The normal checks and balances aren’t operating.

Emphasis added again. But who has the ability to wield "Congress’s own powers of oversight"? Big hint: Republicans control both houses of Congress. If "the normal checks and balances aren’t operating," it's not a natural phenomenon. It's because the people empowered to check and balance the Executive Branch aren't doing so. Those people are Republicans. Republicans could intervene, but they won't, because they're happy to destroy the American system if their side is winning as it's being destroyed.

Many of you will know the meaning of this image as soon as you see it:

For those who don't, it's from a 2019 sketch on the Netflix comedy series I Think You Should Leave. A hot-dog-shaped car has crashed through the front window of a clothing store, and a man dressed in a hot dog suit talks to everyone in the store as if the identity of the person who drove the car through the window is unclear. The line that's become a meme is "We're all trying to find the guy who did this."



Healy, Dowd, and Lozada are all trying to find the guys who didn't stop Trump, as is most of the Beltway political universe. But it's Republicans in Congress who are wearing the hot dog suit.

EVEN WHEN REPUBLICANS WERE VOTING FOR MAINSTREAM CANDIDATES, TRUMPISM IS WHAT THEY WANTED

Jonathan Chait tries to imagine a normal Trump presidency:

In an alternate reality, Trump’s 2024 victory paved the way for a traditionally successful presidency with broad popularity and concrete policy achievements. After the election, his polling numbers shot up, and numbed Democrats retreated into self-doubt; some of them concluded that their best path forward lay in working with the new president. Congress formed a bipartisan DOGE caucus of members eager to eliminate inefficiencies in government. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, at the time perhaps the Democratic Party’s best-positioned 2028 presidential contender, sent a letter to Trump offering cooperation.

Chait recognizes that Trump had no interest in that sort of presidency:

In the real world, despite the obvious opportunity, Trump never tested the possibilities for constructive engagement....

The available evidence suggests that Trump could never imagine supporting a piece of legislation proposed by a political opponent merely because it advanced some worthwhile policy goal. (That is why passing an infrastructure bill and bolstering domestic manufacturing of silicon chips ranked among Trump’s highest stated priorities, until President Joe Biden passed these ideas into law, at which point they became disasters to be repealed.) ...

Instead of working within the system, he set out to crush the opposition. He ... has used the threat of investigation, prosecution, and punitive defunding to extort media owners, law firms, and universities into compliance. He has attempted to establish, in his immigration-enforcement powers, the ability to disappear people who may or may not have committed crimes, and may or may not even reside in the country illegally, brushing aside court orders to stop.

And Chait knows that Trump has surrounded himself with like-minded people:

Trump’s allies do not recognize any legitimate place for democratic opposition. They have come to see all of progressivism as a false consciousness implanted in an unwitting populace by a handful of puppet masters in academia, philanthropy, media, and Hollywood. Their operating theory is that, by cutting off funds, they can uproot liberal ideology itself.

Chait says that "Trump and his inner circle have consciously patterned themselves after Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary." But Republicans were illiberal -- or at least opposed to treating the Democratic Party as legitimate -- long before they discovered Orbán.

Grover Norquist, the best-known anti-tax activist, said that "bipartisanship is another name for date rape" in 2003. That was during the George W. Bush presidency, which began with the pursuit of a bipartisan education bill but then moved on to highly partisan tax cuts and a post-9/11 national security strategy that relied on torture and legally dubious overseas prisons. Bush fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn't pursue cases invoving nonexistent Democratic electoral fraud (and, of course, he'd won the White House by means of a disputed vote count in the home state of his governor brother, a victory endorsed by the Bushes' party-mates on the Supreme Court).

Rank-and-file Republicans cheered that electoral victory and agreed with the allegations of voter fraud because even then they didn't believe that Democratic votes were legitimate. They believed that Democrats won elections because undocumented immigrants voted for the party or because Democratic voters are brainwashed by, as Chait puts it, "a handful of puppet masters in academia, philanthropy, media, and Hollywood." They've wanted to defund public broadcating since the early 1980s; Andrew Breitbart began quoting the aphorism "Politics is downstream from culture" as a means of explaining that alleged brainwashing during Barack Obama's first term.

In the pre-Trump years, even when Republican voters settled on Mitt Romney and John McCain as party standard-bearers, they craved more, perking up in 2008 only when the charismatic demagogue Sarah Palin joined the ticket and embracing would-be authoritarians Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in 2012 before Mitt Romney's money sank their campaigns. Trump is the kind of president they've always wanted, the fantasy avenger from the QAnon posts so many of them binge-consumed during the height of the COVID pandemic.

That's why no Republican has had what Chait calls a "traditionally successful presidency" in decades. Playing well with others simply isn't "traditional" in the GOP. What's traditional is a craving for jackbooted thuggery.

WE HAVE TO SAVE OURSELVES FROM TRUMP, BECAUSE AMBITIOUS CAREERISTS WON'T

The Atlantic has a new cover story about the president.

Here's what's most striking about this story: Its authors are remarkably eager to to tell us how they were jerked around by Trump, and how they responded by writing exactly the story he asked them to write. Admitting that doesn't fill them with shame. Hey, they're ambitious careerists, A-list journalists who had to produce a big story for a "Trump's first hundred days" deadline. Wouldn't you have allowed Trump to manipulate you to get that story?

Parker and Scherer begin by telling us that they pitched an interview to the White House.

Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom.

Already he's messing with their heads -- I won't just give you an interview, I'll give you a photo shoot! Maybe even in the Lincoln Bedroom! At that point, Trump is a cat toying with a caught mouse. Any idiot can guess what happened next:

But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.

The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”

Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.

They could have retained some self-respect and written the story without his cooperation. But they had a phone number for him and called him. He agreed to talk for a while and went into a boasting monologue, which Parker and Scherer recount at length. But he'd denied them the big get, and he knew it. They'd talked to him, but they still wanted an interview on his home turf. And he toyed with them again:

As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.

“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—[Jeff] Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.

They have interviews with Trump insiders. They have this conversation. But they still want the big get. Near the end of the piece, he calls (or butt-dials) one of them after one in the morning and doesn't leave a message, and instead of finding a way to leverage his apparent craving for another interview, they plead for more, and he tells them what his conditions are:

We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.”

At this point, we already know that that's exactly the story they've written.

Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.

... he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6.

Trump teased and bullied and cajoled his way to getting what he wanted -- a detailed account of his awesome, unimaginable comeback (I'll spare you the details, though I'll note that I found his comeback all too imaginable even a few days after January 6).

He eventually gave Parker and Scherer an Oval Office interview, and it's ... a big nothing. It's the same spin we get from Trump in every other medium.

He often avoided direct answers in order to recite lists of accomplishments....

We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged....

Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.

The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”

That's what you did all that groveling for? This rehash?

The press and high-level politicians in both parties won't save us from Trump because they fear that going after him head-on puts their careers at risk. That's why the second-term Trump resistance came from the bottom up. The rest of us have less to lose.

YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE PEOPLE DISCUSS AROUND THEIR KITCHEN TABLES? LIFE-THREATENING ILLNESSES.

President Trump's polling is awful right now, with his job approval coming in at a wretched 39% in new surveys from AP and The Washington Post. Trump's numbers are especially bad on specific issues, as the Post notes:

If establishment Democrats are worried about attacking Trump in his areas of strength, maybe they should stop worrying -- he no longer seems to have areas of strength. But if they want to be cautious, you'd imagine that they'd want to go for the areas where he's weakest.

But that doesn't seem to be the case.

The most timid Democrats are locked into a rigid formula: Talk about nothing except the economy and Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security. Never veer from this path. And so we have this:

Democrats, after weeks of struggling to find a message that resonates with ordinary Americans while President Donald Trump dominates the news, are beginning to settle on one: the allegation that Trump and his allies are crippling Social Security.

Former president Joe Biden used his first public comments since leaving office to criticize Trump’s handling of the popular program. Early Democratic ads are targeting Republican senators on Social Security. Democrats have visited Social Security offices around the country, sometimes getting turned away and going public. Senate Democrats have set up a “war room” to deliver the message.

It's good that they're doing this. But why not look at the list of items above on which Trump is getting absolutely crushed in polling and start talking about those as well?

Look at the last item in the bar graph above. "Reducing federal funding for medical research" is opposed by 77% of The Washington Post's poll respondents. It would be safe even for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries to talk about that, too.

Medicare and Social Security are a constant presence in older people's lives, so of course we're afraid to lose them. But cancer and stroke and ALS and Alzheimer's and other medical conditions are frequent worries. We'd like to think there are smart people working on cures and treatments for these conditions -- and then we see DOGE, for no reason we can comprehend, cutting grants to medical researchers. We see a U.S.-based Russian scientist with expertise in advanced cancer detection being arrested, detained, and threatened with deportation over a minor customs violation. We see the administration punishing universities for alleged campus wrongthink by cutting off research grants, while handing over control of those grants to a crackpot with no scientific expertise.

People don't just talk about money around their kitchen tables. Older people in particular talk about their health. It's reasonable for us to think that treatments we might need, or family members might need, will never come or will be delayed because of this Trump/Robert Kennedy/Project 2025 vendetta against science.

The young firebrands many of us hope will shake up the party probably won't talk about any of this -- at their age, health isn't a top concern. So the old guard ought to speak up. Come on, Chuck and Hakeem -- 77% disapproval makes this safe enough even for you to talk about.

THE GOP IS A NICHE PARTY

The new New York Times/Siena College poll is very bad for Donald Trump. I'll let Nate Cohn explain:

You would be hard pressed to find a single “good” number for Mr. Trump in the survey.

His job approval rating is just 42 percent, and voters disapproved of his handling of every issue tested in the survey, including longstanding strengths like immigration and the economy.

Only 43 percent view him favorably, down from 48 percent in the final Times/Siena poll before the election and the lowest since his attempted assassination last July.

On question after question, voters say he’s going too far. Sixty-six percent of them say “chaotic” describes Mr. Trump’s second term well; 59 percent say “scary” fits at least somewhat well.

Cohn reminds us of the conventional wisdom of a few months ago, which most elite commentators believed (and many centrist Democrats still seem to believe):

Bring yourself back to the beginning of the year, when Mr. Trump was basking in victory, when there was talk of a rightward cultural “vibe shift” or even an incipient realignment....

While he won only narrowly, the election was still a decisive victory for populist conservative politics over an exhausted liberalism. There were countless opportunities for him to push major initiatives with significant public support, on issues like immigration, crime, energy, “woke” or the economy. Back in January, it seemed possible for Mr. Trump to solidify a coalition behind these issues.

Not anymore.

Remember the widespread belief that young people in particular were now Trumpers for life? That moment appears to be over. I'm looking at the crosstabs, and on issue after issue the 18-29 age group rejects Trump more vigorously than older people.

Question: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president?"

* Respondents overall: 42% approve, 54% disapprove.
* 18-29-year-olds: 26% approve, 69% disapprove.


Question: "Please tell me if this describes Donald Trump very well, somewhat well, not too well or not at all well: Understands the problems facing people like you."

* Respondents overall: 44% well, 54% not well.
* 18-29-year-olds: 28% well, 72% not well.


Question: "For each of the following, tell me whether you support or oppose the policy. Deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries."

* Respondents overall: 54% support, 42% oppose.
* 18-29-year-olds: 37% support, 61% oppose.


Question: "The tariffs imposed by President Trump."

* Respondents overall: 39% support, 55% oppose.
* 18-29-year-olds: 20% support, 71% oppose.


Question: "Government spending cuts by DOGE."

* Respondents overall: 42% support, 44% oppose.
* 18-29-year-olds: 17% support, 65% oppose.

It's all like this. As a result, 18-29-year-olds say they'd support a Democrat in the 2026 midterms by a margin of 59% to 30%. (Overall, it's 47% to 44% in Democrats' favor.)

We're regularly told that the Democratic Party has become a niche party -- that the party's core is educated, well-off whites -- but this poll suggests that the Republican Party is a niche party now. College-educated whites, college-educated non-whites, and non-college-educated non-whites all reject what Trump is doing. Only non-college-educated whites offer support.

Question: "Tell me whether you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump has handled each of the following issues as president: The economy."

* White, college: 33% approve, 65% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 26% approve, 72% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 34% approve, 62% disapprove.
* White, no college: 58% approve, 40% disapprove.


Question: "Immigration."

* White, college: 39% approve, 59% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 39% approve, 60% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 32% approve, 65% disapprove.
* White, no college: 60% approve, 38% disapprove.


Question: "Managing the federal government."

* White, college: 35% approve, 64% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 40% approve, 53% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 34% approve, 57% disapprove.
* White, no college: 55% approve, 41% disapprove.


Question: "Trade with other countries."

* White, college: 34% approve, 64% disapprove.
* Non-white, college: 27% approve, 66% disapprove.
* Non-white, no college: 39% approve, 59% disapprove.
* White, no college: 54% approve, 40% disapprove.

The pattern keeps repeating. Trump's alleged new coalition of blue-collar Americans of all races is now a coalition of blue-collar white people only.

The press won't tell you this because the press believes that blue-collar whites are normative, blue-collar non-whites are of interest only when they support Republicans, and college-educated people aren't Americans at all. But that's absurd. We're all Americans. And everyone seems to be abandoning Trump except one demographic group.

YOU'D HAVE ANGRY ENERGY TOO IF YOU'D MADE HATING LIBERALISM YOUR ENTIRE PERSONALITY FOR DECADES

I don't like admitting this, but I understand how David Brooks feels:

I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliché to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.

A vitality gap has opened up. The Trump administration is like a supercar with 1,000 horsepower, and its opponents have been coasting around on mopeds. You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days.

I've detested 100% of what the Trump administration has done, and I certainly wouldn't say that the administration has verve, but I'll concede that, regrettably, the Trumpers have a hell of a lot of energy.

I don't agree with Brooks that it's primarily Trump's energy. Brooks writes:

Some of this is inherent in President Trump’s nature. He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.

Hey, you know what they say: Tiny hands, big thumos. (Actually, no -- nobody says that.) Brooks is right about Trump's "burning core of anger," but Trump spent most of his middle age getting a moderate amount of screen time on a TV show of which he was reportedly the star, even though it largely focused on non-famous contestants. Apart from that, he mostly slapped his name on buildings and other commodities (water, steaks, a fake university) built by others, until he discovered Fox News and almost accidentally became a pundit, and then a politician. He's a lazy guy. He's not a ball of energy.

Brooks is on more solid ground here:

The administration is also driven by its own form of righteous rage. Its members tend to have a clear consuming hatred for the nation’s establishment and a powerful conviction that for the nation to survive, it must be brought down.

The real reason the Trump administration seems energetic is that it's fueled by the pent-up energy of the conservative movement, which has spent decades stewing in eliminationist resentment of everything perceived as liberal. Trump is the angry figurehead, and Elon Musk supplies his own drug-fueled jitteriness (as well as army of boys for hire), but the desperate need to attack everything all at once is what you get after millions of Americans have spent years mass-consuming (and mass-producing) right-wing propaganda. Now that they've undergone this form of brain poisoning, they're consumed with the desire to reverse every form of human progress we've seen in America since 1900. Conveniently, the Heritage Foundation prepared for the Trump presidency by compiling a book longer than Ulysses on how to do just that, and an array of right-wing billionaires have kept the authors of the program well remunerated until they were ready to execute their plan.

Because this is David Brooks, he can't help blaming the old guard for their own demise at the hands of rage-fueled Trumpers. He's right that they partly brought this on themselves, but not in the way he thinks:

Trump’s offensive style takes advantage of the unique weaknesses of America’s existing leadership class....

The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.

Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world. They tend to believe that if they say something or write something (ahem), they have done something. The system breeds a fear of failure that the more audacious Trump largely lacks. Such elites sometimes assume that if they can persuade themselves that they are morally superior, then that in itself constitutes victory; it’s all they need to do.

That isn't the reason the establishment failed. The establishment failed because it refused to do what people want it to do, which is make a serious dent in economic inequality and precarity. People are working hard and not getting ahead, while the rich get richer and richer. The establishment didn't want to do anything about this except tinker at the margins, and so millions of voters who weren't Trump superfans decided to vote for him because he promised to do something bold, even if they had no idea how destructive it would be.

When Brooks tries to imagine how to fight back, he frequently sounds like one of the weak-willed establishmentarians he describes:

On clarity of purpose: Trump’s opponents have still not produced the kind of one-sentence mission statement that he produces — that the elites have betrayed us, so we must destroy them.... My mission statement would be: America is great, and we will fight for what has made America great.

... Democrats will do the most good if they can stop sounding like Democrats for the time being, with all the tired rhetoric about the oligarchy and trickle-down economics.

Why does the anti-Trump movement need a goddamn "mission statement"? It's not some hipster Brooklyn startup named Sage + Acacia. Just fight the bastards.

And I see that "oligarchy" is the new "Latinx" -- the single word whose evil spell magically makes all Democrats unelectable, for reasons no one can explain. Yesterday Politico published a profile of Michigan senator and wannabe centrist savior Elissa Slotkin, in which we were told this:

Her strategy also focuses on language and tone. She said Democrats should stop using the term “oligarchy,” a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes “kings.”

In fact, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing massive crowds in non-coastal America with a tour called "Fighting Oligarchy." Do Brooks and Slotkin object to the word "oligarchy"? Or do they object to fighting the oligarchy? Because people want that, and I sense that Brooks and Slotkin (and most mainstream Democrats) don't.

Right-wing propaganda tells Americans that elitism is cultural rather than economic, and many fall for that, but it's clear now to many people that Trump's war on propriety isn't solving any of their problems. Simply pointing out the harm done by the Trump administration is good, but harnessing class anger might be the only way to persuade Americans that there's an alternative to Trumpism that's equally vigorous.