First time as tragedy, second time as fash

What makes 2025 different from 2017? And how do we stop it getting worse?

Now that we’re three trimesters into the reign of Tubby II, I got the notion to thumb through my old notes on Tubby I, January-September 2017. I hadn’t thought of that period for a long while, and my vague recollection was, while it felt unprecedented (as does the current era!), the outrages didn’t seem as heedless and headlong as they do now.

Remember the Muslim Ban? Remember how there were some court rulings against it and, though conservatives screamed bloody murder about “black-robed masters” — as they were accustomed to do, back before the Supreme Court could be utterly relied on to do whatever Trump wanted — Americans were somewhat against it, probably (as now, with immigrants) less out of fellow-feeling for the despised minority than in shock at the brutality of the gesture.

But back then Trump more or less kept quiet — almost as if he were sensitive to public opinion — and waited for SCOTUS to reverse those rulings. Which they did. Terrible, of course, but a world away from Tubby II’s current loud, repetitive self-justifications, assaults on the law, and defiance of the courts — including last weekend’s, when he gave Judge Immergut the finger and ordered the National Guard troops the judge had blocked to Oregon via other states.

Also, in 2017 there weren’t federal officers helicoptering into apartment buildings and kidnapping U.S. citizens of Muslim appearance and putting them in real danger of extraordinary rendition, as we have now. And it was expected that the next Democratic president would rescind the ban, as he (more or less) did, whereas Trump’s lawless totalitarian speedrun makes the prospect of fair future elections that would enable such a reversal at least questionable.

Oh, speaking of conservatives, they were not only unhelpful but also so ineffectual that they became irrelevant. They either went all in with MAGA or tried to split the difference between Tubby and the old, more polite racism, misogyny and oligarchy they’d grown up with. Take Jonah Goldberg, a broken man after his humiliation by Trump, still gamely trying shit like “questioning Trump’s legitimacy is exactly what the Russians probably wanted from the beginning: to undermine Western and American faith and confidence in democracy.”

Weak, right? No wonder their place in rightwing media was taken over by committed lunatics like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk; after Trump took the gloves off, not even the Chamber of Commerce types wanted the polite version anymore. Now your average Republican has to sound at least a little Trumpish to have any hope of advancing in the gang.

One big difference between then and now is that Trump’s atrocities didn’t come in a barrage in 2017 as they do now. Take his Warsaw speech, which expanded on the blood-and-soil fascism of his inaugural address. (Oh, and remember when it was considered unseemly to call him a fascist? Ha ha, weird.) The speech made a stink and briefly lingered like a deadly fart, then dissipated and vanished. He wasn’t pumping the theme, by himself or through buffoonish official federal social media accounts (like this LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED thing recently vomited up by DHS), into the discourse every goddamn day.

Speaking of social media, I remember also when Trump’s early Twitter meme-assaults on the mainstream press, like the gif of him body-slamming a guy with a CNN logo for a head, were considered a gross breach of presidential decorum. Now it’s just Trump Being Trump.

What restrained him then? Maybe it was at least partly the presence of the Republican old-timers on his senior staff like Mick Mulvaney and John Kelly, which I assume the GOP apparatchiks convinced him to accept as a way to keep his agenda from being pettifogged to death by hostile bureaucrats. This time around I suppose he decided the better way was to destroy the apparatus entirely via the DOGE smash-and-grab and the appointment of freaks and lunatics to his cabinet. No bureaucracy, no problem!

Also the Prestige Press was a little more likely to report his outrages as outrages in 2017. There are many possible explanations for their current tendency to bothsides the hell out of them instead — approval, cowardice, toxoplasmosis etc. Whatever the reason, it’s not doing what we used to think the fourth estate was meant to do.

Maybe he’s just more vengeful, senile, and prone to indulge vicious freaks like Miller and Vought than he was eight years ago.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the level of protest. In 2017 there were marches seemingly every two or three weeks — abortion, immigration, science, climate, the works. Now there are the Indivisible 50501 rallies, and also a very impressive network of anti-ICE protests in places where Trump’s goons have cracked down.

As that latter venue for protest involves putting the protestor in harm’s way, its ranks are unlikely to swell; but it may be that protest under Tubby II is going to be a hybrid phenomenon — activists doing heavy lifting while ordinary people repeatedly gather in large groups to make their opposition impossible to ignore. It worked for the early 20th Century labor movement, and against the Vietnam War.

Of course, one might say something like that happened during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and that an alliance between the fascists and the trimmers killed or at least stalled the social justice movement it was building. But it could also be argued that the energy and some of the organizing behind it persists, which is why Tubby is so keen to portray such opposition as “left wing” “terrorism” and use his goon squads to smash it.

One thing seems clear to me: The opposition — call it resistance if you will, I won’t laugh — is not going to come through the press or the intellectuals or even our alleged opposition party (unless it comes under new, much less sclerotic management in a hurry). That seems to only leave the streets. It would be nice if events made that unnecessary, but I have to say that if you don’t like the difference between 2017 and 2025, you’ll like the difference between 2025 and 1933 even less.