Opinion: Trump Is Counting On Your Exhaustion

The truth is, I don’t want to talk much about politics either. After such a long, difficult, grueling campaign that started with a 100 day sprint and ended in unbearable heartbreak, I want to stay in the psychological equivalent of a blanket burrito with comfort food in easy reach and a mindless bingeable show to watch. With the election over and the transition to the worst people ever underway, it feels like the only reasonable reaction is to step back from politics, assess our emotional wounds, and try to make life as simple as possible. As the news chatter picks up on developments in the country and around the world, the temptation to tune out grows even stronger.

But as much as I — a certified politics person — want to put my brain on pause for the next four years or so, I know that the incoming administration and their allies are counting on my disengagement, despair, and disillusionment. The less attention on their depraved abuses of power, naked and unabashed corruption, and blatant disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law, the more the Trump Administration can act with impunity. Withdrawing to our own bubbles of personal comfort just makes the inevitable return to gravity that much worse.

As someone who has turned the volume down but not tuned out completely, I can tell you that anyone retreating to the illusion of a politics-free world is in for a horrifying and rude awakening. Already, Donald Trump is talking about dismantling birthright citizenship, which has been the route for every person born on US soil since 1868 to claim our rights in this country. He’s backtracking on promises to lower prices (surprise, surprise) because his plan for sky-high tariffs will almost certainly increase the cost of goods across the entire supply chain. Trump’s campaign invective about pursuing, imprisoning, and even executing political opponents who investigated him, called out his malfeasance, or challenged his policies? That never went away, but now it’s out, loud, and proud in the worst way. And there’s no sign from anyone, anywhere in government that they’re going to stop him or hold him accountable.

So that burden falls to us, the people who are technically in charge of this shambolic system. We will have to organize and coordinate and resist with everything we have to stop the excesses of the second Trump Administration from destroying the republic. This won’t be like the first term of his rule, where ineptitude and laziness generally slowed or stalled the worst of his impulses. Trump and his minions have had four years to plan, plot, and stew over the loss of power that the Biden Administration represented, and with Project 2025 as their bible, they are going to strip the country to the studs.

The depth of this threat to the American republic can’t be fought with half-hearted scrolling or retreats from reality. When the second Trump Administration starts up, we will need to consider every tool in the arsenal to deny, delay, and deconstruct their efforts. Aesthetic resistance and shallow memes won’t be enough (if they ever were) to rally opposition to the regime. This resistance will be for keeps, and building it will demand constructive hopes and empowered dreams. A tuned out populace can’t supply much of either.

We are all still healing from the catastrophe of this election. It is necessary to refill our cups and protect our peace. After what we just went through, we deserve restorative retreats from the constant barrage of bad news. But protecting ourselves can’t be an end in and of itself. We step back, we reset, we give ourselves the space and time to heal because we want to be at our peak when we must step back into the fray. And if it’s not enough on its own to know that we will be needed by the vulnerable, by the targeted, by the unheard and unrecognized, then maybe we can find the strength to fight from spite. Because our opponents, flush with power, are ready and waiting for us to give up. And I’m not in the habit of giving them the satisfaction of winning.