Fighting Back Against Trump One Conversation at a Time
Thinking about how to fight back against Trump
The first two weeks of Trump 2.0 have been louder, more chaotic, and more dangerous than I feared. Trump is governing without any guardrails—Congressional Republicans have fully supplicated themselves, the tech and business community are on board, the media is trying to curry favor, and the Democrats are disoriented and divided.
It’s not great.
I am still processing how we got here (and how we get out of here). Throughout that process, I have also spent the last several weeks thinking about what Message Box looks like in the Trump era. Politics and the media ecosystem have changed dramatically, and so should my approach to writing about politics and media.
For my longtime readers and the many new members of the Message Box community who have joined since Trump was sworn in, here’s what you can expect:
The Path Forward
This newsletter, which I started on a whim during the height of the pandemic, is now entering its fifth year. The original concept was twofold — use my many years of campaign and government experience to help my readers better understand what’s happening in politics and arm them with poll-tested advice on how to talk about politics with their friends and family. That won’t change. My core theory of political communications argues that the only way to beat the Right Wing media machine is to empower a grassroots army of messengers to tell our story in their online and IRL communities. At the risk of confirmation bias, the 2024 election results reaffirm the need for Democrats to adopt a grassroots communications strategy.
As I have been doing since the election, I will continue exploring three big areas:
Analyzing what happened in this election and how Democrats can rebuild our coalition;
Strategizing how to fight back against the Right Wing media machine dominating American politics; and
Identifying specific ways to fight back against what Trump and his minions are trying to do to this country. That will include where to volunteer, where to donate, which campaigns matter most, and how to talk to the persuadable voters in your life about what’s happening in politics.
Fighting the Rampant Misinformation
As Trump’s response to the California wildfires shows, his presidency will be defined by misinformation designed to confuse the masses and distract from his incompetence and criminality. His first term had safeguards in place but now, like the fires themselves, it is near impossible to extinguish every smoking piece of misinformation. Back then, legacy media invested a ton of time and money fact-checking Trump’s lies. Most of them have abandoned those efforts, and trust in the media sank to a point that almost no one is persuaded by the few remaining fact-checkers out there. More alarmingly, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and the other Big Tech barons gave up on fact-checking in a naked attempt to curry favor with the incoming administration. Now, I’m not trying to become the next Daniel Dale, but this year I want to do things:
Give my readers information from credible sources to push back on Trump’s lies.
Separate the signal from the noise, so readers can focus their energy (and anxiety) on the things that matter.
I hope you’ll follow along and stick with me as we enter the Trump era. The work of this community of 120,000 activists and volunteers has never been more important. I consider it a privilege that so many of you want to read what I write about politics.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber and are interested in supporting this work, I am offering a 20% discount on paid subscriptions for a year.
It will be a long, painful few years, but victory is close and possible. We are on the right side of history. Our moment will come.