Resistance (At All Costs)

by Kimberley Strassel

  Democrats had soaring ambitions for a Hillary Clinton presidency. She would cement Obama’s gains and put the nation irrevocably on a path to progressive enlightenment. Obama had given the federal government sweeping new control over private health care; Clinton would use anger over the resulting soaring prices to pivot to true, government-run care. Obama erected a hulking new bureaucracy to micromanage the energy and finance sectors; Clinton would cement those regulations for eight more years, making it impossible for Republicans to dismantle them. Obama raised taxes on the wealthy; Clinton would make that the new norm and continue to grow the size of government. A Clinton administration would protect Obama’s legally dubious moves: the Paris Climate Accord, his executive immigration orders, his crackdown on religious freedom. And the granddaddy of ambitions? The Supreme Court was finally, tantalizingly up for grabs. A Republican Senate had blocked Obama from putting his nominee, Merrick Garland, in the seat of the recently deceased Antonin Scalia. Clinton would see that nomination through. For the first time since Nixon, there would be five reliably liberal justices on the Court, potentially more if another conservative retired or died during a Clinton presidency.

  Trump’s victory demolished this dream. And the left’s rage was against everyone and everything. It was furious at its own side—that the party had been so foolish as to settle for its heir apparent, Hillary Clinton, and close its eyes to her failures and baggage. A growing and ascendant progressive wing of the party was still angry that the Democratic National Committee had rigged the primary against its favorite, Bernie Sanders.

  It was furious with Republicans overall—particularly that the GOP had blocked Obama from doing more in his time in office. “Dear people who spent eight years demonizing Obama at every turn and are now tweeting me to ‘give Trump a chance’ on day 1: Trust is earned,” declared American actor Seth MacFarlane. Democrats raged over the Garland nomination, throwing it out as an immediate reason for why the party should deny Trump cooperation on anything.

  The left was furious at any group or body that it felt might have played a role in allowing Trump to happen. That included pollsters, who had misgauged the depth of Trump support and led Clinton into false security; the FBI, which had briefly reopened the probe into Clinton’s private server right before the election, potentially depressing her turnout; women, for the crime of supposedly voting against their own self-interest; and, of course, the media, for giving Trump so much air time. Anti-Trumpers poured particular venom on CBS executive chairman and CEO Les Moonves, who during the campaign bluntly celebrated Trump’s effect on TV income and ratings: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” he told a conference in February 2016.

  And the rage only increased as the election results sank in. It suddenly crystallized for Democrats not just that they’d lost, but just how true it was that Trump wasn’t the typical Republican president. Republicans always run on lower taxes, fewer regulations, and smaller government. But the left and the media had become good over past decades at browbeating Republican candidates and presidents out of a truly conservative agenda. They’d barrage them with criticism in sensitive policy areas like the environment, or health care, or poverty programs, and the GOP would step back. Republican leaders changed things, but only slowly and around the edges.

  Trump, Democrats realized in horror, really didn’t give a toss what anyone thought of him. Moreover, he seemed to care deeply about fulfilling his campaign promises. The Paris Climate Accord? Gone. All those climate-change rules? Gone. Obamacare? Trump would repeal it, if at all possible. The judiciary? Candidate Trump’s 2016 list of potential Supreme Court nominees included an all-star roster of textualist jurists and thinkers. And as the NYT’s Egan morosely pointed out, Trump had also carried to victory a Republican House and Senate. He had the allies to pass his agenda. Democrats hadn’t just lost their fairy-tale castle in the sky; they’d landed a dragon.

  The left’s hatred of Trump the man combined with its fury over its loss to create an epic level of rage. We have no way of knowing whether this anger has any equal in history. What we do know is that history had never before provided the twenty-first-century tools that would allow this fury to explode and grow and endure. Social media gives Trump critics the ability to immediately organize and to perpetuate a state of permanent anti-Trump outrage. Twenty-four-hour cable stations, flanked by hundreds of Internet outlets, seize on every accusation—collusion, corruption, incompetence—and stoke and push the charges into every home, transforming “news” into a new form of political takedown.

  And within days, the anger turned into a formal, committed movement. Indeed, the speed with which the idea of resisting Trump morphed into an official “Resistance” movement was remarkable. At first, it was just liberal polemicists decrying the election results. New York Times columnist Charles Blow, in a November 10 column titled “America Elects a Bigot,” lamented that America had chosen a man who “appeared in pornos” and “boasted of assaulting women.” He concluded: “I respect the presidency; I do not respect this president-elect. I cannot. Count me among the resistance.”

  Perhaps the first post-election formalization of the term came with a viral video from liberal personality Keith Olbermann, via GQ’s website. He predicted: “At some juncture soon there will be the resistance. Those of us who warned against and pleaded against and fought against this madness will find avenues for dissent, which will have enough support to at least impede this monster.” He added his own twist on Churchill (with no apologies to the conservative hero): “We shall fight online. We shall fight in the press and on television. We shall fight on the street corners of public opinion. We shall never surrender.” Within a week of the election, the San Francisco Chronicle’s political writer, Joe Garofoli, had given the word a capital “R.” He called on Americans to “unfurl out of the fetal position, stop moaning to your Facebook friends, and do something positive if you’re seething or freaked out or scared by the prospect of President-elect Donald Trump.” What would that be? Garafoli explained: “Organizers are urging anti-Trumpers to join the Resistance.”

  Join they did. By Inauguration Day, that Resistance was fully organized. And it was on that day that it became clear that the Resistance was something all its own and particularly corrosive to democracy.

  I’d agreed on Inauguration Day to provide commentary for CBS News, which involved getting across D.C. in a car. That meant picking our way through the inaugural crowds. I saw plenty of concerned citizens calmly walking with anti-Trump signs. They were engaging in the kind of peaceful political protest that is a hallmark of American society and of which we should generally be proud.

  But I also saw people smashing car windows, racing in mobs after anyone in a MAGA hat, screaming taunts and insults at the media. They were the folks already holding the “Impeach” signs and promising they would not stop until Trump was forcibly removed from office. The claims of illegitimacy, the scorched-earth tactics—that’s the official Resistance.

  * * *

  And that is why it is so important to make distinctions. Here’s an important one: Not everyone who passionately dislikes Trump is part of the radical Resistance. Plenty of average Americans don’t want this president and are committed to seeing him leave office. But they want to see that happen via the ballot box in 2020; they are not willing to break all the rules to get an earlier result.

  Contrast the tactics of the Resistance, for instance, to its putative forbearer—the Never Trump movement. Trump had faced down his own GOP mutiny in the months leading to and following his nomination. The Never Trumpers counted among their ranks every type of conservative: grassroots activists, pundits, faith leaders, politicians, former Republican officials. And Trump had given each of them an ostensible reason to oppose his nomination.

  In the course of a year’s campaign, the real estate mogul had deployed some shocking language and behavior. He’d mocked a disabled reporter. He’d taunted his primary rivals—making fun
of Carly Fiorina’s face, calling Jeb Bush “dumb as a rock,” and ridiculing the size of Marco Rubio’s ears. Some voters—many who’d watched Trump in his reality TV days—wrote it off as Trump-shtick. Others found it refreshing, an antidote to too-polished politicians. But for many Republicans, it was a mark on his character.

  He’d rattled a number of Republicans with his policy proposals, particularly the biggies of trade and immigration. The GOP had long hailed itself the free-trade party. Trump, while claiming to be a free-trader, railed against pacts that he claimed were a continued “rape of our country.” Republican leaders for years had pushed for a grand immigration bargain and a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. Trump came down on the side of local officials and base voters who instead wanted more border security, and he promised to build a “great wall.”

  Defense hawks worried he might completely withdraw troops from global hot spots. Law-and-order conservatives worried that Trump, like Obama, would rule via executive order or presidential decree. Whole crowds of Republicans noted that he’d only recently been a Democrat and worried he’d govern like one.

  The point is: Whether you agreed with them or not, most Never Trumpers had principled reasons for their opposition, which stemmed from their own deeply held views of conservatism. All this meanwhile came at a time when Trump was still a relatively unknown quantity, and as Republican primary voters were bickering angrily over all their candidates.

  Yet the problem for Never Trumpers was that other thing they all claimed to deeply believe in: democracy. In April 2016, Trump was close to locking up the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination. News broke that his two remaining rivals, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, had teamed up with the sole goal of denying Trump the nomination and forcing a contested convention. Some Never Trumpers also started working to convince delegates in states Trump had won to break their pledges and vote against him at the convention. These headlines infuriated many Republican primary voters, who felt elites were rigging the game. And it backfired. On the eve of the crucial Indiana primary in May, a Wall Street Journal-NBC-Marist poll found that 58% of Indiana primary voters disapproved of the Cruz-Kasich effort. As CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill observed: “Voters feel like Donald Trump is being now thwarted, he is being blocked, he is being obstructed.” Prior to all this, Cruz had polled competitively in Indiana. By the end of voting, Trump had crushed him by 17 percentage points. The Texan dropped out of the race.

  And that was pretty much the end of the Never Trump movement. A few holdouts made a last stab at thwarting Trump’s bid at the August convention, but the effort went nowhere. While Democrats were more than willing to rig their own primary to crown Hillary over Bernie, Republican leaders ultimately rejected such tactics—to their credit. To do otherwise was undemocratic and would provoke a voter backlash. As we at the WSJ editorial page wrote when Trump wrapped up the nomination: “GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy.” The ultimate list of Trump convention speakers ranged from House Speaker Paul Ryan to faith leader Jerry Falwell Jr. to Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel to Duck Dynasty star Willie Robertson. And in the months and years since the convention, the vast majority of original Never Trumpers have cautiously accepted the president, whether out of admiration for (or relief over) his conservative agenda or (ironically) in response to what they now view as unfair attacks from his opponents.

  The Resistance, from the start, has been something very different. True, it still counts among its ranks some prominent conservatives who continue to reject a Trump presidency. But they are the misfits in this movement. Whereas the original Never Trumpers were concerned Trump would destroy conservatism, the vast majority of the new Resistance hate Donald Trump for embracing conservative policies. And whereas the original Never Trumpers agreed to let democracy take its course, the Resistance continues to work to immediately destroy his presidency.

  Which brings us to the second major distinction: Within the Resistance, there are leaders, and there are followers. And they are not necessarily in that movement for the same reason.

  The vast majority of those Americans who blithely refer to themselves on social media as part of the Resistance are the followers. They are daily whipped into frenzies by the steady stream of accusations against Trump—the claims of his racism, misogyny, treason, authoritarianism, and more. Some are politically aware, though blinded by their hate. Some have no clue of the facts, but are willing to believe anything (think: most snowflake college students).

  But it’s the leaders of the Resistance who are doing the damage, and are the primary focus of this book. They are a loosely gathered collection of Democratic politicians, political operatives, big-name pundits, news organizations, and well-funded activists. For as much as these folks legitimately dislike Trump, they are also smart enough to know that the president is not a Russian spy, or a racist, or a tyrant. They nonetheless continue to every day decry him in the most over-the-top and relentless ways possible. They do this for a simple reason: It benefits them.

  First and foremost, a politics of fear allows them to gin up the masses, to whip those Resistance followers into a hysteria that pays handsomely—literally. Within days of Trump’s inauguration, liberal special interest groups were fund-raising like mad off their dire predictions of his presidency. “Join the Resistance: Stop Donald Trump’s Attacks on the Environment. Donate Now!” read one e-mail from Friends of the Earth in November 2016. In February 2017, the Washington Times reported that the Sierra Club was bragging its donations had swelled by 700 percent since the November election, compared to the same period a year earlier. Every traditional organization got in on the act—civil rights groups, environmental organizations, labor unions, pro-choice outfits.

  Bigger, umbrella fund-raising organizations also cashed in. The Sixteen Thirty Fund is a left-leaning group that collects money from donors, and then “sponsors” liberal projects. In 2016, when Obama was still president, it raised $21 million. Contributions in 2017, Trump’s first year in office, nearly quadrupled to $79 million.

  The fear-mongering opportunity was so huge that Resistance leaders rushed to start up new nonprofits. Democracy Forward—whose board includes Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman, John Podesta—was launched with a mission of fighting Trump administration “corruption” in court. A former Obama official started American Oversight, a “Freedom of Information Act litigator investigating the Trump administration.” Groups like Demand Justice were set up to oppose Trump judicial nominations. The money continues to pour in.

  Resistance slogans have proven equally lucrative for Democratic politicians running for election. Anti-Trump rhetoric has fueled massive donations to political campaigns, starting with special elections in 2017, up through this 2020 election cycle. Democratic candidates for Congress in 2018 raised more than $1 billion, breaking records and swamping Republicans. Beto O’Rourke alone raised an extraordinary $80 million in his (ultimately doomed) quest to unseat Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

  Resistance leaders have also used their nonstop Trump hate to mobilize volunteers and voters for Democratic causes. In October 2018, Time ran a piece titled “How the Anti-Trump Resistance Is Organizing Its Outrage.” The story laid out how Resistance types were enlisting average Americans, fueled by anti-Trump fervor, to do their bidding. “Hundreds of thousands of volunteers, allied with thousands of autonomous groups, are doing the grunt work of propelling their neighbors to the polls, using tactics tailored to their communities. Suburban moms are knocking on doors in North Carolina battlegrounds; racial-justice organizers in Georgia are mobilizing black voters in churches and restaurants; college students in Pennsylvania are using social media to reach new voters. In Texas, immigrant-rights activists are helping Latino voters get their paperwork in order. Teenage gun-safety advocates from Florida are on bus tours to register other newly eligible voters.” An NBC News piece b
y Republican strategist Evan Siegfried in October 2018 laid out how all this was helping Democrats rack up voter registrations in key areas. “In Iowa, 2018 voter registrations so far are double what they were at the same point in 2014. Even more telling is the partisan breakdown: Democrats added 23,064 new members so far this year and Republicans only 1,636.”

  More broadly, Resistance leaders discovered the benefits of conflating Trump with his policies, as a way of delegitimizing the entire conservative agenda. Here’s one way it works: A Resistance leader will call Trump ignorant and evil, but in the same breath also note that Trump believes in so-and-so policy. Ergo, said policy is ignorant and evil. In a November 26, 2018, column, the same NYT economist, Paul Krugman, decried the Trump administration as “anti-objective-reality.” Trump and Republicans suffered from “sheer depravity” and engaged in “tough guy posturing.” Mr. Krugman also tossed in the terms “greed, opportunism, and ego.” It turns out the actual subject of the column was GOP climate change “denial.” Only in the age of Trump can liberals write off those who question man-made global warming as morally “depraved.”

  Trump gives Resistance leaders new ways to demean and undercut their entire opposition. A particularly nasty claim is that Trump and his election somehow prove that conservatives as a whole are vile. Amy Goodman, the host of the liberal Democracy Now! news program, wrote at the end of 2016 that “Trump’s campaign was overtly racist, and this seems to have motivated a terrifying number of voters.” Got that? People didn’t come out to vote for Trump because he promised lower taxes or less regulation or better judges. They did it because they hate minorities, according to the Resistance.

  Resistance politicians have made an art of the same sort of guilt-and-dismissal by association. This was California Senator Kamala Harris in the days following the Trump election victory: “One side believes it is okay to demagogue immigrants, has proposed unrealistic plans to build a wall, and is promising to break up families by deporting millions of people. The other side believes in respect, justice, dignity and equality as part of an approach to bring millions of people out of the shadows.” Again, every Republican, by virtue of voting for Trump, is against respect, justice, dignity, and equality.