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Chris Hayes had a great message of hope for those of us still trying to reckon with Donald Trump’s win: there is no reason to give up.
I have not been able to bring myself to watch any cable news since Tuesday night, much less the hate-filled gloating on Trump/Murdoch TV, aka Fox News.
But an article on HuffPost put this commentary from Chris Hayes onto my radar and I thought readers might get the same kind of pragmatic inspiration from it that I did.
Hayes concluded, and I agree, that Trump won as a result of voters rejecting the economic status quo. As awful as his victory is, we can take heart from that fact and it will likely provoke him and his MAGA extremists into major missteps.
Here’s the explanation:
HAYES: Trump and Republicans have an interest, a vested interest, in interpreting this as a mandate for all of their worst governing impulses, all the Stephen Miller-style, Project 2025, dark fantasies of smashing the administrative state.
But those ideas were never popular. Remember, we've been through this. They were polling at 6%. Trump tried to distance himself every chance he had from them, because they polled so terribly. When you wrote down what they wanted to do, people didn't like it. That was not the source of this victory. You can see it all over America in last night's results.
Hayes went on to cite example after example of Democratic candidates or liberal measures having won Tuesday night. That is where our strength lies, he pointed out.
HAYES: What I want to say is that this is not a nation that, because of last night, has suddenly signed on wholesale to the far-right agenda of Maga and Trump and the Republican Party. But we know they're going to interpret this election as a mandate for precisely that, for full Maga ism. And we also know they have a plan. It really is a destructive plan to the American Constitution, to American democracy, most importantly, to so many of our fellow Americans, mixed-status families, trans folks, women, working-class voters, who are going to take it on the chin from tariffs and gutting labor law.
And we also know Donald Trump is an aspiring authoritarian. I mean, the guy does not have a democratic bone in his body, he tried to overthrow the constitutional order with violence. We all saw it happen on national television. He celebrated, talked about using political violence repeatedly in his campaigns, and because of all that, we know they're going to try to do things to subvert and alter the constitutional order, but the most important thing to those of us who are committed to stopping them is to remember their success is not foreordained in any way. They're going to try, and they're going to be a lot of people trying to stop them, and the outcome of that is as yet undetermined. And I'm not saying this from some place of airy hope. We've been covering Trump since 2015. We covered his first term. He tried to do lots of bad things, and failed to do them because he is completely distractible and inconstant, because he's a vortex of chaos, because he cannot be stopped from doing stupid, self-destructive things all the time. None of that changed because he won an election.
Are Republicans better prepared this time? Are they more loyal? Is the judiciary more in their favor? Yes, yes and yes. But does that mean the outcome is foreordained? No. The reason I say that is that public opinion, mass opinion, it's not a fixed thing. It's a real force, and it changes, and it flows and reacts to events, and even Donald Trump has backed down when he found himself on the wrong side of it.
Hayes noted that public outcry and mobilization moved Trump to end his family separations and then gave himself credit for ending his own monstrous policy. The same force pushed Trump to distance himself from his most extreme antiabortion position. It's not a rosy picture but it's not hopeless, either.
HAYES: There will likely be things he doesn't abandon, but in the face of that, it really is important not to conceive in advance that politics don't matter. They do. Public opinion still matters. Politics didn't go away in America because three out of 100 people switched their presidential vote, which is to be clear, what happened last night between 2020 and 2024.
And politics depends on the work of organizing and mobilizing and persuading our fellow Americans. None of those tools have gone anywhere. In fact, all of them are even more important this time around. We have to pick them up, and we can't let anyone pry them from our hands.
I’m going to take a few more days off to digest and recalibrate. But I’ll also be thinking a lot about what tools we have and how to use them.
If you’d like, I’d love to see your thoughts below on how to get through this terrible time in our country.
You can watch Hayes’ full commentary below, from MSNBC’s November 6, 2024 election coverage.
Also, a lot of the people I worked alongside were absolutely convinced she was going to win and my own pessimism was out of place.
My feeling now is that I can finally start making some plans.
I hope to have a real post up later tonight.
What makes me want to scream is how the campaign missed this or did not think it important.
I am praying the Dems take back the House. That could help blunt a lot of their plans.
One of my faults is that I can be mentally petty towards people even though I don’t ever recall acting out in a petty way physically towards anybody. I will admit that I am going to be LMFAO when his Maga supporters suffer right along with the rest of us as he tanks the economy because of job losses/ business closings, rising unemployment, higher interest rates, takes away Social Security, decimates the environment, takes away even more personal rights and liberties, and possibly even another pandemic, bird flu maybe? Hang onto your ass MAGA. Daddy’s home and he’s gonna be spanking everybody when he’s done with those uppity girls.
And to your thoughts Ellen about the Reddit comment, that person may be onto something. Some of the mid- 30 somethings that I work with are anxious about ever being over able to own a home. My telling them that Harris wanted to help them buy a home aside, they were going to vote for Trump for the chance at home ownership. I bluntly told them that my dad and uncles didn’t drag their asses over land, sky, and sea from North Africa to Berlin and across the Pacific, killing people like Trump. I think Boomers whose dad’s made the same sacrifices the men in my family did are being very selfish and remiss in not passing on that history to their children and grandchildren.
I’m sure they voted for him anyway, but I could see in their faces that it did give them pause. So perhaps showing a force of strength on our side for tolerance empathy, and all those wokie things the right hates, can maybe turn this country around eventually.
“More consistently successful anti-fascist ‘violence’ tends to take two forms, balancing the need to protect vulnerable communities from fascist violence and the need to avoid fascists being able to claim victimisation. The first is preventative – large scale mobilisations that deter fascist activism in the first place. If an anti-fascist counter-demonstration can mobilise a hundred times as many supporters as a fascist march, the march might be quietly cancelled, postponed or otherwise curtailed, and fascist claims to represent popular views are undermined. This is where the coalition-building aspects of anti-fascist activism become vital – the wider the spectrum of opposition you can mobilise, the harder it is for the fascists to paint opponents as extremists who themselves are the main threat to society.”
It reminded me of what Kevin wrote below: “We must speak up for the people who are being attacked.”
This is similar to what a woman told me Election Night, when Kamala’s loss seemed imminent. The woman is a current county commissioner and a former head of our local Democratic Party, IIRC. She’s also very smart and extremely well respected. So I was glad to be able to talk to her. When asked what we will do if Trump wins, she told me, “We’ll do what we did last time. Mobilize to protect the vulnerable.”
Make no mistake: I see all kinds of bad things ahead. But I do not think it is preordained he will ethnically cleanse and turn this country into the Christian Nationalist nation his handlers want and he probably could care less about (the Christian nationalist part, that is). I’m not saying it won’t happen, just that it’s not a certainty.
https://www.alternet.org/fox-news-trump-prosecutors-smith/
Little Steve Bannon gloated within the last day that yes, Project 2025 is the agenda. I’ll add that the Republican Study Committee in the House is poised to inflict theirs as well. And I’ll add that given Little Trump’s lies about what he would or would not do at many points in his unfortunate time in the public spotlight, we cannot cling to notions that Angry Right Wingers will not pursue their stated and planned agenda. I’ll note that in his victory gloat on Wednesday morning, Little Trump essentially kicked RFK Jr to the curb already. My understanding is that on Wednesday, he also reaffirmed his intention to do mass deportations of migrants and to get those revenge prosecutions going so he could try to put his opponents into prison. He’s serious about this.
The forces around Little Trump have literally spent the last two years planning carefully to make their moves once they got full power again. To think that they’ll look at a poll and say “Oh well, we can’t do that now” is utter nonsense. Their response to that poll will be to use one of their preset Right Wing propagandists like Rasmussen or Trafalgar or Insider Advantage and announce “See, the American people do want this. Let’s go!” I’ll add that the mainstream pollsters are going to respond to this election result by following Trafalgar’s lead and leaning into Right Wing voters and opinions for the next decade or so.
This is going to be an extremely dark and violent period in American history. Wishcasting for that not to happen did not help the Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s, and we shouldn’t do that here. What is needed is for us to document the atrocities as they happen for posterity. This website will be essential for that, provided that the Vance White House doesn’t try to target it. (And given the publicly cheered comments from Little Trump about dealing with “the enemy within”, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try something.)
They’re going to come out of the gate swinging. We can expect a nationwide Fetal Personhood bill within 2025, along with a devastating Tax/Social Security “Reform” bill from the GOP House which will effectively wipe out Social Security for Middle Class Employees up to 59 years old while once again skyrocketing their current taxes. We can expect an extremely violent crackdown regarding migrants, including massive forced deportations and a return to the family separations and the “throw them in the Mexican desert” policy. We can expect a series of vindictive prosecutions of Little Trump’s impeachers, including the Biden family, VP Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, etc. We can expect a series of prosecutions of people in BLM, and people suspected of involvement with Antifa. The insurrectionists of January 6 will be pardoned and celebrated as heroes. We can expect hateful policies towards the gay and trans community, just as the Pence White House did before. The Department of Education is being thrown in the trash. The National Labor Relations Board is being thrown in the trash. Massive tariffs will be thrown against multiple countries, especially China, and prices will skyrocket. Protestors in the US will be forcefully arrested and prosecuted. And that’s only the beginning of 2025. These guys have a long, detailed agenda and they’re going to run it. Anyone thinking that the “guardrails” will stop this agenda is forgetting that Angry Right Wingers control much of the judiciary, so court challenges will simply be laughed out of the room. Remember, these are the same judges who were given “credibility” when they mostly blocked the obvious nonsense of Little Trump’s election challenges after he lost in 2020. Now that he’s indisputably won, they’ll use that credibility to tell activists “You didn’t complain when the law worked the way you liked, so you don’t get to complain when the same law isn’t what you like.”
Scooter is correct that the American electorate chose this path. They do want this. They figure that it doesn’t matter if Little Trump is an unrepentant convicted felon (which means right and wrong no longer matter, and nor does the basis of having laws) so long as they can return to a fantasy time when things were “great” rather than the pandemic wasteland the Pence White House abandoned us to and which killed over a million people in this country alone.
I don’t agree with Scooter about future elections. We will still have them, but the next two or three national ones are going to the GOP in a big way while the Dems try to figure out who they are now. We shouldn’t have any illusions about the 2026 midterms, which will go solidly to the GOP as enough Dem activists are cowed into staying home as happened in the early 2000s. Remember that it took until 2006 before the Dems fielded candidates that could win again after W was selected by the Supreme Court. This time, it will probably take twice that long, given that Angry Right Wingers now control all three branches, including much of the judiciary.
As far as a solution at this time, I have two. The first is, again, that we must document the atrocities as they happen. We must do so with clear eyes and without false excuses for what is going on. We must document the attempts by Angry Right Wingers to do evil and to both cover up their violence or lie about why and how it happened. We must speak up for the people who are being attacked, which will include us. We must remember the words of Martin Niemoller. The second solution, which will be taken by those who can, is for sane people to consider their options about where they are living. When Little Trump squeaked through in 2016, multiple people I knew simply left the US. One director I’d worked with for over 15 years returned to his home in France and told me he would not return to “Trumpland”. More people I know now are planning to leave, simply because they are concerned for their safety. We will all have to weigh the issues of whether this is possible or necessary. I know people who are justifiably worried about the fascist policies that are coming and the violence that will go with them.
As for Chris Hayes and the New York Times and this discussion about “guardrails”, I can only say that we don’t have the luxury of hopium at a time like this.
