Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada? It was an absurd situation. I briefly considered recycling an old joke of mine about merging all of the High Plains states into a single province of South Saskatchewan. But as I toyed with it, the joke soured. The president of the United States was bellowing aggression against fellow democracies. The situation was simultaneously too stupid for serious journalism and too shameful for wisecracks.

In this second Trump presidency, many of us are baffled by how to respond. The former Trump strategist Steve Bannon memorably described Trump’s method as “flood the zone with shit.” Try to screen all the flow, and you will rapidly exhaust yourself and desensitize your audience. Ignore the flood, and soon you’re immersed in the stuff neck-deep.

The first Trump term was very different.

[Read: It’s not amateur hour anymore]

More than a million people demonstrated against him on January 21, 2017, many more than had attended his inauguration the day before. On January 27, Trump issued an executive order purporting to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Thousands of people thronged airports across the nation to protest. About a hundred were arrested. In less formal ways, civic-minded Americans also rallied against the new administration. They read and viewed more news, and paid for it at record levels, too. Trump reviled one news organization more than any other: the “failing New York Times.” In 2017 alone, the company’s revenues from digital subscriptions climbed 46 percent, pushing total company revenues above $1 billion.

Meanwhile, the administration bumbled from fiasco to fiasco. Within the first week, Trump’s choice of national security adviser lied to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government, setting in motion his early resignation and then criminal indictment. Trump that same week summoned then–FBI Director James Comey to dinner to pressure him to end the bureau’s investigation of Trump-Russia connections. The demand would lead to Comey’s firing, the appointment of a special counsel, and the prosecution and conviction of important Trump allies such as Paul Manafort.

First-term Trump knew what he wanted: unlimited personal power. But he did not know how to achieve it, and an insufficient number of those around him was willing and able to help him. The senior administration officials who supported Trump’s autocratic ambitions lacked bureaucratic competence; the officials who possessed the bureaucratic competence did not support his ambitions. That’s one reason it took Trump more than a year—until March 2018—to impose the first major round of the tariffs that he wanted but his top economic adviser opposed.

First-term Trump also lacked reliable partners in Congress. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck devil’s bargains with Trump to achieve their own agendas: tax cuts, judicial appointments, the attempted repeal of Obamacare. But they were not his men. They overlooked his corruption, but also imposed limits on what he could do. In 2019, Trump tried to name two personal loyalists to the Federal Reserve Board. McConnell’s Senate rejected them.

[Read: Donald Trump’s first year as president: a recap]

Second-term Trump is very different. He has moved rapidly to consolidate power. Even before he took office, the Department of Justice preemptively stopped all legal actions against him for his attempted seizure of power on January 6, 2021. As soon as he was inaugurated, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all of those convicted for the violent attack on Congress. He then announced investigations of the lawyers who had acted to enforce the law against him.

Trump has moved rapidly to oust independent civil servants, beginning with 17 nonpartisan inspectors general. He moved fast to install loyalists atop the two most important federal management agencies, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management. His administration is united in claiming power to refuse to spend funds already appropriated by Congress and to ignore laws that constrain the absolute power of the executive branch. The whole Trump team, not only the president personally, is testing another important tool of power: stopping congressionally approved grants to states, to ensure that he is funding supporters and punishing opponents. The Trump administration retreated from the test after two days of uproar—but how permanently, who can say?

Trump’s administration has launched large-scale immigration raids in Democratic cities and commenced legal action against local officials who stand in the way. The administration has stopped all international humanitarian aid, cutting off Ukraine. Trump is backed, not undercut, by senior national-security officials in his threats of territorial aggression against Greenland, Panama, and Canada. The Republican platform and congressional budget-writers approve Trump’s musings about replacing tax revenues with hoped-for windfalls from tariffs. Even his seemingly juvenile move to rename the Gulf of Mexico was immediately endorsed by his Department of the Interior. The absurd act carries an underlying serious message: The Trump administration stands behind its president’s high-handed rewriting of rules, even the most established and uncontroversial.

Looming ahead are even more crucial acts of consolidation, including the appointment of an FBI director who has proclaimed his willingness to use the federal police force as a tool of presidential personal power.

Trump’s opponents seem dazed, disoriented, and defeated. Despite the GOP’s slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, and despite Trump’s own low approval rating, the new White House for the moment carries all before it. There have been no mass protests. The demand for news and information—so voracious in 2017—has diminished, if not vanished. Audiences have dwindled; once-mighty news organizations are dismissing hundreds of journalists and staff.

[Read: It’s already different]

Compared with eight years ago, Trump is winning more and his opponents are resisting less.

What’s changed?

Four major things.

First, this time Trump is not arriving in power alone. He and the Republican mainstream have merged, a convergence symbolized by the highly detailed Project 2025 plan written for Trump by the Heritage Foundation. Trump disavowed the plan during the campaign. He was lying when he did so. Now its authors are his most effective henchmen, and unlike the situation he faced in 2017, Trump can now combine expertise and loyalty in the same body of staffers.

Second, this time Trump’s opponents feel beaten in a way that they did not after 2016. That year, Hillary Clinton received nearly 3 million more votes than Trump. Clinton’s popular-vote advantage had no legal meaning. The office of the president is won or lost according to the arcane rules of the Electoral College, not by direct vote-counting. Politically, though, the popular vote matters a lot—that’s why Trump confected all those silly lies about his supposedly historic victory in 2016 and his allegedly enormous crowd size at the 2017 Inauguration. Back then, Democrats felt outmaneuvered but not out-voted. By contrast, Kamala Harris’s unqualified loss in 2024 has crushed morale. Democrats are divided, criticizing one another for their loss, not yet uniting to sound the alarm about how Trump is using his victory.

Third, Trump owes many of his early successes to previous Democratic mistakes. On issue after issue—immigration enforcement, crime and public order, race and gender—Democratic governments over the past eight years have drifted away from the mainstream of American public opinion. The drift is best symbolized by that notorious answer Harris gave to a 2019 questionnaire asking whether she favored taxpayer-funded gender-transition operations for undocumented immigrants and federal prisoners. Her related response in an interview with a progressive group was like some kind of smart-aleck word puzzle: How many unpopular hot-button issues can be crammed into a single sentence? Harris believed that punching every one of those buttons was necessary to be a viable progressive in the 2019–20 cycle. She, and America, paid the price in 2024.

A real quandary arises here. The best-organized Democratic interest groups want to fight Trump on the worst possible issues; the Democrats who want to fight on smarter issues tend to be less organized to fight. Until that conundrum is solved, Democrats are disabled and Trump is empowered.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the workforce? Not popular.

Hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers entering the United States with little way to expel them if they are ultimately refused (as almost all of them will be)? Even less popular.

Create a rift between the United States and Israel? Very unpopular.

Trans athletes competing in girls’ and women’s sports? Wildly unpopular.

These are bad fights for Democrats to have. For that very reason, they are the fights that Trump Republicans want to start. Dangerously and unfortunately, they are also the fights that some of the most active of Democratic factions seek to have.

The fourth difference between 2017 and 2025 is the difference in the information space in which American politics is conducted. In 2017, politically minded Americans used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share links to news sources. Some of those sources were deceptive or outright fake, but even fake news at least replicated the form and style of actual news.

Since then, new platforms have risen to dominance, especially among younger Americans and those less connected to politics. These new platforms are far more effective at detecting and manipulating user bias, fear, and anger. They are personality-powered, offering affirmation and bonding as their proofs of truth.

For pro-Trump Republicans, this new information space is marvelously congenial. They love and hate based on personal recommendations, and will flit from issue to issue as their preferred “influencers” command. Such a movement centered on celebrity and charismatic leadership has no problem with the fact that its favorite media spread disinformation and distrust. In fact, it’s useful. Trump has in effect adapted a slogan from Mussolini: “Trump is always right.” Its corollary is: “Only Trump is right.” Nothing important is lost from a Trump point of view if right-wing media encourage their users to despise science, law, and other forms of expertise.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini]

The anti-Trump coalition, however, is all about institutions. It depends on media that promote understanding of, and respect for, the work that institutions do. The new-media age is inherently inhospitable to institutionalists, and deeply demoralizing for them. Before they can organize to resist Trump, they must build new ways of communicating that adapt to contemporary technology but do not succumb to that technology’s politically destructive tendencies.

All of the above takes time. But it all can be done and must be done.

The second Trump administration has opened purposeful and strong. Its opponents have opened confused and weak. But today’s brutal reality can be tomorrow’s fading memory.

The second-term Trump synthesis does not even pretend to have an economic agenda for middle-class people. The predictable next round of tax cuts will disfavor them. The ensuing deficits will keep mortgage rates high. The tariffs and immigration crackdowns will raise consumer prices. Trump is offering nothing to help with the cost of health care and college.

Trump using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” as his walk-on song, staffing his administration with accused abuser of women upon accused abuser of women, and relying heavily on reactionary anti-woman gender politics as his political message and messengers: All of that will exact a political price in weeks and months ahead.

Trump himself will lead and epitomize an administration of rake-offs and graft. He may succeed in sabotaging laws designed to prevent and punish corruption in high offices. He won’t be able to suppress awareness of his corruption.

The second-term Trump world will bubble with threats to U.S. security. Trump is determined to make each of them worse by fracturing our alliances in both the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific regions. The worst threat of all is that Trump will be drawn into military action inside Mexico, without the cooperation of the Mexican authorities. Trump’s project to brand drug cartels as international terrorist organizations has legal implications that Trump supporters refuse to consider. Right now, the cartels have powerful incentives not to commit violence against U.S. citizens or on U.S. territory. Yet Trump is poised on the verge of actions that could change the cartels’ calculus and import Mexico’s criminal violence north of the border on a huge scale.

[Read: What’s guiding Trump’s early moves]

Trump won the election of 2024, but still failed to break 50 percent of the vote. His hold on Congress could slip at any time. His plans to foster voter-ID laws and gerrymandering to disenfranchise Democrats will collide with the new reality of American politics that these measures will harm his prospects more than his opponents’: Trump does best among the most disaffiliated Americans, whereas Democrats are widening their lead among those Americans who follow politics closely and vote most often.

The most immediate task for the anti-Trump coalition in these early months of 2025 is to avoid more mistakes. President Joe Biden ended his presidency by listening to advice to grant clemency to thousands of drug offenders, including heinous murderers. Who offered that advice? Don’t listen to them anymore! Fight Trump where he’s most vulnerable, not where progressive interest groups are most isolated and most dogmatic. Build unity from the center, rather than indulge the factionalism of the ultra-left.

A great many Americans despise Trump for the basic reason that he’s a very nasty person who speaks in demeaning ways and does cruel things. The movement to stop him should look and sound and act nice. If you get reprimanded for “respectability politics,” or caricatured as “cringe,” or scolded for appealing to suburban “wine moms,” that’s when you’ll know you’re doing it right.

The MAGA elite feels and fears the weight of American democracy. It knows that de

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