The ‘Resistance’ Is Over

Is Donald Trump over? Can we all now relax and move on to the next thing? That’s the message from a significant portion of Democratic primary voters.

Just as Trump is bored with Iran and the economy and wants to play with monuments and gilding, so too are many Democratic primary voters in Florida and elsewhere bored with Trump and eager to play factional politics instead.

The political statistician Nate Silver summed up the mood on X today: “It’s kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0.” Silver then listed stalwart anti-Trumpers who have lost their contests in 2026 and concluded, “People want to move on.” America is a fast-moving, dynamic country.

It’s tough for Americans to stay focused on a single thing, even if that single thing is the threat to American democracy.

As the celebrity spokesmodel Heidi Klum tells the audience on Project Runway : “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day, you’re out.” This law also apparently applies to Democratic candidates who took serious risks to challenge Trump.

The resistance, it seems, is out.

The far left of the Democratic Party has never been as energized as the party’s center about Trump and democracy.

A 2017 analysis in The Washington Post suggested that between 6 and 12 percent of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election.

With many careful caveats, the analysis observed that these voters exceeded Trump’s margin of victory. [ James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite ] In 2024, likewise, some leaders of the activist left noisily defected from the Harris-Walz ticket.

For many of them, opposing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza mattered more than stopping a Trump presidency at home.

The effect of this mobilization on the left is hard to measure, but The Nation was quick to insist that the Biden administration’s Gaza policy likely cost the party Michigan, because many Arabs and Muslims swung toward Trump.

The article did not seriously consider whether culture politics, such as Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights, influenced socially conservative Arab and Muslim voters, even though the city of Dearborn has long been a locus of anti-gay grassroots politics in the state.

The claim that Harris lost to Trump because of Gaza may well be activist self-medication, but this kind of story about the election is telling.

This year, the dulling of anti-Trump impetus on the left is even more visible and consequential.