First, let me express the sadness we all feel over the tragic plane/helicopter crash in D. C. last evening. Our hearts go out to the families and friends of all the victims. Something like this knocks the breath out of all of us. I decided to process in posting this today, but it was struggle, and I am still not sure it was the right decision. But when I read about Trump trying to score political points off this tragedy, I knew I had to finish the series. What a truly small and petty man he is.
Again, I ask you to share this blog along with the previous two. As I have been saying, the wider the audience of discussion, the stronger our opposition to Trump will be. Thank you for reading this series and sharing it with others.
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The Resistance
The day after Trump’s re-election I knew I was in the first stage of grief – denial – psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Ross first described in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying.
Since then I have gone through the three other stages – anger, bargaining, depression. I have not yet gotten through the final stage – acceptance.
I’m not sure which stage “disbelief” falls under, but that is the most dominant feeling I seem to have. It may take me a long time to get to acceptance emotionally. I’m there intellectually, but the whole thing still seems too surreal to be true.
I think “anger” is the easiest emotion to feel among those of us who despise everything about Trump, his words, his actions, his smugness, his pettiness, his childishness. It’s all a part of grief.
And rightfully so. We grieve over what our nation has done to itself, made worse by the fact the image we have of ourselves for making such a terrible person president.
It makes no sense any more than does an abused woman taking her abusive husband back as if things are going to be different. They never are because that’s who he is.
The same is true with Trump. He is who he is because that’s who he has always been and nothing is going to change. Smallness, pettiness, meanness, vindictiveness, incompetence, self-absorption, it’s all there because it’s always been there.
I know in my mind that accepting that fact is the first step toward dealing with him, indeed, limiting the damage he is already doing.
It’s very difficult to accept it because his re-election represents exactly what the Kamala Harris campaign said it would be – going back, back to old discriminatory attitudes and behavior.
But it also represents something entirely new, and perhaps more dangerous. His re-election represents the triumph of lies over truth in American politics.
It’s one of the things that makes evangelical support for Trump an enigma unlike any we have ever seen, and without doubt a sign of its failure and possibly its demise (we can hope).
Donald Trump is not only a malignant narcissist. He is a pathological liar. “The truth is not in him,” to quote what the First Letter of John says about someone who claims to know Jesus, but doesn’t (2:4).
Given the liar he is, that he would say in his inaugural speech that he believes his life was saved by God so he could make America great again was not only wrong, it bordered on blasphemy.
He lies about everything – troops going into California to turn on the water from the north, not true; tariffs being paid by the countries exporting goods to the U.S, not true; our country being invaded by criminals from South American jails, not true; kids coming home from school having been made transgender, stupidly not true, and on and on.
The fact that enough people believed what he said to re-elect him President says all we need to know about the trouble we’re in. Not only are we not a Christian nation. There are legitimate reasons to wonder if we are even a decent nation anymore.
We not only have to wonder if we can save our democracy. We also have to ask ourselves if, given the country we seem to have become, is it worth saving.
I know that sounds harsh, but accepting Trump’s re-election means accepting the truth it tells about how far we have fallen from a nation that was once an example for the world to follow.
We can at least be clear about the nature of our struggle against Trump. It is a fight to recover the role of truth telling in American politics, and by extension, in American life as a whole.
The loss of personal integrity among Republicans is making that challenge more complicated and difficult. This is not to say Democrats always tell the truth. It is to say that there is no American politician who lies the way Trump does, Republican or Democrat. What is more, there is only one political party whose leaders have made it clear they will not challenge the lies he tells.
Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde underscored how indispensable honesty is to the nation in the sermon she preached during the prayer service at the National Cathedral Trump attended. The second pillar of real unity in the nation, unity without uniformity, she said, is honesty.
She noted that unless we can tell the truth in private conversations and in public discourse, unity is not possible. “If we’re not willing to be honest,” she continued, “there’s no use in praying for unity, for our actions work against the prayers themselves…we don’t always know what is true, but when we do, it is incumbent upon us to speak the truth, even when, especially when, it costs us.”
Because he is never honest, to be honest is one way we resist Trump’s assault on our national character, a resistance based on the knowledge that in a society with no moral center, anything goes, no one can be trusted, and all values become self-serving.
We have never been in such a circumstance as a nation, and we are today for one reason and one reason only, Donald Trump.
Sadly, the people who have become the primary victims of Trump’s attacks are gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans, and immigrants who are being made out to be criminals menacing the rest of us.
Not only is Donald Trump a petty man, a man-child who does not hesitate to make someone “the other”, he has the temerity to claim he is an instrument of God in making American great again.
If I believed in the kind of God partisan evangelicals do, I would never stand near Trump when he speaks out of fear that he would be struck down by a lightning bolt that would hit me, too. Which is to say, every time he speaks.
Resisting Trump also means being brutally honest with and about everyone who supports him. Those of us who didn’t vote for him must stop making excuses for the people who did.
Trump is not just another president, and supporting him is not just an expression of one’s right to make that choice. It is a choice to support evil. Doesn’t matter if they see it that way or not. Germans who supported Hitler may not have believed they were supporting evil, but they were nonetheless.
Resisting Trump requires resisting the people who support him. That could involve direct confrontation of family or friends, though that will likely not be often. What we can do is to be sufficiently informed to correct Trumpers when we hear them say something we know is uninformed and/or false.
Recently a cousin of mine posted comments on FB that I knew were theologically uninformed about the Bible, but consistent with the narrative partisan evangelicals use in supporting Trump. I decided to call him on it. His response was to post a statement by someone else about blocking people like me when we take issue with them.
I responded by saying that I thought that was a good idea. But I didn’t block him. I paused receiving his posts for 30 days. I thought it was the least I could do for him and for me. We’ll see what happens in a month.
I am not naïve enough to believe my words or actions will make any difference to him, but he does know that I disagree with what he said and that matters.
Sometimes keeping the peace and a measure of peace of mind means we may have to let relationships “sit” for a while until the time is right to renew them. It’s not the best solution, but neither are we living in the best of times.
At the end of the day each of us must decide how we can to get to a place where we can live with ourselves. Sometimes it’s not as complicated or difficult as it may seem
That is especially the case, given the fact it is possible many Americans will not open their eyes to the kind of person and president Trump truly is without a large-scale negative impact of his policies.
As ironic as it is, sometimes suffering is the only catalyst for change to which people respond. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it often is.
Just one week into his presidency and we have already seen just how mean and vindictive Trump is. We can expect more of both, along with the chaos he uses to distract from the evil he is committing.
The first chance we will have to stop Trump from wielding unchecked power will be the mid-term elections in 2026. They give us the chance to put Democrats in control of the Senate and the House.
That will require Kamala Harris voters and the people who voted for a third-party candidate or who didn’t vote coming together because they recognize the threat we are facing. If we fail to defeat the Republicans in the mid-terms we will forfeit the chance to witness to the critical need for truth and truth telling.
It really is as simple as that. The 2026 mid-terms are the key to our future as a country.
Democrats in the Senate and the House are not without power now to fight Trump and his Republican allies. The Senate filibuster is in place at least for the next two years to prevent Republicans from signing on to everything Trump wants done.
Moreover, the margin of power in the House is close enough that a few decent Republicans (perhaps there are some) might join with Democrats to limit Trump’s extremism.
Our responsibility is to contact our Senators and Representatives to let them know we oppose Trump. They may agree with him, but letting them know we don’t may cause them to hesitate rather than simply bow before him without thinking of the damage they are doing. That matters, probably more than many of us believe.
There are also Democratic governors and attorneys general around the country who are showing a willingness to fight Trump extremism. And the ACLU and Marc Alias’s Democracy Docket that will fight Trump in the courts, along with individual lawyers will defend clients wronged by Trump’s orders and policies.
It is true that we don’t know if the Supreme Court will help protect us against Trump’s unitary executive overreach that has already begun to show itself, but until we know it won’t, we have to trust that at least five justices will stand by the country rather than Trump.
In all these way we have tools that can be used to check Trump’s extremism until the mid-terms, but the lasting impact anything done now hinges on the outcome of the 2026 mid-terms.
One of the reasons many Americans may not have yet understood just how precarious American democracy is because of Trump is because they have never truly thought that we could lose our democracy from a threat from within, especially from our own president, but here we are.
The truth we face is that it can happen here because the signs are unmistakable that it already is. But the rest of the story is that limiting Trump’s efforts to rule over us as an autocratic unitary executive is still in our hands.
What we must not do is to give into the temptation to underestimate the power of small acts of kindness, how healing empathy and compassion are, and how critical personal integrity is in sustaining relationships.
It is always tempting to de-value the role we can play in fighting evil. We would choose to be super heroes if we could, but none of us can. The good we do seems small, but it can and does have a rippling effect if we keep doing it.
That is why we cannot give in to despair or apathy. No team wins when they believe they will lose. No candidate wins who thinks she will lose. The Allies defeated Hitler in no small part because British Prime Minister Winston Churchill would not let his people give up. We cannot either.
What is more, an attitude of hope gives us more energy than negative thinking does. The rhetoric we hear from Trump, and his minions like Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Mike Johnson, and people who voted for Trump is mentally and emotionally draining.
Negativism has that effect. We can refuse to be caught up in it. We can choose to live by universal values in the trust that goodness, kindness, compassion, justice, and love are redemptive qualities that feed on themselves.
I believe Americans will grow tired of and even become disgusted by Trump’s words and actions. Some people, perhaps many, told themselves that Trump wouldn’t do what he said he would do in order to justify voting for him. They now know they were wrong. That may lead to a weakening of support for him.
We cannot rely on that, of course, and the good thing is that we don’t have to. We control what we do, and what we do can produce a counter energy to what he does.
Important to that work is remembering that we are not fighting against a majority of Americans, only 31% who are Trump’s loyalists. Any support beyond that is soft and whose eyes can be opened to the truth about him.
We are actually in the majority and must remember that we are. It doesn’t feel that way, but it is nonetheless true, which means we have no excuse for not doing what each of us can do to show that Trump does not represent us.
If you voted against Trump, you did something important last November. You showed that who you are is in itself a protest to who he is and the direction he wants to take the country. Not giving up or giving in is where each of us starts.
Yes, it can happen here because it already is, but we can and must trust that resistance to Trump will have the last word.
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