This week on A Couple Thinks, we spent some time sitting with a question that’s been hovering in the background for a while now: what is going to happen between now and the post-Trump era?
Our conversation was sparked by a New York Times opinion piece by conservative column by Ross Douthat titled “Trump’s Second Term Has Ended the Conservative Era.” This particular piece caught our attention because Lisa finished the entire piece, which rarely happens with this particular writer.
Douthat uses a real-estate metaphor to frame Trump as a developer who didn’t renovate conservatism so much as demolish it—tearing down long-standing pillars like limited government, Reagan-era foreign policy, religious moralism, and institutional trust. What’s being erected in its place, he argues, is unfinished, unstable, and deeply idiosyncratic to Trump himself: loud, gaudy, and built on weak foundations.
What made the piece especially striking wasn’t just the criticism of Trump, it was also the acknowledgment, from a conservative writer, that there may not be a coherent “after” yet. The factions circling Trumpism don’t share the same goals, policies, or even worldview. Trump himself embodies contradiction: isolationist rhetoric paired with aggressive foreign action; economic nationalism mixed with chaos; cultural grievance without a governing philosophy.
In our conversation, we zoomed out from the essay itself to talk about what this moment feels like to live through. That sense that we’re still in the “worse before it gets better” phase. That unsettling realization that decline doesn’t always arrive as a single event—it can look like a long stretch of not-good things, punctuated by flare-ups of cruelty, vindictiveness, and institutional stress.
We also talked about something that feels newly important: even conservative voices are starting to speak more plainly about Trump’s legacy. Less hedging. Less “I don’t like him, but…” More acknowledgment that real damage has been done to norms, to institutions, and to the country’s credibility at home and abroad.
From there, the conversation widened again. When Trump is eventually gone, what happens to the people, systems, and incentives that enabled him? What does accountability look like? What does repair look like—both institutionally and socially? How do communities coexist after years of open bigotry, public flags, hats, and declarations that can’t simply be tucked away again?
We didn’t pretend to have answers. But we did talk about what now looks like: resistance, protest, disruption, participation in primaries, pressure on elected officials, and refusing to disengage just because the process feels long and exhausting.
As always, we closed with actions you can take this week—and with our joyful moments, because holding onto joy is not frivolous. It’s part of staying human while we push back.
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We’re still in the middle of it. But we’re not just watching.
