The opposition to the new administration has rallied hard and fast – so much so that the elected opposition seems to be struggling to keep up. It’s not surprising that things would turn out this way, and you can point to one reason: George W. Bush.
See, in 2001, there were very few people willing to stand up and say what a disaster we had on our hands. I certainly thought so, partly because we’d not had a President win with fewer votes than an opponent in over a century and the lack of even a plurality was uncharted territory – but mostly because I knew that what we had, aside from an amiable dunce in the Oval Office, was basically a matador for the worst aspects of a Republican Congress. And that’s more or less what we got for four years, propelled by the national panic after the attacks. But it faded fast – by the time of his second inauguration, Bush the Lesser was already below 50% approval and would never get positive again.
So on the one hand, you have a bunch of people seeing Trump and saying “not again.” On the other hand, you have the spectacle of a President polling under 40% approval before his administration is two weeks old. And on the third hand, you have a sense that this is not some doofus you might like to have a beer with, albeit surrounded and supported by the cream of the GOP establishment. This is a weak, scared, angry old man, surrounded only by courtiers and enablers and white supremacists and possibly pawns of a foreign power, and they don’t even know how to keep the lights on or read things before signing them.
The ACLU didn’t raise four years’ worth of budget in a single weekend for nothing. The Bush years paved the way for this, even if people didn’t really get it at the time. When the GOP and the media rose as one in 2009 and dictated that there should be no accounting for the Bush years, that Obama was not allowed to demand a reckoning or even exercise the full powers of his office, they normalized everything that happened. And now the bar is being lowered again, in some ways to the point of a legitimate constitutional crisis. There are bells being rung now that cannot be un-rung, and we’re not going to survive as a nation if we pretend we didn’t hear them.
If we want to keep an America worth keeping, we have to fight now.