Waiting for Outrage

Patriotic Americans have many valid reasons to want to give up on their country, but here’s an underrated one. To date, Donald Trump’s second term has been far more transgressive than his first—yet public reaction has been far more subdued.

Mass protests were already being held in Washington and other cities within 24 hours of the start of his presidency in 2017, when the greatest outrage to that point was Sean Spicer demanding that people not believe their own eyes about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd.

No comparable demonstrations have occurred since January 20 of this year. The closest we’ve come are the events that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are staging out West, which feels less like a “Resistance” uprising than a communist succession ritual.

To quote another demoralized American patriot: Where’s the outrage?

Forget January 20. Focus only on what’s happened since Friday. More evidence emerged that some of the Venezuelan “gang members” renditioned to El Salvador weren’t gang members at all, and obviously so. The president ordered the Justice Department to seek sanctions against any law firm that “frivolously” challenges his administration, another move designed to scare the legal profession away from representing his enemies. One of his top envoys pushed Russian propaganda in an interview with a Russian propagandist, not all of it related to Ukraine. And the campaign to bully Greenland into being annexed continued, replete with a very unwelcome visit to the island by an American delegation and insults lobbed by Vice President J.D. Vance at Denmark, a loyal American ally.

No one wants to don a pussyhat for any of that?

“Just because people aren’t in the streets doesn’t mean a backlash isn’t happening,” you might say, and that’s true. Trump’s job approval is already underwater, a fate that every president dating back to Jimmy Carter managed to avoid during the first six months of their first term— except Trump himself in 2017. The honeymoon is ending early.

But that’s less encouraging than it seems. This isn’t his first term, after all, it’s his second, and his net approval rating is higher at this point than it was when he was a new president eight years ago. Americans know who he is now, they’re marinating in a much richer sauce of daily proto-fascist insanity than they did during his first term, and … they’re just not that bothered.

I could spend the rest of this column, and the next 10 columns, spitballing reasons Voters’ expectations for his second term were realistic (i.e. ultra-low) after January 6; he won the national popular vote this time, which gave him more legitimacy; the opposition party is an unholy mess and thus a nonstarter for many; and Americans simply no longer have the mental bandwidth to mount a sustained outrage response. Digital-age attention spans have grown too short and digital-age disinformation has grown too ubiquitous and distracting for any particular scandal to get legs.

Demoralization is a distraction in its own right. If resistance is futile, why torment yourself by paying attention?

But what if it isn’t futile? The bar needed to trigger resistance has risen, sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be cleared. Which Trump outrages might plausibly spur swing voters into a real backlash—protests, a spiraling approval rating, a spurt of resistance from the Republican quislings in Congress?

Is Greenland our best bet?

Attention deficits.

The first difficulty in convincing Americans to feel outraged about corruption is getting them to understand it.

That’s why sophisticated financial scandals sometimes struggle to gain traction. Unless you’re brazen enough to stash gold bars around your home, the average joe might not be able to follow the mechanisms of chicanery. Trump, for instance, has gotten away with promoting his own memecoin despite the fact that cryptocurrency is being regulated by his own administration. How many voters could explain how memecoins work?

How many understand the state of play in Ukraine well enough to recognize that Steve Witkoff’s talking points on conquered territory are indistinguishable from the Kremlin’s?

Even when voters do sense something amiss, one of Trump’s political superpowers from the beginning has been “everybody does it.” You can howl at them all day long about how shady it looks that the White House is aggressively soliciting corporate sponsorships for, of all things, the coming Easter egg hunt, but you’ll run headfirst into “everybody does it.” Since when is “pay to play” unusual in Washington? Why should we hold Donald “Drain the Swamp” Trump to account for his swampiness when other politicians get away with it?

A second problem with getting Americans to care about corruption is gatekeeping. Any scandal that can be suppressed will be suppressed by media outlets favorable to the president, and I don’t just mean President Trump. There’s a reason the severity of Joe Biden’s decline came as a shock to so many Democratic voters after last summer’s debate.

Trumpist media is especially ruthless about gatekeeping, though, as authoritarians tend to be. Sometimes they’re overmatched: When the price of eggs reaches $10 per dozen, there’s nothing Fox News can do to keep viewers from discovering the hard truth in the dairy aisle at the supermarket. Likewise, when the president and his chief henchman berate Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on live television, that’s big enough news that it’s also going to break through.

But most Trump corruption isn’t so intrusive that it can’t be hidden from the audience. Take the president’s habit of retaliating against his political enemies, whether by rescinding state privileges for “unfriendly” law firms or canceling the security detail of a critic who’s under threat of death. A Trump-aligned news outlet can safely ignore that as “irrelevant” to the average American. Or it might decline to mention an especially hair-raising case of corruption so long as there’s enough plausible deniability to avoid reporting on it: Until we know for sure that innocent migrants were swept up in the rendition to El Salvador, why bother following the story at all?

Mandate for ruthlessness.

The third obstacle to Americans getting angry about corruption is expectations. Is a scandal a “scandal” if everyone expected it?

We needn’t plunge back here into the debate over what Trump voters were and weren’t “voting for” when they reelected him. It’s enough to say that many of his ugliest policies so far were foreseeable and that the electorate preferred him anyway. Tariff-palooza, skepticism of the Ukrainian cause, and “retribution” against political enemies were clearly marked on the MAGA menu on Election Day. That probably explains why Trump’s job approval didn’t collapse after he pardoned the January 6 convicts: As phenomenally unpopular as that was, the whole country knew it was coming. So how mad at him could people be?

Expectations will make it especially hard to persuade the public to care about the disappeared “gang members” sent to El Salvador. To see why, consider the Trump voter in Wisconsin whose Peruvian wife was recently arrested by federal agents for overstaying her visa after the two returned from their honeymoon. (She’s been working on applying for a green card.) Do you regret your vote now, Newsweek asked him? I do not, he insisted, while contemplating the prospect of having to move to Peru.

What else could he have said, though? To confess surprise and disappointment that the Trump administration has behaved exactly as everyone expected the Trump administration to behave would be to plead guilty to idiocy. That same logic will guide public reaction to innocent immigrants getting swept up in “gang” dragnets, I suspect. Many Trump voters will prefer to save face by blessing his misconduct rather than confess that they were stupid to have ignored the warnings about how he’d abuse his power upon returning to office.

The more foolishly a person has invested in a belief, the further they’ll go to avoid admitting error. Trump will benefit lavishly from that.

Which brings us to the last impediment in getting Trump voters motivated to protest. Many of them backed him because they have strong beliefs about who society’s “bad guys” are, relished the idea of him taking the proverbial gloves off against those bad guys, and aren’t about to question his methods now that he’s moving forward with doing just that. In any dispute between the president and their cultural enemies, they’re siding with the president—period.

Violent immigrants. Elite lawyers. “Woke” universities. All are villains of feral populism and so it’s effectively impossible for Trump to go too far in getting rough with them. When his immigration czar, Tom Homan, was asked in an interview on Sunday why immigrants deported under the Alien Enemies Act shouldn’t have due process, Homan responded by referencing the Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by an illegal immigrant. “Due process?” he said. “Where was Laken Riley’s due process?”

That’s a superb expression of the mindset I’m describing: that the federal government should respect the rights of the bad guys exactly as much as killers respect the rights of their victims, even if it means a few not-so-bad guys get caught in the crossfire due to mistaken identity. The more comfortably any given Trump target slots into the role of a stereotypical “bad guy,” the less his supporters will care about Trump abusing his power to persecute them.

Which brings us to Greenland.

The Greenland exception.

Greenlanders and their parent government in Denmark have responded to Trump’s annexation fantasy in a commendably dignified way. The Danes tried to smooth things over by offering the White House greater access to the island and Greenland’s representatives spoke openly about building a closer relationship with the United States, albeit while reiterating that they don’t want to become an American territory.

Trump was unmoved. Earlier this month he told—of all people—the head of NATO that the United States “needs” control of Greenland as a matter of international security. The chairs of Greenland’s five political parties responded with an unusual joint statement declaring that they “cannot accept the repeated statements on annexation and control” and that they “find this conduct unacceptable to friends and allies in a defense alliance.” The island’s pissed-off prime minister declared, “Enough is enough.”

But it wasn’t enough. On Sunday the White House announced that second lady Usha Vance will travel there later this week to take in the sights and attend the national dogsled race. Just a vacation? Not exactly: Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, will also be part of the delegation. This time Greenland’s prime minister was furious. “Until recently, we could trust the Americans, who were our allies and friends, and with whom we enjoyed working closely,” he told a local newspaper. “But that time is over.” Of Waltz’s presence, he said, “The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us.”

Just so. Waltz’s visit is a symbolic incursion by the United States: His presence is unwanted yet he’s going anyway, presaging how the U.S. military might potentially deal with the island if the locals continue to resist. Greenlanders, like Americans, must learn that resistance is futile.

As for Mrs. Vance, her husband warmed up the crowd that’s awaiting her by declaring that Denmark isn’t being “a good ally” with respect to Greenland, never mind that the Danes spend more on defense than they’re required to under NATO and were a superb ally to the U.S. in Afghanistan. If that means America needs to take more of a “territorial interest” in the island, the vice president warned euphemistically, that’s what Trump will do.

Are Donald Trump’s supporters prepared to tolerate seeing him go full Putin in subduing Greenland—or Canada, for that matter? Let’s apply the factors I described earlier.

Unlike with complex financial scandals, the public won’t have trouble grasping the stakes in this case. They couldn’t be simpler: For reasons that remain opaque, the president has it in his head that the U.S. should control Greenland’s and Canada’s territory and he’s going to inflict pain on them until their resistance breaks. Right now that means economic pain; perhaps in time it’ll mean something more.

As tensions rise, the news will become impossible for Trump-friendly media to suppress. The trade war with Canada (if it ever begins in earnest) will hit their audience squarely in the wallet. And hostilities, diplomatic or otherwise, with a NATO partner like Denmark might fracture the alliance entirely. There’s a reason an influential populist gatekeeper like The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro has begun speaking out against Trump’s Canadian folly. Unlike much of the president’s insanity, it simply can’t be ignored.

Expectations are also a problem for the White House. Apart from a blip during his first term that was quickly forgotten once the pandemic began, Trump has never led Americans to believe that acquiring Greenland, let alone Canada, was a priority for him. Rather the opposite: He was the candidate who would “end endless wars” like the one in Ukraine and begin extracting the United States from messy foreign disputes. Now here he is initiating them instead—and no one’s quite sure why. 

His voters don’t need to save face here, in other words. They didn’t invest during the campaign in a Putin-esque project to build an American empire so they won’t feel as obliged to rationalize what he’s doing. I doubt 1 in 10 of them could even explain the argument for grabbing Greenland beyond muttering something about minerals.

Finally, and hopefully needless to say, Greenland, Denmark, and Canada aren’t the stereotypical “bad guys” whom Trump’s voters might instinctively deem worthy of ruthless treatment. Again, it’s the opposite: Menacing two neighbors with whom America has peacefully co-existed for ages for nakedly avaricious reasons amounts to playground bullying of the weak by the strong. And it’s having a predictable effect on international sentiment toward America, beginning in Greenland itself.

It’s so cartoonishly villainous, and so wildly out of character for the United States, to try to shake down fellow Western democracies to sate the leader’s lust for territory that I wonder if this is the thing that’ll finally end up sparking the kind of 2017-era resistance to Trump that’s been missing from his second term so far.

Maybe not: One smart thing about using tariffs for leverage is that the pressure is exerted “invisibly,” hidden in the price of goods. But if the tactics used to make Greenland and Canada comply were to become more aggressive and overt, that might provide a “who are we?” jolt to Americans in a way that nothing else—or almost nothing else—would.

Do we respect the freedom of other peoples to determine their fates, or do their rights end where our banditry begins? Who are we?

We won’t see pussyhats again, but large demonstrations? A sharply sinking approval rating? A rare glimmer of outrage among invertebrate congressional Republicans? Even a pessimist as dour as me thinks it’s possible. (I said possible, not likely.) The uglier America under Trump gets, the less those who supported him reluctantly last fall will like what they see in the mirror.