What Could Go Right? This American Horror Story Is Not Without Heroes

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This American Horror Story Is Not Without Heroes

One year into President Trump’s gobsmacking second term, there is a framing popular on the left, born half from fear, half exasperation. It goes like this: Congress is useless, the Supreme Court is in Trump’s pocket, and the American public is asleep. Nothing is stopping Trump from running roughshod over American rights, institutions, and values.

Certainly, we’ve seen no definitive sign that the United States will move gracefully beyond this current flirtation with authoritarian drift. But I don’t believe that it’s correct to say that America is taking all of this lying down, either.

Let’s start with the courts. So far, the Supreme Court has meaningfully checked the Trump administration in only a couple of cases, prohibiting the federalization of the National Guard and stopping deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. What it will do this year regarding tariffs, birthright citizenship, and the removal of agency heads remains an open question, although justices did seem disinclined yesterday to allow Trump’s firing of Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s governing board.

Lower courts have been much bolder. Just Security, which tracks legal challenges to the Trump administration’s executive actions, has logged nearly double the number of plaintiff wins than government victories—in all, more than 200 instances in which federal action has been blocked. In the past few days alone, one federal judge has thrown out a Department of Justice (DOJ) case that demanded access to California voter rolls, another granted a temporary restraining order after Trump froze federal funding for low-income families in five blue states, and a third barred ICE from retaliating against peaceful protestors. “Wherever you look, there are lawyers who are trying to make it as difficult as possible for the Trump administration to violate our rights,” former US Attorney Joyce Vance told Progress Network member Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently in an interview. “They are being remarkably successful in the lower courts.”

Similarly, the US Department of Health and Human Services has been forced—sometimes by the courts, sometimes by public pressure—to let the money flow again for things from mental health and addiction services to Planned Parenthood.

We’re also starting to see some coordinated pushback from Congress. Proposed budgets from the Senate have undone Trump’s 22% cut to federal science programs, shrinking it to 4%. A bipartisan coalition is trying to revise Trump’s executive order to charge a $100,000 fee on H-1B visas. Republican lawmakers are pressuring Trump to quit the saber-rattling over Greenland (which seems to have worked, at least temporarily) and came out hard in support of Fed chair Jerome Powell after the DOJ-led investigation was announced against him last week.

One-time supporters are also registering their unhappiness. Last month, our founder, Zachary Karabell, wrote about the Indiana state senate’s surprise rejection of White House-backed state redistricting maps that would have given Republicans an edge in the 2026 congressional election. Podcaster Joe Rogan made news recently when he denounced ICE as Gestapo-like. And certainly no one expected Marjorie Taylor Greene to have become a MAGA non grata.

Ordinary Americans, too, are mobilizing. In The New York Times, Michelle Goldberg points out that people power brought Jimmy Kimmel back to the air and outperformed Elon Musk’s $20 million spend in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race last year. Grand juries refused to indict New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, over a mortgage fraud case with “no credible evidence,” and have repeatedly refused to indict in cases lodged against protestors—one of whom was being charged with a felony after throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection Officer.

As I’ve written before, the No Kings protests are vast—even reaching into Trump country—persistent, and nonviolent. Thousands participated in the “Free America” walkout yesterday. Protests are ongoing in Minnesota, and a general strike is being called for tomorrow.

This isn’t a lullaby meant to soothe us into complacency or sweep away the damage that has been done in the past year. That damage is real, and painful, and it has notched more points on the scoreboard than its mitigation has. There is an obvious risk to downplaying it. But the stories we tell ourselves, collectively, matter a great deal. And so there is real risk, too, in downplaying America’s response to Trumpism, even as it has disappointed many in its slowness and its cautiousness.

But if the “resistance” cannot declare triumph, neither can Trump. That may not be the most heartening of stories, but it’s an accurate one.

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By the Numbers

63%: Share of Gen Z that intentionally unplugs from smartphones, the highest of any generation

1,800: Number of households left to be reached in Cabo Verde’s push for universal electricity access

1973: The last year—until 2025—that both India and China registered a simultaneous drop in coal power generation

145: Nations that have signed the High Seas Treaty, which went into effect this past weekend

14%: Share of electricity in Texas that comes from solar, beating out coal for the first time

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Quick Hits

👩 Virginia swears in a historic group of elected officials: the state’s first female governor, its first black attorney general, and the first Muslim woman to hold statewide office, as lieutenant governor.

📉 In 2025, the US recorded the fewest shooting deaths since 2015, not including suicides.Gun sales and mass shootings also declined last year.

🚗 The gap between rich and poor is narrowing in India, at least when it comes to assets the Western world largely takes for granted, such as refrigerators, mobile phones, and vehicles.

📈 Seven in ten Americans now live five years after a cancer diagnosis, for the first time ever, as survival rates continue to dramatically improve.

🐻 South Korea has ended its bear bile farming industry, as the popularity of the practice has nosedived in recent years.

💥 The first crash test dummy modeled on a woman’s body was unveiled in November in the US, although it may take some years before it is used in vehicle safety testing.

☢️ Everything we thought we knew about nuclear could be reinvented if next-gen reactors—cheap, easy to build, and safe—can get off the ground.

🔬 This week in scientific steps forward: an injectable that may “functionally cure” Hepatitis B, a blood test that can predict Crohn’s disease years before symptoms appear, and an immunotherapy drug combination that treats multiple myeloma substantially better than existing treatments.

👀 What we’re watching: Everyone knows that microplastics are multiplying in the body. Wait, are they?

💡 Editor’s pick: Words from Martin Luther King Jr. that go beyond the standard quotations.

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TPN Member Originals

(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)

• What Renée Good’s killing says about US citizenship | WaPo ($) | Theodore R. Johnson
• The prosecution of Jerome Powell | Yascha Mounk | Yascha Mounk
• Why every country should set 16 (or higher) as the minimum age for social media accounts | After Babel | Jonathan Haidt
• The US is staying in most international organizations, but slashing support | CGD | Charles Kenny
• The loyal opposition | The Renovator | Danielle Allen
• The CIA didn’t create the Islamic Republic | Middle East Uncovered | Faisal Saeed Al Mutar
• The world is adjusting to an unreliable United States | WaPo ($) | Fareed Zakaria
• Greenland folly | Diane Francis | Diane Francis
• Our time of resistance | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat
• Is a country rising or falling? Watch its currency. | TFP ($) | Tyler Cowen
• Admitting there’s no affordability crisis is the first step to solving it | WaPo ($) | Zachary Karabell
• ‘Looksmaxxing’ reveals the depth of the crisis facing young men | The Atlantic ($) | Thomas Chatterton Williams
• The ‘vcel’ movement | No Mercy/No Malice | Scott Galloway