Today, Right Now, is the Easiest Moment To Draw the Line Against Donald Trump

First, thank you and welcome to the 3,000 new readers of this newsletter since Saturday. I hope going forward you will find this column, which I usually aim to publish 2-3 times a week, useful context for navigating the strange times we’re in. The response to my last column, about how the events of the last two weeks would be viewed if covered overseas, was incredible and I think helped clarify for many people that, no, you’re not crazy. This is really bad.

Needless to say, things haven’t gotten better since Saturday. I watched with sadness, but not surprise, over the last 24 hours as Sen. Susan Collins, who has never hesitated over the last decade to disappoint American democracy, agreed to support Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, a move sure to undermine American security and erode our standing with allies, and Bill Cassidy — a doctor! a lifelong vaccine advocate! — agreed to support antivax conspiracist RFK Jr. as the head of nation’s health services, overseeing programs he couldn’t even correctly explain at his confirmation hearing.

At the same time, as Elon Musk continues his junta-style takeover of the operations of the federal government, we are watching spreading chaos and the wholesale, illegal, and unconstitutional destruction of the US civil service—arguably not just one of the most important institutions in American life but one of the most important and revered institutions in the entire world, a force of millions of nonpartisan dedicated public servants that has been the backbone of the entire last eighty years of the American Century.

Here’s the challenge and sad truth we face, the challenge this week makes crystal clear:

Today, right now, right here, is the easiest moment to draw the line against Donald Trump. Every day from here, it will get harder — the politics more inevitable, the destruction more irreversible, the sheer waste more costly, the downstream impacts on American life and the world beyond more catastrophic.

The challenge is that fact has also been true every day for the last nine years.

Yet every day for the last nine years, nearly every Republican and every institution in American life in the US has hoped that someone else would be the one to draw the line against Donald Trump.

It would have been easiest for the Republican Party to draw the line against birtherism even before Donald Trump ever ran for president.

Then it would have been next easiest to oppose Trump in 2015 and 2016 in his first presidential primary. It would have been easiest to draw the line after he’d insulting Mexicans in his speech declaring his presidential run, easiest to next the draw the line the following month after he’d insulted John McCain for being a POW, easiest to draw the line in the months that followed the same way that — right or wrong — the Democratic Party actually did against unite against Bernie Sanders in 2020 as it coalesced in the course of 48 hours around Joe Biden.

Yet each of Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, and the rest each hoped that one of the others would be the leader needed at the time. Had any of them—or all of them—acted then, we might be just wrapping up the end of eight years of the Rubio, Bush, Perry, or Kasich administration, a period of time where hundreds of thousands of extra Americans didn’t have to die because of the mismanaging of the Covid pandemic.

It would have been easiest to draw the line against Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, when he insulted Gold Star families and made all manner of remarks unbecoming of a national leader. It would have been easiest for Mike Pence and Rupert Murdoch to draw the line on Donald Trump in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape, as they considered doing.

It would have been easiest to draw the line for President Trump in the hours after his reckless Muslim Ban during his first week in office.

It would have been easiest to draw the line against President Trump when he failed to condemn the deadly Nazi march and rally in Charlottesville in 2017, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.”

It would have been easiest for Congress to draw the line against the repeated obstruction of justice and ties to Russia highlighted in the Mueller investigation in 2018.

It would have been easiest for the GOP and the Senate to draw the line at the first impeachment in 2019, when he first tried to unilaterally withhold legally mandated foreign assistance to a critical US ally in the midst of a war.

It would have been easiest for the US Senate to draw the line against Donald Trump on January 6^th , 2021, he’d egged on a would-be insurrection that resulted in the storming of the US Capitol that threatened the lives of Members of Congress themselves and ended America’s 231-year-old history of peaceful transitions of power, rather than hoping that the justice system would do that for them.

It would have been easiest for the Democratic-led US congress over the last four years to spend any meaningful effort curtailing future presidential laws, patching up our democracy, and codifying the broken norms that Trump’s first four years exposed, as the US did so thoroughly and thoughtfully in the years after Nixon’s presidency and the myriad scandals of Watergate, when we saw a Cambrian explosion of good government laws, fresh oversight, and new limits on presidential powers.

It would have been easiest for the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to bring charges against Donald Trump for fraud in the Stormy Daniels case quickly in 2021, rather than apparently assuming that someone else would prosecute him for the events around January 6^th . Or the Manhattan DA to do the same thing the first time around, rather than sidelining the case for Alvin Bragg to pick up in 2023 again.

It would have been easiest for Merrick Garland Justice Department to launch an immediate, full-scale investigation of Trump’s January 6^th actions in January 2021, rather than waiting nearly two years to grind into gear in the hope that Trump would just go away and “norms” could be protected.

It would have been easiest for the Republican Party and Congress to draw the line after the damning and overwhelming evidence in the January 6^th hearings in 2022 that Donald Trump engaged in a corrupt and widespread effort to circumvent the election results in 2020.

It would have been easiest for the Republican Party (again) to draw the line in the summer of 2023 when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago and recovered highly sensitive classified documents lying unsecured.

We might then be settling into the third week of the Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley administration with a president who would understand that institutions like USAID actually represent the most basic international bulwark again instability and the rise of China, and that every dollar spent in international aid, a complete pittance in our federal budget, is in investment in wars unfought, financing that avoids spending even more in military force, blood, and treasure down the road.

It would have been easiest to draw the line against Trump after any of the four unprecedented criminal indictments and 90-odd felony charges in multiple federal and state cases across 2023 and 2024.

It would have been easiest for Republican donors and officials up and down the ballot to draw the line after he’d been convicted of 34 felonies by a jury.

It would have been easiest for the Supreme Court to rule quickly last spring — consistent with every fabric of our history and constitution and the most fundamental tenets of the rule of law — that of course the president is not broadly immune from criminal liability for actions taken while in office, that of course the most basic limit on the power of the presidency is that he is supposed to respect and faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

It would have been easiest this fall for the first news organization — cough, ABC News, cough — to not cravenly offer a multimillion-dollar settlement over a nuisance lawsuit by Donald Trump that would chill journalism.

It would have been easiest for the first major tech company to not offer a multimillion-dollar bribe to President Tump to ensure they could operate unimpeded.

It would have been easiest this winter for the first new organization — cough, CBS News, cough — to not willingly hand over original reporting material for Trump’s FCC to “review” for partisan bias.

It was easiest to stop Matt Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general — and it would have also been easiest for Thom Tillis to vote no against the demonstrably unqualified and unworthy Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, a fact we know because Thom Tillis promised Hegseth’s sister that he would do just that if she came forward!

And then, from there, it would have been easiest if the small group of GOP senators with apparent sense and conscience had kept going and opposed Gabbard, Kash Patel, RFK Jr., Dr. Oz, and the other monumentally unqualified worst nominees who will do real damage to the country, the world, and lead surely to the unnecessary deaths of Americans who will be betrayed by the government they rely on to protect them. After all, there are plenty of competent Republicans who would have supported Trump’s agenda and not brought conspiracies into the very offices most important to protect against them.

Today, though, we are unfortunately surprised yet anew when the GOP fails to stand up against these worst nominees or, apparently, stands up against Elon Musk’s clearly unconstitutional moves against the US treasury, USAID, and move — it’s just bellyaching! — or stands up to defend political purges of federal law enforcement, or the wholesale unwinding of the nonpartisan civil service. We are disappointed anew when corporate American leaders and media organizations cower in the face of Donald Trump’s threats and bullying.

With each passing day, with each passing hour, it will get harder to stop the momentum and inevitability of the wreckage that Donald Trump is wreaking on our future and our constitution.

Now in 2025 it should be clear: There’s no one else coming. No one else is going to stop Trump. No one else is stepping up. There is no constitutional cavalry coming. There will be no surprise profiles of courage in the GOP caucus.

We are all there is.

We are all that there will be.

We are, as they say, the ones we’re waiting for.

What drawing that line here in this moment looks like exactly, I don’t pretend to have a perfect, comprehensive answer to — mass protests, donations to legal defense funds, a blizzard of legal cases and restraining orders, aggressive and demonstrative actions by Democratic officials and leaders who seem only now to be waking up to the horrors of the last two weeks, daily courage and backbone from any number of civil servants whose names we will never know intense, fearless investigative journalism (like what WIRED is doing! yay!) and more and other things too — just resistance and friction on everything, everywhere, until it’s enough.

Regardless, it’s time we all got to work.

If we want America to be around as a democracy next year during its 250^th birthday, this right now, today, right here is the easiest moment to draw the line against Donald Trump.

GMG