The #Resistance Heroes Working to Give Trump New Powers to Crush Dissent

A mood of bipartisanship has taken over Washington, as “top Democrats” seek to “find common ground” with Trump.

A new bill, The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, that would hand unilateral power over to the White House to shut down nonprofits deemed by the President and Treasury Secretary to be “supporting terrorism,” is making its way through Congress and gathering considerable Democratic support. The proposed new law, which civil rights groups insist will provide “sweeping, unchecked power” to “selectively target and suppress voices of dissent under the guise of national security,” could very well be a harbinger of how the Democrats plan on engaging with President-elect Trump in his second term. Which is to say empowering the Trump administration to suppress bipartisan enemies—Gaza protesters, climate migrants, unhoused populations, China, anti-police activists—while offering faint objections to soon-to-be President Trump’s more vulgar excesses. 

The law would grant the Treasury Department, which will soon be under Trump’s control, full authority to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if they determine these entities “support terrorism.” As Noah Hurowitz details at The Intercept, while a version of the bill failed to pass last Thursday, it is back on the menu this week, and a revised version will be voted on again and has thus far garnered support from 52 House Democrats, many key public figures who made their personal brand “resisting” Trump. 

Chief among them is California Representative and Senator-elect Adam Schiff. Schiff, who practically lived in the MSNBC greenroom during the Trump years, raising his profile as a supposed bulwark against the rise of Trump’s fascism, has lent his support to the soon-to-be Trump White House to arbitrate which nonprofits are “terrorists” and which aren’t. This is a seemingly strange pivot for someone deemed by the New Yorker in 2017 as the “Unlikely Liberal Hero of the first Trump term” and NPR in 2019 as “The Surprising Face Of [Trump’s] Impeachment Inquiry.” But it makes sense when one properly contextualizes Schiff’s “resistance” as mostly media branding. 

It’s branding that never went away. “Adam Schiff vows to stand up to Trump if he takes steps against democracy,” a recent Fox headline blared. Schiff appeared on Jake Tapper’s State of the Union Sunday, again painting himself as a beleaguered, indefatigable leader of the resistance to Trump. “I'm not going to be intimidated by anything [Trump] says, by anything he does,” Schiff soberly told CNN viewers.  

Schiff is, of course, not alone. Several of the Congressional Democrats working to help Trump crush dissent—including Rep. Mike Levin, Rep. Kathy Manning, Rep. Colin Allred, Rep. Susie Lee, and Rep. Wasserman Schultz—have long accused Trump of “sedition,” “authoritarianism,” and seeking to “subvert democracy.”  

So why are these supposed anti-Trump liberals, who routinely paint Trump as a would-be dictator, helping hand over such tremendous power to him? 

It’s because they share a mutual enemy: in this case, the Palestinian solidarity movement and other anti-war activists. Schiff, whose top donor in his successful Senate run this year was AIPAC ($112,599, almost twice the amount of his number two donor), wants to use Trump to achieve his unseemly ends while posing as his opposition. 

This is a theme we are seeing slowly emerge in the wake of Democrats’ second loss to Trump: Rather than working to disrupt Trump, delay, throw him off balance, many key Democrats are seeking to utilize him to carry out mutual reactionary ends: namely, “securing the border,” gutting funding to leftwing activists, doubling down on hostility to China, further criminalizing homelessness, and otherwise carrying out the disagreeable tasks of bipartisan power concentration. 

Monday morning, influential MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough made a bizarre announcement signaling a similar turn. In their opening segment they announced they had personally met with Trump last week, in concert—supposedly—with “top Democrats,” to seek out where they could work together. 

“A lot of Democratic leaders we’ve talked to this past week,” Scarborough told his viewers, “since the election, have told Mika and me, it’s time for a new approach. And when I say top Democrats, I mean top Democrats. They said we are open… to working with the incoming president if the incoming president is open to working with us.”

If this is to be taken at face value, it seems, at least in some key quarters, there’s an emerging consensus Trump can help carry out mutually agreed agenda items. Scarborough went on to insist that these “top Democrats” are lobbying Trump to “find common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.” On what those “issues” would be Brzezinski and Scarborough were mum. But given the show’s nonstop fear-mongering about “pro-Hamas” anti-genocide protestors, it’s clear what at least one of point of “common ground” will be. 

Another area of mutual interest is the so-called “securing of the border.” As I’ve argued for months, top Democrats have grown increasingly right-wing on the border not because of electoral necessity—they are using public demands as cover for pushing what is an emerging national security consensus that the U.S. needs a fully militarized border in the face of rapidly unpredictable and dire climate chaos. (If there was any doubt this was the case, a post-Election Biden, with zero political considerations, is doubling down on his anti-asylum policy). Trump, by making the maximalist demand of mass deportations, has helped move the migration Overton window window far to the right. Now, massively increasing “border security” personnel and surveillance, getting rid of asylum protections, and embracing the “border wall” are seen as Reasonable, Centrist positions. Expect, in the coming months, a “compromise” on “the border” that, just a few short years ago, would have been seen by liberal consensus as a disturbing, fascistic overreach. 

As Republican Speaker Rep. Mike Johnson works to bury a reportedly damning House Ethics Committee report on Trump’s Attorney General nominee Rep. Matt Gaetz over credible allegations he raped a minor, Democratic minority leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries is not putting up any fight. Jeffries told reporters last week he would avoid disclosing the report through parliamentary maneuver, but would instead "defer at this moment to whatever course [House Republicans] decide to take. And I hope they take a course that is bipartisan."

This isn’t to say there is zero resistance to Trump from Democrats, but this is mostly taking the form of posturing from Governors seeking the White House in 2028. It’s not that there will be zero partisan pushback, it’s that, unlike in 2017, it’s largely coming in the form of one-off statements and executive orders—not anything looking like party or donor network coordination. Even governors supposedly working to resist Trump can’t help but suck up to him while vaguely alluding to this mysterious “common ground”.

“It’s a combination of fight where you need to fight, and that includes everything—legal action, a bullhorn, peaceful protests and civil disobedience,” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy told the New York Times. “And then at the same time, we can’t close off the opportunity to find common ground.”

On several other issues—from new criminalization regimes on the homeless to racketing up the Cold War posture against China—Democratic Party elites have moved close to Trump’s position and will, no doubt, find many areas of “bipartisan cooperation” in the coming months. One should always be wary of the word “bipartisanship,” but doubly so now. It is unlikely to emerge around protecting social security, defending the environment, or taking on the power of corporations. It will no doubt mean codifying the power of the U.S. security state, its proxy in Israel, and the suppression of dissent and unwanted populations stateside. An emerging conventional wisdom that should, at all cost—and for want of a better word—be resisted.