President-elect Donald Trump arrives at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on November 13, 2024, for his meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
As the new Trump administration begins to take shape, the MAGA leader’s cabinet picks are dominating the news cycle. Matt Gaetz, one of the most unethical members of Congress, as attorney general? A Fox news host with no governmental experience as defense secretary? Pro-Putin conspiracist Tulsi Gabbard in charge of national intelligence? Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. heading the health department?
If 2017 was a preview of President Donald Trump’s using bizarre, offensive appointees as a way to wreck the effectiveness of the “administrative state,” 2025 promises to be the feature show. There’s no mystery here; it’s going to be a combination of kleptocracy, autocracy, and idiocy—and not necessarily in that order.
There is, however, another important story shaping up: the inevitable clash that will unfold between a Trumpified federal system and Democrat-led states desperate to protect their populaces and their progressive policies. Push the federal nuttiness and cruelty too far, and ultimately something will give. If the DOJ is turned into a MAGA commissariat, if military members are brought out onto the streets to clamp down on protesters, it will fall to Democrat-led states to work to keep the country’s justice system and public safety agencies functioning. And if their state National Guards are federalized in an effort to force their participation in immigrant roundups and militarized policing, it will fall to Democratic political leaders and the public to resist the march toward the Führerprinzip as best they can.
Earlier this week, the governors of Illinois and Colorado announced the formation of a coalition of states ready to take on the feds. They named it Governors Safeguarding Democracy and put forward the idea that through pooling legal expertise and political resources, state governments would have a fighting chance of standing up to Trump’s extreme policies.
Although California’s Governor Gavin Newsom is not one of the group’s founders, his state, by virtue of its size and its economic clout, will play a key role in this process, as it did in 2017. After all, California has generated a cache of environmental and healthcare advances over the past few years and won’t stand by as these policies are eroded. Newsom has pledged to slow down the Trump administration’s efforts to go after immigrants—and the state will have to if it wants to avoid the calamitous economic dislocation, including unprecedented inflationary pressures and massive upheavals in the state’s housing market, that would follow in the wake of any serious effort to deport the millions of undocumented migrants who live and work in the Golden State. And knowing that Trump’s people will likely respond by withholding funds for disaster relief or other needs from states that don’t toe the line, it will have to sue the Trump administration repeatedly to access dollars that it is entitled to.
Last week, before flying to Washington, DC, to lobby the Biden administration to sign an array of waivers that California has applied for concerning environmental and health policies in particular, Newsom announced that he would be convening a special legislative session in early December to shore up state laws against the expected onslaught. The governor, who has national political ambitions for 2028, said this was necessary to get a jump on fighting the “unconstitutional and unlawful federal policies” he anticipated would be flowing out of DC come January 20. Legislative leaders agree. Over the coming years, the state’s House speaker, Robert Rivan, and Senate president pro tem, Mike McGuire, will almost certainly be two of the more important political figures nationally as states take sides in what is shaping up to be brutal political trench warfare in the years ahead.
McGuire (D-North Coast) says he is prepared to “defend the people, policies, and values that make the Golden State great.” State legislators will, he argues, look to work with the incoming administration where they can, “but if the president-elect tries to undermine our state, our freedoms, or our democracy, he will quickly see how determined the people of California truly are.”
In other words, buckle up.
Newsom is particularly interested in using the special legislative session to secure funding for the state’s justice department, so that it can prepare to file a raft of lawsuits against Trump policies. With the federal DOJ in the hands of a bomb-thrower such as Gaetz, who will presumably gut it of professionals and put in their place people willing to persecute Trump’s perceived enemies, it will fall to progressive state attorneys general to do the work of protecting workers’ rights, ensuring access to the ballot box, investigating corporate corruption, and so on.
In this most dire of moments for American democracy, the world will look to California and the other powerful Democrat-led states to navigate the country’s way out of the twisted wreckage.
We cannot back down
We now confront a second Trump presidency.
There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.
Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.
Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.
The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
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Onwards,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
