American political leaders have forgotten how to be gracious to their opponents when people on the other side do something for which they deserve credit. Our antagonisms have become so deep and bitter that we are reluctant to give an inch to our political adversaries.
This is not good for democracy.
What we need is a new ethics of opposition. Its prime directive is simple: fight hard and unrelentingly for democracy and the rule of law. But when, for whatever reason, our opponents achieve something valuable, say so.
It pains us to follow this maxim at a time when so much that we care about is under attack.
Yet now is a good moment to follow it, even though, as Newsweek’s Bobby Ghosh puts it, “It isn't easy to praise someone (President Trump) who habitually, preemptively, and lavishly praises himself.” But there is no denying that the Trump Administration has just achieved a major and important foreign policy objective, a ceasefire in Gaza and the return of twenty hostages who were abducted during the horrors of Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
As Ghosh argues, “(T)he guns in Gaza have quieted. And it isn't because of the nudgings of real estate developers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, the promptings of Qatar and Egypt, the pleadings of Europe, the finger-wagging of human-rights organizations, or the hand-wringing of the United Nations alone.”
“The ceasefire,” he says, “is the gift of Donald Trump.”
Not sure that gift is the right word, for it is something given willingly with no expectation of payment or reward. Is that the right description for a president who is reportedly desperate to win the Nobel Peace Prize? Or for a president who was caught on a hot mic brokering a meeting between his son Erik and the President of Indonesia? Recall that Eric Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., serve as executive vice presidents of the Trump Organization.
Gift or not, Trump got done what the Biden Administration did not accomplish. He induced, threatened, or cajoled the Israeli government to make at least a temporary peace with Hamas.
He did so after wasting a lot of time before drawing a line in the sand for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As Ghosh observes, if the president had not gotten lost in fantasies about “real-estate opportunities in Gaza, thousands of Palestinian lives might have been saved, and more of the Israeli hostages would be in the bosom of their families.”
Better late than never.
President Biden’s former national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, got it right when, on October 12, he said about the ceasefire and hostage deal, “’I give credit to President Trump, I give credit to [Steve] Witkoff and [Jared] Kushner and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio. These are hard jobs. The president of the United States is the hardest job in the world, and these other jobs, including the job I occupied, are tremendously difficult…. And to get to something like today takes a village, and it takes determination and really hard work, and so I, without question, offer credit for that.’”
He was joined in that by Arizona’s Democratic Senator Mark Kelly. “’I think,’” Kelly said, “he should get a lot of credit. I mean, this was his deal. He worked this out.’”
Late-night television host and frequent Trump critic embraced the ethics of opposition, which we are championing, when he said, “What a day for Donald Trump…You know what? He finally did something positive today and I want to give him credit for it … “
Kimmel twisted the knife a bit with a bit of sarcasm about the president, saying, “he’s not the type to take credit for himself,” but quickly added, “the fact is the bombing has stopped, the hostages have been released, and Trump deserves some of the praise for that. So I know it sounds crazy to say, but good work on that one, President Trump.”
To hue to this line, we have to be able to focus on what someone does, no matter how much we dislike the person who does it or other things they do.
This is harder than it should be, not just because of the things the administration is doing at home, but because the leader of the free world never misses an opportunity to kick sand in the eyes of people he considers his enemies.
For example, while basking in the glory of his Middle East accomplishments, Trump told a story about a meeting he had with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi a decade ago and attacked 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee Hilary Clinton while doling so. As the president put it, “We knew each other from the beginning…. I was going to meet him, and then Hillary Clinton was following me…. And he liked me so much he never even got to see Hillary. ... [Sisi] didn’t want to waste a lot of time. He knew what was going to happen.”
Later, he asked El-Sisi if he remembered “crooked Hillary Clinton.”
That followed on the heels of the president’s speech to the Israeli Parliament, when he went out of his way to call former President Joe Biden's administration “the worst in U.S. history,” then said former President Barack Obama was "not far behind."
It doesn’t help that Trump is so eager for credit and so angry and resentful when he doesn’t get the amount of credit he craves. What CNN observed during his first term is even truer today: “The funnel cloud of anger, score-settling, political chaos and divisive rhetoric that swirls around Trump at all times also has the effect of drowning out debate about the nature of his policies and any good press that he does get.”
Trump makes it hard for liberals to adhere to our ethics of opposition because he “makes it impossible, in practice, for liberals to be tolerant (egalitarian), rational, and optimistic about human nature—three things that are essential aspects of liberal ideology and liberal psychology.” AS John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady say, the president “oozes authoritarian ugliness.”
As hard as it is, giving the president credit when he deserves it is not only the right thing to do, it also helps blunt the criticism that those who oppose him on most things are driven by blind hatred or Trump derangement syndrome, a belief that Trump encourages at every turn.
If we are to have any chance of repairing and rebuilding our democracy in a post-Trump world, we need to learn the lesson that all great strategists understand. Giving ground does not mean surrendering.
Doing so at the right time is necessary to make victory possible in the struggle to preserve democracy, even if Trump’s recent success turns out to resemble Ebeneezer Scrooge’s fictitious benevolence on Christmas Day.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.