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When we talk about opposition in politics, sometimes it’s just a policy disagreement – but in the current political crisis in the US, the opposition has become the opposite of the Trump administration in meaningful ways. It had to because this is not only a policy conflict.
Between the administration and the opposition are actual opposites of principle: among those committed to inclusion and those to exclusion; truth and lies; kindness and cruelty; the protection and destruction of systems that in turn protect the climate or public health.
It seems possible that what will ultimately emerge is a clarified sense of principles and a deeper commitment to them (which is why part of the conflict is over American history itself).
On one hand, there are the heads of the federal government and their spokespeople, whose lies are part of their disdain for the electorate and the rule of law. Those lies also get served up as the justification for their cruelty – the cruelty directed toward federal workers, immigrants, children in this country in need of food and healthcare, including vaccines, and the millions of people currently starving or devastated by preventable disease around the world since Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” gang destroyed USAID.
Politicians’ lies were once decried and punished when detected, in a process that often led to contriteness and apologies from the liar. Even the act of lying was a furtive one when people feared detection and its consequences. Now lies are the backbone of the Trump administration’s utterances – from likely lying about the inhabitants of the small boats they are blowing up in the Caribbean, to lying about vaccines, the economy, climate, polls, laws, history, race, immigration and pretty much everything else.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt specializes in grotesque falsehoods in praise of Donald Trump’s health, intelligence, success, and popularity. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, peddles lies about health and healthcare and the science behind them. Vice-President JD Vance has likewise lied about a broad range of subjects, but his venom has been particularly directed at immigrants, who he falsely accuses of dire economic impacts and outlandish crimes. White House adviser Stephen Miller has told the same lies with even more venom. But Trump is first and last the liar-in-chief.
It’s clear that many on the far right are now part of a subculture that celebrates and revels in cruelty and viciousness and doesn’t mind dishonesty. Trump officials sometimes seem baffled by the response from the rest of us who aren’t part of it, but apparently they don’t think we matter. We’re not their target audience, and this indifference to the opinion and values of the majority is itself a testament to their commitment to minority rule. It’s our job as the opposition to matter. And we have.
The immigrant-rights opposition is motivated by solidarity with those under attack, underwritten by compassion. From Los Angeles to Chicago to Charlotte, North Carolina, people have risked their own physical and legal safety to stand with those under attack by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and organized, trained and otherwise done the work to protect their neighbors. It has had a major impact on the ability of ICE to persecute immigrants and the Brown and Black people whose immigration status doesn’t seem to matter to these goon squads – sometimes as specific as preventing a person from being hauled away, sometimes as broad as the unprecedented protests this year.
For example, the Chicago Tribune reports that on 25 October, “agents deployed even more teargas, this time right before a children’s Halloween parade in Irving Park, where a resident raced out of his house, still in his Chicago Blackhawks pajamas, to confront feds who’d tackled a man in his front yard.”
Others, as lawyers, judges, protesters, journalists, scientists and educators, have defended truth, facts, science and law to protect human beings and the social and natural systems we depend on. They have stood up for the authority of truth that authoritarians seek to squelch or corrupt. The withholding and corrupting of information by the administration is corrosive to democracy, and it comes from a kind of elitism that regards the rest of us as not deserving the truth – and maybe suckers who will buy the lies (which plenty on the right actually are, and most of the rest of us aren’t).
Facts, truth, science, history are themselves democratic. The causes of the civil war, Covid-19 and the climate crisis are the same whether you’re a billionaire or a busker, and money can’t buy you out of that – though it can buy you a social media platform or a network news corporation to corrupt.
The opposition has been marked most of all by solidarity (which is by definition alliance and commitment to those who are not the same as you), an embrace of difference. I do not believe there has been anything like this level of solidarity with immigrants and refugees before, from the crowds showing up in the streets to the US senator who flew to El Salvador to try to rescue the kidnapped and persecuted Kilmar Ábrego García. I hope that it gives rise to a shift in the Democratic party’s discourse about immigrants and refugees, from a watered-down acceptance of their characterization as a burden and a problem, to recognition of their irreplaceable contributions to this country, economically and otherwise.
The attempts to secure truth and maybe justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims has also been driven by solidarity with the victims and a sense of principle that the Trump administration and Trump himself don’t share. Their victimization was the result of the radical inequality between poor girls and young women and wealthy men, so one of the underlying questions is about equality, about whether we will have a nation in which everyone’s rights matter, in which everyone deserves protection by the law.
It has been remarkable how this scandal that refuses to die down was what caused widespread Republican defection, when members of the House and Senate voted so broadly to release the files and some Republicans spoke openly against Trump himself. Polls show Trump’s own popularity and that of his handling of the economy and immigration has declined radically over the course of the year.
It was not clear when 2025 began what kind of opposition to the Trump administration there would be and how effective it would be. Many at the beginning of the year feared a powerful administration whose destruction went unchallenged, but it has been challenged and it has stumbled, faltered and backed down in many situations.
The administration now seems to be getting more extreme and reckless as it grows more desperate, chaotic and unpopular. We enter 2026 with radical uncertainty about the fate of this country – but also with the clarity that people have the power to determine what it will be, if they continue to show up and stand on principle.
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Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
