Against defeatism
By 
This [gift link] is a powerful and correct argument against being supine in the face of Trump’s narrow victory:
All of this negative attention has had an effect. It’s not just that the president’s overall approval rating has dipped into the low 40s — although it has — but that he’s losing his strong advantage on immigration as well. Fifty percent of Americans said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration, according to a recent poll from Quinnipiac University, and a new Reuters poll showed Trump slightly underwater on the issue, with a 45 percent approval to 46 percent disapproval.
Americans were even negative on the specifics of the president’s handling of immigration. Most people responding to a March Reuters/Ipsos poll, 82 percent, said the president should follow federal court rulings even when he disagrees with them. A smaller but still significant majority said the president should stop deporting people in defiance of court orders. And Americans were broadly opposed to the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have lived in America for a long time or who have children who are U.S. citizens or who are law-abiding except for breaking immigration law.
[…]
The individuals and institutions inclined to work with Trump thought they would stabilize the political situation. Instead, the main effect of going along to get along was to do the opposite: to give the White House the space it needed to pursue its maximalist aims.
But all the while, there was real weakness. There were the tens of millions of Americans who voted against Trump, still opposed him and remained dismayed by his lawless cruelty. There was the clear disorganization of the Trump administration, the fact that it was split among rival power centers and that Trump did not, in the four years between his first and second terms, become more able or adept at managing the executive branch. He looked exclusively for loyalty, and the result — after his initial blitz of executive orders — was haphazard incompetence across a number of fronts.
[…]
The Trump administration is still pushing to realize its vision — and high-profile prisoners like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk still face deportation — but the administration is no longer on a glide path to success. It could even careen toward failure. By exercising political leadership, by acting like an opposition, both lawmakers and ordinary citizens have turned smooth sailing into rough waters for the administration. And while there is still much to do (Abrego Garcia has not been released, there are reports that the administration has sent at least one detainee to Rwanda, and there is also at least one person who is missing from all records), it’s also true that Trump and his people are not an unstoppable force.
Trump wants us to be demoralized. He wants his despotic plans to be a fait accompli. They will be if no one stands in the way. But every time we — and especially those with power and authority — make ourselves into obstacles, we also make it a little less likely that the administration’s authoritarian fantasy becomes our reality.
Again, some marginal Trump supporters are finding out for the first time that if anything Trump/Vance place a higher priority on deporting immigrants who are here legally than those who aren’t — let alone being focused only on violent criminals — and they’re not going to like it.
underdiscussed factor in the debate of how this happened a second fucking time: right wing penetration into alternative media markets, in particular those in languages other than english, was extreme and not particularly well monitored or tracked
[image or embed]— m (@keptsimple.bsky.social) April 23, 2025 at 1:56 PM
there were people being told that trump's real plan was to hone in on deporting criminal undocumented immigrants so that the people who are just here to work could be fast tracked to legal status— m (@keptsimple.bsky.social) April 23, 2025 at 1:58 PM