How Gaza protests helped Trump gain power | Will Bunch Newsletter

It feels like the world is on fire right now. No, that’s not some Donald-Trump-is-back metaphor. I mean it literally. An epic stretch of virtually no rain whatsoever here on the Eastern seaboard is giving us a taste of what it’s like to live in California, including our very own wildfires, and in the darndest places — like Brooklyn or Manhattan. Meanwhile, Trump has named an energy secretary who insists there is no climate crisis, so maybe it is a metaphor after all.

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You could see this one coming.

It seems like about five years ago — in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours — but it was just last April when student protests over Israel’s post-Oct. 7 attacks on Gaza and the deaths of Palestinian civilians roiled dozens of college campuses from coast-to-coast.

The tent encampments and student-led marches, from the Penn campus here in Philly to UCLA some 3,000 miles away, hearkened back to the youth unrest of the 1960s, but things were a little different this time. In an overheated election year, with some leading politicians accusing the protesters of antisemitism, university leaders were quicker to call in the police, who didn’t hesitate to make arrests or use force.

At the time, a few pundits warned that the aggressive police-state tactics felt like a grim foreshadowing of what could await all protesters — not just those in opposition to Israel’s far-right government and its war tactics — if an authoritarian Donald Trump won the November election. One wrote: “By the time a returned-to-the-White-House Trump makes good on his vow to send out troops and tanks to put down any Jan. 20, 2025, inauguration protesters, America might be numb to such images.”

OK, I cheated: That pundit was me. But now that Trump is indeed the president-elect, with a vow of retribution against his political enemies, there’s growing concern that the incoming administration will clamp down hard on the right of dissent that is supposed to be guaranteed in the First Amendment. In a 4 a.m. posting to his Truth Social website, the 45th and soon-to-be 47th POTUS confirmed that he plans to use the U.S. military for his sweeping mass-deportation agenda, which did little to calm fears that troops could also put down protests.

Meanwhile, and even more urgently, a bipartisan bill is racing through the current lame-duck session of Congress that — in an echo of the police-state style crackdown against the Gaza protests, which were often in Democratic-run jurisdictions — could have a much more sweeping impact.

The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act — also known as H.R. 9495 — emerged from the uproar over the Gaza protests to give an administration’s treasury secretary, without further input from Congress, the ability to potentially devastate nonprofit groups by stripping their nonprofit status if they determine the group is “a terrorist supporting organization.” The bill’s bipartisan backers proposed the measure with more radical pro-Palestinian groups in mind, and also tied the bill to an understandably popular second measure that removes the threat of tax penalties for Americans held hostage overseas, including as many as four to seven now in Gaza.

Some 52 Democrats, including the staunchest supporters of Israel’s conduct, joined the GOP House majority last week in an effort to fast-track the bill that needed a two-thirds majority and fell just short. This week, the bill is moving toward final House approval that would only require a simple majority — even as progressive Democrats are increasingly alarmed that the incoming Trump administration will use to measure to punish other left-leaning groups that have nothing to do with Palestine.

“I think in view of Trump’s election, this bill basically authorizes him to impose a death penalty on any nonprofit in America or any civil society group that happens to be on his enemies list and claim that they’re a terrorist,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat, told the Washington Post in voicing the growing liberal alarm over the measure. The congressman said those fears would apply to “a hospital performing an abortion, a community news outlet that he doesn’t think is giving him sufficient attention — or basically anyone, certainly groups that might be trying to assist migrants in this country.”

The measure is also opposed by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the international anti-famine organization Oxfam International, which chillingly compared H.R. 9495 to what it’s confronted around the globe trying to function in authoritarian regimes. “This bill follows the same playbook Oxfam has seen other governments around the world use to crush dissent,” its American CEO said last week in a statement. “Now we are seeing it here at home.”

Mother Jones also notes in a new piece that the anti-Gaza-protest playbook will likely inspire a Trump regime in other ways, including following through on his campaign threats to deport campus protesters. Cornell University grad student Momodou Taal — a protester whose student visa was revoked but has dodged deportation, for now — told the magazine that last spring’s crackdown set an awful precedent, saying: “I think what [President Joe] Biden has allowed for is that the clampdown is made easier for Trump now because the groundwork has already been laid.”

Indeed, Cornell’s moves to suspend Taal and other pro-Palestinian students who disrupted a job fair in September is just one part of a campus crusade against dissent and, arguably, free speech that seems to have succeeded in sharply reducing protests against the killing of civilians in Gaza — or against anything else for that matter.

In the two weeks since Trump’s election to another term, protests have been — with a handful of exceptions involving the socialist far left — a dog that hasn’t barked, in sharp contrast to Trump’s initial victory in 2016. Mostly that’s because many who formed a “Trump Resistance” eight years ago have concluded that mass protest isn’t the most effective tactic, but it’s hard to know much reluctance to take to the streets is also driven by the fresh memories of the riot cops on campus last spring and their aggressive tactics, which led to more than 3,100 arrests.

But this much is clear: If Democrats are serious about serving as the last line of defense against Trump’s most monarchical tendencies, the last thing they should be doing right now should be giving the incoming president a tool to quash protest groups he doesn’t like, using dictatorial fiat. Over the last 14 days, I’ve received a ton of reader emails asking what they can do to make a difference and not surrender to the end of American democracy as we’ve known it. Here’s one simple and easy thing: Call your member of Congress and urge them to oppose an un-American piece of legislation called H.R. 9495.

Question: Will, do you believe the Dem[ocratic] governors are ready and can hold up their states’ rights against this incoming administration? — Crazy Chicken Lady/StompOutHateInMI (@stompouthateinmi.bsky.social) on Bluesky

Answer: Important side note: I tried this week soliciting your questions from my new perch over at Bluesky, and the engagement was positive and fantastic. Now, answering the question: America’s current batch of Democratic governors are a curious mix of lofty ideals, embarrassing elitist flaws, and personal ambition. You can see that in the announcement by Illinois’ billionaire Gov. J.B. Pritzker that he and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis would be leading a new kind of “Trump Resistance.” Yet just a day or so later, Polis went off on his personal X account about how much he loved Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run Health and Human Services, because (yes, it gets worse) they’d worked together on fighting vaccine mandates. Excuse me? That said, the real test will come with state responses to Trump’s looming mass deportation plan, which could involve Trump federalizing state National Guard units. Governors like Pritzker or Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro can capitulate or fight back under the Constitution. Democracy depends on the latter.

I got a lot of great responses about how readers are planning to respond to the second Trump presidency. I wish I could publish them all. It was encouraging to me that the overall tone was one of resistance, not retreat, and that most folks are still mentally sorting out the best ways to do that. “My thoughts contained a few expletives with this basic idea: this is my country also, and I am not going to turn away from it now.” wrote Charles Clauser. “I vowed to challenge a friend or family member if they author or support an inaccurate post in social media or make inaccurate statements in my presence. I vowed to write more letters to the editor. Write more in Substack. Become more active in the Democratic party. And I do plan to cancel Twitter and join Bluesky...” Joe Stepansky said he plans to fire his Trump-voting financial adviser and start going to town board meetings, but also to keep “living life. Be it a cruise or going to New England or whatever. Enjoying my numerous hobbies and my pool table.”

📮 This week’s question: I almost hesitate because of the angry tone around this on social media, but, seriously, what is the future for the Democratic Party? Is it really too “woke,” or not progressive enough, or something else? Please email me your answer and put “Democratic future” in the subject line.

The phrase, “Do not obey in advance,” which is the first fighting-fascism rule from Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s best-selling On Tyranny, is already becoming a cliché in these first days of the Donald Trump transition. But two unlikely imperial supplicants were the MSNBC Morning Joe hosts, the married couple of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. True, the couple had once been friends back around 2015 with the then-candidate, and used to take his phone calls on the air. But their relationship became so acrimonious that Trump publicly spread an infamous conspiracy theory about Scarborough and made a snide remark about Brzezinski visiting Mar-a-Lago bleeding from plastic surgery, as the MSNBC hosts used the F-word — “fascism” — to describe Trump’s 2024 campaign.

That’s why it was more than a little shocking Monday morning when Scarborough and Brzezinski revealed their unorthodox way of dealing with a “fascist” president — that they’d gone to Mar-a-Lago Friday to meet with the president-elect, presumably on bended knee. It certainly can’t be called an act of journalism, because there were no cameras present. “Don’t be mistaken: We are not here to defend or normalize Donald Trump,” Scarborough — a firebrand conservative GOP congressman in the 1990s who now is an independent — told his presumably shocked viewers. “We are here to report on him and to hopefully provide you insights that are going to better equip all of us in understanding these deeply unsettling times.” But the MSNBC star also claimed that an “upbeat” Trump “seemed interested in finding common ground with Democrats on some of the most divisive issues.”

Brzezinski, for her part, answered her own question of how could they meet with Trump by asking, “How could we not?” A better question and answer would have been the one way the MSNBC stars could have gone to Mar-a-Lago while retaining their integrity, and even performing a public service: by demanding that Trump only agree to speak to them on camera, unedited, with no subject restrictions, and to ask some of the tough questions that the president has avoided, like his wackadoodle cabinet picks or his plans to use the military for mass deportations.

Instead, Scarborough and Brzezinski put the exclamation point on the trend that began before the election when the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times both spiked their editorial boards’ already written endorsements of Kamala Harris, presumably not to offend the candidate on his road back to the White House. Not only was this not an act of journalism, but it was the worst form of ritual humiliation, meant to show Trump’s strongman dominance over a pliant news media — another watchdog institution meant to cower before the new regime. The worst part is that this show of submission just days after Trump’s victory makes life harder for those journalists left who do plan, in a moment of increased risk, to keep asking the tough questions in this muddled new era.

I have some searing advice for the deeply troubled Democratic Party. I wrote that among the factors in its recent election defeat, “the greatest was the Democratic Party itself, and the whimpering cowardice of the people it foolishly ran for office in most places. Disconnected from the day-to-day concerns of the working people they purport to represent, not even brave enough to support programs that are actually working (let alone, heaven forbid, their president), the only surprise on Election Day was how close a few of the Democrats’ inevitable defeats ended up. I noted the party wouldn’t bounce back overnight, and that any comeback would require a great deal of soul searching.” I wrote this 10 YEARS AGO TODAY, on Nov. 19, 2014. Do some things never change?! Check it out: “The Democratic Party files for moral bankruptcy.”

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