We cannot expect 'the walls' to ever just close in on Trump

With Donald Trump’s wild U-turn on the Epstein Files, combined with overwhelming GOP losses at the polls and the president’s pained admission that his “signature” tariff policy has been driving up prices for no good reason (and may even be tossed out by Republicans on the Supreme Court), you’re going to see a lot of these.

“THE WALLS ARE CLOSING IN ON TRUMP!” we’ll be told.

As if that’s something walls do on their own.

As if all of these walls didn’t require superhuman shoving from the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell or candidates, volunteers, and supporters across the country or a left-right coalition opposed to Trump stealing Congress’s power to tax.

The belief that someone else is going to take care of Donald Trump and he’ll eventually sink into placid obscurity is the simplest explanation of how we got into this mess. And no honest adult should encourage that fairy tale.

Trump came back from the overwhelming condemnation of January 6th to take the reins of government and reward the perpetrators of the most disgraceful attack on our Constitution with MULTIPLE pardons. He can come back from anything.

And he’ll never go away gracefully, no matter how he’s defeated or, worse, how his movement carries on victoriously after him. If you’re reading this, you know that.

But we need to start spreading the message that this time, there will be costs for being a Mitch.

You’ll remember that McConnell shrugged off Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election, like Mike Pence, leaving open the fantasy that the results could be overturned until the last possible moment.

“President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” McConnell said on the Senate floor days after the election. “Suffice it to say, a few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the republic.”

Then, after the insurrection Trump sparked and refused to contain until it was clear that it had failed, McConnell reportedly said, “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a b---- for us.”

And then McConnell pretended that criminal consequences were enough for Trump, knowing the MAGA majority he installed on the Supreme Court would never let that happen. His key vote and leadership prevented the Senate from convicting Trump, the one step, in retrospect, that could have actually prevented a second Trump term.

We are now in the phase of the opposition to Trump, where we need to get into the difficult work of encouraging defectors.

Erica Chenoweth, co-author of the book that introduced the 3.5% rule to the world, has noted again and again that one of the four key reasons mass nonviolent movements are most effective in resisting authoritarianism is that they can encourage defections from the ruling party because “those defections can lead to key moments of political crisis for those holding power.”

You can argue that one of the key reasons violent actors around January 6th were encouraged to gather was the lack of defections from figures like McConnell or Pence. No significant voice in the Republican party or its supporters signaled to the insurrectionists that what they were planning was futile and likely to be punished by the law. The fear of Trump convinced them to let someone else handle it.

Until Election Day, 2025 was the darkest year of U.S. history in my lifetime. Only the carnage of COVID and the run-up to the Iraq War come close.

Figures like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and even Bill Gates have gone all in on this regime, and none—with the possible exception of Musk, who has destroyed his brand without the stock market noticing—have suffered any real consequences. Not even a whiff of social stigma has glanced these men as Trump has waged war on Americans and committed aimless murder of hundreds of thousands abroad.

And you’d be wise to say, what consequences can we even muse about offering these titans of our time? The only one that seems possible at this moment, given that the American public, especially decisive voters, seemed to have turned against Trumpism, at least for now, is shame.

We must speak in praise of a return to shame, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a columnist at Boston Review, so often does.

“It is, quite literally, the least one can do to ensure rules of social conduct that uphold minimal levels of dignity for all involved,” he wrote.

The threat of shame and the legislative and legal consequences that come with overwhelming public rejection are, at this point, the longest levers of power we have today. But that requires the public to hold together even past this crisis and not expect anyone—Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, John Roberts, or Jack Smith—to do our work for us.

That prospect seems pretty hollow now, but our failure to quell Trump when that seemed possible to even Mitch McConnell must be our education.

The walls never close in on their own.

We are the walls, and we must never forget that Trump’s advantage is that he does not let up. And again and again the walls have fallen on him, only to reveal him standing in a window. That’s when what happens with the walls matters most.

That's when our job really begins.

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