Front Burner - What happened to ‘The Resistance’?

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Donald Trump’s first four years in office were met with protest and obstruction — a popular movement which came to be known as ‘The Resistance.’ It featured a coalition that included members of the media, establishment Republicans, figures on the left, celebrities and business leaders. Forty days into his second term, many are wondering: what happened to ‘The Resistance.’ Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and joins us to discuss ‘Resistance Fatigue,’ the Trump administration’s plan to overwhelm the attention of the public, and whether people are, today, too overburdened to care.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today, starting at $19 per month

at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi everyone, Jamie here. So as I mentioned yesterday, we want to do a call-in episode of the podcast all about tariffs and the overall impact that Trump is having on Canada right now, our economy, our elections. So please do send us those questions. Keep sending them in. We've got some really great ones so far. You can email frontburneratcbc.ca.

Voice notes are the best. Record your question and email it to frontburneratcbc.ca. Please let us know who you are and where you're from so that we can shout you out. You can also submit directly on Spotify if that's where you're listening. Leave them in the comments. We have turned them on.

Okay, here's today's show. ["The Last Supper"] Try and take your mind back to November 8th, 2016, the night that we all found out that Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton and was set to become the 45th president of the United States. The scene here is so different than it was a few hours ago when people were happy and

relaxed. I have been looking around the room at people who are stone-faced. Some of them have been crying. Fox News decision desk has called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. This means that Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States. Do you remember the public reaction to that day? The way the corporate media reacted, establishment figures, the Democratic Party, the business world. For a lot of them, it was like the world had ended.

Then came his inauguration two months later and against that backdrop, the Women's March, the single largest demonstration in American history. The day after Donald Trump became their president, they chanted. They urged. Come on, they chanted. They urged. Come on, we got this. Keep on coming. They shouted. And they waved every insult they could muster.

It was part of a broader cultural movement known as the Resistance. Well, it's a stark difference this time around as Biden received Trump at the White House with the words, Welcome Home. Many with cultural, financial, and political power have largely fallen in line with Trump and the party of opposition appears to be struggling, even absent. So what changed? What happened to the conclusion things felt different this time around? I think it was clear in the run-up to the election that things felt different.

That if you looked at the newspaper accounts of Donald Trump's plans or if you read Project 2025, the document that the Heritage Foundation put together describing what the Republican establishment's intentions were for a second Trump term, it was clear that they were going to be existential, that they were gonna remake American institutions, that the government was gonna be something profoundly

different on the other side of a Trump administration. So in the run up to the election, the consequences of a Trump presidency were evident and yet there was just this apathy. You had a lot of, um, you had a lot of younger voters. You had a lot of voters, you know, across every segment of, um, the country who were essentially throwing up their hands in the air saying that they couldn't see much difference between the two parties, that they felt like the Biden presidency had been this massive disappointment and that they couldn't be bothered to get excited about

the prospect of throwing themselves into this election. And so to me the writing was on the wall even before Trump was elected. Okay Let me ask you about the resistance so it refers to a large coalition right that included leftist neoconservatives liberals in the Democratic Party Establishment Republicans students groups and more thinking about it now. It's kind of incredible. You had Bush era Republicans who helped to sell the Iraq war positioning themselves in this coalition alongside Bernie bros. And how would you define, yeah, how would you define what made up the resistance

and what were the core tenants of the movement? I mean, first of all, I think we have to concede that there's something maybe a little bit silly about the word resistance, that it just kind of, it implies, like we're in the middle of a Marvel movie, and that there was this sense, going back to 2017, that Trump could be stopped, and that whether it was through action or whether it

was through the Mueller report and the Trump Russia scandal or whether it was through the adults in the room because of the likes of General Mattis or General Kelly standing up to Donald Trump and saying, don't do this. Really, it felt like Trump was just like one silver bullet away from getting knocked out of the presidency or being contained. And so that was the essence, I think, of the resistance. And it was actually kind of effective, I would have to say, even if the term itself is easily

mocked, that the Women's March actually played a very significant role in stiffening the spine of Democratic politicians so that when Trump did come into office, there was a unified, rigid opposition that greeted him. When he passed the Muslim ban and the other curtailments of immigration, there was civil society rushing to kind of, to make a point, to the airports, to demonstrate against it. -"MSG!" -"MSG!"

-"We're here to make a very strong statement that, Donald Trump, you do not represent our values. Wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, in the machine that slowed Trump down. I want to ask you specifically about the role that corporate media played. So you know, almost immediately his election, his first election was framed as this existential crisis. Networks focused around the clock coverage on all things Trump. They hired what were essentially live fact checkers to interrogate every claim. Journalists publicly confronted him. I'm not concerned about anything with the Russian investigation because it's a hoax.

That's enough. Put down the mic. Mr. President, are you worried about indictments coming down in this investigation? Mr. President. I tell you what, CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, changed the paper's motto to, democracy dies in darkness, which he famously advertised during a Super Bowl ad in 2019. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.

When you think about media's relationship to Trump during his first four years, what do you remember the most and what constitutes the biggest area of difference to today? All right. Just setting this in the long arc of the history of American media, coming into the 21st century, you had the advertising business for most newspapers and television networks supremely challenged by all sorts of new technological developments. You had the Iraq War. You had the rise of blogs. Media lost confidence in itself and lost confidence in its business plan. And when Trump came to office, there was this opportunity for media to play in its own minds

a heroic role in standing up to the dictator as he was marching into power. And so I think that democracy dies in the darkness is extremely idealistic, but it's also self-serving because it became, you know, became the basis for a Super Bowl ad, but it was very invigorating to have this sense of mission, which felt like had been missing. It was invigorating to see the ways in which doing the right thing, doing media investigative journalism, fact checking, as you say, the president in real time, these were things that brought viewers, they brought subscriptions. And so, it felt like an incredibly ennobling, an incredibly exhilarating moment to be in journalism. What happened?

So I think a couple things. The structural problems underlying the economics of American media are the structural problems underlying American media. We, you know, primarily you had social media that was kind of waging this assault on the underlying economics, the underlying business of media. That's still true. You have the fracturing of America, which is reflected and both exacerbated by the way in which people consume news. And so people kind of retreated to their silos.

There's no authoritative source of media. And then, you know, we talk about Jeff Bezos, and there's this other storyline that emerges, which is that Donald Trump took the Washington Post coverage of his administration, which was tough and extremely good, understandably personally, and he started to lash out against Jeff Bezos. He started to refer to it as the Amazon Washington Post. The Washington Post, which I call a lobbying tool for Amazon. Okay, that's a lobbying tool. And there was a contract that Amazon was bidding on at the Pentagon to move the Pentagon's computing into the cloud on Amazon Web Services. And it was a real intimidation campaign

that Trump was waging, which was he would say, I am going to threaten the totality of your business interests because of your ownership of the Washington Post. Some of the greatest companies in the world are complaining about it having to do with Amazon and the Department of Defense. And I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what's going on because-

Well, Amazon is blaming President Trump now for losing a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract to Microsoft. The president has accused Amazon of not paying enough in taxes and Bezos of spreading fake news for the Washington Post. And everybody else in the world saw what was happening. They saw that there was a price to be paid

for standing up to Trump. You know, whether that actually went down exactly in a way that was as nefarious as it seemed is hard to tell, but certainly the president's explicit intentions were nefarious. And I think that that probably, to some extent, rocked the American elite. It was a lesson, an object lesson that was assimilated into many minds. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit?

No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at ZenSurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. The TikTok Juno Band Choice Award is back. Who's Canada's favorite artist?

You decide. To vote, search Junos on TikTok. The winner will be revealed at the Junos, hosted by Michael Buble. Live March 30th at 8 Eastern on CBC and CBC Gym. There was in some ways an entire resistance industry, right? Bestselling books, merch, speaking tours, organizations which fundraised incredible amounts of money. Resistance grifters I think is the term

that circulated at the time. I know you have also written about how this was about sustained outrage. The ability to remain surprised by the behavior of the president. But Steve Bannon, the brainchild of the early days, has talked openly about the fact that they sought to drive apathy and cut into this sense of public outrage. They would, as he put it, Flood the zone.

Every day we hit them with three things. They'll bite on one and we'll get all of our stuff done. Pang, bang, bang. Hit the public and the media with a deluge of headlines, information and scandal. Really, any one of which could drive a news cycle for a week, but all at once it became so difficult to follow. And the idea was that this made Trump look strong and thus created a sense of resignation for everyday people.

Do you think that that specific strategy of flooding the zone has helped to create this moment today? Yes, I think it does. I mean, I see it in my own, the way that I understand reality that when so many things are happening at once, it is indeed hard to have sustained outrage. It's hard to focus on the one thing.

It's hard to create a message that mobilizes people around in response to say the Muslim bad, which was one thing that people could see happening and they could respond to and focus their energies there. So that's certainly the case. The other thing that I think is related to all of this is that over time, Americans have become, I don't know if it's decadence is the right sort of way to word to describe this, but there is this detachment that Americans have

from their government and in moments of severe crisis like COVID or Hurricane Katrina, there's this kind of renewed appreciation for the role that government can play in people's lives. But as the Trump administration, the second Trump administration is to set it on Washington and engage this project of gutting the state, of just destroying the capacity of the government.

It's unfolded in a way where even very smart people it's unfolded in a way where even very smart people who are not in Washington don't really see the toll. In Washington, we see it because it's a local story. You meet people all the time who, at the dog park or grocery store, who've just been fired or are having to make big leg decisions about whether they're going to accept auppers to leave the government or not. And so you can see the way in which this loss of capacity and competence is going to be extremely debilitating because I know all the smart people who are now leaving the government. But from afar, the fact that the innards of these marble buildings in DC are being gutted just doesn't click as a major story.

Do you think that there's something that would? So I think that there will be moments in the realm of COVID or Katrina where people understand that the capacity of the government is being wrecked. I mean, the one thing that we know about life is that crises happen and individuals are not able to address those problems on their own. It takes some sort of form of collective action

and government is the way in which we mobilize collectively in response to problems. So it's inevitable. So we've talked about the public, we've talked about the media, but another organ of the resistance was Congress and even the courts. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker come to mind as well as others who made names for themselves with these like viral contributions during high profile Senate confirmation hearings. There have been discussions of matters out there that they have not asked me to open an investigation.

Perhaps they've suggested. I don't know, I wouldn't say suggest. Hinted? I don't know. Inferred? You don't know. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who became something of like a resistance icon.

So I'm not stepping down just cause I'm getting older. I got the fate of the country resting on these tiny shoulders. But damn, the world's getting scary when the only one who, the Democrats, it feels different. Chuck Schumer has told the New York Times, quote, we're not going to go after every single issue. We are picking the most important fights and lying down on the train tracks on those fights. Other prominent democratic strategists have talked about literally doing nothing.

And I'm telling the Democrats, just sit there, play possum, let them go, let them go, let them go. Poll numbers are declining. The collapse is already underway. Let's see when it, when it put them. What have you made of the Democratic Party's response to Trump's second administration? Um, well, I mean, I think it has been, it has been hapless. I think it's been inner. Um, but I think it exists within a cultural context that we're describing. And so, you know, I think that there's, and I'm not a political consultant, so I don't know exactly what

the right way for Democrats to respond actually is. Even when the things that you're describing, there's probably some thought and logic that goes into the, let's just shut up, political strategy. But that said, I think it's almost marked by a kind of fear. There are things that are happening that just are very hard to describe. So there was a police officer who was beat up on January 6th, Michael Fanon. And he's become kind of a resistance-like spokesperson who has to fight before the January 6th commission. He does various political appearances.

Rest assured, I have been betrayed by my country and I've been betrayed by those that supported Donald Trump. Whether you voted for him because he promised these pardons or for some other reason, you knew that this was coming, and here we are tonight. And he is being stalked right now by bad boys and by other right wing military who have been ardent by Donald Trump. My colleague, McKay Coppins wrote a book about Mitt Romney and he asked Romney the question, why don't more Republicans speak out against Donald Trump? And what Romney said was that they're afraid of what could happen to their families.

I think fear is a very real political emotion. I don't know if Democrats are experiencing fear, but I think that we talked about Jeff Bezos, I think that fear is part of his calculus. I think that when you you see a tsunami that's happening in the way that this first couple weeks of the Trump administration have unfolded, I think one of the natural responses is that people have is like, Oh, I better, I better just kind of ride this wave and you know, see if I can find a way to make my peace with power. Otherwise, I'm just going to get pulled under by it all.

And that's I think it helps to count for the way in which the business elite have responded. I think it helps to count for the way in which there is no moderate Republican resistance to Trump. And then the other thing is that Trump's first term has to American institutions. I think American institutions performed pretty well in response to that test, but they were also weakened in the course of that test. I mean, Trump has changed the judiciary. He has softened the judiciary, made it much more favorable to him. I think Trump has created these divisions within America

that make it harder for America to respond. I think, you know, I'm just struck by the flimsiness of American institutions in the course of the last couple of weeks. Not to undermine your point that there is this very real climate of fear out there, but do you think also it's like giving them too much leeway, right? In a way too, right? Trump is someone that the Democrats have again and again classified as an existential threat to the country. His rhetoric has been analogized by Ann Applebaum in the magazine that you write for to Mussolini and Hitler.

And then in response to his congressional address this week, many drama crowds just like sat in the gallery holding up paddles with protest slogans on them or wearing pink t-shirts also with slogans on them. I've just been struggling to understand if you believe yourself to be up against that kind of anti-democratic challenge, one that you have classified as fascist, why are you not willing to go beyond these largely performative acts? Yeah.

I mean, I guess that kind of begs the question, what's the step that they would take beyond those merely performative acts? And I, I, I just don't know. I think that, you know, politicians generally are weak need and they get pushed by publics and I think the public, the public has been incredibly apathetic about what's happening. I think, you know, I look at the way in which protests engulf campuses last spring, and like now Trump is basically threatening to destroy

or seriously injure American universities. And like, where are the protests in response to that? Why aren't college kids descending on Washington? Why aren't unions taking a more adversarial position? Where are the women's march? Oh, you know, where's the reprise of the women's march this time? You know, broadly speaking, like what you see,

you know, what Ann Applebaum writes about in other contexts or Smithy Snyder has written about in other contexts is that, you know, when you have an authoritarian leader who keeps pushing and poking and prodding and doing all these things, we do lose our capacity for outrage over time. It's a very, very difficult emotion to sustain. So in the, in the, as like just as a point of fact, Democrats don't actually,

you know, control anything right now. So there are hard limits on what they can actually do to slow things down. And like institutions like Congress are now, have been recalibrated in a way to make it harder for them to express dissent because you have Republican leaders who can rig the rules however they'd like. Do you think part of this also comes down to them seeding what was once understood

as a kind of moral high ground. That it's now difficult to moralize about threats to the world order or human rights when a large percentage of the population believes you, for example, to be implicated in war crimes in Gaza or difficult to warn about the threat of billionaire donors while also courting them. Do you think there's anything to that argument?

I'm just I do struggle to understand why, why the public isn't as outraged as it should be. And I do struggle to understand why Democrats have been kind of basically inarticulate and making a case against Trump. The bigger problem is, it goes back to the first resistance, is that it's very hard to make a case that democracy is under threat for a sustained period of time because democracy erodes slowly. Democracy erodes, you know,

maybe in the first couple of weeks since Trump administration's eroded in a flash flood, but even so I think that the public probably does grow weary of descriptions of democracy being under assault and that there was only so long that those messages could work and now Democrats probably need to pivot to some other explanation of why this is a disaster. And indeed, there are other explanations of why this is a disaster that I'm sure, if they have any political sense, they will begin to pivot to. I mean, for instance, Trump is running the economy, you know, could very well be running the economy into the ground.

That's the type of message that empirically voters are very responsive to, because it corresponds with their lived experience. You mentioned before a lack of student protests or protests on the street. In trying to understand that more, I want to ask you about political violence. Trump has talked about his desire to unleash active troops on American civilian protesters. It was reported in 2021 that he said of anti-racism protesters to his defense secretary, I believe. Can't you just shoot them?

Just shoot them in the legs or something. And he's suggesting that that's what we should do, that we should bring in the troops and shoot the protesters. The commander in chief was suggesting that the US military shoot protesters. Yes, in the straits of our nation's capital. That's right. Is there part of you that worries about the prospect of

political violence? Absolutely. I mean, I think that when you one of his first acts as president was to harden the Proud Boys and Oath Keeper leaders and people who participated in January 6. Essentially, he was basically legalizing paramilitary groups that had tried to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6. And so it's not just the fear that you describe, I think is also very real that at some point he can invoke something called the Insurrection Act that would allow him to use troops against American citizens.

That's always, I think, part of the worst case scenario that could at some point plausibly unfold in response to protests that happened against him. So yes, we live in a time where political violence is in the air, political violence is manifest at various moments, and it does feel as if it has been encouraged by the president of the United States. Donald Trump himself flourishes in a kind of combat style type of politics, I think. He publicly humiliates his opponents.

He frames others as weak and himself as strong, betraying allies and friends. This is someone who thrives on conflict. And so to that end, does Donald Trump need a resistance? Is there Trumpism or MAGA without one? Yes. I mean, I think there hasn't been a resistance in the course of the first however many days of the Trump administration.

And I think he's done more damage in those first couple of days than he arguably managed to do over the course of his entire first term. So MAGA is like a slogan, it is movement. It's a set of media. It's a mindset that permeates a group of followers. But then there is this other thing that's attached to it, which is Elon Musk.

It is the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. It's business that has a goal of eviscerating the American government so that a different form of capitalism and a different form of government can pay coal. And you've got to say that they've gone a very long distance to achieving their wildest dreams in a matter of weeks. Okay. That feels like a good place to end.

Franklin, thank you very much for this. Thank you. All right. That is all for today. Again, please keep sending those questions in. Front Burner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Ali Janes, Lauren Donnelly, Joytha Shingon, and the rest of the team. We'll be back in a few minutes.

Thank you. All right. That is all for today. Again, please keep sending those questions in. Front Burner was produced this week by Matthew Amha, Ali Janes, Lauren Donnelly, Joytha Shingupta, and Mackenzie Cameron. Our video producer is Evan Agard and our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabason. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos, And I'm Jamie Pueysohn.

Thanks so much for listening and we will talk to you next week.