The Week Ahead

May 4, 2025

Donald Trump may play like he doesn’t know the answer, but we all know it. Yes, Mr. President, you are required to uphold the Constitution. NBC’s Kristen Welker asked the question, and Trump responded, “I don’t know.”

Even conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is turning over in his grave at that. As for the living, far too many of them simply shake their heads in disgust in private and then turn away, lacking the courage to stand up in public. Those are the people history will judge unkindly, hopefully far worse than unkindly, because they richly deserve to be consigned to its dustbin.

As Trump continues to go too far and the country begins to rally, we are again at the point where it’s tempting to ask, could this be it? Is this the week where the Trump fever dream is finally going to break? I’ve asked that question before—naively during Trump’s first term when family separation at the border seemed too hateful to stand, and again after January 6, when it seemed almost certain decent people would not stomach what Trump had done. No matter what he does, the answer has always been no. The fever hasn’t broken.

Tonight, cautiously, I think it’s time to ask again. Could the fever finally be breaking? And what can we do to encourage it along?

Early in the first Trump administration, I thought Trump would implode at some point in that sort of spectacular way that happened at the end of Watergate, leading to Richard Nixon’s resignation. Republicans had had enough. They rejected their party’s leader, and they told him so. They told him he needed to leave. Increasingly I suspect that’s not the kind of fever break we’re going to see here, because today’s Republican party lacks that kind of courage. Instead, it’s small incremental numbers. The shift from 49% to 51% who disagree with Trump. The kind of numbers we see in polls where 30% of the people who didn’t vote regret that decision and Trump’s approval rating sags down to 43%. And it’s numbers like the ones in theSkimm poll we looked at in Friday night’s post where large numbers of women, for a variety of different reasons, seem to have both finally had enough and become highly motivated to make it stop.

As Joe Biden used to say, just enough of us. It doesn’t have to be a landslide. The fever needs to subside in a few more places, not everywhere. This week, it looks like we continue on that trajectory. It is slow. It is frustrating. Sometimes it does not feel like we are winning, and there are still signs that Trump is dangerous and unafraid to lash out, like he did this morning when he ridiculously refused to rule out invading Greenland to annex that country. Honestly, he might as well have called for more Lebensraum.

Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss, who represents Massachusetts’ Fourth Congressional District nailed it on Fox News earlier this week: “What I'm seeing is a president who is more interested in the valuation of his memecoin than he is about people's 401ks. What I'm seeing is a president who along with Howard Lutnick is self-dealing on crypto instead of worrying about the strength of the US dollar.”

All of that is fodder for a lot of conversations this week. Remember, you don’t have to convince everyone, just enough. Small progress is meaningful progress if we understand the change we need to create here.

While we wait for our political leaders to show us the way, instead it’s Americans all across the country who have begun to do what needs to be done. We protest. We follow our own lead. We listen to our own voices about the moment requires. In many ways it will be the people who pull elected Democrats out of the stunned inaction that followed Trump’s everything, everywhere, all at once approach to implementing Project 2025. Even those who knew what was coming were stunned by its speed, its breadth, its cruelty, its rejection of American values. But now everyone has had a moment to catch their breath, and the people truly are showing our leaders what needs to happen.

This week and every week the lesson is clear: Do not give into the bully. You can’t win if you cave. Trump has not won in court on a single one of his executive orders trying to bring the law firms to heel. Every firm that has pushed back has won. Trump lost another one Friday evening. Judge Beryl Howell in the District of Columbia told the Supreme Court to step aside while she wrote an opinion that truly is for the ages, including this footnote: “If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.” Although the opinion is 102 pages, you may want to skim it.

At dinner this weekend, a friend told me that one of the most encouraging conversations she’d had recently involved a look at how other countries that have been through a democratic backsliding process, like Hungary and Poland, did. It turns out that the temporary paralysis that came with the first 100 days of this administration is fairly normal for countries in this position, especially for the opposition. Then, everyone gathers themselves together and moves forward.

The timing of our conversation was perfect, because as I’ve been doing a lot of research about how other countries have worked through attempts by would-be dictators to take over, as I continue to work on my book. I had reached the same conclusion—that giving ourselves a little grace for the shock of dealing with a president who wants to dismantle democracy is appropriate. But it’s also important to remind ourselves that just like Americans saved the country during the Civil War, during the Civil Rights era, during Watergate, we can do it again.

The moment calls for courage, and if elected officials, regardless of party, can’t muster it, then they need to step out of the way (and we don’t need to reelect them). It’s a failure of imagination to think government has to be the enemy. That it has to be stagnant, cowardly, and mired in gridlock. But at a bare minimum, our elected officials should be capable of defending the Constitution. Why else do they take an oath to uphold it? Trump offers only the politics of grift and revenge, and that is not democracy.

This is where we are as we start the week ahead. It’s time to move forward. Our progress may feel slow. It may not always be linear. But we are beginning, and right now, it feels important to be here and to keep going.

If you’ve been enjoying Civil Discourse and find value in the newsletter, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support makes this work possible—it funds the time, research, and resources that go into every post, and it helps keep the newsletter independent and accessible. Now more than ever, it’s important to find voices we trust, and I appreciate each and every one of you who are a part of this community.

We’re in this together,

Joyce