Trump 2.0 is already assailed by lawsuits, but it's small comfort to America's defeated liberals | Emma Brockes

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : These people are worse, in a way, than the Maga faithful, since many of them are social liberals who have quietly traded their respectable views about immigration and abortion to vote for a lunatic who has promised them a freeze on capital gains tax.
49% : Opposition will not be about sending a message through the medium of public demonstration - the time for that, clearly, has passed, not least because Trump won the popular vote.
46% : For the American electorate, those who didn't vote for Trump are left with the small consolation of a kind of pre-emptive schadenfreude, an overflow of bitterness that seems connected to the sourness now emanating from government, and has the power to poison us all.
46% : While those screaming for Trump may consider tariff-stoked inflation a cost worth paying for the pleasure of feeling superior to immigrants, there are certain prices they won't want to pay.
29% : Instead, one assumes the real job of resistance will fall to armies of lawyers pushing back against Trump's executive orders - from the president's apparently unconstitutional attempt to revoke birthright citizenship (the ACLU lawsuit has already been filed), to the protected status of Elon Musk's cost-cutting department (lawsuits from a variety of advocacy groups accuse it of a lack of transparency), to the weakening of job protections for career civil servants, who Trump is expected to try to fire and replace with loyalists.
25% : From the flurry of punitive executive orders and the pardoning of rightwing extremists, the wishful thinking that swirled around Trump ahead of the election - that perhaps he won't be that bad - has on day one proven to be wrong.
24% : Of course there are plenty of wealthy people who voted for Trump who will be insulated from the worst effects of his presidency, should it turn out that tanking the environment and slashing business regulations doesn't send the S&P through the roof, as they hope.
23% : Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde went after Trump from the pulpit, an act of moral courage so rare in Washington that Trump was forced to slump in his seat like a schoolboy.
20% : Aside from legal challenges, those who didn't vote for the man have little means of resisting - and are frankly still in shock It is a strange effect of the second Trump presidency that, where Donald Trump and his allies know the ropes this time round and have grown in assertiveness, their opposition seems paralysed, rather than emboldened, by experience.

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