A Guide to Surviving the Trump Presidency

Here are tips to staying sane as we embark on yet another four years of Trump

Today is a day so many of us have dreaded for so long.

By lunchtime, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America. By dinner, he will undoubtedly have signed a series of scary executive orders targeting immigrants and others. Trump will then head off to be feted at a series of inaugural balls (including one paid for by Mark Zuckerberg). Eventually (after too many Diet Cokes and watching all the Fox shows on his DVR), Trump will go to bed and wake up to do it all over again.

After today, the Trump presidency will last another 1,460 days. Somehow, as a country and as individuals, we must figure out how to survive all of them. It won’t be easy. Everything seems daunting, and the path back looks long and treacherous. I know many of you want to throw your phone into the nearest body of water.

While I can’t promise you it will be easy (it won’t), I do have some thoughts on how we can all survive the Trump years together.

1. Remember, Trump’s Win Was Not as Resounding as it Seems

Everyone is treating Donald Trump as if he just won in a Reagan-esque 49 state landslide. The Republican Party is so fully in his thrall that Senate Republicans appear willing to rubberstamp the nomination of a weekend news anchor with a reported drinking problem to run the Pentagon. CEOs and billionaires, many of whom formerly opposed Trump, are bending over backward to kiss Trump’s ass in the most debasing way possible. Even the media, which is supposed to hold Trump to account, is adopting an accommodationist stance to avoid angering our incoming tinpot dictator.

But Trump’s win was not as resounding as he would have you believe. Yes, he made huge gains across the country. Yes, he became the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote. Yes, he made huge inroads in core parts of the Democratic coalition. But it’s also true that Trump only won by 100,000 votes across three battleground states.

No, I don’t say that to try to convince you that Democrats don’t have a ton of work to do or to suggest that we did everything right during the campaign. Far from it. The Democratic Party needs to reevaluate how we do everything — our message, our strategy, our policy agenda, and our leadership. What we are doing is not working.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that victory is closer than everyone wants you to believe. We can win if we do the work — and make the necessary changes.

All is not lost.

2. You Don’t Have to Follow Trump Down Every Rabbit Hole

We’ve been down this road before; we know that Donald Trump is going to flood the zone with so much shit that it will feel impossible to focus on his dangerous and damaging misdeeds. Even before being sworn in, Trump has floated using military force to take Greenland and the Panama Canal. He has mused about using economic sanctions and tariffs to force Canada to become the 51st state. Amid deadly wildfires, Trump has started referring to the California Governor as Gavin “Newscum” and made up an entire tale blaming the fires on smelt. It goes on and on.

But we don’t have to follow him down every rabbit hole. We don’t have to react to every outrage. In this era, our attention is our most valuable resource. We don’t have to give it to Donald Trump every time he demands.

The question is, how do you separate the signal from the noise? Helping you decide which Trump's misdeeds matter and which don’t will be a significant focus of this newsletter (and Pod Save America) for the next 1400 or so days.

3. Channel Your Anxiety into Action

Sitting around your house doom-scrolling and fretting about all of the terrible thing that Trump and his MAGA minions are doing to America is a terrible way to spend the next four years. Maybe, it seems exhausting after the campaign we just went through, but when you are ready, I highly recommend channeling your anger and anxiety into action.

There is no easy or obvious way to beat back the ascendant MAGA movement. But we also don’t need all the answers right now. We can do it in stages. The most impactful way to stop Trump is to take back the House in 2026.

If we do that, Trump will never pass another law without Democratic support again. Speaker Jefferies will control what comes to the floor. We will have enormous leverage in budget negotiations and, as importantly, Democrats will have subpoena power to investigate the rampant corruption and criminality that will almost certainly be pulsating throughout the Trump Administration.

Retaking the House is very much within our reach. The GOP currently has one of thee narrowest margins in history. If a mere 7000 votes across three districts had gone the other way, Hakeem Jeffries would be Speaker of the House right now. Because of the nature of our Trump-era coalition, Democrats tend to overperform in midterm elections, which have significantly lower turnout. With the notable exception of 2022, the first midterm for a new President is usually very good for the opposition.

If 2026 seems like a long way off, you don’t have to wait that long. There are several important elections in 2025. Virginia and New Jersey has key gubernatorial and legislative elections. These races will be even more closely watched than usual because while these are traditionally Democratic states, Trump significantly improved his performance in both states compared to 2020. These races will be a major test fo whether the MAGA movement is ascendant or a flash in the pan that succeeded because of inflation and an unpopular Democratic incumbent. If Republicans win, they will be emboldened to be even more aggressive in pushing their extreme agenda. If we win, it will give vulnerable Republicans permission structure to be even more terrible.

If November seems like a long way off, you don’t have to wait that long. There is a critical State Supreme Court race in Wisconsin taking place in April.

Stay tuned to Vote Save America for opportunities to get involved.

3. Support Pro-Democracy Media

Trump and the Republicans won the election largely because they won the information wars. They understood better than the Democrats how the media environment has changed radically since 2020. Trump leveraged podcasters, TikTok influencers, and prominent YouTubers to get his message to the key swath of voters that don’t consume legacy media. His advertising team even targeted individual voters with tailored messaging on streaming platforms.

Democrats were caught flat-footed. We were too wedded to the old way of doing things. Turning too often to the legacy media, which is rapidly declining in credibility and reach, to get our message out. To be fair, the Republicans had a major structural advantage. They have spent decades and billions of dollars investing in a Right Wing messaging machine.

Democrats have to catch up quickly. As someone who works for a progressive media company and writes a newsletter, I am incotovertably biased on this matter — but Democrats need to a better job of supporting our own media ecosystem. This effort must start with Democratic officials who must view progressive media and content creators as their allies. They need to go on our shows to make news and not save the good stuff for declining cable audiences. Donors need to invest as much in media and content as they do in paid advertising.

All of you can help by patronizing progressive media. If you can subscribe, great. Every dollar helps, but your attention is even more valuable. If you follow/subscribe to content on YouTube, TikTok etc and share it with your friends and family , etc, it will increase how much the algorithms will share progressive content. Getting it in front of more eyeballs

It may seem small, but we won’t win elections if we can’t better compete in the information wars.

4. Don’t Give Up Hope

The most important piece of advice I can give you is not to give up hope. I know things seem especially dark right now. I was around back in 2004 when Democrats lost a winnable election to a woefully underqualified candidate with little regard for people’s civil rights. Like Trump, George W. Bush made gains with core Democratic constituencies. Like now, pundits were talking about an emerging Republican majority that could dominate politics for decades on end. And just like in this moment, the Democratic Party seemed to enfeebled to mount the necessary comeback. But two years after that devastating election, Democrats retook the House and Senate. Four years afterward, Barack Obama won a huge landslide victory.

Such an outcome is not a foregone conclusion. It will take real work and hard decisions. But none it will be possible, if we give up hope. As always when it comes to hope, I turn to my old boss. This quote from his 2008 Iowa Caucus victory speech speaks to the moment in which we find ourselves.

Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it.

Let’s go fight for it