Donald Trump Can Bring America Together
Or we can watch him take it apart.
Donald Trump has a gift for bringing people together. Two months ago, Canadians were ready to throw out the Liberal party and elect a Conservative government. Now, in reaction to Trump’s threats to annex them, Canadians have united behind Liberal leader Mark “Elbows Up” Carney. President Claudia Scheinbaum of Mexico achieved an 85% approval rating with her deft response to Trump, who has clearly brought the Mexican people together. A similar story is unfolding in France, the UK, and Germany, where the Trumpian menace has united people around pragmatic leaders, some of whom previously struggled in the polls. The man is a unifier.
The Threat
Trump is now manifestly an authoritarian threat. He has ignored a 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a man he acknowledges sending to an infamous Salvadoran torture prison by mistake, without due process, and in defiance of a lower court order. He embraced Nayib Bukele, who governs El Salvador in a permanent state of emergency and imprisoned 83,000 people in brutal dungeons with no due process. With cameras rolling in the Oval Office, Trump commended Bukele’s gulag and speculated about using it for “homegrown” (i.e., American-born) criminals or dissidents.1
This came just two weeks after Trump humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky, who is courageously defending his country from a Russian invasion. It came only two days after Trump’s clownish performance on tariffs sent markets reeling and his supporters into a frenzy. He has threatened law firms, universities, federal agencies, and the Federal Reserve for not bending to his wishes. His threats to our allies have left our global reputation in tatters. Only when panicked investors sold enough Treasury bonds, which serve as the foundation of the global economy, did Trump temporarily withdraw his more reckless tariffs. A month ago, in simpler times, we worried about Musk’s recklessness, Kennedy’s imbecility, and Hegseth’s incompetence. We now face more fundamental problems, and they will only continue to grow.
Will Trump catalyze a domestic opposition as effective as those he has inspired overseas? Can he bring Americans together around our shared values and principles? Or will we retreat into frightened acquiescence?
The Stakes
A great deal is at stake. It took hundreds of bloody generations for the West to impose a fragile architecture of restraint and reason over the brutality of emperors, kings, and warlords. The creation of institutions that could tame power was a slow and painful process that required a massive sacrifice and struggle. It was a miracle of history and a tribute to human perseverance that the West developed constitutions that bound rulers, legal systems that protected property and mitigated revenge, universities that pursued science and safeguarded truth, media that scrutinized power, and alliances that maintained peace.
These institutions have never been perfect; they can be hypocritical, oppressive, and corrupt. But over time, they enabled lives that were richer and more humane, governed more by laws than men, more by merit than by might. Along with the culture, enterprises, and technologies that they enabled, these institutions form the foundation of what we consider civilization. Donald Trump is setting them all alight.
Two and a half centuries ago, another mad king brought Americans together. Among the twenty-seven grievances that Thomas Jefferson spelled out in the Declaration of Independence were several that resonate today. The signers accused the king of colluding with the enemies of the American colonies, usurping legislative authority by abolishing laws he found inconvenient, interfering with an independent judiciary by making judges dependent on his will alone, transporting Americans overseas for trial on false pretenses, and cutting off trade with the rest of the world by imposing tariffs without popular consent.
Like the kings of old, Trump offers no argument. He plainly has no governing philosophy or program. Trump is a primitive, feral hunger for domination masquerading as populism. His urge is not to build, but to conquer and humiliate. He treats every independent institution as a threat, including the judiciary, the press, the Federal Reserve, NATO, universities, the civil service, and even the very notion of objective truth. Trump seeks to flatten them not because they are wrong, but because they stand in his way. It is politics as vengeance, governance as a show trial, the state as an extension of one man’s ego. MAGA is reduced to a Sun King’s slogan: "L'État, c'est moi".2
The Response
So far, the political response has been fragmented. Some of this is courtesy – we usually give presidents one hundred days to find their feet. But many of those attacked have scrambled to protect their own skin. Most law firms initially folded. Until Harvard, universities equivocated. Media outlets “both-sides” themselves into oblivion. Democrats who very much favor hands-on government held rallies demanding “Hands Off”. Congress has abdicated due to fealty and fear.
Mindless resistance only feeds the Trumpian fever. No more pink hats. We need to build a civic opposition that defends liberal democracy as a civic cause, not a partisan one. It is the shared compact that makes partisan politics possible in the first place. This is not left versus right. This is civilization versus Caesarism. The rule of law versus the rule of one man.
It is fine for Bernie Sanders and AOC to rally their followers. But to confront Trumpism as merely another Republican affliction is to miss its danger entirely. It is not Republican. It is anti-republican — in the oldest sense of the word. To stand against it, a civic movement must cut across ideological lines. It must be rooted in civic principle, not tribal affiliation.
Humility helps. Our institutions have encouraged cynicism. Universities that shut down dissenting voices, elites that rig systems in their favor, an openness to immigration that became lawless and chaotic, and a public media that lost the trust of half the country — these fertilize the soil that grows Trumpism. A credible resistance must acknowledge these failures. This is no time to defend the status quo.
We need to repair what is broken. We can reform higher education without rejecting science, research, or the miracle of campuses that regularly turn naive adolescents into thinking, skeptical citizens. They have their flaws, but our state and local colleges, no less than our top research universities, are engines of prosperity and opportunity envied by every country in the world. We must not surrender them to those who see knowledge as a threat.
Which Side Are You On?
Civic power grows from institutions that find peers and allies to reassert American values. This demands that apolitical leaders find the courage to speak, organize alliances, and take risks. Business executives unaccustomed to political organizing need to stand alongside companies they compete with to affirm our core beliefs. We need them to speak out not only about the damage posed by mindless tariffs but also about the threat to liberty posed by Trump’s use of overseas dungeons and his insulting treatment of our military and commercial allies. If they cannot defend our civic principles together, Gates must separate from Musk, Sandberg from Zuckerberg, and Hoffman from Andreesen. Like all of us, they must choose sides knowing that history will keep score.
This is not a good time to assert narrow self-interest. Labor must protest not only against thoughtless attacks on federal agencies, but also against tariffs that will drive up costs for working families without protecting manufacturers. Republicans need to follow Lisa Murkowski in confronting Trump’s thuggish threats and intimidation. Every business, profession, town, and civic organization needs to discuss a public response to the threats to our constitutional order with their peer organizations. We need to hear the collective voices of athletes, artists, ministers, and military leaders. Taylor Swift needs to follow Harvard’s heroic lead and use her hard-earned endowment to stand up for what she believes. Like Harvard, Swift has legions of devotees in every region, demographic, and political faction.
History suggests that successful civic movements begin with moral clarity and slowly develop strategic discipline. Protest evolves into genuine political pressure. Marches become strikes, lawsuits, boycotts, and noncompliance. Institutions lend them credibility, but the lessons of Selma, Gdańsk, and Cape Town are that engaged and committed people ultimately determine whether despots win or lose.
I have marched in dozens of demonstrations. Frankly, they bore me. I prefer to rant here, not in the streets. But this isn’t about my preferences. It’s about our country. Trump threatens to reduce every obstacle to his power to rubble. We face a stark choice: capitulate or reassert our most deeply held values.
Donald Trump will bring us together. But let’s not wait until everything is ash.3
Musical Coda
El Salvador now easily leads the world in incarceration rates, with 1,659 per 100,000 people. This is triple the US rate, which is already among the world’s highest. Aside from El Salvador, only Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan imprison more people per capita than the United States. An American is four times more likely to go to prison than a person living in China.
Literally “the state, it is me”. Attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to King Louis XIV of France.
Amid the swirl of progressive alarm bells, conservatives Andrew Sullivan, Bret Stephens, David Brooks, and Matthew Continetti have recently published takes on Trump’s attack on the constitutional order that are worth reading.