After a year of Donald Trump defying court orders, trampling free speech, and now operating a literal reign of terror against a city that didn’t vote for him, a new refrain is quickly gaining popularity: the liberal “Resistance” has been vindicated by this presidency.
“One day they will admit that the resistance libs were always right,” tweeted Center for American Progress president and CEO Neera Tanden.
That sentiment has been repeated by a slew of liberal commentators recently, who think that what critics in Trump’s first term disdainfully referred to as the “#Resistance” — the coalition of card-carrying members of the Democratic establishment like Tanden and rank-and-file liberals like the pussy-hat-wearing protesters of the 2017 Women’s March — are owed an apology. As Trump increasingly acts like an unstable wannabe dictator, their comparisons of him to Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, or warnings that he was on the road to eliminating US democracy, no longer look like overwrought hysterics. They look prescient.
“If people had predicted back in 2024 precisely what Trump’s return to the White House was going to look like, I suspect they’d have been accused of suffering from Trump derangement syndrome,” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently wrote. “But the shrillest of Resistance libs have always understood Trump better than those who make a show of their dispassion.”
Goldberg and others are completely right that warnings about the authoritarian potential of Trump’s presidency were not hyperbole. No one watching what’s happening right now in Minnesota or who has observed the administration’s repeated attempts to bully and silence its critics over the past year can deny that.
But taking a victory lap here isn’t helpful. That’s not just because there were very real problems with the liberal Resistance of Trump’s first term that critics were right to gripe about, but, more important, because simply…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
