Yesterday, the political mood in America began to change. Donald Trump's presidency is still extraordinarily dangerous, but he's starting to get pushback, and it no longer seems reasonable to argue that he's precisely in tune with the mood of the country, which just wants to do the two-fist Trump dance to "YMCA" and would like all his critics to shut up.
It's not just that a federal judge has blocked Trump's freeze on federal aid spending until Monday. It's the deep skepticism demonstrated by some in the media as it became clear that programs such as Head Start, Meals on Wheels, and suicide prevention programs for veterans were being frozen. The Trump surrogates in the clips below are arrogant, but they're on the defensive. It's a start.
STEPHEN MILLER: Does anyone believe that an unaccountable career bureaucrat should be able to approve vast sums of money for the projects that they personally agree with?
JAKE TAPPER: I'm literally asking about Meals on Wheels. I don't know what you're talking about.
BROWN: Would you support getting rid of school lunch for vulnerable kids and getting rid of childhood cancer research?
REP. MCCORMICK: Philanthropy is where you get most of your money for childhood cancer research. When you talk about school lunches, hey, I worked my way through high school.
There has also been pushback by Democrats -- more is needed, but this week already looks very different from last week, not to mention the two months following the election. In my update to yesterday's post, I showed you Chuck Schumer's response to the spending freeze. That was good, and so is Tim Kaine's response to Trump's offer of a buyout to all federal workers, by means of which the president and his allies hope to create a government free of everyone except right-wing zealots (I don't think the buyout is intended to make the government non-functional, although it's likely to have that effect if it succeeds):
Sen. Tim Kaine tells federal employees to ignore Trump’s offer to quit with pay for months. “Don’t be fooled. He’s tricked hundreds of people with that offer. If you accept that offer and resign he’ll stiff you just like he stiffed the contractors. He doesn’t have any authority to do this.”
Can any of this stop or slow Trump? That's not clear yet -- but until yesterday, Democrats and the mainstream media seemed cowed, and the conventional wisdom was that Trump critics were sad throwbacks who needed to understand that the times had passed them by. A cover story in New York magazine depicted young Trump fans as society's new trendsetters:
And this seemed to be the conventional wisdom about Trump and his opponents:
You might regard all this as trivial. But I think it contributed to Democrats' belief that the public didn't want them to attack Trump forcefully (or at all).
Now it feels as if some Democrats are willing to fight, and some journalists are willing to ask whether Trump's actions are beyond the pale. That has the potential to send a message to apolitical normies that Trump is controversial, just the way he was in his first term.
Or perhaps the people who needed to see opposition to Trump as thinkable were those Democrats and journalists. They appeared ready to let Trump roll them, but the outrageousness of his latest moves overcame their fears, and their preference for meekly going along. This Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that the public really hasn't embraced second-term Trumpism:
There's a lot of work to do. But suddenly it's harder to sell Trumpism as a gregarious podcast-ready insult comic leading a merry band of bros and Mar-a-Lago plastic surgery cases in a hilarious war against humorless woke scolds. It's now clear that if Trump has his way, many ordinary people will be hurt. If that becomes the new conventional wisdom, we have a chance to limit the damage he does.
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