There were mass resignations, but that just cleared the way for more MAGA appointees. These loyalists aren’t the bumbling clowns of the first term, either. They’re more experienced and disciplined this time, with a clearer understanding of how to manipulate the levers of power and muscle through their agenda. During the campaign, they even wrote out detailed plans called “Project 2025,” which described exactly what they intended to do—from dismantling the Department of Education and gutting the EPA and climate protections, to ending the independence of the Justice Department. An analysis from the nonprofit Democracy Forward found that this agenda, which was designed to avoid congressional approval, would strip overtime protections for 4.3 million hardworking Americans, reduce food assistance for 40 million people in need, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs, roll back civil rights, and much more. It was a blueprint for a less free, less fair, less prosperous America.
Many of those Trump put into government had their own scores to settle and pet ideological projects. After Trump’s Schedule F executive order ended the historic independence of the federal civil service and allowed the president to summarily fire huge swaths of experienced federal workers, there was virtually no one left in the government willing or able to question increasingly authoritarian policies, or with the competence and experience needed to make crucial decisions. All of a sudden, injecting bleach to treat a virus seemed like a splendid idea.
When it comes to his policies, “cruelty is the point,” as the writer Adam Serwer memorably put it. Well, incompetence is also the point. If Republicans make our government dysfunctional, that only bolsters their argument that the “deep state” is the problem and the only solution is a leader who uses dictatorial power to get things done. The message resonates with frustrated voters who want to blow up a broken system. Tails he wins, heads we lose.
While you’re thinking about all this, don’t forget that Trump also promised to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies—especially me, President Obama, and “the entire Biden crime family.” I take this seriously, and so should you. After all, “Lock her up” wasn’t just a campaign slogan. When Trump became president, he tried to do it. According to the report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in 2017 Trump called Attorney General Jeff Sessions at home and told him to order the Justice Department to prosecute me. He made the same request to White House counsel Don McGahn in 2018. Of course there were no crimes to prosecute and no case was ever brought. But Trump’s State Department did launch two additional investigations into my emails after the FBI had already determined there was no case. In both 2017 and 2019, the State Department reached the same conclusion: “None of the emails in this review were marked as classified,” they reported. By contrast, we now know that when Trump left office, he took highly classified secrets and left them strewn around Mar-a-Lago like party favors. For Trump, the rule of law is meaningless. He only understands the rule of the jungle. So I have no doubt that if given the chance again, he’d abuse his power to come after me, Biden, and anyone who has had the temerity to stand up to him.
I know it’s tempting to dismiss everything I’ve said here as hysterical. I wish the imagined future I’ve sketched out were just a liberal fever dream, some kind of dystopian MSNBC fan fiction. But it’s not. I didn’t even mention the fact that Trump has repeatedly said he would be a “dictator on day one” or his previous calls to “terminate” the Constitution. That felt too on the nose for this exercise. But if we take Trump’s plans and promises at face value, and if we are realistic about the lack of guardrails, then this dark future becomes chillingly real. And the only way to stop it is by defeating Trump this November so soundly that he can’t steal or bully his way into power. That means we all have to be wide awake, highly engaged, and absolutely tireless in our efforts.
Easier said than done, right?
After the 2016 election, I worried that many of the people who poured their hopes into my campaign—especially young people all over the country—would be so discouraged and deflated that they would disengage from politics altogether. Instead, a mighty resistance emerged, from the grassroots up, that mobilized to challenge the Trump administration’s abuses. Thousands took to the streets. Hundreds of new organizations sprang up. People ran for office for the first time. And in 2020, a pro-democracy coalition overwhelmed MAGA and sent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House.
But I understand how difficult it can be to sustain this kind of engagement over years and years of unrelenting political warfare, especially if it seems like there’s no end in sight. Exhausting us is part of the authoritarian playbook. They unleash a torrent of lies not because they think we’ll believe all of them, but because they hope we’ll eventually be so overwhelmed that we’ll give up on the idea of truth and justice completely. They tell us the game is rigged so we won’t bother playing. They sling as much mud as they can and say that everyone is corrupt because they want us to get disgusted and walk away.
Exceptional political talents sometimes come along like shooting stars, cutting through the noise and capturing our imaginations. Governor Ann Richards did it in Texas. Bill Clinton did it in 1992. Barack Obama did it in 2008. But most of the time, politics is less like an inspiring episode of The West Wing and more like “a slow boring of hard boards,” as Max Weber put it. Progress only comes through persistence and usually in fits and starts. It can be demoralizing.
Most Americans are not political junkies. They don’t want to have to think about the fate of democracy every day. They have jobs to do, kids to raise, aging parents to support, meals to cook, and houses to clean. At the end of a long day, if you turn on the news or scroll through social media and all you see is an unrelenting drumbeat of bad news, conflict, and propaganda—it’s enough to make anyone give up and tune out.
We can’t do that. Not this time.
Being informed is crucial, but stepping away from the news when it’s got you down is an important part of staying in the fight over the long term. Big Tech’s algorithms are designed to keep us hooked 24/7, but that’s not a healthy way to consume news and will only lead to burnout.
Here’s my advice for when you start to feel overwhelmed or out of gas: First, put down your phone and go outside. Take a walk. You don’t have to tramp around in the woods for hours like I do. It might be enough to just walk around the block. Take a deep breath and think about the people you love and the hopes you have for the future. Perhaps you’re looking forward to going to college next year, or getting married, or finding a new job. Then look around at everyone else in the neighborhood. Think about their hopes and dreams. Remember we’re all in it together. This is why we have to stick together. It’s why we can’t give up. Because the stakes matter for you and for all of us.
Take care of yourself. Maybe don’t listen to a gut-wrenching interview from a war zone or with a rape survivor denied an abortion on your morning commute. Save it for later so it doesn’t set the tone for your whole day. Try creating digital firewalls for yourself. That could mean putting your laptop or phone on “do not disturb” while you’re at the park with your kids or cooking dinner, so you’re not seeing push notifications and breaking news pop up incessantly. But don’t give up on the news entirely. Be a savvy media consumer. Find journalists you trust who will give you the straight story and pay attention to what they report.
The prospect of a Trumpy future should scare you. We have to stop it. But the prospect of a better future should also motivate you. If Democrats have the chance, there’s so much progress we can make. Abortion rights and voting rights can be restored and written into law. We can build on the boom in clean energy, electric vehicles, and advanced manufacturing that Biden began. We’ll see real results—with more good jobs, rising incomes, and a healthier environment. You won’t have to worry about a madman with his finger on the button or a crook with his hand in your pocket. Instead of chaos and narcissism, we can have competence and compassion.
Here’s another piece of advice: Get busy. As the wise and wry congresswoman from Colorado Pat Schroeder used to say, “You can’t wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time.” There are millions of Americans working to defend our democracy every day, in ways big and small. They’re volunteering, organizing, donating, even running for office themselves. And history tells us that when our nation faces the greatest perils is when our people find their greatest strengths. So I’m not giving up, and I hope you won’t, either.
We can’t allow ourselves to be exhausted. Instead, we should channel the strength of Rosa Parks, who dismissed the idea that the only reason she sat down in the front of that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, was because she was tired. “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she said.
There’s a wonderful phrase in a letter that the dissident playwright and first freely elected president of Czechoslovakia Václav Havel sent to his wife, Olga, from prison:
Everything meaningful in life is distinguished by a certain transcendence of individual human existence—beyond the limits of mere “self-care”—toward other people, toward society, toward the world…. Only by looking outward, by caring for things that, in terms of pure survival, you needn’t bother with at all… and by throwing yourself over and over again into the tumult of the world, with the intention of making your voice count—only thus will you really become a person. (emphasis mine)
I love that. We’re all tired. It’s been a long few years. It’s easy to feel powerless or like our efforts and our voices don’t matter. They do. We can’t stop throwing ourselves over and over again into the tumult of the world. It’s the only way to prevent the bleak future we fear and build the better country we deserve.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
Her eyes were red from tears but flashed with resolve. It was February 2024, and Yulia Navalnaya had just learned that her husband, Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and pro-democracy activist, had died in an arctic penal colony. We were at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich, Germany, at a conference on international security attended by world leaders, diplomats, activists, and academics.
“I thought: Should I stand here before you or should I go back to my children?” Yulia said. “And then I thought: What would Alexei have done in my place? And I’m sure that he would have been standing here on this stage.”
Like everyone, Yulia assumed Navalny had been murdered by Vladimir Putin’s thugs. For years, Navalny had been a persistent thorn in Putin’s side, exposing the corruption of Russia’s political elite and speaking out against authoritarian repression. He was poisoned in 2020 by Russian agents and nearly died. Yet he recovered, returned to Russia, and was promptly arrested. Navalny knew the risks but refused to bow to intimidation. It was no secret what happened to prominent critics of the regime. They fell out of windows or were shot in the elevator of their apartment building. Their tea was poisoned with radioactive isotopes. Their planes mysteriously exploded in midair. Sometimes they just dropped dead with no explanation offered. Now Navalny was dead, too, and so was one of the best hopes for change in Russia.
“I want to call on the world community, everyone in this room and people around the world[,] to come together to defeat this evil, defeat this horrible regime that is now in Russia,” Yulia said, keeping her composure through the grief and anger.
After she left the stage, I took her hand and told her how sorry I was for her loss. I was in awe of her strength.
Over the years, I had gotten to know Yulia and her daughter, Dasha, as well as a number of Navalny’s colleagues at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which does so much to expose abuses by Putin’s regime. As Navalny languished in a Russian jail cell, I encouraged the Biden administration to push for his release and explore possible prisoner swaps. I was impressed by Yulia and her devotion to both her family and the cause of Russian democracy. A former banker with a degree in international economics, she is fiercely intelligent and politically savvy. Before Navalny’s death she often preferred to stay in the background. He was the charismatic leader rallying opposition to Putin; she was the rock giving him strength and sure footing. Now, Yulia was grappling with whether to step forward and pick up Navalny’s public role.
It was a painful decision I had seen too many other women face over the years. I’ll never forget visiting Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua’s first woman president, and seeing the bullet-riddled car in which her journalist husband had been assassinated by the regime of dictator Anastasio Somoza. She kept it on the front lawn of her house in Managua as a reminder of the sacrifices she and her country had made for democracy.
In Munich, as Yulia reeled from the news of Navalny’s death, she huddled with another woman who had been unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight: Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya from Belarus. Sviatlana considers herself an “accidental politician.” She never intended to run for office or become the face of the opposition to dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko, a key Putin ally. As for Yulia, it was Sviatlana’s husband, the activist and journalist Siarhei Tsikhanouski, who was the public figure. In 2020, as Siarhei prepared to run for president, he was arrested and held incommunicado. Without even being able to talk to her husband, Sviatlana stepped in and ran in his place. She didn’t think it would be more than a gesture of love to Siarhei.
“I didn’t have a political background,” Sviatlana explained to me. “I was an ordinary housewife, but it became so important for me.” Lukashenko underestimated Sviatlana and didn’t bother to block her candidacy. She joined with two other women leaders, Veronika Tsepkalo and Maria Kolesnikova, to mobilize a unified opposition movement. Sviatlana did it all while juggling the demands of being a de facto single parent to her two young children.
To everyone’s surprise, Belarusians responded enthusiastically. They bravely joined rallies and protests—rare and risky in a country ruled with an iron fist. In July 2020, more than sixty-three thousand gathered in Minsk in what was the largest rally in Belarus’s history. “I don’t need power, but my husband is behind bars. I had to hide my children,” Sviatlana told the throng. “I’m sick of putting up with it, keeping quiet, and being afraid.”
With Sviatlana’s support surging, Lukashenko’s regime got serious about rigging the election. In the end, he declared himself the winner with 80 percent of the vote. Independent observers say Sviatlana was the real winner, but she was forced into exile, and her husband was sentenced to nearly twenty years in prison. Protesters filled the streets but were met with mass arrests and a widespread crackdown.
Sviatlana refused to fade into obscurity. She now travels the world urging leaders to hold Lukashenko accountable for his crimes and support freedom in Belarus. She coordinates the country’s pro-democracy movement and does everything she can to shine a spotlight on the plight of the many political prisoners held in Belarus, including her husband. She has had no contact with him and doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. The Belarusian regime denies the International Red Cross’s requests to visit him and the other prisoners arrested for running the political protests. It’s a form of personal torture that she channels into her work.
After meeting with Yulia in Munich, Sviatlana told the press, “We understood each other without any words.”
In the days that followed, Yulia showed the same kind of steely determination. She addressed the European Parliament and urged the continent’s leaders to treat Putin like the criminal he is.
“You aren’t dealing with a politician but with a bloody mobster,” she said. Because “Putin is the leader of an organized criminal gang,” Yulia explained, the world needed to think like a Mafia prosecutor: “Not diplomatic notes, but investigations into the financial machinations. Not statements of concern, but a search for mafia associates in your countries, for the discreet lawyers and financiers who are helping Putin and his friends to hide money.”
“There has been so little time to think, to plan, to process,” she told a reporter in early April. “But we have to keep working, to keep moving forward.” In July, Russia ordered Yulia’s arrest in absentia, meaning that if she ever returns to her country, she’ll be imprisoned just as her husband was—a clear sign that her voice and advocacy pose a threat to Putin’s corrupt regime.
I have been working with courageous women like Yulia and Sviatlana for thirty years. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “A woman is like a tea bag: You never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.” Time and again, I’ve seen women activists in difficult and dangerous circumstances prove her right. Exposing corruption and human rights abuses, defying dictators, fighting for democracy—this is dangerous work. Yet all over the world, I’ve met women who answer repression with astonishing resilience and determination. I still don’t know how they find the courage, but their example gives me hope and inspiration.
“The world has finally woken up to the fact that we’re powerful,” Leymah Gbowee told me recently at a conference on democracy at Wellesley College.
Leymah won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to bring peace and democracy to Liberia after a long period of war and dictatorship. Between 1989 and 2003, about 250,000 Liberians were killed and millions fled their homes. Soldiers, many of them little more than children, raped and assaulted women with impunity. In 2003, women like Leymah started saying to one another, “Enough is enough.” She began organizing nonviolent protests. Thousands of women from all walks of life, Christians and Muslims together, flooded the streets, marching, singing, and praying. Dressed all in white, they sat in a fish market in the hot sun under a banner that read THE WOMEN OF LIBERIA WANT PEACE NOW.
