Glimmers of Hope by Geoff Carter « The Pen in Hand Blog

Attribution: Stiller Beobachter from Ansbach, Germany, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Geoff Carter

“I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”

–Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Admiral Yamamoto said this after the Japanese sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor—the strike he himself had planned. The admiral was well aware of the vast resources of the United States and had hoped to annihilate the U.S. Navy in one fell swoop. When he realized his forces had missed the U.S. aircraft carriers, he knew Japan would be in for it.

Donald Trump’s second administration has more than a passing resemblance to the Pearl Harbor attack. He struck swiftly and without warning when he cranked out over one hundred executive orders and sent megadonor Elon Musk and his DOGE squad to confiscate reams of sensitive information from the Social Security Administration, fired thousands of federal workers without warning—or forethought, and dissolved USAID, the Department of Education, and many other necessary agencies.

The president has slashed funding to the VA, threatened universities, intimidated law firms, harassed the media, and has robbed hundreds of Americans of their Constitutional right to due process. He has broken the law in countless other ways. He is attacking America and trying to destroy our democracy, and—like Yamamoto—he is trying to do it quickly.

And, like Yamamoto, he has awakened a sleeping giant. It turns out American citizens like their democracy. They really like it. They like Social Security and Medicaid. They respect their veterans. They understand the importance of science, research, independent thought, and an independent department of justice. And they’ve gone out on the streets to say so.

Protests have sprung up in the usual places. Demonstrations have amassed huge crowds in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles–and other liberal bastions, but significant protests have also been cropping up in small towns in deep-red states like Montana, Utah, Arkansas, Alabama, and Kentucky. Americans gathered to protest everything from Elon Musk and DOGE’s indiscriminate slashing of government programs to the unfair and illegal deportations of American citizens to Trump’s incredibly inept handling of tariffs and the economy to his cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin to his pardon of over one thousand January 6^th felons to his hamstringing of Social Security. There’s more to get angry about—unbelievably—but the callous way that his administration moved so quickly and ruthlessly caught everyone by surprise.

Congress still seems shell-shocked. The slim Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate have refused to do anything to slow down Trump. They even found a loophole to extend Trump’s declared “economic emergency”, allowing him to raise and lower tariffs at will. They have done nothing to protect the immigrants summarily deported without hearings or trials to a CESCO, a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

The judiciary is stopping Trump at every turn, ruling against his policies in dozens of lawsuits, but it seems only a matter of time before he decides to simply ignore court rulings. He’s already turning his back on the SCOTUS order to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the maximum-security prison in El Salvador to which he had been wrongly sent. Last week, he had Hannah Dugan, a Milwaukee County judge, arrested for allegedly hindering the arrest of an illegal immigrant in her courtroom.

Things may seem dark and bleak, as they did in the days after Pearl Harbor, but we are seeing glimmers of hope. Massive protests are not only continuing, but they are growing. Grassroots organizations like 50501 and Indivisible have been rallying and organizing huge protests. On April 15^th, over five million people across the country joined in to demonstrate against the draconian Trump cuts. Massive boycotts of corporations like Target and Amazon that have knuckled under to Trump’s demands to strip DEI policies are suffering losses from massive boycotts.

Tesla, Elon Musk’s car brand, has suffered a 71% profit loss during the first quarter of this year. At one point, to boost the brand, he and Donald Trump put on a weird sort of Tesla car show on the White House lawn. It didn’t work. Volkswagen just recently passed Tesla as the number one EV in Europe. As a result of this, Musk announced he will be spending less time doing government “work” and more time with Tesla. His other communications company, Skylink, has had international contracts with Canada and a number of South American countries cancelled because of his involvement with the Trump regime.

Harvard University stood up to Trump’s threat to pull its federal funding. They sued him and won. While a number of big law firms took the knee and kissed the ring, others have fought Trump’s efforts to hamstring their business, suing him. They won.

While some members of the media, like ABC, or Bezos’s Washington Post, have succumbed to pressure from Trump, others have refused to remain silent. While there isn’t straigt-line evidence of a cause-effect relationship, Trump’s poll numbers are now in the toilet. According to an April 27^th CNN poll, his approval rating is at 41%, the lowest rating in over seventy years. In a recent NPR poll, his disapproval numbers are even worse when it comes to specific policies about tariffs (58% disapprove), the economy (55% disapprove), immigration (52% disapprove), and foreign policy (53% disapprove). According to a recent ABC Poll, Elon Musk’s approval ratings are so far underwater (57% disapproval), he might have to decompress. A deep dive into the numbers reveals that he is even less popular than Trump on specific issues. Only 6% of those who think federal layoffs have gone too far approve of Musk.

Is any of this starting to rattle President Trump? Maybe. His Easter Sunday Instagram rant seemed more unhinged than usual. He posted another tweet stating that the polls “WERE FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATONS” (Yahoo News). The usual. Worried about cracks in his Republican wall, he has warned senators not to vote for a bill to limit tariffs. Republicans whose seats are up for reelection in 2026 are worried.

Trump’s policies are so unpopular even solid-red districts are either electing Democrats or seeing huge cuts into their majorities. Despite Elon Musk dumping millions of dollars in an effort to elect the Republican-backed candidate to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, liberal justice Susan Crawford won by double digits.

Is Trump starting to slip? Is he losing? Not yet. We cannot begin to think about letting up. We need to get out into the streets and stay out there to protest. We need to hold more town halls with or without our representatives present. We need to back up Bernie Sanders and AOC as they barnstorm the country with their “No Oligarchs” message. We need to heed the warnings of Illinois Governor Pritzker and fight back immediately.

We are not winning. Not yet. But we are not alone. Hopefully, with time, more members of Congress will step up and fight for our Constitution and our country. With people like AOC, Governor Pritzker, Bernie Sanders, and millions of angry Americans on our side, we can win.

Trump has underestimated the American people. He has awakened a sleeping giant and filled us with a terrible resolve. These are not just glimmers of hope. Not anymore.