We Are Going to Win

On June 6th, Will Stancil argued that “Abrego Garcia coming home feels like the point where we can say Trump’s revolution failed.” Mere days later, Trump deployed California’s National Guard to LA against the wishes of both the state’s governor and the city’s mayor. While I could see the logic of Stancil’s point, I was not confident in it. Things got much worse over the summer, or so it seemed. 

Yet looking back on the year as a whole, I now firmly believe he had the right of it. And Garcia’s case really is very instructive. He was in a foreign prison, completely outside the protection of our legal institutions. The idea that he could be brought back, despite what a court or even the Court might order, seemed far-fetched in the face of the administration’s intransigence.

And yet they did bring him back. They have since done a great deal to try to exact retribution upon him for this loss of face, but that is only harder now that he is here rather than in some strongman’s torture complex. The fact that he is here now is proof that there are institutions independent of Trump’s authority capable of exerting their own authority against his wishes. It is proof that he has failed to personalize our system. The fact that they have had so much difficulty getting their revenge on this one man, this one very vulnerable individual, is a very public demonstration of weakness.

Trump did not begin with as strong a hand for authoritarian consolidation as many thought. Orban, for example, came to power with a tidal wave of popularity, into a unicameral parliamentary system overseeing a unitary government. Trump, by contrast, won narrowly in 2024. The federal government alone is far more complex and unwieldy than Hungary’s, with our symmetric bicameralism and separately elected president (not to mention the complexity of just how he is elected to begin with), our independent agencies, and our powerful Supreme Court. But we are also a federalist system, and our state governments are quite strong by the standards of such systems, and our local governments also wield considerable de facto power.

Still, there was no question that he and his people were going to try to consolidate an authoritarian regime, whatever hand they were dealt, the second they were able to take the White House again. And try they have. Part of what was so terrifying at the beginning of the year was the way many elites acted as if Trump had won a landslide and had the widest conceivable support among the public. Many among the press, the universities, corporations, and law firms surrendered in advance. Then there was the speed at which they seemed to be dismantling the structure of the government in February and March, through the seizure of computer systems and DOGE's lawless, chaotic closures and firings. Normally anarchic congressional Republicans lined up to pass a deeply unpopular bill at Trump’s behest, despite their narrow control of Congress.

So they have tried, this first year of Trump’s second time in office. But so far, it has been a failure, one that has backfired on them rather than strengthening their position. Trump’s narrow support among the public has vanished. Despite his aggressive attacks on the press, his administration continues to leak like a sieve and what is discovered in those leaks is reported, however unfavorable it may be to him. Heavy-handed attempts are met with social revolts, ranging from mass protests to grand juries to consumer boycotts. Ordinary American citizens are filming, berating, and obstructing masked ICE thugs, often not as a matter of organized opposition but due to earnest outrage at what they are seeing unfold in front of them. Off year and special elections have provided evidence that voters are enraged. His Republican Congress is rapidly regressing to its dysfunctional mean. While the Supreme Court has continued to run interference on his behalf through the shadow docket, he’s lost very frequently. Trump has almost always been delayed in the lower courts, eating up time that he simply cannot afford to waste. He has less than a year before the midterms, and then two years after that before the 2028 election. There’s a great deal to accomplish between now and then if dictatorship is the goal, and right now it does not appear that they have what it takes to run that gauntlet.

So now, at the very end of 2025, I want to take a moment and say to you: we are going to win. 

We are going to keep mobilizing against the regime. We are going to keep showing our fellow citizens that huge segments of the country are against what is happening and the administration is powerless to stop us from telling them so. We’re going to crush the Republicans in November and remind the Democratic Congress in 2027 what it means to uphold their duty to the Constitution. Trump will not even get to attempt his oft-floated 2028 run, and the Republican candidate will lose.

We are going to win. But it is going to hurt. The president can do a great deal of harm to our institutions and to innocent people, even in the absence of public or elite support. We must use every tool we have to push back, but ultimately, people are going to continue to get hurt, and some are going to die—whether at the hands of ICE or on the orders of the “Department of War.”

It is going to hurt, and this victory will not be the end. Throwing the Republicans out in 2026 and 2028 means victory in battle but not an end to the war. We stand a very real chance to be stuck in polarization hell, perpetually cycling between fascists who can’t quite go the distance on the one hand and a do-nothing Democratic gerontocracy on the other. What our moment needs is Reconstruction Democrats.

We are going to win against Donald Trump, but we have a much bigger victory that we need to be aiming for. We need to Reconstruct this country.  We must put liberal democracy on the right footing to face the challenges of the era we live in. We need to fight for the liberal future rather than just clinging to the imperfectly and unstably liberal past.

At Liberal Currents in 2026 we are going to do more than ever in today's battle against a would-be dictator and tomorrow’s battle for the larger fate of the country. We will organize an ambitious agenda of reform and reconstruction, with a vision for America’s economic, social, and political future, as well as for our place in the world. Whether we want it or not, our next constitutional moment is upon us. At Liberal Currents, we intend to arm liberals to take advantage of that moment, rather than allowing ourselves to be dragged along by events.

We will win against Donald Trump. Let’s aim higher.

Featured image is General Robert E. Lee Signing the Terms of Surrender