Littwin: For progressives who have taken a vacation from the news, Monday is your wake-up call ...Middle East

“Eve of Destruction” on repeat for the last few days should tell you something about my state of mind.

But to tell you the truth, I’m more concerned, gentle readers, about the state of yours.

For all those progressives and liberals and other assorted never-Trumpers who have said — understandably — that they needed a vacation from the news after the cataclysm that was November 5th, it’s time to buck up.

It’s time to face reality.

It’s time to get back in the game, back in the saddle, back off your back. Choose whichever cliché works for you, but please choose. As one president mentioned at his inaugural, ask not what your country can do for you.

On Monday, the Trump Restoration officially begins. Many have written that the day represents the end of an epoch, one that began post-Watergate or maybe with the start of the New Deal or however you want to play the time-machine game.

But there’s no denying that we’re in a completely new place, a very different and even scarier place than we were when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. That election could, at the time, be written off as an anomaly, as opposed to Trump 2.0, which seems like an open door into authoritarianism.

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Whatever Trump says, the election wasn’t a landslide. Even the Electoral College win was relatively modest. Trump beat Kamala Harris by approximately one-and-a-half percentage points, which was the second closest presidential race in nearly 60 years.  But he did win nearly half of U.S. voters, and that is not nothing. 

It is, in fact, a lot.

I’ve read all the post-mortems. You can blame Joe Biden’s refusal to step away until it was too late. You can blame willful ignorance, or maybe amnesia, on the part of too many voters. You can blame those Democrats who stayed away from the polls. You can blame Trump’s elected enablers in the MAGA-ruled GOP. You can blame the populist war against the so-called elites that is being played out not only in the United States but across much of Europe. 

You can blame Russian disinformation, even if that effort pales in comparison to the $250 million misinformation campaign led by First Bro Elon Musk, who has now been joined by much of the New Oligarchy on the Trump bandwagon.

Maybe the most disturbing post-mortem comes via political analyst Ron Brownstein. You should listen to his interview on Tim Miller’s podcast, in which Brownstein explains how historically normal the election was, despite the fact of Trump’s many pathological abnormalities. 

Biden’s administration was unpopular. The economy, whatever the numbers say, was seen as a disaster. Unpopular incumbents (or their vice presidents), with bad economies, generally lose elections. Voters went with the alternative, even though the alternative was Trump, and even though a significant number of Trump voters expressed their concerns about him.

Here’s a number Brownstein mined from the exit polls. Pro-choice women voted in greater numbers for Trump in 2024 — post-Dobbs — than they did in 2020, when Roe v. Wade had not yet been overturned. That’s hard to believe, but what isn’t these days?

In other words, voters treated Trump much as they would any other candidate running against an unpopular incumbent.

That’s taking Trump normalization to the nth power. And, for the love of American democracy, that can’t continue.

Thankfully, Trump will undoubtedly help in the cause. His clown show of cabinet nominees — paraded every day before various Senate committees — help show what’s in store. And we haven’t even gotten yet to RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard or Kash Patel.

The Pete Hegseth Senate hearing proved at least three things: Hegseth would be the least qualified person to ever run the Defense Department; in MAGA world, Hegseth’s scandalous history is somehow a compelling factor in his favor; facing intimidating political pressure from Trump and his oligarch pals, even those GOP senators with deep reservations about Hegseth (see: Sen. Ernst, Joni) seem to have caved.

So, what to do?

The obvious answer is to resist. But how to resist is less obvious, although putting pressure on the slim GOP majority in the House may be a place to begin. Knowing what you’re resisting, though, has to be critical.

I’ll be tuning in Monday for Trump’s inaugural speech after he takes the oath, presumably on a Trump-branded Bible — replicas soon to be on sale for, I don’t know, let’s guess $500 apiece.

I’ll be tuning in even though the speech will be filled with lies and fake visions of America as a hellscape. He’ll claim complete credit — his ability to bully does deserve a decent share, for sure — for the Israel-Hamas agreement. He’ll tell lies about Aurora being taken over by migrant gangs. He’ll say he’s deporting everyone in the country without documents, except for maybe the Dreamers, without saying how many detention camps — yes, detention camps — will be needed. He might even say, God help us, on Martin Luther King Day, that the famed activist would approve of his war on DEI.

He’ll say all this, and probably far worse, as the three richest people in the world — who control much of what you read and see about, well, nearly everything — watch approvingly from the dais, along with the guy who runs TikTok, which is set to be banned, but not if Trump can help it.

I’ll be interested to hear what Trump says about Ukraine. It won’t be that he’ll solve — as promised — the situation on Day One. He won’t try to explain to his working-class followers why he wants to continue cutting taxes for the wealthy. When he claims he’s saving American jobs with mass deportations, he probably won’t delve too deeply into how, with advice and consent from Musk, he wants to expand H-1B visas — over the objections of those ranging from Steve Bannon to Bernie Sanders. Here’s the easy explanation: Musk obviously believes Americans aren’t smart enough to compete for tech jobs.

☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN

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But if you do tune in, you can take some joy — if you’re that kind of person, and I know I am — that the inauguration will be moved inside by the prospect of sub-freezing temperatures, forecast to be in the teens in D.C. when Trump is sworn in. 

Trump has said he’s making the move so people won’t have to wait outside for hours in the cold,  which, as of Monday, will officially have nothing to do with climate change. But I’m guessing, along with Fox News, that he’s taking the swearing-in ceremony inside because he’s afraid the sub-freezing temps will diminish the all-important crowd size.

Crowd size is important only to Trump, of course. But if you’re paying attention — to the inauguration, to the hearings, to the promise of retribution against perceived enemies, to the Project 2025 plan to plant Trump followers everywhere in the bureaucracy, to the promise of mass deportations — you’ll remember what the stakes really are.

Here’s my forecast: The stakes are much too high — much too alarmingly high — to possibly ignore.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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