Thank you so much for being here. Whether this is your first time or hundredth, you are the reason I’ve made it to where I am today. For that, I am deeply grateful.
One of Donald Trump’s most indisputable accomplishments has been to instill a feeling of defeat and paralysis among his opponents. There’s no contributing anything new to this tired conversation about our imperiled democracy.
Nearly every article written throughout his time in politics has been quietly rooted in the hope that it might be the one to finally turn the tides. To put an end to Trump once and for all.
Of course, every writer hopes that their piece might help in making a difference.
But part of covering life’s most important topics is doing so with the understanding that our words may fall flat or amount to little more than drops in overflowing buckets. If we write with the hope of saying what’s never been said, we’ll fall short almost every time. In the fight against climate change or a political foe, we can’t expect to craft the call to action that will ultimately change the world, nation, or even our home district.
More than likely when we cover politics in the years ahead, we’ll be little more than a voice in a chorus. Sometimes, it might feel like we’re the only singer left standing on stage when we attempt to speak truth to power. We’ll come up with new words to say what’s already been said about how the man running the government doesn’t believe in the very institutions he represents. That he swore an oath to defend a constitution he doesn’t believe in. That he’s a liar, traitor, and adjudicated rapist.
We’ll find new avenues for expressing the same, urgent truths about the weighty crossroads at which our nation stands.
Our words may not reach the right people. Maybe they’ll only be preached to a converted choir. Maybe the words will be lost in algorithms that deliver messages to only those ready to hear them. Maybe our opponents will try to suppress them.
But even when words don’t seem to have an immediate impact, they can contribute to subtle shifts in public attitude. And movements can grow from the accumulation of many small contributions. Even if we’re a drop in the bucket, all turning tides have to begin somewhere.
Even if we have no new calls to action and the entirety of our plan can be summed up in the phrase “don’t give up,” our words are important all the same.
Sometimes, it seems that the best we can do in righteous fights is be reduced to truisms about good and evil and doing what little we can. We recite clichéd facts about how “every vote counts!” and “every voice matters” even when we begin losing hope ourselves.
As people, we often have a hard time seeing beyond the day-to-day. It’s no stretch of the imagination to understand how attitudes of the past began to shift. We can see the ways that opinions began to change when we compile the periodicals and look for patterns.
But so often, we’re numb to the way the past affects the present and how the current moment fits into the grand fixture of history. We forget that we’re a step along a process rather than a completed picture.
When historians look back at today, they might see a flood of dissent reflected across all media forms. They might see it followed by a stark and totalitarian quiet. Or maybe the story these years will tell is one where dissent mounted to a point where the Trumpian movement was quelled completely. Maybe when we look back at today fifty years from now, we’ll understand the role that each of these articles reciting the same old ideas played.
But today, it’s hard to continue believing that we’re providing something new with the words we write in this fight for our future. We won’t be the first to remind people that Trump is a felon, nor that he incited an insurrection and tried to stay in office through all means necessary, nor that decent human beings don’t conduct themselves in the way he does. We won’t be the first to point toward his infractions or his flagrant abuses of power.
Even while the news around Trump’s malfeasance may be commonplace — perhaps even inescapable, there remain people within our country so disengaged from the political process that they’re unaware an inauguration even took place. Occasionally, there will be readers to whom this tired information we present will be new.
Sometimes, there will be people for whom this old news clicks with a newfound gravity. And other times, there will be people who’ve never felt a need to vote in their entire lives who hear our words and finally feel called to the polls.
A common sentiment among Democrats is that this is a battle already lost. Trump’s strategy hinges on his opponents’ premature acceptance of defeat. He hopes to control the narrative and silence critics.
Much of Trump’s fury and rhetoric is rooted in uncertainty. But Trump is not Putin, and while he’s remained standing in the face of mounting criminal charges, there have been growing signs of discontent and division between members of his administration, his base, and his congressional allies. Trump’s agenda for this term is mutually conflicting. He can’t appease one half of his party without offending the other. He can’t fulfill the tenets of Project 2025 without infuriating opponents and supporters alike.
Trump presents himself as a strongman defender of the nation, but there are no objective measures by which he’s a strong leader. His candidacy and rule resulted in popular vote losses in every election between 2016 and 2022, and even in this most recent election, the margins of his victory were historically low. A majority of voters in the country voted for someone who wasn’t Donald Trump.
Though this may seem like a time when all is lost, our jobs as members of the resistance are more important than ever before. Trump and his administration may hope to stifle the progressive voice. But our nation moves in pushes and pulls. However dark this term grows, it will be met with an equal and opposite backlash in the years ahead.
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