Waiting for Midnight: A Quasi-Optimistic Take

Things are yet not as bad as they need to be. But we're getting there.

As my friends and readers know, I am not an optimistic person. I think the glass is half empty, and that the water is evaporating. And, to be honest, I think history has mostly proven me correct.

But, at this dire moment in American history, I find myself with a vaguely optimistic perspective — as long as “optimism” includes economic devastation, massive human rights abuses, and clear violations of the constitution.

Robert Reich calls this position “nauseous optimism.” I call it “Waiting for Midnight.”

1.

In terms of the American democratic order, it is clearly five minutes to midnight. The Trump administration has defied judicial orders in multiple contexts: immigration, DOGE, and others. People (including many who are here legally and have committed no crime) are being picked up on the street and disappeared — watch this chilling interview with ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan, in which Homan admits that they’re not receiving any kind of due process, but who cares, because neither did their victims. Universities and law firms have been forced to either bend the knee to Trump or suffer devastating, existential-level repercussions.

And, in response to this week’s scandal de semaine, in which the “National Security Advisor” mistakenly invited a journalist to a top secret Signal chat, Trump, Hegseth, and their surrogates have gone full Orwellian, calling the entire event a hoax, despite the screenshots and non-denials from other officials. If that’s not “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible,” I don’t know what is.

Arguably — and many on the Left have argued — it’s already midnight. None of the foregoing examples are compatible with the definition of democracy, so we are already in a post-democratic, authoritarian period. So, rise up and revolt, they demand. “Stand up and sound the alarm,” wrote

Robert Reich

in dismay when the venerable law firm Paul, Weiss caved into Trump’s extortionist demands.

But it isn’t midnight. Not in terms of public opinion, and not even in terms of the kinds of depredations we’ve seen from the regime. Not yet.

First, it won’t work to “stand up and sound the alarm.” We tried that literally every day in 2024. It didn’t work.

Now, conceivably, if there were mass protests that were brutally suppressed by the regime, perhaps that might catalyze wider opposition (at the cost of hundreds, perhaps thousands of deaths, beatings, and imprisonments, of course). But is that likely? Given the way Americans regard such things, it’s more likely the protests would look like Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, or the Climate March: things liberals care about. Tragically, a lot of people basically like what Trump and Musk are doing, even if they disagree with some of the extent of it. “Sound the alarm” is a reflex, not a strategy.

2.

It’s also not yet midnight in terms of what’s actually happening. We are two months into a 48-month (at least) term. What would “midnight” look like, then? Here are some examples:

Trump defying a clear order from the Supreme Court. Not lower court orders, not nationwide injunctions — I mean a clear statement from a majority of the conservative-dominated Court that, for example, birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, or the “unitary executive” is unconstitutional, or due process must be accorded to everyone in the United States, or any number of other issues. If Trump pulls an (apocryphal) Andrew Jackson, that would be constitutional midnight, and if I had to guess whether it will come to pass, I’d say the odds are 50/50.

Massive chaos impacting millions of people. Like a serious recession brought on by Trump’s tariffs, or hundreds of thousands of seniors being unable to get their Social Security checks, or economic disruptions that are widespread and devastating. I’m not an economist, but based on what I’ve been reading, I think there’s at least a 50% chance this will happen in 2025.

Huge governmental fuckup. Bigger than ‘Signal-gate,’ although that’s the closest yet. I mean something people feel directly, like a huge measles or bird flu outbreak, or a war, or a horrific natural disaster that we’re unprepared to deal with, or a scandal that’s salacious and strong enough to break through the noise.

Elections are actually canceled. I’m more pessimistic here; I think “election integrity reforms” will make it very hard for Democrats to win without actually penetrating into the public consciousness, but it’s possible that sham elections get noticed, and that becomes a tipping point. A lot of people are minding this store.

Something that shocks the national conscience. Finally, politics is unpredictable. One incident with one person – Elian Gonzales, Matthew Shepard, Rodney King, George Floyd, Rosa Parks, Kim Phuc Phan Thi – can shock the movable middle of America, especially if there’s videotape.

I know, of course: it shouldn’t have to get this bad for people to care. Musk has already ruined the lives of tens of thousands of honest, hard-working government employees, including many veterans, park rangers, and other sympathetic people. The level of Trump’s corruption is astounding. A president defying any judicial order, as this administration has done many times now, is grounds for impeachment. The attacks on higher education, the media, lawyers, and even the Kennedy Center have all the earmarks of nationalistic authoritarianism. I’m personally afraid to express certain opinions lest they be used against the institution where I work. This should be more than enough.

But it isn’t. Politics is the art of the real, not the ideal. And when I look outside my window, things seem fine. They aren’t fine, but they look that way. Spring is springing, I’ve got an inbox full of unanswered email, my law school students are busy and thriving and anxious — things are pretty normal. That means it isn’t midnight yet.

And that’s a well-informed coastal elite liberal. At least a third of Americans are getting there information filtered either by right-wing media channels, or right-wing and/or wacko non-journalists on TikTok, podcasts, or YouTube. This is not going to change anytime soon. For midnight to take place, there have to be disruptions that penetrate this hard shell of misinformation, that dismay even the right-wing puppeteers, or are too massive to ignore or spin.

3.

And then what? Suppose it’s midnight. What happens then?

First, a lot of powerful voices who have been relatively quiet — won’t be. Past presidents, conservative Republicans, celebrities — some of these have already spoken out, but my optimistic hunch is that more of them are waiting for things to get worse. “Sound the alarm” right now and you look hysterical. ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ they call it, and if you were there, remember how absurd ‘Clinton Derangement Syndrome’ seemed in the 1990s and 2000s? That is how many progressives look right now.

That changes if midnight comes to pass. And while I don’t expect Jesse Watters or Josh Hawley to ever jump off the Trump train, we have seen the initial stirrings of more rational voices beginning to do so: several Republicans opposed the effort to impeach Judge James Boasberg, for example. There have been misgivings expressed on Fox News. And there are plenty of conservative Republicans who, while not Never Trumpers, are aware of the stakes here.

There are even more who are carefully holding up their fingers to gauge the winds of public opinion. Right now, those winds are pretty divided; Trump’s approval ratings are in the mid-40%, but that’s still higher than he had for most of his first term, and majorities of Americans support his core policies. But if they turn against Trump, plenty of opportunistic as well as idealistic people will as well.

That won’t mean Trump will step down, or be impeached, or anything like that. We’re stuck with him, and from an anti-democratic point of view, Mr. Vance-Thiel might be even worse. But it would mean a significant decrease in his support, not among the MAGA base, of course, but among business leaders, cultural figures, and others who, at present, are keeping mum or marching in lock step.

Trump is not, after all, a strong leader with a wide base of support. He narrowly won the election, won it on grounds that have little to do with what he’s actually doing, and just two defections in the House of Representatives would make it hard to do anything legislatively at all. Moreover, Trump is also susceptible to pressure from people he needs or respects, and that includes mainstream right-wing media.

Again, none of this will happen next week. While progressives are rightly aghast at the ICE Gestapo and the illegal, reckless, and unconstitutional DOGE insanity, remember that moderates and conservatives still support the basic ideas for which they stand: an immigration crackdown and shrinking the size of government. (The data showing that DOGE has not effectively done that has not yet broken through.) With them, Trump is still in a kind of honeymoon period. And even among moderates and liberals, many people are still on their news fasts, which I totally understand.

That can change, but only when Trump really messes up, or when the effects of his already-baked-in mess-ups are felt by ordinary people — like spiraling inflation, or job losses, or brutal disappearances captured on video. Which will eventually happen, I think.

4.

If this analysis is correct, then it might make sense to wait for midnight.

Which is what Democrats and others have been doing: wait until the thing falls apart, until the shit hits the fan, until Trump’s incompetence and malevolence make it through the Fox Propaganda Haze.

Now, I know, many of you will hate this. We are scared, we are angry, and moderation seems naive. We want people like AOC and Bernie out there fighting for us. We don’t want people like Chuck Schumer and the trustees of Columbia University bending to Trump, goddamit!

I feel the fear and the rage, believe me. But are they the same as wisdom?

An example: for all the ire directed at Schumer, I have yet to see a single response to his cogent argument that if the government were to shut down, the GOP would open up only the parts they wanted to open, making matters an order of magnitude worse than they are. Republicans would have all the leverage; the departments they like would be functioning, the programs they hate would be stopped, and Democrats would be the ones keeping the government shut by refusing to go along with their demands. And, given the media and online landscape of 2025, do we really think the movable middle of America would necessarily blame the Republicans for the impasse?

People are calling Schumer a coward. And he may not be the right leader for this moment. But I think it shows courage to do the wise, unpopular, strategic thing instead of the rash, ill-thought-through thing that everyone wants you to do.

Likewise Paul Weiss. I obviously don’t like what the firm gave away to Trump. But it was facing an existential risk. No client would stay with a firm blacklisted by the US government, and possibly unable to even enter a federal court building. So, the firm would close, Trump would still be there – and what, exactly, would be gained? More outrage on Bluesky? Most of America would shrug.

And, yes, even Columbia University. What, precisely, would “standing up to Trump” look like in practice? Is a gigantic research university supposed to fall on its sword? Who is going to save it, if the $400 million in funding cuts are but the first stage of the war? Besides, their concessions to Trump were mostly things they were going to do anyway, and the department of Middle East Languages and Cultures has been problematic for years — I suspect they welcomed the opportunity to take action. Yes, they caved, but they gave Trump more symbol than substance.

I’m mindful of the moral hazard argument in these cases: now that Paul Weiss and Columbia have folded, it's much harder for Davis Polk and Harvard to resist. I’m also mindful that this moment feels like a Pastor Niemoller moment, time to stand up for what is right.

But again, we’re two months into a 48-month term. Tactically, what is gained by self-destructing now, instead of trying to survive until the winds of change shift? Moral rhetoric is easy; decisions that affect thousands of people, and institutions critical to our society, are hard.

Finally, I’d gently suggest that blaming the victim of authoritarian violence, rather than the aggressor, is misguided. Maybe Columbia, and probably Paul Weiss, caved prematurely. But what the hell do I know? I’m sure the leaders of both organizations, like Senator Schumer, worked through a lot of different scenarios before choosing this cause of action. I don’t think they acted out of cowardice. They acted out of strategic self-interest, and some amount of public interest, in the context of extreme risk and big unknowns.

That is what you do, when you don’t have power. One of my favorite essays of all time is an article by the queer Evangelical feminist scholar Virginia Ramey Mollenkott entitled “Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbitransgay People as God’s Tricksters.” (‘LGBTQ’ had not been codified at the time.) Mollenkott focuses on Biblical figures marginalized by society, and proposes that they have a moral imperative to survive which justified tricksterism, scheming, and accommodation. When you are “low and outside” —low in the hierarchy, outside the dominant group — you learn to survive by tricks, by wits, by whatever means necessary, and doing so is a moral act. Mollenkott, drawing on her own experienced as a formerly-closeted lesbian growing up within a patriarchal, conservative church community, wrote that “it is time for queer people and all other oppressed people to openly espouse an ethical system that honors necessary subversion and ceases to shame those who practice it.”

Obviously, gigantic law firms and universities are not “low and outside.” But I think Mollenkott’s analysis holds, at least when people’s lives are not being put at risk. (Following Daniel Boyarin, I also note how the rhetoric of martyrdom has a specifically Christian lineage, and am interested in Talmudic tactics of scheming and survival.) If appeasing the autocrat with mostly symbolic concessions ensures the survival of liberal democratic institutions for the time being, isn’t it worth it? I think the name of the game is to survive until the circumstances change — in other words, to wait until midnight comes.

And who knows, maybe some Republicans are playing that game too.

5.

Which is my last point, courtesy of an Uber driver I met this week.

Republicans in Washington and in state government are now divided into two camps: people who love MAGA, and people who are pretending to love MAGA. Some are true believers; they think that they’re saving a threatened nation by any means necessary. But a lot of others are reading the political tea leaves and positioning themselves accordingly. This is craven, sure, but it is also how things have worked for thousands of years.

“We have to make Republicans fear the voters more than they fear Trump,” the Uber driver told me. I agreed, and asked for permission to quote him, which he granted. At some point, I think that will happen; Trump is making too many mistakes. But unfortunately, we saw in 2024 that swing voters are not sufficiently motivated by democracy, or due process for bad guys, or Trump’s felony convictions, or any of the other egregious offenses that, really, informed citizens should care a lot about. That is sad, but it’s how the human mind and heart are sometimes.

Fortunately, those same voters are motivated by things like social security, the cost of living, economic opportunity, and, I would say, some basic conception of America as the land of the free. And all of those are in a lot of danger right now. Eventually, I think there’s a chance that these voters see that Trump has broken his promises to them – not to Democracy, but to them, the voters who put him in power.

In a better world, they would have seen this already. But just wait. Midnight will soon be upon us.

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Thanks as always for your support. I hope you’ve been enjoying the somewhat deeper dives I’ve been taking of late — 2000 words is a lot harder than 1000 words, but I think the explorations are worthwhile. And it’s your financial support that makes it feasible.

I was on the ‘State of Belief’ podcast last week talking about a lot of these same issues. Here’s one clip and a link to the whole episode:

And meanwhile, more reports from near-midnight:

• Michelangelo Signorile
  did a great write-up of the makeup artist wrongly deported to the Salvadorean hell-hole that Kristi Noem thought would be a good background for her photo-op.

• Popular Information
  continues to cover stories no one else is covering, like the Energy Department targeting clean energy companies, even though they were doing well and making money.

• Ditto

  Chris Geidner
  at Law Dork, who each week seems to write the definitive take on the most important legal cases - and here, the attack on the legal system as a whole.

• If you haven’t yet, please read DeSmog’s long-form reporting on how Jordan Peterson is now among the world’s leading climate deniers, and presumably making boatloads of money doing it.

• Speaking of newly rich right-wing provocateurs, who’s paying Chris Rufo, who wants to tear apart my family and put me in jail? Here’s the answer. Bonus: he’s probably breaking the law.

Thanks, and keep up the self-care.