Trickle Down Bullying; the Clampdown; Acquiescence.

I’m All Lost In…

The 3 things I’m WORRYING about this week.

#56

Capitol Hill, Seattle, November, 2024

1) Trickle Down Bullying

Trump’s progenitor, Ronald Reagan, gave us trickle down economics. Donald Trump is going to give us trickle down bullying.

Trump’s recurring temper tantrums—often misogynistic or racist—but at their core, always about intimidation rather than discourse, have empowered his MAGA faithful. Aggrieved bros are now free to scoff at the longstanding civic norms that (until now) have helped ensure people can go about their daily lives with a sense of safety and belonging.

It’s already begun in the immediate wake of Trump’s election victory with an anonymous racist text message campaign aimed at African Americans. And soon enough, you’re going to see widespread, flippant and aggressive unchecked macho hysterics out in the open: At the grocery store; on the bus; at the bank; on airplanes; in the park; at restaurants; at the workplace; on college campuses; and in high school hallways (teen boys this week are already taunting: “your body, my choice.”)

This represents one of the true nightmares about Trump’s looming return to power, and also one of the glaring ironies: Under Trump, “Law and Order” will actually mean lawlessness. Trumpism will officially remove the legal guardrails against abusive social behavior.

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, a civil rights and civil liberties agenda bloomed in America. After Congress enshrined a series of universal protections into law, this humanist expansion of rights defined late-20th-Century and early-21st-Century jurisprudence. (You can read about my own father’s Supreme Court-level contribution here.) The resulting civil rights infrastructure, such as workplace safety and consumer protection, is about to be ignored, gutted, and reversed.

From police brutality to your kid getting bullied at school; from gender discrimination in the workplace to corruption in the marketplace; from hate crimes to casual mistreatment during everyday interactions, there will be no avenue for recourse or accountability.

Now that Trumpism has made it socially acceptable to bully, gas light, and hate your neighbor, the courts will follow the zeitgeist. Longstanding legal protections will soon be cast aside by Trump-appointed judges. Right-wing legal firms are certainly already lining up cases aimed at officially striking down much of the mid-late 20th Century’s civil rights legacy. We’ve already witnessed the end of national abortion rights, affirmative action, and much of the 1965 voting rights act.

In the meantime, now that voters have signed off on an anti-democratic backlash against egalitarianism, the world of bullying with impunity is upon us.

A small personal example that certainly pales in comparison to what’s about to crash down on immigrants and trans people, but in the Summer of 2022, XDX and I stopped at a diner on Interstate 84 on our way back from a wedding in Boise, Idaho. We were an interracial couple; she’s Chinese, I’m white/look and am Jewish. Bad vibe in there, and we hustled out pretty quickly after lunch under some unfriendly glares. Again, hardly comparable to what’s in store for other targeted groups, but there is no telling how it would have played out in that Idaho diner today.

2) Military Rule Coming to a City Near You

Take no comfort in the fact that you live in a Blue state—or more specifically, in a city. America’s metro islands of pluralism are about to become the beachheads of our tragic future.

Trump’s mass deportation agenda will begin in cities. His raids and arrests will be the first chess move in a larger algorithm. Federal troops will sync with local police (and with Proud Boys vigilante “patriots” rushing in to help), immediately weakening local autonomy and setting the stage for stand offs between citizens and law enforcement. The ensuing civil unrest will give Trump the “Reichstag Fire” excuse he needs to cue general clampdowns and martial law in the “crime ridden” cities he already demonized on the campaign trail.

This is 1939 Nazi playbook stuff.

In 2025, Hitler’s Jews are Trump’s immigrants– “poisoning the blood of the nation.”

3) Acquiescence

I learned about the Holocaust in middle school in Ms. Clemmer’s class. Stunned to find out that Adolph Hitler came to power through legitimate means rather than through some violent takeover, we asked “How could this happen?” Ms. Clemmer told us about Germany’s staggering inflation and taught us about scapegoating (Jews and Berlin elites). Eighth-grade reading level and all, this was hardly difficult to comprehend.

The top reasons Trump won? Persistent inflation, scapegoating immigrants, and pointing at cultural elites. Yet, rather than continuing to ring alarm bells about the terrifying historic parallel at hand as they did during the election (calling out how Trump’s language directly sampled Hitler’s, for example), the news media are suddenly treating Tuesday’s results as a basic election postmortem story. They are pretending we still live in a normal electoral setting as they obliviously do traditional election analysis pieces. Worse, the analysis itself is playing into Trump’s hands by parroting the MAGA POV: The liberal media elite are now blaming the liberal elite for not listening to “real” Americans, and … Hey, stop condescending to MAGA voters, maybe their complaints about immigrants have merit. I mean, you know, immigrants may not actually have been eating dogs, but Trump was just joking, and hey, he was, you know, onto a larger point …

Never mind that MAGA voters consistently condescended to “libtards” too, liberals are now solicitously adopting a politicized version of the facile Hallmark Channel narrative of America (fancy city-girl returns to her small hometown/realizes she’s lost touch with what’s important in the world/falls in love with “regular”-guy). In short: People who choose to live in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle (as well as in Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta) are the bad guys. We aren’t real Americans, we’re Trump’s “enemy within.”

I’m not saying there isn’t (a lot of) truth in the notion that the establishment has hurt the working class. That’s 100% correct, though it’s GOP policies like tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-union laws, and eviscerating corporate regulations that have helped capitalism run amok.

And there’s a big difference between condescension and: calling out racism and bigotry; denouncing misogyny and transphobia; exposing corporate fraud; fact checking and correcting conspiracy theories; and defending science and the rule of law.

(I’d add that plenty of “regular” folks, not just liberal snobs, have called BS when their neighbors lean into bigotry—fighting against transphobia for one inspiring example, here.)

People who voted for Trump are grown ups. Treating people as grown ups means not giving them a pass on supporting a shoddy demagogue who has been found guilty of fraud and sexual abuse, who issues racist statement after racist statement, who shamelessly lies. Sorry New York Times, I’m not interested in putting the MAGA voter under a microscope as if they’re some magical species that I fail to understand.

I understood them in 2016 [“A Deplorable Night,” PubliCola, November 9, 2016] and, having listened to Trump’s grievances about pet-eating immigrants, I understand them in 2024.

Ceding the post-election narrative to the Trumpist talking point that liberals have somehow deeply offended “authentic” Americans is the first step of acquiescence that allows the winners (MAGA, in this case) to write the history.

When you write the history, you control the future. The notion of a MAGA future is a grim one.

Flash back to November 8, 2016: Late in the night after Trump won the election, angry and emotional crowds gathered for impromptu and noisy protests in Seattle’s urban epicenter, Capitol Hill.

Fast forward to this past Tuesday night in the same neighborhood. Acceptance and fatigue have apparently set in: After it was clear Trump was going to win the election, Capitol Hill was relatively empty and totally subdued. I left an election night event at 8:45 and sat at a bar drinking a whiskey in morose silence while a smattering of folks, including a couple who seemed to be on a successful first date, chatted amiably.

Capitol Hill, Seattle, November, 2024

This week’s recommended reading: The Penguin Gandhi Reader.
This week’s recommended listening: Tristan Arp, a pool, a portal