People (Still) Have (Some of) the Power: Looking Forward to 2026

There's no show this New Year's Eve at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts because the jazz musicians scheduled to play will be a no-show. They cancelled. A fun thing happened after Donald Trump first took over control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and then put his name above that of our 35th president in whose honor the center was built and named. Trump perceived the center as in essence an object he could grab, and in some ways it was – and in other ways it wasn't. Trump now largely controls the building – but he doesn't own the arts or the artists or the audience.

"Empty seats, canceled shows plague Kennedy Center ahead of Trump renaming," says the headline of a recent article in the Washington Blade, and since he slapped his name on the building, the cancellations that have been going on for several months have intensified. Trump has taken over a building, corrupted its meaning and name and legacy, and found out nobody wants to play with him or for him. An arts center is not an object; it's a set of relationships between artists, audiences, and administration, and Trump broke those relationships, which were not for sale, and not in the hands of any one person and never can or will be. It's a microcosm of something that has happened a lot this year in more important ways.

I opened one of my first newsletters after launching Meditations in an Emergency February 2nd with these words: "I can sum up the Trump/Musk/Vance theory of power in five words: 'We have power; you don't.'" Except we do, and we have used it ferociously, creatively, devotedly, bravely this year. What has happened at the Kennedy Center is that artists have exercised their power to not cooperate. Governors and mayors and the state and city workers under them have likewise declined to cooperate in 2025. So have all sorts of people in all sorts of places and situations. As Patti Smith famously sang, "People Have the Power." Not always, not everywhere, but sometimes, when we take it.

Ordinary people have chosen to speak up in countless ways, holding up signs on freeway overpasses, making the #NoKings demonstrations the largest in this country's history, donating and supporting resistance groups, showing up in immigration court to try to prevent ICE from nabbing people, just like they have in cities and suburbs across the country, supporting their neighbors under attack in many small and personal ways that sometimes do but often don't get recorded. The resistance has been robust, and even remarkable. Indivisible membership grew immensely; new organizations sprang up, neighborhoods and communities created their own organizations and networks.

The same thing that happened to Trump happened to Elon Musk. He's the richest man in the world, in money anyway (in every other way he's deeply impoverished), and he has a lot of power that he bought with some of that money. He used that to harm and ordain the deaths of a lot of poor people with his attack on USAID (estimates are that 600,000 have already died and more than 13 million will as a result). Which was itself only part of sabotaging and corrupting crucial parts of the federal government while treating federal workers like dirt. But early this year the Tesla Takedown protests helped increase his unpopularity (he did a lot of that work himself). This resulted in plummeting Tesla sales, share prices, and public opinion, about which he could do nothing except whine. He too ran into the limits of his power, and he shuffled backward out of government in chagrin. Likewise, he sank a lot of money in backing a right-wing judge in the race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Wisconsinites voted the progressive candidate to a resounding victory anyway.

And then there's Stephen Miller: as the indispensable Greg Sargent points out in the New Republic, "in important ways, Miller is falling short of his most elaborate authoritarian designs. The deportations are lagging far behind his hopes. He has not persuaded Trump to deploy the dictatorial power he pines to see. And he has unleashed a cultural moment in defense of immigrants that is more powerful than anything he anticipated. " Authoritarians and elites often assume that we are like them, selfish and cowardly. They assumed we would be cowed by their puissance – or at least threats and their masked thugs in the streets – and do nothing if we ourselves were not impacted, that there would be no serious impediments to their rampages, no obstacles put in their way, no solidarity across differences. There have been many.

This fun comment in the screenshot below by historian Rick Perlstein is part of what prompted this last-minute essay (I know 2026 is just hours away, especially for those of you on the East Coast, and it's already here in Europe and well into Thursday beyond that, as my friend and collaborator Thelma, who lives in Fiji, reminded me). I don't think I said it quite that way, but I did say somewhere that they have the power to command. We have the power to refuse to obey the commands. Donald Trump is not singlehandedly doing all those things – he's giving orders and when people don't follow them the orders aren't worth the electrons with which he screeched about them on social media. We've seen an admiral resign rather than continue taking illegal orders to kill civilians in the Caribbean, and we know there is a lot we are not seeing as federal employees in quiet ways decline to cooperate with illegal, unjust, and destructive orders and policies. We've seen legislation passed to counter what they're doing – tomorrow, January 1, California's new law banning law enforcement from covering their faces while working goes into effect. In some authoritarian regimes, people are scared to disobey. We're not there.

It has been in many ways a grim year, but it's also been a glorious one, in which MAGA began to fracture thanks in part to Trump's obvious fear of what's in the Epstein files, Republicans in the House and Senate stopped being so obedient to Trump, the tide turned and the Democrats swept the November elections, and most of all millions of people in this country stood on principle, sometimes literally. We saw some big universities and big law firms cave to pressure from the administration, others stand strong, some corporations and oligarchs not even cave because they had no principles to surrender, just opportunism that will get on board with almost anything. We saw that the most privileged too often fear losing their privileges, and those with less to lose cared more about what belongs to us all, human rights, voting rights, and Constitutional rights, the rule of law, the ideals of justice and fairness, the principles encoded as e pluribus unum and "all men are created equal." The United States has never fully lived up to these lofty things, of course, but they've likewise never been under attack the way they are now.

One fun thing the Kennedy Center debacle shows is that Trump and Co. haven't learned anything much this year. They'll continue operating as though they can do anything they want and we'll keep demonstrating that they're wrong. This clown car has to crash, somehow. Maybe it will in 2026 or maybe we're seeing it crash in very slow motion, and we're certainly watching Trump fall apart mentally, physically, and politically. Afterward, there will be a lot of pieces to pick up, not the clowns or their car, but all the stuff they've crashed into and driven over. What will come after them, if we're lucky, is another era of reconstruction, not going back to the deeply flawed country we had before Trump's second term, but forward to repair the weaknesses and corruptions that let Trump happen (though a big part of what let him happen is corrupted news media, and that's a subject for another essay).

I've been saying since 2017 or so that schadenfreude is hope for all living things, by which I mean that it's less that we (well some of us) wish them harm than that we wish their harm to stop. The harm they're attempting to visit on everyone and everything else will bite back – you can't wreck the environment, public health, the economy, and sabotage a functioning government without consequences. We are those consequences.