Do Not Be Gaslighted

On the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, we who opposed his election face a simple question: What is there left to do? It is perhaps easier to know what we will not do:

We will not seek by violent insurrection to overturn a free and fair election.

Nor will we disrupt the tradition of peacefully transferring power that has been honored, with one exception, since the Founding.

Nor will we engage in a years-long campaign maligning the idea of elections and the efforts of election workers.

Nor will we describe reporters as enemies of the people.

Nor will we call for our political opponents to be prosecuted and jailed simply because they are our political opponents.

Nor will we wish to see American soldiers deployed against American citizens on American soil.

Nor will we hope to see protesters shot in the legs.

Nor will we dehumanize immigrants by calling them vermin or snakes and claiming their blood poisons America.

Nor will we enable or embrace the cruelty, dishonesty, indecency, and dishonor that we know, after a decade of experience, define Donald Trump.

We who oppose Donald Trump believe in elections; we believe in democracy; we believe in the Constitution; and we believe in the idea of the American republic.

So we won’t do any of these things, each of which Donald Trump has done and each of which his supporters necessarily endorsed when they cast ballots for him.

This is not to say that Donald Trump’s supporters themselves possess the cruelty, dishonesty, indecency, and dishonor that he so proudly and publicly exalts. I assume most of Donald Trump’s supporters are no more or less cruel, dishonest, indecent, or dishonorable than any American whose name could be randomly plucked out of the phonebook. Therein lies the tragedy of our politics: Most of Donald Trump’s supporters are not cruel, dishonest, indecent, or dishonorable, but they nonetheless debase themselves by choosing to take on his cruelty, dishonesty, indecency, and dishonor as their own. They are better than this awful man, but at least during a private moment in the voting booth last year, they endorsed his viciousness. They wouldn’t tolerate such cruelty, dishonesty, indecency, and dishonor in their own day-to-day lives, not from family or friends or co-workers or neighbors, and not from themselves, but they accepted all of it in their president. It’s all so very sad.

Trump supporters — good people and good Americans, I must assume — pose a challenge to we who oppose the man and his movement. If his supporters aren’t bad people and they voted for him, then maybe, after all, he’s not so bad. Given our own fallibility, the mere possibility cannot be denied, but it also needn’t be endorsed. Overwhelming evidence proves Donald Trump’s viciousness and his contempt for the idea of America and for so many of his fellow Americans. That many of our family, friends, neighbors, and countrymen failed to see or appreciate his cruelty, dishonesty, indecency, and dishonor does not make him otherwise.

We face a challenge prompted by the camaraderie we may feel toward our fellow Americans whom we currently count as opponents in a moment of special political peril. We may be tempted, in the name of getting along, to paper over our differences and deny the unhappy truths we have come to know about Donald Trump and his politics. This desire testifies to the humanity we share with our political opponents, yet it remains imperative, without regard to this fellow feeling, that we who oppose Donald Trump and his movement of American fascism resist any invitation, no matter its motive, to deny the truth and silence our consciences for the sake of a false unity.

We must refuse to participate in our own gaslighting. We see and know the truth of this man and his movement, and we need not — indeed, if we cherish the idea of America, we must not — succumb to calls for comity that depend upon us abandoning our own good sense and rejecting the evidence of our eyes and ears.

A friend recently asked me what I thought of Pam Bondi, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. My answer: “She participated in the campaign to overturn a free and fair election in 2020 and endorses the Big Lie by refusing to this day to acknowledge Donald Trump lost that election. She’s a seditionist. Next question.”

This answer is simple because it straightforwardly recounts what Bondi did, and it’s easy because I didn’t have to contort my conscience or engage in magical thinking to overlook the recent past. I just told the truth. That’s what we need to do during Donald Trump’s regime: Tell the truth, plainly and without apology or qualification.

We needn’t be angry or dramatic or hateful in our insistence on the truth. We should be straightforward and calm and matter-of-fact: “Pam Bondi is an election-denying seditionist. It happened. She did what she did, and she continues to do it. It was and is wrong. Next question.” Likewise: “Donald Trump is cruel, dishonest, indecent, and dishonorable. The evidence is plain. It abounds. We are better than this. Next question.”

Timothy Snyder, a scholar of fascism, argues in On Tyranny, “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” The truth matters, and one of our highest duties in the coming years will be to tell it. No matter what seemingly high-minded motives may tempt us to consider doing otherwise, and no matter the temporary ease and comfort we think it would provide us to accept invitations to deny plain, palpable, uncomfortable truths, we must not allow ourselves to be gaslighted.