A Third Reconstruction? The end of the beginning?

Or possibly we've turned a corner? A lot of commentators in DC seem to think so. As Josh Marshall remarks:

... you build autocracies when you’re popular (often by goosing the economy in a smart and concerted way), not when you’re swirling the bowl with approval ratings in the mid-30s and falling.

Trump's stupid human cockfight on the White House lawn can't distract from the reality that he has lost a dumb war and murdered thousands of Iranians and a few Americans out of sheer vainglory. 

It can't even distract from the court-ordered removal of his illegally placed name from the Kennedy Center. For now he is covering up the wound, but his body and brain are obviously failing. 

The array of Trump setbacks don't mean that the Orange Toddler and his tribe of second rate grifters and sycophants won't wreak vast additional damage on our country and people. They can and they will. But just perhaps we can begin to look ahead

I like the prescription offered by Chris Geidner who chronicles the legal fights which the defense American democracy entail every day: 

... The lessons to take from the Kennedy Center debacle — itself by no means over — are essential to understanding how we get out of this moment and, in particular, how we move forward while Trump remains in power. 

First: Stand up, speak out, and challenge them. [Congresswoman Joyce] Beatty’s lawsuit, like so many over the past 17 months, was the result of a person who thought the Trump administration did wrong and lawyers willing to back that person up in that fight. 

Second: Remember that this is not a quick process, especially not litigation. It took nearly six months for this clearly illegal act to be reversed. 

Third: Realize they’re going to push back — and that they’re going to get more unhinged as you are closer to winning. Friday’s D.C. Circuit filing was embarrassing (at best), but, at this point, it should not have been unexpected. 

Fourth: Support one another. From the support Beatty got for her effort to the guy going around offering pizza to people at the Kennedy Center on Friday night, Trump’s effort to destroy community is best combatted by simply not allowing it. 

Fifth: Be ready for the fact that they’re not going to be nice about the losses — and that there will be malicious compliance and passive aggressive compliance (as well as, yes, noncompliance at times). But, as here, even the temporary noncompliance was a sign of how much this win mattered — and gave way to compliance by morning. 

Sixth: Celebrate the wins. They purported to change the name, it was despised and also illegal, Beatty sued, the lawyers did their job, the judges did as well, and — after an absurd 48 hours — they took down his name. Take the W. 

Seventh: Get up the next day, and start it all over again.

David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo offers a hopeful, but sobering take on our moment: 

... Make no mistake: This was the first step in what will be a decades-long effort to strip Trump from American public life and repair the damage he has done. It will be slow, pain-staking, halting, and thankless work — and perhaps most frustratingly it will have to overcome the inertia of faux reconciliation and indifference. 

The political dynamics of this renewal, America’s reconstruction history suggests, will be brutal. 

Each effort to undo what Trump has done will be met with howls of outrage, real or not, to maximize the political price exacted. Elected officials will have to decide whether to expend political capital to pay that price. If the 2008 financial crisis and Trump I are any indication, the stomach will not be there to engage in these fights even in the immediate aftermath of Trump II, let alone for the decades it will take to finish the work. 

The destruction of state capacity is the biggest and hardest thing to reverse. But the cosmetic and structural changes Trump has wrought without legal authority, in D.C., national parks, and the White House itself will carry symbolic weight that is likely to trigger the kind of backlash past Democratic administrations have avoided. 

If we don’t begin to confront now the scale and scope of the work ahead, we, too, will wilt when the times comes. 

It won’t be easy for all the obvious reasons but also for a particularly Trumpy one: He hasn’t just broken things. He’s replaced them with crap. Trump’s own track record across decades in business and his first term in the White House strongly suggests that we will face the additional friction point of projects done poorly, on the cheap, and not built to last. 

Shoddy work is a direct product of two Trump mainstays: corruption and performative spectacle. If it’s all just a grift, it doesn’t need to last. It just needs to wow the audience and produce the opportunity to cash in. The suckers are stuck with the aftermath. 

Everything Trump manages to accomplish creates a double whammy of burdens for those who to seek to undo it: the actual cost of demolishing, repairing, rebuilding, and replacing, plus the opportunity cost of what else could have been done instead. ...

He concludes: 

That’s why blocking Trump at every turn now has double the benefits.

So this indeed is the task for our Third Reconstruction, not only to win our institutions, not only to eradicate the white supremacy that enables the current regime, but also to reform our democracy so as to preclude another set of con men from taking advantage of our discontents. Are we up to the task?