We are only one week into 2026, and already the execrable nature of 2025 is overflowing into the new year. Adjectives like “horrible” or “gruesome” fail to capture the full texture and energy of what Donald Trump and his MAGA forces are doing to the country’s democracy and to the American people, and yet too many Americans still insist “this is not who we are.”
They are wrong. Decades — and at least 150 years — of historical evidence proves that Trumpism is an American-made phenomenon and not something transplanted from abroad or brought here from another dimension through a crack in the time-space continuum. This is exactly who the nation is. Otherwise, Trump would not have been elected twice by tens of millions of people — many of whom would gladly put him back in office for a third term if given the opportunity.
At its core, the Age of Trump — distilled in the ugliness of the president’s second term in office — is a moral calamity that demands a great reckoning if our democracy is to even survive in 2026 and beyond.
America’s collapse into neofascism is more than a crisis of America’s political and social institutions. At its core, the Age of Trump — distilled in the ugliness of the president’s second term in office — is a moral calamity that demands a great reckoning if our democracy is to even survive in 2026 and beyond. This work begins by making a moral inventory of Trump’s abuses, a list that is long and still growing. It is overwhelming by design.
Among them, the Supreme Court has made Trump a de facto king who functions, with few exceptions, above the law. He has weaponized the Justice Department and other agencies against his critics and political opponents, and he has deployed active-duty members of the military and National Guard as part of a mass deportation campaign in Democratic-led cities. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement are disappearing undocumented residents, as well as American citizens who fit a racial profile of being non-white. The won-in-blood victories of the civil rights movement and long Black Freedom Struggle are being taken away. Health subsidies for the Affordable Care Act have been allowed to expire, causing a spike in premiums and, for many Americans, cutting off access to doctors and medicine.
As we have seen in recent days, Trump’s abuses are not only domestic, they are also international. He is abandoning the people of Ukraine in their freedom struggle against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Now, in a clear violation of international law that constitutes an act of a belligerent nation, he is effectively extorting Venezuela by launching air strikes on multiple targets, taking control of the country’s vast oil reserves and seizing President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, who are set to be put on trial in New York on narco-trafficking charges.
To make matters even worse, new research by the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life shows that the country’s moral challenge is intergenerational; it will not go away even if Trump is no longer president and Democrats somehow find a way to take back Congress and the White House.
Our moral challenge is amplified by how the mainstream news media, Democrats and other centrist voices largely avoid speaking in moral terms about America’s democracy crisis, as well as the deeper systemic failures that helped to birth it. The reason is simple: The language of normal politics, which includes public opinion and polling, horse race coverage of campaigns and elections, personalities, controversies, gossip and “who won the day,” is far more familiar and dramatic — and therefore easier to digest — than moral judgment.
Fortunately, there are secular public voices that are speaking this moral language who should serve as examples for their peers.
In a recent essay, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explained that the second Trump administration has done great damage to America’s “moral purpose” in the world and that “the moral challenge he and his regime pose to the soul of this nation has become clear: the loss of our core ideals, the deterioration of our founding principles, and the abdication of America’s moral authority in the world.”
What could a moral framework for the pro-democracy movement in 2026 potentially begin to look like?
First, pro-democracy Americans must internalize a basic truth: Democracy is not just a noun; it is something we do. When we defend democracy, we are taking moral action.
We must remember: Democracy is a moral contract. Despite historical flaws in practice, it rests on the foundational claim that individuals have the right to choose their government and hold it accountable.
Objective truth and the facts have moral value. Defend them. Authoritarians attack truth, facts and reality itself to undermine justice and human freedom.
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When malign actors use disinformation and misinformation to advance their cause, they are engaging in immoral acts because they are manipulating the public, potentially causing direct harm (such as with science denialism) and delegitimizing democracy.
“No Kings” is both a moral and a political claim that tyranny must be antithetical to American values. In 2026 and beyond, the No Kings protests should locate themselves within a tradition of moral movements, such as the Black Freedom Struggle and civil rights movement.
Mass protests like No Kings are just a beginning. Such marches and other non-violent collective actions will need to be repeated and consistent, and they must demand concrete policy and legal changes.
Ultimately, the United States needs a 21st-century Great Awakening — a massive shift in the country’s moral consciousness — if it is to escape from and then heal the damage caused by the Age of Trump and the country’s democracy crisis and culture of cruelty.
In their recent Bulwark essay “We Need a New Great Awakening,” Minister Paul Brandeis Raushenbush and leading pro-democracy advocate Ian Bassin wrote of the “Great Awakenings” that have resulted when America has faced moral trials in the past — “moments in which we collectively re-find our purpose, conscience and responsibility to one another in response to a feeling of having lost those things.”
The modern equivalent, they wrote, “would compel us to look honestly at what we are doing to immigrants — and why. It would demand laws enforced with humanity and policies shaped by the recognition that every person has inherent worth. It would move us from indifference to accountability, from fear to courage.”
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For decades, and to great effect, the American right-wing and “conservatives” have weaponized — and monopolized — the language of morality. The Christian right has been at the vanguard; White Christians are among Trump and MAGA’s most loyal supporters. The Age of Trump and American neofascism have been greatly empowered by this framing, where Democrats, liberals, progressives and other designated enemies are not just to be disagreed with but are instead deemed to be evil, demonic and the poison in the blood of the nation.
Today’s Democrats and the mainstream liberals and progressives have surrendered the moral language — if not the entire moral front in the larger political battlefield — to the right-wing. To save themselves, as well as America’s multiracial, pluralistic democracy, they must push back hard. Technocratic arguments about public policy will not do this work.
Currently, Democrats and the broader pro-democracy movement lack fluency in moral language; they are mostly babbling. This year and beyond, they need to quickly learn to speak moral language fluently — and with conviction.
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