Happy New Year All! In 2025 Let's Take And Celebrate The Wins When They Come

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Good morning everyone. Happy New Year. Will it be? I think we’ve gotten a taste of what is to come in recent days - Trump weak, reckless, impulsive, and comfortable in chaos, inconsistency, idiocy and hypocrisy.

One of my big takeaways from 2024 is how important it is to Trump that he be seen as “winning.” He often began his interviews last year by claiming he was ahead in the polls and winning even when he wasn’t. As I wrote here throughout the general election, the foundation of Trump’s “brand architecture” was that he was winning in the polls and a winner, and Biden then Harris was losing and thus a loser. “Winning” is what makes him a strong man (or strongman). The right dropped over 100 polls in the last few weeks to push the polling averages and forecasters to make it look like he was winning in public polling (which as we documented here he wasn’t) to give him a narrative to bring to late deciding and low information voters that he was winning and a winner. Winning is so important to Trump that he is still arguing that he won the 2020 election.

So, in our own work we need to come to understand how important these concepts of winning and losing are to what is about to happen. In opposition, we need to take, celebrate and build on the “wins” when they come. We cannot be perpetually disappointed, somehow turn our wins into losses or dwell on the “weakness” of our side. We are going to lose more than we will win next year, and we have to become psychologically and emotionally prepared for this. The best way to do so, in my mind, is to take and celebrate the wins when they come for when we win in Trump 2.0 we are strong and he is weak. And weakness is the kryptonite of all strongmen.

We’ve had early, important wins these last few weeks and he has a series of repeated, almost shocking losses - the Gaetz withdrawal, Trump getting rolled by his own party on the debt ceiling, his further destabilizing of an already unstable Republican House leadership, the fall of Assad and the dramatic weakening of the Russia-Iran alliance, the Fed and the markets raising the alarm about his inflationary economic agenda, his craven capitulation to Musk on H1-B visas and the internal strife it has caused, the embarrassing release of the lurid Gaetz report, and two very important losses in his ongoing trials for sexual assault, defamation and fraud.

As I wrote to you yesterday this has been a remarkably bad run for Trump, and it is important we understand this and say so. He is losing, stumbling, f-cking up even before he gets into the White House. He is showing weakness, repeated weakness, and while the public may not see it yet official Washington and his Congressional allies have seen it. He is entering the New Year in a far more wobbly state that we ever could have imagined, and we need to learn how to see and accept him as weak and not allow his own strongman protection of himself become our own. So yes, part of our job in the coming months is to keep pulling back the curtain on the orange Wizard every day, and keep chipping away at his desperate attempt to make the ugliest political thing we’ve even seen look strong and successful.

In 2025 we need to take, celebrate and build on the wins when they come, and my friends, the last few weeks we’ve had far more wins than we ever could have expected at this point. It bodes well for next year, and perhaps it will be a happier year than we had any right to believe a few weeks ago. But as I like to say, we will only keep winning if we stay engaged, and keep doing the work.

Remember - Trump is not a strong man, he is a weak man. He remains a serial assaulter of women, fraudster, traitor, 34 times felon and the ugliest political thing we have ever seen. We cannot let his projection of himself onto the world become our own.

For more on where we are and where we go from here check out my recent post and video, The Trump Wrecking Ball Is Already Here, More Notes On The Path Forward, and my recent interviews with thought leaders and change makers like Ruben Gallego, Abigail Spanberger, Ben Wikler and Ken Martin.

Enjoy this remembrance of Jimmy Carter from his biographer, Jonathan Alter.

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Finally, I end the year with what was a small but meaningful moment for me a few days ago. I got a Bluesky shoutout from my life teachers and heros, Timothy Snyder:

In my sit down with Ezra Klein for his podcast earlier this year Ezra concluded our discussion, as he does all his discussions, asking for book recommendations. Here is what Ezra included for me in his fascinating year end compendium of book recommendations from his guests (gift link). It is a reminder that here at Hopium we do not obey in advance yesterday, today or tomorrow:

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you, and here’s to making 2025 better than any of us could have imagined a few weeks ago - Simon