No “red wave.” Relatively smooth elections. Unexpectedly high Gen Z voter turnout. With a divided Congress coming, what can we expect for state and congressional action for the next 2 years?
Watch for an in-depth diagnosis of the surprising 2022 midterm election results and what the business community can expect for the health of our democracy.
Research shows that emotional, cognitive, and social mechanisms drive both direct and indirect contact, offering scalable ways to reduce political polarization.
In a previous article, we argued that efforts to improve the political environment should reach Americans as media consumers, in addition to seeking public participation. Reaching Americans as media consumers uses media like film, TV, and social media to change what Americans see and hear about fellow Americans across the political spectrum. Participant-based efforts include dialogues and community-based activities that require active involvement.
In this article, we show that the mechanisms underlying each type of approach are quite similar. The categories of mechanisms we cover are emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive. We use the terms from the academic literature, “direct” and “indirect” contact, which are fairly similar to participant and media consumer approaches, respectively.
Thus, there is no deep reason that one should be preferred more than another in terms of quality. This said, there are differences in terms of ability to scale (benefitting media consumer / indirect contact approaches) and “stickiness” of a given event (benefitting participation / direct contact approaches, though media repetition can outweigh this issue in many cases). Additionally, these categories should be thought of as part of a continuum, including options that fall in between these poles like attending an event and listening to speakers with somewhat different political beliefs.
In the academic literature, participant and media consumer approaches generally align with “direct” and “indirect” contact, respectively.
If you have been in spaces to improve the political environment by changing how Americans think and feel about each other, you have likely heard the terms “contact theory” or the “contact hypothesis.” The takeaway from these is relatively straightforward: interpersonal interactions across a divide, especially under certain conditions, tend to reduce prejudice and lead to benefits like warmer feelings between the groups. In the literature, these are often called “direct” contact approaches.
This is fairly similar to our framing of “participant” approaches. However, a default understanding of direct contact, the term we will use going forward, is mostly about dialogue and interpersonal interaction, without necessarily trying to achieve some tangible outcome together (e.g., cleaning up a park in a neighborhood). Our definition of participant approaches includes both more dialogue-oriented and action-oriented activities.
A variant of contact theory involves work on “indirect contact,” which we also previously wrote about in The Fulcrum. Indirect contact involves seeing others in a better light and in relationship with each other. It includes parasocial contact (positive one-sided relationships with a character) and vicarious contact (seeing people across some divide, acting in constructive ways with each other).
Much like the relationship between direct contact and participant approaches, indirect contact is similar to—but not exactly the same—as our definition of efforts to target Americans as media consumers. Our definition of media consumer approaches includes all indirect contact efforts, but it also includes approaches that have an impact without any form of “contact” with another person (e.g., sharing data that can help correct misperceptions of each other).
Since the academic literature has mostly discussed direct contact and indirect contact, this article will generally stick with these terms, recognizing their general—but not perfect—alignment with our preferred terms of participant and media consumer approaches.
The literature has explored why direct contact works, and we will try to extend this to indirect contact approaches.
Substantial academic work has gone into understanding why direct contact works. This academic research shows a variety of emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive reasons for effectiveness. In this article, we will highlight these findings, starting with definitions for improvements for each.
These categories go beyond shorthand answers for why contact theory works, such as one “sees the common humanity” of the other side. While there is some truth to a statement like that, researchers have gone much deeper.
Since there has been less academic research on indirect contact overall, there has also been less research on its mechanisms. We will argue that the mechanisms for indirect contact seem quite similar, at least from a theoretical basis.
Therefore, at least in terms of underlying mechanisms, we do not believe there should be a major reason to choose one approach over another. Likely, they both should be used, and other factors (e.g., scale, funding, exact target audience) should help choose how much to focus on each.
How direct contact improves emotions toward other groups, and how indirect contact should be similar
Early theories—and perhaps common intuition—suggest that improving views of one another is primarily a matter of knowledge correction. The assumption is that if people simply learn accurate information about the other group, their attitudes will shift. However, contemporary research shows that while knowledge plays a role, it is most effective in tandem with more emotional mechanisms. At least two key mechanisms are anxiety reduction and empathy building.
Indirect contact should also help to reduce anxiety and build empathy.
When people are portrayed via indirect contact in a better light, anxiety about interacting with them should tend to decline. One way to think of this involves using More Like US’s CAST (Complex, Admire, Similar, Together) framework for those in the arts for how to better portray those across the political spectrum. The connection with anxiety is quite easily seen when imagining interacting with a person mostly aligning with CAST, and also how anxiety-inducing it is to interact with those seen in a light opposite to CAST (stereotypical, inferior, totally different, and worthy of avoidance).
To unpack this point using CAST, it should be a relatively low-anxiety situation to interact with someone, seen as fully human with a lot of complexity, capable of actions worthy of respect or even Admiration, who shares some similarities, and has some track record of successful cross-ideological togetherness (e.g., friendship, collaboration). On the other hand, it seems likely to cause a great deal of anxiety to imagine interacting with someone seen as stereotypically and completely different and cognitively and/or morally inferior, without any track record of successful cross-ideological interaction.
And regarding indirect contact’s ability to build empathy, parasocial relationships—one-sided connections formed with media figures—can allow individuals to feel as if they “know” someone from the outgroup, thereby increasing emotional investment in their well-being and perspective.
Direct contact also works via cognitive mechanisms, as do some indirect misperception corrections.
Another crucial mechanism for correcting misperceptions about outgroups is the enhancement of knowledge about that group. Without increased knowledge, individuals rely on preconceptions that can be “false, stereotypic, or logically flawed.”
When individuals engage in direct intergroup contact, they often gain insights into the complexities and diversities of the outgroup, challenging oversimplified stereotypes. Such stereotypes can involve factual errors of those in the other group.
Similarly, indirect contact often relies—at least in part—on correcting these factual errors. For instance, some of the top-performing interventions in the Strengthening Democracy Challenge involved using survey data to correct overly negative misperceptions of members of the other party, including their surprisingly low willingness to break democratic norms or infrequent extreme positions on immigration and dehumanization of those in the other party. These interventions are indirect by definition since they were accessed via a computer without any interaction with another person. These misperceptions are sometimes called “perception gaps,” and More Like US focuses strongly on correcting them throughout our resources.
Direct contact importantly develops relationships, and indirect contact can facilitate relationships and social norms.
Ideally, direct contact across the political spectrum will blossom into a relational component, building some friendships or collaboration. Friendships appear to have emotional, attitudinal, and policy implications.
A 2016 Pew Research Center study found that “having friendships that cross party lines is associated with feelings about the opposing party, especially among Republicans.” Additionally, in the original More in Common Perception Gap study, Democrats with more formal education were more likely to say that “almost all” of their friends had the same political views, and the researchers provided this as an explanation for the finding that perception gaps among Democrats increased with additional formal education. Finally, in the early 2000s, around the time when Massachusetts became the first state to allow same-sex marriage, Pew Research also found that having a gay friend, colleague, or family member almost doubled the likelihood of supporting same-sex marriage.
Indirect contact, particularly the variant of vicarious contact, normalizes relationships across divides. When people see a successful relationship, it becomes easier to imagine it in one’s own life. Some classic examples of this include the TV show Will and Grace, which helped normalize friendships between straight and gay Americans, and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, which at least helped reduce taboos surrounding white and Black romantic relationships.
Indirect contact can also more easily change social norms at scale, a position we argued in a previous article in The Fulcrum. These social norms can encourage interaction. As More in Common found in its recent report from March, The Connection Opportunity, community norms were the strongest predictors of interest in connecting, across all differences studied.
Finally, direct contact—especially via relationships—allows for the benefit of repetition, and indirect contact is designed for repetition.
The last factor is something of a quirk of human psychology—the mere exposure effect, which finds that the more people are exposed to at least a neutral stimulus, the more they tend to like it. This was mentioned as a possible mechanism for the impact of contact theory / hypothesis in one of the most well-cited reviews.
Direct contact can harness the benefits of the mere exposure effect if it leads to some kind of friendship or collaboration. These involve repeated interactions, which are central to any successful relationship.
People have opportunities to be exposed to indirect contact repeatedly. It can be packaged in many forms (e.g., TV, film, song, social media), and a given type of content can be repeated many times (e.g., across numerous episodes of a show, in many different social media posts). These all provide opportunities to lead to the benefits of the mere exposure effect.
Repetition also helps to address one of the most common criticisms of indirect contact approaches: that the effect of a given intervention can decay relatively quickly. As anyone who works with messaging knows, repetition is key; whether or not it is precisely accurate, the “rule of seven” in concept in marketing is that “a potential customer should encounter a brand’s marketing messages at least seven times before making a purchase decision.” Somewhat similarly, how people think about those in another group is unlikely to change for good after a single message, and change will nearly always require repeated messages in various forms. Part of the power of repeated messaging comes from the mere exposure effect.
Since direct and indirect contact means both can use emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive mechanisms, the choice to use each comes from other factors.
This article argues that the underlying mechanisms driving benefits from direct and indirect contact are similar, so one type is not obviously better than the other in terms of effectiveness.
Therefore, the choice to use direct vs. indirect means should often come from other factors. Direct contact allows for personal practice that can build confidence for future interactions. A single direct contact event may be more emotionally impactful (not to mention simply longer in duration), so it is likely “stickier” in terms of the longevity of its impact. Meanwhile, indirect contact generally allows for greater scale, often at a lower cost per person impacted.
Because we at More Like US focus on scale in a country of >340 million people, we tend to emphasize indirect contact—and more broadly, efforts to impact Americans as media consumers. This is entirely about the desire for scale, not because More Like US sees direct contact as ineffective. Additionally, More Like US offers simple, repeatable messaging guidance about how to have more successful conversations across the political spectrum, using the framing of being SVL (pronounced like “civil,” and referring to sharing Stories, relating to their Values, and Listening during political conversations). Thus, an indirect means of conveying a message can hopefully lead to more successful direct conversations.
Conclusion: Let’s use both direct and indirect contact methods, which both activate similar mechanisms
Given the strong theoretical and empirical foundations outlined above, there is ample reason to pursue both direct and indirect contact methods. Both approaches activate similar underlying mechanisms—emotional, cognitive, relational, and repetitive—making them comparably effective. These shared mechanisms underscore the complementary value of each method.
The emotional power and "stickiness" of direct, participant-based interactions create deep, lasting impacts through firsthand experiences. Meanwhile, indirect, media-driven contact methods enable far-reaching scale, repeatedly exposing large audiences to positive, nuanced portrayals of others across political divides.
This complementary relationship suggests a strategic balance rather than a stark choice between methods. Direct approaches foster personal confidence and emotional connection, addressing potential suspicion or reluctance toward mediated messages. Indirect approaches efficiently address widespread misconceptions and normalize constructive interactions, providing the necessary repetition for sustained attitude change.
Ultimately, leveraging both direct and indirect contact strategies will provide the most robust solution to improving political relationships in America. A combined approach, grounded in shared psychological processes, offers the flexibility, depth, and scale required to meaningfully shift attitudes, build empathy, and strengthen social bonds across divides. By embracing both pathways, we can better foster a healthier, more connected society.
James Coan is the co-founder and executive director of More Like US. Coan can be contacted at James@morelikeus.org
Imre Huss is a current intern at More Like US.
Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Chicago History Museum and eobrazy
Some 4 million people could lose federal housing assistance under new plans from the Trump administration, according to experts who reviewed drafts of two unpublished rules obtained by ProPublica. The rules would pave the way for a host of restrictions long sought by conservatives, including time limits on living in public housing, work requirements for many people receiving federal housing assistance and the stripping of aid from entire families if one member of the household is in the country illegally.
The first Trump administration tried and failed to implement similar policies, and renewed efforts have been in the works since early in the president’s second term. Now, the documents obtained by ProPublica lay out how the administration intends to overhaul major housing programs that serve some of the nation’s poorest residents, with sweeping reforms that experts and advocates warn will weaken the social safety net amid historically high rents, home prices and homelessness.
“These are rules that are going to cause an enormous amount of hardship for millions of people in communities across the country,” said Will Fischer, director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. “It’s going to cause people to become homeless, kids to be pulled out of their schools, people to lose their jobs.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which drafted the rules, declined to comment.
The two rules obtained by ProPublica are labeled as drafts and could change before they are officially proposed. At a meeting at HUD headquarters this month, Ben Hobbs, who heads the agency’s public housing office, said the rules were under review at the Office of Management and Budget, according to a HUD official in attendance. (OMB typically reviews proposed rules for compliance with federal standards and consistency with the president’s policies.)
The push to adopt the rules is part of a broad effort to roll back federal housing programs under the current administration. Trump’s budget proposal called for cutting funding for public housing, housing vouchers and other rental assistance by 43%. In March, HUD and the Department of Homeland Security announced a data-sharing agreement targeting so-called mixed-status families, in which some family members are eligible for housing assistance and others are not because they are in the country illegally or have another immigration status that makes them ineligible. More recently, HUD reportedly planned to require all local public housing authorities to identify such families to the federal agency.
Work requirements impart a “renewed sense of purpose for millions of Americans,” in the view of HUD Secretary Scott Turner. Calling welfare a “lifelong trap of dependency” for many, Turner and other senior Trump officials wrote in a joint op-ed, “for able-bodied adults, welfare should be a short-term hand-up, not a lifetime handout.”
Federal housing assistance programs support more than 8 million people by providing units in public housing or subsidies that help cover the cost of rentals on the private market. Under these programs, participants pay a percentage of the rent — generally 30% of their adjusted income — and the government covers the rest. Most of those assisted are elderly, disabled or children. The average family that lives in public housing or receives housing vouchers makes less than $20,000 annually and receives benefits for 10 to 12 years, although non-elderly, non-disabled families typically stay far shorter, according to HUD data.
The first rule would not mandate work requirements and time limits; instead, it permits local housing authorities and landlords to implement them. Hobbs originally wanted the rule to require those policies, but career staffers at HUD persuaded him to make them voluntary, according to a HUD official familiar with the matter. The rule would allow local housing authorities and private landlords to impose work requirements and time limits in four major federal housing programs: public housing, Housing Choice Vouchers, Project-Based Vouchers and Project-Based Rental Assistance (the latter three are part of what is commonly called Section 8). Residents, including both parents in two-parent households, could be required to work up to 40 hours a week. The time limits could be as short as two years, after which residents would lose assistance.
The time limits would apply to any family in which the household heads are not elderly or disabled, with few exceptions. Similarly, the work requirements would apply to residents ages 18 to 61 who are not disabled, pregnant, primary caretakers of young children, college students or in other exempted categories. Housing providers may allow them to perform job training or community service instead of traditional work. Housing providers implementing work requirements would have to offer support services to residents, but what those services are would be up to the providers. HUD expects 750 public housing authorities and 3,500 landlords to implement work requirements or term limits in response to the new rule. Such provisions will likely be adopted first in more conservative parts of the country, Fischer said.
The new regulation asserts that it will promote economic self-sufficiency and free up subsidized housing for millions of people who qualify for assistance but cannot receive it because of the limited amount of housing aid that the government provides.
Housing advocates and researchers expressed a different view. “It’s disguised as work requirements and term limits, but in reality it’s a way to strip families of their benefits,” said Deborah Thrope, deputy director of the National Housing Law Project, an advocacy group. “This is a huge departure from how the HUD programs have been run since their inception.”
Some 4 million people could lose housing assistance, estimated Fischer, Thrope and Katherine O’Regan, a former HUD official and now a professor at New York University. Many of those people could become homeless as a result.
Fischer noted that most non-elderly, non-disabled households receiving assistance already include one or more people who work. But their jobs often come with limited hours and pay, so even working families could lose their assistance as a result of the rule.
There is little evidence that work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency among recipients of housing assistance, according to researchers at NYU. Studies of other welfare policies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have largely found that work requirements do not notably increase employment but do cause people to lose assistance.
The second proposed rule targets mixed-status households. Under long-standing HUD regulations, such families are permitted to live in public housing or receive vouchers, but their benefits are prorated so that the ineligible members receive no assistance and the family pays a greater share of the rent. The proposed rule would change that by making mixed-status families ineligible for assistance, with few exceptions. It would also require U.S. citizens applying for or currently receiving housing assistance to provide documents proving their citizenship, such as birth or naturalization certificates. The authors of the rule argue that it would bring HUD regulations into “greater alignment” with federal law.
The rule could affect 20,000 mixed-status families that receive housing assistance, according to a HUD analysis of the rule obtained by ProPublica; 16,000 of those families include children. They live mainly in California, Texas and New York; the average income of a mixed family of four is below the federal poverty line of $32,000.
The rule would allow the families to keep their assistance if the ineligible member moves out. But, as most of them are families with children, HUD expects virtually all of them to give up assistance out of “fear of the family being separated,” the analysis reads.
HUD’s analysis anticipates that public housing units may initially be left vacant as a result of the proposed rule. Because the regulations would kick out households receiving prorated assistance and replace them with fully eligible households, it will increase the government’s rental assistance costs by up to $370 million each year, according to the analysis. But HUD will not initially increase funding to the local public housing authorities that distribute assistance, so those authorities may have to offer fewer vouchers or leave units unoccupied, HUD expects.
The requirement that residents and applicants prove their citizenship — and that housing providers verify it — could create $100 million in new costs, HUD expects. This new obligation will be especially difficult for homeless and low-income people to fulfill even if they are eligible for assistance, said Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It is very likely that people who need assistance the most are not going to be able to receive it because of these additional documentation barriers,” she said.
The first Trump administration proposed a similar rule in 2019 but then received more than 30,000 comments in response, the vast majority in opposition. HUD ultimately did not complete the adoption process before Trump left office. The administration of President Joe Biden withdrew that rule proposal in 2021.
When, or if, HUD publishes the proposed rules, they would then be subject to public comments, which the agency must consider before adopting them — a process that can take months or years. The HUD spokesperson did not respond to questions about when the agency expects to publish and adopt the rules.
Millions Could Lose Housing Aid Under Trump Plan was first published on ProPublica and was re-published with permission.
Jesse Coburn covers housing and transportation, including the companies working in those fields and the regulators overseeing them.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
— First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
“When the people stand together, even the most ruthless ruler cannot hold them down.”
— Václav Havel
In the days after the Charlie Kirk assassination, the loudest voices came, predictably, from the extremes: retribution on the far right, cheers on the far left. What caught my attention, though, was a quieter response: friends, acquaintances, and voices on social media who weren’t celebrating but spoke with a kind of resigned acceptance. This is what happens when you push people too far, they said—violence becomes the only option. And these weren’t just “liberals.” They came from across the spectrum, including centrists and anti-Trump Republicans, all convinced that peaceful protest had already been tried and failed.
I agree with them that we have to resist. Where we differ is on how. Political violence will only escalate and invite retaliation, pushing us closer to collapse. What we need is disciplined, sustained nonviolent resistance. But every time I make that case, I hear the same refrain: peaceful protest has been tried, it didn’t work, and when a government tramples the Constitution and attacks courts, the press, and the rule of law, violence becomes inevitable.
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that logic holds up. Not morally, not strategically, and not historically. This claim that we’ve truly tested the power of nonviolent resistance in this country and found it wanting is false. We haven’t tested it. Not really. Not yet.
History shows that nonviolent protest can work. Gandhi’s movement helped dismantle British colonial rule in India. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement tore down segregation and expanded democracy in America. Thích Nhất Hạnh and the monks and laypeople he worked with organized what he called “engaged Buddhism” in the middle of a brutal war—feeding refugees, marching, writing, speaking, demanding peace in the face of overwhelming violence, even if it couldn’t end the war itself. None of those campaigns were easy, clean, or bloodless. But each showed how disciplined nonviolence can shift history.
The data tells the same story. Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied hundreds of resistance movements across the twentieth century. They found that nonviolent campaigns were about twice as likely to succeed as violent ones. And Chenoweth’s most famous finding—the so-called “3.5 percent rule”—is even more striking: in the historical record, every nonviolent movement that managed to mobilize at least 3.5 percent of the population at its peak ultimately achieved its goals. Not eventually, not just in theory, but every single time in the dataset.
That doesn’t mean millions of people would have to pour into the streets all at once or march every single day. What it means is that if roughly that share of the population becomes consistently engaged—turning out in repeated protests, boycotts, strikes, and other collective actions—the movement becomes impossible to ignore, and history suggests it almost always succeeds. In other words, peak mobilization doesn’t mean a single giant march; it means sustained visibility and commitment across a movement until pressure becomes undeniable. Three and a half percent is smaller than it sounds. In the United States today it’s around eleven or twelve million people. That’s the bar. That’s what critical mass looks like.
And if you look at the 2024 election results, it’s clear there are more than enough people to get there. Trump won about 77 million votes—roughly 33% of eligible Americans. Another 32% voted for Harris, 1% for third parties, and about a third didn’t vote at all. However you slice it, that’s a plurality, not a mandate. And a solid majority of Americans either actively opposed him or didn’t support him strongly enough to turn out, which means there are more than enough people, in theory, to reach that threshold.
Other movements have shown it’s possible. In 1986, millions of Filipinos filled Manila’s streets for four days until Marcos fled the country. The long-term story of Philippine democracy has been complicated, but in that moment nonviolent resistance accomplished what seemed impossible. In 1989, East Germans packed Leipzig and Berlin until the wall crumbled. That same year, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia forced the end of communist rule. Each case is different, but the pattern is clear: when enough people show up peacefully, regimes lose their grip.
We haven’t filled the streets in numbers so overwhelming they can’t be ignored or suppressed. King once said a riot is the voice of the unheard, and maybe that’s true, but we can’t claim to be unheard when we haven’t even turned up the volume. Before people try to justify throwing bricks and burning buildings, we need to raise our voices until they can’t be silenced.
Reaching that number won’t be easy. Even if eleven or twelve million Americans filled the streets peacefully, the government would almost certainly respond with force. That’s what regimes tend to do when they feel threatened. Protesters have been beaten, gassed, and shot in every successful campaign in Chenoweth’s research. That’s where discipline matters. Because if the movement answers violence with violence, the moral high ground collapses, coalitions fracture, and the whole thing descends into tit-for-tat escalation that edges closer to civil war. And despite the keyboard-warrior bravado calling for that to happen, we don’t actually want it.
I’m not pretending I’ve seen the worst war has to offer—that I stormed the beaches of Normandy or charged up the sands of Iwo Jima into machine-gun fire or watched Dresden burn to the ground. But I did spend fourteen months as an infantryman in Iraq, right after the invasion, as sectarian violence spiraled out of control. I have a pretty good idea of what it looks like when politics turns into bloodshed, and it doesn’t resemble the heroic fantasies people post online. It looks more like a society eating itself alive. Everyone loses.
And just to be clear, this essay isn’t some overwrought, performative rallying cry for “revolution” or the overthrow of our government. What I’m saying is that if we’re unhappy with the direction of the country—dissatisfied with the leadership—we already have the constitutional right to take to the streets, to assemble, to demand redress of grievances. The challenge is building that movement to a size that can actually drive change, while keeping it disciplined and nonviolent. Because once you give up the moral high ground, you lose the only real advantage you have.
So no, we haven’t tried peaceful protest and found it doesn’t work. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what it would take to mount a serious, sustained, disciplined nonviolent campaign against authoritarianism in America. I’m not a pacifist—but I am convinced that escalation is a losing strategy. Until we’ve raised our voices in numbers too large to be ignored, we don’t get to write off nonviolence as a failure. Because once the door to widespread violence swings open, it’s almost impossible to shut. The question isn’t if a nonviolent protest movement can work. The question is when we’ll step up, collectively, and prove that it can.
Nick Allison is a college dropout, combat veteran, and writer based in Austin, Texas. He’s not a journalist or a pundit—just a political independent, unaffiliated with any party, who still believes the Constitution is worth defending. Nick’s essays and poems have appeared in HuffPost, CounterPunch, The Chaos Section, The Shore, Eunoia Review, New Verse News, and elsewhere.
Donald Trump
On Friday, October 3rd, President Donald Trump issued a dramatic ultimatum on Truth Social, stating this is the “LAST CHANCE” for Hamas to accept a 20-point peace proposal backed by Israel and several Arab nations. The deadline, set for Sunday at 6:00 p.m. EDT, was framed as a final opportunity to avoid catastrophic consequences. Trump warned that if Hamas rejected the deal, “all HELL, like no one has ever seen before, will break out against Hamas,” and that its fighters would be “hunted down and killed.”
Ordinarily, when a president sets a deadline, the world takes him seriously. In history, Presidential deadlines signal resolve, seriousness, and the weight of executive authority. But with Trump, the pattern is different. His history of issuing ultimatums and then quietly backing off has dulled the edge of his threats and raised questions about their strategic value.
Is this calculated brinkmanship, or improvisation masquerading as policy? No one can say for sure.
Deadlines can be powerful tools in negotiation—but only if they’re enforced. When they’re repeatedly ignored or abandoned, they lose their potency. And when the person issuing them is known for moving goalposts, the credibility of the office begins to erode.
Trump has a history of missing deadlines and issuing empty ultimatums. Here are just a few:
Members of Congress have responded with varying degrees of concern and contempt. Senator Susan Collins warned: “Deadlines are useful only if they’re backed by real policy. Otherwise, they’re just noise.”
Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a member of the January 6th Committee, was more direct:
“Trump’s latest threat is nothing more than the desperate howl of a man who knows history will regard him with shame." I’m not intimidated by a man whose actions on January 6th showed a cowardly disregard for democracy and the rule of law.”
Yet among Trump’s MAGA base, missed deadlines rarely matter. His supporters see him not as a policy technician but as a symbolic warrior—someone who speaks their grievances aloud, even if he doesn’t always act on them. When deadlines pass without consequence, they blame the institutions he’s vowed to disrupt, not the man himself.
This dynamic reveals something more profound: a shift from accountability to performance, from governance to spectacle. In a healthy democracy, deadlines are not just rhetorical devices—they are commitments.
When they become theater, the cost is not just political. It calls into question Presidential leadership
If presidential ultimatums are to mean anything, they must be grounded in real intent, real consequences,
and real follow-through. Otherwise, we risk normalizing a politics of bluff—where power is measured not by what leaders do, but by how loudly they threaten to do it.
And in that vacuum, the very idea of presidential seriousness begins to fade. Not with a bang. But with a shrug.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
