How to Prepare for a Second Trump Term

It is 9:42 AM, I haven’t properly slept in 48 hours, and I have approximately 7 hours to finish a full rewrite of my Truth Project article. My word count limit is 5,000, I’m at 6,000, and I have about 6,000 more to write/compile before the cuts begin. This is a terrible way to write an article but my brain is a terrible place and the Truth People have been producing Truth Video in very interesting and funny ways for 14 years so really it’s not my fault. That being said, if I was my editor, I would have already killed me. Whatever he’s getting paid to put up with my obsessive bullshit, it’s probably not enough.

I’m busy, is what I’m trying to say, busy and also insane, so I will make this brief: I have co-written an article with Lincoln Mitchell, a public policy expert who has taught at Columbia University and often appears with me on Arnie Arneson’s radio show, about how to prepare for the possibility of a Trump victory.

You can read it here if you would like to.

I have spent my entire 2024 optimism budget on this article and dipped into my projected allotment for 2025. The libertarians have started an optimism deficit website where you can watch the interest stack in real time. They know good and goddamn well I’m never going to be able to balance the budget again. After the disappointment of the 2020 BLM protests, I find it physically painful to propose mass action as a solution to anything.

But I believe the ideas that Lincoln and I propose in this article would work, and I believe that a .00000001% chance of success is better than the 0% chance we have if we don’t try, so here’s hoping we can put together an actual resistance, as opposed to #resistance, to the authoritarian push that may be coming our way.

I’d love to hear what you think. Whether you like our proposed answer or not, the question of what to do if Trump takes the White House needs to be an ongoing conversation, and I hope we can have it here over the coming months.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get back to attempting to describe the Landrieu Dance in a single sentence. Thoughts* and prayers appreciated

*Schedule II stimulants