In the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era

The expression “punch-drunk,” Google informs me, means “stupefied by or as if by a series of heavy blows to the head.” Google’s Oxford Language entry then offers a not-terribly-illuminating example of the term’s use: “I feel a little punch-drunk today.” Right now, a better one might be something like: “After November 5, 2024, a lot of people have been feeling more than a little punch-drunk.”

Learning on the night of November 5th that Donald Trump had probably been reelected president certainly left me feeling stupefied, with a sense that I’d somehow sustained a number of heavy blows to the head. The experience was undoubtedly amplified by the fact that I’d spent the previous three months in Reno, Nevada, as part of a seven-day-a-week political effort to prevent just such an outcome, along with a crew of valiant UNITE-HERE union members and more than 1,000 volunteer canvassers organized by Seed the Vote.

Still, I hoped that battered feeling would wear off after our campaign office was dismantled, the rental car returned, and the extended-stay hotel room vacated. Surely, once reunited with my beloved partner (and a pair of disgruntled cats), I’d find the disorienting pain of repeated shocks beginning to dissipate.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

In fact, it’s only gotten worse, as Trump has rolled out his picks and plans for the new administration. As old radio DJs used to shout: the hits just keep on coming! Unfortunately, these hits aren’t rock-n-roll records; they’re blows to the collective consciousness of those of us who worked to prevent Trump’s reelection, and perhaps even to a few of those who voted for him.

Ethics-deficient Matt Gaetz for attorney general? Bam! Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer, to run the Department of Homeland Security? Pow! Wait, Matt Gaetz is out! Now, it’s Pam Bondi, the woman who accepted an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution from the now-defunct Trump Foundation for attorney general. Bam! Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to run health and human services? Bang! Convicted (and Trump-pardoned) felon Charles Kushner (Jared’s dad) for ambassador to France? Take that, Emmanuel Macron! Wham! And then there’s a double-whammy for those of us who spent a couple of decades opposing this country’s Global War on Terror, as we watch the liberal media (even the British Guardian) lionize old neocon war criminals like John Bolton and Dick Cheney for their opposition to Trump this time around. Whack! No wonder our ears are ringing!

As one uppercut after another left us reeling, a whole flurry of stiff jabs followed in the form of Trump’s announcements of new territorial ambitions for this country. He wants the Panama Canal back. And Greenland, which was never ours to begin with. As he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” L’état, c’est Donald Trump, apparently.

O Canada! Yes, he wants that, too! “It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada,” he wrote on Truth Social. Governor Trudeau, really? Bernie Sanders jokingly probed the possible benefits of a U.S.-Canada assimilation, asking on X, “Does that mean that we can adopt the Canadian health care system and guarantee health care to all, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and spend 50% less per capita on healthcare?”

The Referee Goes AWOL

One problem with being punch-drunk is that not only do you feel funny, but you begin to think everything else is a little funny, too. Demanding the Panama Canal and Greenland, not to mention Canada, is the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a Saturday Night Live skit. As it turns out, though, it’s neither a caricature nor a joke. In fact, Donald Trump has transformed this presidential transition period into a Theater of the Absurd performance. And while some of his most outrageous statements may indeed turn out to be mere political theater, in the post-November 5th world, we won’t be waiting for Godot, but for the other shoe to drop.

And that’s undoubtedly been part of Trump’s point with his recent flurry of absurdities. He’s already testing how far he can go without meeting any meaningful resistance. How hard can he hit (and how far below the belt) before the referee blows the whistle and stops the fight? Or is there even a referee anymore?

Our problem (and the rest of the world’s, too) is that the fight is rigged and anyone who might have refereed it is either too corrupt, too terrified, or too absent to do the job. Don’t count on the courts, not after the Supreme Court granted the soon-to-be sitting president more or less blanket immunity for anything he does on the job. Too many Republican members of Congress, never known for possessing spines of steel, now seem perfectly happy to relinquish their lawmaking powers to unelected First Buddy Elon Musk, ducking and covering when he threatens their reelection prospects with primary fights.

With Congress and the judiciary unwilling or unable to do the job, the executive branch will undoubtedly be largely left to referee itself. Foxes and hen houses, anyone? In fact, at least since Ronald Reagan, no president has sought to reduce the power of the executive, while the once-fringe theory of a “unitary executive” has increasingly come to underpin the moves of successive administrations, locating ever more power in the person of the president. That principle was fundamental to Project 2025, the transition program the Heritage Foundation prepared for the next Trump presidency. The central premise of its key document, Mandate for Leadership, is that all executive government functions belong under direct presidential control. That control would extend even to those offices Congress made independent, such as the Federal Reserve, various special prosecutors and inspectors general, and agencies like the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the reasoning behind Project 2025’s plan to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with Trumpist political appointees, who will serve only at the pleasure of the president.

During his recent campaign, Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 or its architects. But today, the project and the key individuals connected to it are once again openly in his good graces. In fact, he plans to restore one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to his old job directing the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, a low-profile agency with tremendous power. The National Archives describes it this way:

“The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the commitments and priorities of the President.”

In other words, the head of the most powerful office in the executive branch will, under President Donald Trump, be someone whose understanding of the role of president is frankly monarchical — that is, the government of a single, all-powerful ruler.

Still Standing — and Not Standing Still

So, if we can’t count on this country’s vaunted checks and balances to either check or balance the power of an absurdist president, where else can we look?

Well, there’s the media. Its freedom is enshrined in the first article of the Bill of Rights and the rest of us must do what we can to protect journalists (whether from U.S. missiles flying in Gaza, or Trumpian threats at home). Of course, it’s also worth remembering journalist A.J. Liebling’s classic observation that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Such prescient words first appeared in his 1960 New Yorker article about the disappearance of competing newspapers in various markets. I doubt he would be at all surprised, more than 60 years later, by the spectacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial staffs from publishing pre-election endorsements of Kamala Harris. I wonder what he would have made of ABC’s abject $15-million surrender to Donald Trump’s patently frivolous defamation lawsuit.

A free media will remain crucial in the coming period, but though it pains my writer’s soul to admit it, there are limits to the power of the written (or even the spoken) word. To check a power-mad president and his fascist handlers, those of us who are already punch-drunk but still standing in the ring will have to find new ways to amplify our commitment to freedom and human dignity through collective action.

We can undoubtedly look to existing organizations like the fighting unions of today’s reinvigorated labor movement for guidance and inspiration. We can value our own narratives in the fashion of Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify, who creates the space for women to tell our stories in Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. We can work with any number of national progressive electoral organizations like Seed the Vote, Swing Left, or Indivisible. We can support organizations dedicated to defending the groups that even many mainstream Democrats are ready to blame for their loss of the White House — among them undocumented immigrants and transgender folks.

Seeing Negative Spaces

I really do believe what I just wrote. We must continue learning and practicing the skills, discipline, and joys of collective action. However, I wonder whether there’s something else we — each of us individually — need to do as well in the new age of Trump.

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to learn to draw. As I struggle with line and value, and my never-very-impressive hand-eye coordination, I remember how my father, a painter and illustrator, used to say that he could teach anyone the basic skills. He’s been gone for more than a decade now and, though I’m glad he didn’t live to see Donald Trump in the White House, I’m sad that I never asked him to teach me to draw. So, I’ve turned elsewhere.

For all its horrors, the Internet contains wonderful resources when it comes to learning anything — from how to knit to how to interpret that annoying little illuminated wrench on your car’s dashboard. Hundreds of thousands of generous people freely share their hard-won knowledge there with strangers around the world. One of them is Julia Bausenhardt, a German artist and illustrator. I’ve learned so much from her many video lessons on sketching the natural world. Above all, I’ve learned that drawing is as much about what you do with your eyes as with your hands. It’s about learning to look.

Like most drawing teachers, Julia emphasizes the value of observing “negative space.” If you want to understand, for example, how a tangle of overlapping leaves and blossoms relate to each other, take a look at what isn’t there. Consider the negative spaces around the shapes you’re drawing.

I wonder whether those of us seeking to forestall an autocratic takeover of this country would benefit from focusing on the negative spaces around the Trump phenomenon, looking for what isn’t there as much as what is. I suspect that’s what the historian Timothy Snyder is doing when he counsels those resisting Trump not to “obey in advance.” There’s no reason to fill in the space around the future autocrat with our own obedience before it’s even demanded. Let’s decorate it with resistance instead.

Similarly, in the spaces around the program Trump’s handlers have devised (most explicitly, Project 2025), we can discern what’s missing from it. Surrounding its blueprints for destroying public education (the foundation of democratic life), decimating labor unions, and resurrecting long-buried regimes of child labor, forced marriage, and childbearing we can discern negative space.

What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

We must do this work collectively in organized ways, but we can also do it individually in small ways. As I contemplate another four horrific years of Donald Trump, I’m also thinking about the negative spaces of daily life. I’m thinking about small daily interactions with strangers and acquaintances. I’m thinking about the in-between times that surround the events of our lives — “negative time,” if you will. In the era of Trump 2.0, I hope to fill my negative time waiting in lines or sitting in yet another endless meeting with small acts of attention and respect. Those, too, can be acts of resistance.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post In the Negative Spaces of the Trump Era appeared first on CounterPunch.org.