The Difference Between Reaction and Memory
Why today’s outrage may become tomorrow’s justification.
At this moment, the Trump administration is unpopular. We are currently in a war with Iran that is spreading catastrophe like a contagion across the global economy and diplomatic order. The ICE raids and the presence of masked officers have not gone over well for the segment of the American people that participates in polls. These are shock-and-awe policy changes and current events that elicit an immediate negative reaction from people whose sensibilities still point toward an understanding of America as a flawed, but ultimately good-natured nation.
However, a more important question to ask ourselves at this moment is not how people feel now, but what the lasting impact of Trumpism and Donald Trump will be in the larger historical record. As much as commentators like Sarah Longwell and Jonathan V. Last may point to polling to suggest weakness, polling captures reaction and not absorption. It tells us how people experience the shock, not how they will remember it.
And memory, in American politics, has a way of bending toward justification.
In many ways, the current analysis rests on a quiet assumption that often goes unstated but shapes their entire conversation: Trump is overreaching, the public sees it, and that overreach will ultimately undo him. This idea that the system will correct itself because the excess is too visible, too unpopular.
But that assumption mistakes reaction for rejection.
The East Wing has been altered. The Department of Homeland Security has crossed yet another Rubicon on civil liberties. And the idea that Trump is aggressively taking on seemingly intractable (but long-desired) issues for conservatives, like rolling back civil rights or escalating conflict abroad, gives Trump and Trumpism the allure of “getting things done.” In an age of cynicism and TikTok optics, that perception of action even if it requires cracking a few eggs, signals strength. Not just to his devoted followers, but to those on the outer edges who would not cheer, but would grudgingly agree. And there are more of them than the anti-Trump media circuit would like to admit.
This is where the current analysis often falls short. The assumption is that unpopularity in the present signals weakness in the future. But as the Boston Review argues, we are no longer in a political environment where careful positioning or ideological moderation determines outcomes. Ee are in one where politics is about “mobilization, not positioning” and where the old rules have collapsed.
In that kind of environment, the question is not whether something polls well in the moment, but whether it imprints.
I find myself sitting, waiting, and wishing (like the popular Jack Johnson song). Thus, repeating the Black experience of loving a country that doesn’t love me back. But to love something is to be willing to criticize it, and to accept that its darker pathways may ultimately overshadow the few areas lit by streetlights that struggled to be erected by our ancestors.
Living in the now means reading people’s reactions to Trump as they process the shock of the breaking news chyron. But historical thinking requires something different. It asks us to look at what people are saying now and imagine what they will say later and how they will narrate this presidency once the immediacy fades.
And that is where the danger lies.
Because this presidency will have elicited enough emotion like love, hate, fear, and admiration, to change the country regardless of its approval ratings. It will have reshaped institutions, redefined executive power, and created a political aesthetic that is not polished or hidden, but openly combative and divisive. And over time, that very bluntness may be reframed as authenticity, even strength.
That is how shock becomes story.
And how story becomes memory.
And memory, in America, has a habit of sanding down the edges of injustice and forgetting marginalized groups in order to create a band-aid over a wound that continues to deepen beneath the surface.
That is why I do not see this as a moment of weakness. Because the authoritarian executive is no longer theoretical or disguised. It has now been imprinted onto the American political imagination in a form that is visible, confrontational, and, for some, undeniably effective.
Not polished and not subtle.
But real enough to last.
This is a real danger. It is one that we must not repeat.