This may be the last time

Over the weekend, President Trump suggested that, at least in principle, he disagreed with any decision to kill two survivors floating amid the wreckage of a boat blown up by the U.S. military in the southern Caribbean Sea on September 2nd.

The story appeared late last week in the Washington Post, and suggested that after an initial strike that destroyed the boat, which the administration claimed was running drugs, a follow-up attack to kill the survivors took place, relying on an earlier spoken order by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to kill everyone. Questions about exactly who was responsible and what orders were given are taking center stage.

So many people have died as a result of government actions since Trump took office, from hundreds of thousands overseas doomed by the cutoff of USAID assistance to more than eighty civilians blown up in boat strikes in recent months. It would be easy to dismiss the execution of the two September 2nd survivors as just two more deaths carried out in inhumane and extralegal ways. But the response to these has been different.

Last Friday, the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee announced that it was committed to "vigorous oversight" on the strikes. Over the weekend, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine said on Face the Nation, "This rises to the level of a war crime if it's true.” And Republican Congressman Mike Turner from Ohio said, “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.”

Asked about it, the president spoke in a convoluted way, but at least part of his intent seems clear. “I don’t know that happened,” he said, “and Pete said he did not want that—he didn’t even know what people were talking about. So we’ll look into it, but no, I wouldn’t have wanted that second strike… And if there were two people were out—but Pete said that didn’t happen. I have great confidence… Pete said he did not order the death of those two men.”

Today I’ll write about this incident and some other recent developments, and why they should bring us a little hope. It’s not that any one of them clearly signals the end of Trump as a political force. It’s that more and more doors are opening that could lead to that possibility. I want to consider a pattern that’s emerging and what you can do to add to it.

Trump shedding support

While the boat strikes have been continuing, Senator Kaine tried and failed earlier this fall to get the Senate to forbid war against Venezuela without Congress’s approval. And Kaine is now vowing to reintroduce the legislation in the wake of the Post report about the second tap that executed the survivors of original strike.

People are unhappier with the president’s apparent intention to start a war with Venezuela than with almost anything he’s done so far. Next to the desire for the release of the Epstein files, it may be the most bipartisan issue pollsters have found related to Trump. A late-November poll showed that 70% of Americans opposed the U.S. taking military action in Venezuela.

But unhappiness with Trump extends far beyond the manufactured Venezuela crisis. You might have noticed that across the last month, more and more reports bout Trump being a lame duck president have appeared.

Republicans feel less compelled to side with him. After trying to strongarm Representative Lauren Boebert into shifting her position (apparently in the Situation Room), Trump pretended to back releasing the Epstein files once it was clear that he would lose the vote to suppress them. The president’s heated demand to end the filibuster was met with laughter by Senator Mike Rounds from South Dakota.

A lot of this response has been enabled or fostered by the election results a month ago, which were a bloodbath for Republicans, who are now worried about their prospects in the 2026 midterms. Still, this trend began before the elections actually took place. During the last week in October, the Senate voted three times to limit or reverse tariffs Trump had announced earlier in the year.

The effects of those votes are limited, because the House would also have to pass any measure reasserting its power over the president on tariffs. And even then, more Republican senators would have to defect before legislation could gain the support of a veto-proof majority. But the number of elected legislators willing to stand in a public way against the president is growing. It’s a start.

We see the trend elsewhere, too. Indiana state senator Michael Bohacek has said he’ll vote against the redistricting that President Trump has pressed a number of red states to carry out as he hopes to gain Republican seats in the House of Representatives in 2026. Bohacek, who has a daughter with Down Syndrome, said publicly that he’s rejecting the president’s call because of dehumanizing language from Trump himself.

“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references, and his choices of words have consequences,” Bohacek said. “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”

Other Republicans in the House are looking at quitting. Troy Nehls of Texas has said he’ll retire from from his seat in the House of Representatives rather than run again in 2026. Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her retirement as well, which will happen even sooner—just a month from now.

Companies and courts

The broadening pushback isn’t just in Congress. Asked why JP Morgan won’t be funding the president’s project to build a ballroom on White House grounds, CEO Jamie Dimon replied, “We have an issue, okay, which is anything we do, since we do a lot of contracts with governments here and around the world, we have to be very careful how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it. We’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that.”

On the judicial front, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia heard the case last spring about Venezuelan immigrants being deported to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. In June, the judge ruled that the prisoners had to be given the opportunity to challenge their detention. He also launched a contempt probe looking at the Trump administration’s refusal to follow his orders about turning any planes in transit around and having them return to the U.S.

In response to these and other decisions, articles of impeachment have been introduced against Judge Boasberg many times, most recently a few weeks ago by Republican Congressman Brandon Gill of Texas. But the effort has never picked up steam.

Boasberg’s call for a contempt investigation was reversed by a three-judge panel from the court of appeals, which sided with the DOJ. But a subsequent review by a larger panel of judges from the same court of appeals ruled last month that Boasberg could move forward. So he’s now proceeding with his contempt probe of the administration over the failure to turn the planes around.

And this week, a decision from the Third Circuit disqualified Alina Habba from her appointed position as U.S. attorney in New Jersey, and from the role of acting attorney as well—all because her appointment violates the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. This comes on the heels of a federal judge shooting down the criminal indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, ruling that acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, who was prosecuting the cases, had likewise not been lawfully appointed.

The list could go on and on. But I want to underline that each of the examples I’ve given—the assassination of those aboard boats targeted by the administration, funding for construction of the White House ballroom, the redistricting push in Indiana, Senate votes against Trump tariffs, removal of Habba and Halligan (both of whom had been personal attorneys for Trump), and the contempt probe about the plane flights to El Salvador—all of these are directly connected to Trump’s core policies, the ones he has demanded, celebrated, or heartily embraced.

Each shift against the president creates small rifts that have the opportunity to turn into larger ones. One of them, or something similar, will eventually trigger an end to his power.

Past pivot points

Looking at history in the U.S. and around the world makes it clear that people didn’t always know when a long fight against injustice might suddenly gain ground or be won outright. These shifts often defy easy prediction.

In Kenya, where a variety of concentration camps were created to interrogate, torture, detain, and extract forced labor from detainees during the fight for independence from the British, a massacre took place at Hola in 1959. Guards beat to death eleven detainees in British custody who refused to do the labor demanded of them.

The deaths were officially reported as due to drinking contaminated water. But the violence inflicted on the bodies of the dead came to light—and not only the brutality against the men who died. An investigation revealed dozens of other heavily injured survivors of the incident.

Countless more had already been tortured and murdered in the conflict. But it was the lies told about the deaths of these eleven at the Hola camp and what had actually happened to them that turned the tide in England against the bloody suppression of Kenyan independence.

In Argentina more than two decades later, the junta tried to bolster flagging public support for its rule in the spring of 1982 by sparking a confrontation with Great Britain over the Falkland Islands, which lie three hundred miles east of Argentina’s southern coast. Instead, the undeclared war only fueled popular unrest, forcing elections and the beginning of the end of dictatorship the following year.

With Watergate in the U.S., roughly a year of illegal activity aimed at reelecting Richard Nixon was followed by a landslide victory by Nixon. By January of the following year and before Nixon was even inaugurated, G. Gordon Liddy and James McCord were on trial for the Watergate break-in, as five of their codefendants pled guilty.

But it took nearly a year and a half after that for the House of Representatives to begin impeachment hearings. In all, it took nearly two years of relentless investigation of the Nixon reelection campaign and the subsequent crimes to cover their actions up to force Nixon to resign in August 1974. The result hinged on a series of improbable events, discoveries, and persistence.

And these three cases are ones where a situation flipped completely to a new dynamic, leading to Kenyan independence, the fall of dictatorship, and the resignation of a president. Far more often, doors open to limited progress. But that’s valuable, too.

Less than everything is better than nothing

On questions about Guantanamo in the early years, the Supreme Court deferred mightily to President George W. Bush and his treatment of those he detained at the naval base in the war on terror, even when the justices had no evidence of what kind of detainees they were. Three years into post-9/11 detention at Gitmo, the Supreme Court established that U.S. courts had jurisdiction and could rule on detainees held there.

Four years after that—in 2008—the Court declared part of the Military Commissions Act unconstitutional and ruled that detainees had a right to the writ of habeas corpus, to have their claims of unlawful detention heard. After President Obama took office the following January, he deemed torture off limits, and began his futile attempt to pressure Congress into closing Guantanamo.

Hundreds of detainees had already been released under Bush, and Obama continued the trend, as did Biden. –Yet the detention facility itself was never closed, helping to create a template for the kind of fusion of military bases and concentration camp-style detention we’re seeing used against immigrants now.

Nevertheless, those court cases and presidential actions liberated a lot of people who had been detained without due process. And I think people sometimes forget about the value in jamming a bad process for the additional people who never got caught up in it in the first place—those would have been caught up in it if the machine hadn’t been stalled.

If you can’t save everyone, you can often save someone. But if you can’t save anyone, you can work to prevent others from ending up in the same situation.

Roots of change

Given that it’s the 70th anniversary this week of Rosa Parks’ refusal to leave her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, I want to address that action and the bus boycott as a whole. Rosa Parks had been involved with social justice issues for years before she refused to give up her seat on that bus.

The boycott afterward destroyed the bus line’s profitability. The company capitulated, but the state and local authorities responded by trying to strengthen laws and enforcement to maintain segregation. The courts weighed in, even as the state continued to appeal the court decisions. The Supreme Court’s final ruling declaring bus segregation unconstitutional was handed down in November 1956.

Yet that wasn’t even the first bus boycott. And though it sparked the rise of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national figure, the matter was far from settled. A wave of Freedom Riders wouldn’t take up the mantle for desegregation on interstate buses until 1961. And much of the hardest work of the Civil Rights movement still lay ahead.

So I don’t want to pretend that all victories are definitive, or that in most cases, it’s possible to even identify a singular turning point that marks the downfall of authoritarian rule, as publicizing the Hola Massacre did for Kenyans. Even in that case, it was years of resistance to torture, censorship, forced relocation, civil tumult, and death that kept the possibility alive in the first place.

Yet each of these instances is a good reminder that if you wait for certain victory to act, you’ll never do anything. Change starts with smaller actions, with going against the odds. And the strangest possibilities can sometimes lead to the biggest gains. So open every door you can to the future that you want to see.

The long view

One thing I’d like to note is that nearly three months ago, it was Nick Turse of the Intercept who broke the story that the September 2nd boat strike had included a follow-up attack to kill survivors. That story made a small splash, but one that wasn’t nearly as large as the response to coverage from the Washington Post late last week.

Sometimes, you might be part of the first wave of people responding to lawbreaking, a growing crisis, or an inhumane policy. And while it might not be your action that breaks through to popular perception, what you do might still get someone else to pay attention, to report, or to take action in critical ways.

I’ve written before about remembering that one day Trump will be gone, and lately it seems as if some of his allies are finally becoming aware of that eventuality. But my point here is that not only should we be trying to build the world we want to live in after he vanishes from the scene, but we can also be taking small actions to poke holes in the network, structures, and corruption that are expanding right now.

So much money is being earmarked to put your neighbors into camps, to abuse protesters, to line the pockets of thieves, and worse. Every part of that that gets blocked is a win.

To-do list

All this is not to say about any individual moment, like the boat strikes or the Epstein files, “Here we go. This is definitely gonna be what ends him. Sit back and watch what happens now.”

The point is to keep opening doors to better possibilities. Maybe what you do will be some tiny part of something crucial, or maybe you’ll just provide a distraction while the seed someone else has planted takes root.

There are people who aren’t ready to be brave or take physical risks, but who are ready to do something. And sometimes one thing leads to the next when you least realize it’s going to make a difference.

You can feed people, you can accompany people who have been arrested for doing the things you might be afraid to do. You can support the organizations doing the hardest work, by backstopping their needs for skilled volunteers, for simple administrative tasks, or for money.

What door cracking open today matters most to you? Is it the beating that Democrats gave the Republicans in elections a few weeks ago? Then team up with a great candidate—one you really admire—who’s running in 2026. Or cajole that potential candidate you know would be fantastic to run for office at any level. We are a year out from the election; primaries haven’t even happened yet. There’s no reason to settle for anyone you don’t support right now.

Get involved in the amazing stands around the country against ICE and Border Patrol abuses. Hand out zines informing people of their rights.

Local government and community action are still a place where you can make a huge difference. I was talking to a minister just the other day. While he doesn’t preach party politics from the pulpit, he talked about how he focuses on the biblical aspects of helping neighbors and getting the church as a whole involved in caring in an ongoing way for those outside their immediate community.

Even that simple message, when applied to issues like immigration and homelessness, does good while sparking conversation withing the congregation. If church members find themselves resisting those missions, he told me, he wants to encourage discussions and contemplation about why. He is trying to save souls, literally and metaphorically.

And his mission is to tend to his flock, but most of us have more flexibility. We can go be part of whatever cause most beckons to us in the moment. Do the big things where you feel ready, and if you can’t do those, the small things are important, too. Go right to the edge of what you’re able to do, see what’s possible once you’re there, and keep moving.

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