Mary McNamara: Stop the outrage. To cope with Trump, ignore what he says and watch what he does

In the months following Donald Trump's election to his second term as president, many who did not support him seemed to go into hibernation. Off went the televisions, cratering postelection ratings for CNN and MSNBC. Social platforms, particularly X, were fled or ignored; political headlines squinted at and passed over.

There were protests, but nothing like the worldwide women's marches that followed his 2016 victory. Only 24.6 million viewers tuned in to watch his second inauguration, compared with the 31 million who watched his first and the 33.8 million who tuned in for President Joe Biden's. Yes, a second-term drop has precedence, but considering the drama — including a felony conviction and assassination attempts — that surrounded the 2024 campaign, this dip was remarkable.

Even after his fire hose of initial executive orders — which included pardoning many Jan. 6 insurrectionists, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization, rolling back protections for transgender Americans, halting federal government DEI programs and attempting to end birthright citizenship — response has been relatively muted.

Terms including "outrage exhaustion," "resistance fatigue" and "surrender" have been thrown around to describe the marked difference between the reaction to the beginning of Trump's first presidency and his second, with Democrats often described as being in "a defensive crouch."

Fatigue is no doubt part of it — love him or hate him, Trump is an exhausting political figure. But far from being a surrender, the relative silence feels more like a necessary course correction.

As Henry Ford once said, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." Perpetual outrage, no matter how justified it may seem, is not a sustainable political strategy. Those who disagree with Trump's vision of America (and I count myself among them) must figure out a more effective form of resistance.

For too long Trump has positioned himself, and been duly treated as, a maypole of cultural mayhem. To some, he is the cause of all our ills; to others, the only possible solution. In the media — mainstream and social — at protests and rallies, in grocery stores and over the dinner table, political conversation has devolved into shouting contests of "You're a fascist. No, you're a fascist."

As William Butler Yeats famously told us at another precarious moment in history, "The falcon cannot hear the falconer ... the centre cannot hold." And amid the cacophony of mutual rage, it has not. If we are to prevent more anarchy, the blood-dimmed tide that Yeats predicted in his poem "The Second Coming," the center that unites us must be regained, reimagined, rebuilt.

And that will not be accomplished by a lot more yelling.

So where others might consider the lack of initial widespread resistance to the man himself as a surrender, I see the first step in self-care and a potential return to sanity.

When Trump won in 2016, millions wept, damned the electoral college and took to the streets in protest. Others cheered, damned the woke mob and took to the streets in triumph. As president, his ubiquity in American discourse was unprecedented. Every move he made, every word he spoke or posted (he never seemed to be off Twitter) was met with a deluge of commentary. Everything that could possibly be said about a president has already been said about Trump. He was a savior, he was Hitler, he was everything in between as someone with a public platform.

Rarely a day went by when he wasn't in the news and soon the outrage itself became the news. Media outlets were condemned as being too hard or too soft on him, for reporting on this and not that, for promoting false narratives or not exposing them, for choosing the wrong headline or photo.

Was it a frenzy? Yes, it was. And I say that as someone who wrote often, and usually scathingly, about Trump during those early years. Was it justifiable, journalistically or politically? Yes, indeed. Never before had a president behaved as Trump behaved, at least in public. He flouted not just political conventions (and many laws), but also time-honored rules of civilized discourse.

Did the outrage become part of the problem? Absolutely. Trump derangement syndrome is real and it occurs in both his detractors and supporters. What each of us sees when we look at him — a dangerous whipsaw of insane rhetoric and diabolic intent or a canny businessman who just wants what's best for Americans — increasingly defines us.

And that's what has to change. Trump will continue his barrage of threats, feuds and untrue or outlandish commentary and that should be reported — he is the president and what he says is still news. But the time has long passed for wasting breath on absurdities like his proposed annexation of Canada and Greenland, his assertion that nothing was being done to fight the Los Angeles fires or his continued insistence that he won the 2020 election.

Instead, it is time for all of us, no matter how bewildered or beset we feel, to act like mainstream Trump supporters. The ones who say, "I don't listen to what he says; I just pay attention to what he does."

What he has done thus far has already given more than a few of those supporters pause — undocumented workers who believed they would be exempted from Trump's deportation policies; Trump-voting federal workers now out of work or in hiring limbo; and Republican Congress members unhappy with the Jan. 6 pardons, Trump's freeze of Inflation Reduction Act funding or his threats to withhold emergency aid to California.

Several of his executive orders are being challenged in court — a federal judge blocked Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship, calling the move "blatantly unconstitutional" — and one transgender inmate has already sued, arguing that Trump's order that the federal government recognize only two genders assigned at birth violates federal law and the Constitution.

No doubt many of these orders will spark all manner of protest as they are implemented.

And that's as it should be. The fight must dodge Trump, the persona, and be brought to Trump, the president, and the changes he does or does not bring to this country.

Who Trump is and what he stands for require neither copious analysis nor doomsday hyperbole. This is too well-known to even be that interesting at this point.

Instead, we need to focus all attention on who we are and what we stand for. There's nothing wrong with a defensive crouch as long as everyone in it is working on a plan and prepared to spring.

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