Since his re-election in November 2024, Donald Trump has been back in the White House for over 20 months. Every single day since his return to the presidency, his administration has launched a torrent of alarming actions that directly attack democratic institutions, free speech, the Constitution, environmental and corporate regulation, public health, the rule of law, ethics, and human rights—targeting hundreds of thousands of immigrants for violent assault and deportation—while engaging in brazen acts of unprecedented corruption.
With Trump’s relentless authoritarian onslaught, a large cross-section of Americans are angry, depressed, and overwhelmed, with many tuning out the news, or over time gradually accepting this madness as normal. But there are also literally millions across the country who are actively protesting Trump’s policies, his cruel ICE raids, his reckless war on Iran, his irrational tariffs, and his active plot to subvert the outcome of this November’s election.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sarah Kendzior, a journalist, anthropologist, and researcher, who’s the best-selling author of several books including her latest, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, and is the former co-host of the popular Gaslit Nation podcast. Here, she assesses the state of the nation and what we can expect if the Democrats take back control of the House, the U.S. Senate or both.
SARAH KENDZIOR: We have had 10 years of Trump and the Biden interlude was really Trump and his backers continuing to operate behind the scenes because they were never punished even for open acts of sedition in January 2021. So this has just been nonstop kind of bad news for a decade. And then you add in things like AI technology, climate catastrophes, all of these other factors, which of course Trump and his administration are doing nothing to stop. They’re trying to exacerbate them and it is very overwhelming. I think there’s a big difference between expecting the worst and accepting it. I think it’s normal and rational to expect Trump and his backers to do the worst possible things for America, the worst things for ordinary average Americans.
But that doesn’t mean you accept it. It doesn’t mean that you kick back and sort of shrug and say, “Well, I accept this abuse of migrants. I accept this abandonment of the next generations and so forth.” You have to retain your moral core. And I wrote an essay about that a decade ago called, “We’re Heading Into Dark Times” that gives advice about how to keep that moral core. And one thing I recommended people do is just keep a diary, write down every day what lines you wouldn’t cross; what values you maintain no matter what. And that way, even when you feel shook up and panicked, you still have a sense of who you are within this broader struggle.
SCOTT HARRIS: Sarah, if the Democrats take control of the House or the Senate or both, they face an enormous challenge of reconstructing our broken nation’s democratic institutions. They probably won’t get a chance to really do that until they have a trifecta, the House, Senate and the White House, maybe the following year in 2028. Democrats aren’t very good at accountability. We’ve seen failure after failure with George W. Bush. There was never any Democratic party effort for accountability about mass surveillance or torture. In the case of Donald Trump, Merrick Garland, the attorney general under Joe Biden, he waited two-and-a-half years to prosecute Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection that killed a bunch of people and of course was a blatant attempt to overthrow the elected U.S. government. Democrats back in power in Congress, what do you think?
SARAH KENDZIOR: I mean, I think a lot of them are in on it. Not most of the Democrats, but definitely the top ones. I think they’re in hock to their donors, in particular AIPAC, Silicon Valley donors, fossil fuel donors. A lot of them overlap directly with the Republicans. You have the same lobbying groups and the same corporations paying off everybody on both sides of the aisle so that there isn’t any true representation. And again, it’s like people forget the Democrats did actually win in 2020 and they got the House, the Senate and the presidency, and then they failed to enact even their most basic campaign promises. I mean, one I’ll never forget, it’s just that they resolved to protect the Postal Service. That was a major issue because Louis DeJoy had tried to tamper with the election. And then when Biden replaced people on the board of governors that selects who’s in charge of the postal service, he picked people that would protect DeJoy.
So this whole situation we’re having now with mail-in ballots and the legitimacy of the election and whether Trump is going to start to claim that votes are illegitimate because of it, all could have been prevented had Biden just fulfilled his campaign promise on the most basic thing like the Postal Service, but they didn’t do it. They had two years to get this stuff done and they failed. And I think that because the Republicans are so overtly horrible, there is a good chance that Democrats will win, including in places they haven’t won in a long time. But that shouldn’t really be seen as an endorsement of the Democrats as much as just real fear and hatred of the Republicans because they don’t follow through. They have this constant rotating villain that just switches sides. It was like Joe Lieberman when I was younger, so Connecticut shout out there.
Now it’s John Fetterman, it was Kristen Sinema. There’s always one who just switches and then you end up with a 51-49 vote and it doesn’t pass and it’s a mess. And so I kind of wonder who that person will be. It’s very frustrating. I sometimes think the greatest success will be more in governors or mayors or people who can issue direct orders and get direct results like the way (Zohran Mamdani has been doing in New York. And obviously he has his flaws too, but it seems like he moves at a much faster pace without a lot of this nonsense that the Biden folks especially did. Remember the Senate parliamentarian? Suddenly all these characters come out of the woodwork whenever anyone has a good idea and they’re like, “No, no, no, no, no, impossible. That can never happen.” And then everybody’s like, “What did I vote for? Why did I spend all this time?”
I’ve heard this from volunteers, why did I spend all this time volunteering to campaign for people and help them for free when they have no desire to help me and they’re doing nothing to stand up to all this red tape and bureaucracy either?”
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Sarah Kendzior (27:35) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack or social media, subscribe here.
