Hagenau

I’ve always been a history aficionado, a consumer of both Hollywood and Penguin House’s efforts to sell it. Martial history in particular. One of the best to do it was Spielberg and Hanks’ adaptation of Steven Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. It follows Easy Company of the 101st Airborne from D-Day to Berchtesgaden. And there’s a particular feeling in the later episodes of Band of Brothers that rhymes with where we are today: Hagenau.

It is not triumph. It is not celebration. It is fatigue mixed with hope. By the time Easy Company reaches Hagenau, a French village on the Rhine, staring across the river into Germany, the war has already been decided in spirit, even if not yet in paperwork. Germany is still dangerous. Men are still dying. The enemy can still ambush you, shell you, kill your friend from a tree line or a cellar window. But something fundamental has changed, and the momentum has shifted. You can feel the machinery breaking down on the other side.

That is what late-stage Trumpism feels like now, and Thomas Massie and Bill Cassidy exemplify it.

For years, I used the analogy that Trump’s first term was D-Day. The immediate task was survival. The objective was simply to get off the beach alive. Institutions were stunned. The press was overwhelmed. Democrats were disorganized. The sheer chaos and velocity of it all created paralysis. Every day felt existential because every day was existential. And then COVID. There was no initiative.

And then the campaign progressed. Trump lost. January 6th happened. There was accountability, at least partially. But like the Germans in the Ardennes, MAGA was not actually dead. They regrouped. They found weak points. They discovered that institutional memory in America is short and that fear is politically potent. Trump 2 became the Battle of the Bulge: violent, furious, overconfident, and initially successful because exhausted people, including myself, wanted to believe the war was over when it was not.

And for a moment, it worked.

The immigration overreach. The attacks on civil liberties. The increasingly open authoritarian rhetoric. The economic instability. The bizarre loyalty tests. The obsession with vengeance over governance. The naked, open corruption and self-enrichment. All of it briefly created the illusion of regained momentum. Like the Bulge offensive, it looked terrifying precisely because it was reckless. When movements begin to lose strategically, they often become more dangerous tactically.

But overreach matters. History is full of regimes and political movements that confused fear for legitimacy. The deeper Trumpism pushed into grievance and performative cruelty, the more people quietly began to recoil from it. Not everyone loudly. Not everyone online. But enough. And then came Alex Pretti and the Straight of Hormuz.

This moment feels like Hagenau.

The men of Easy Company in Hagenau are not the boys from Toccoa anymore. They are colder now, more cynical. They have seen replacements arrive bright-eyed and terrified and watched friends die. Everyone stops romanticizing war once you have carried enough bodies.

That is where many longtime anti-Trump Americans are emotionally. The people who have been fighting this fight since 2015 are tired. Some are burned out entirely. Some became consumed by the outrage cycle and lost perspective. Others withdrew into private life because permanent emergency is not sustainable for human beings. There is a weariness now among the veterans of this political war. A sense of, “God, are we really still doing this?”

And yet Hagenau also introduces something else: new faces.

Young people who were children during Trump’s first rise are now politically conscious adults. People who once dismissed concerns about authoritarianism as hysteria have now seen enough with their own eyes to understand the danger. Veterans, conservatives, independents, immigrants, suburban parents, exhausted moderates: new people keep entering the line. They bring energy that older fighters no longer possess. They have not spent ten years doomscrolling. They have not internalized helplessness. They still believe things can be won.

That matters enormously.

Because late-stage authoritarian movements often rely less on persuasion than exhaustion. They want people demoralized. They want normal citizens to conclude that resistance is pointless, that corruption is inevitable, that outrage is meaningless, that nothing ever changes. Cynicism becomes the final weapon. Not ideology. Fatigue.

But Hagenau is important precisely because Easy Company keeps moving. One bridge at a time. One patrol at a time. One objective at a time. The Rhine is ahead. Germany is collapsing. The war is not over yet, but the trajectory is becoming unmistakable.

That is where we are politically.

Trumpism can still win tactical victories. It can still dominate a news cycle. It can still produce moments of intimidation or fear. Every decaying movement retains pockets of strength. Even in the final months of World War II, German soldiers could still kill Americans. Tactical competence does not equal strategic viability.

And that is the real question now. Does Trumpism actually become stronger with figures like Ed Gallrein, a universally loathed Navy SEAL in that community (I’m serious, everyone thought he sucked) elevated into visibility? Or does it reveal the shrinking nature of the coalition itself? Movements in expansion mode broaden their appeal. Movements in contraction mode become more insular, more performative, more dependent on grievance signaling to reassure the remaining faithful. They begin selecting for loyalty over competence, spectacle over persuasion.

Hitler made Rommel kill himself and placed Walter Model in his stead. Something, something Pete Hegseth.

The anti-MAGA coalition does not need to become euphoric. Hagenau is not Paris, with liberation footage showing cheering crowds and champagne. It is colder than that. More disciplined. More sober. The people still here understand the stakes better than they once did. They understand that democratic institutions are not self-sustaining. They understand that character matters. They understand that civilization is more fragile than they previously assumed.

But they also understand something hopeful: the enemy can be beaten.

Not by magical thinking. Not by hashtags alone. By persistence. By organization. By keeping your head when exhausted people around you want to emotionally surrender. By winning elections. By taking the House. By taking the Senate. By continuing to grind forward even after years of fatigue.

Because once you are over the Rhine, the end becomes visible.Not guaranteed. Not immediate. But visible.

And that is the feeling now. The strange combination of weariness and optimism that emerges only after surviving the worst part. The sense that history has begun bending back toward sanity, if only people remain steady long enough to finish the job.

Hagenau is not victory.

But you can feel, in part, this war ending, even if war itself never does.