GIVING UP IS UNFORGIVABLE

A look at the wreckage wrought thus far by the present administration, and what can be done about it.

In a book that seems sometimes relentlessly optimistic, former U.S. attorney Vance—she resigned the day before President Trump’s first inauguration—opens with the realization that, in the first salvos of his second term, she had been focusing on all that was wrong and not with all that was right: “The rule of law was being bent, but it was not broken.” She then exhorts readers, “Don’t be the frog,” the one in the pot that’s being slowly heated and will thus cook to death without complaint. The metaphor is useful to the extent that, as she notes, that’s how dictators come to power, in “a slow slide toward tyranny, easily dismissed for far too long by far too much of the populace.” Anyone who’d been paying the slightest attention to the news knew about Project 2025, yet many dismissed it, even as Trump professed to know nothing of it, and even as he’s been busily enacting it ever since. Vance, it should be said, is no Pollyanna; she has a clear vision of what’s unfolding around her, paying close attention to the administration’s supposed insistence that it’s just enforcing the law (“Dictators like to cloak their early steps in the appearance of legality”) while undoing the courts. The optimism, whether warranted or not, comes in with Vance’s insistence that “we have a republic to keep, and we are not quitters.” But what of all the boiling frogs? Vance offers useful pointers on how to avoid the pot and exercise one’s constitutional rights, most important of them voting, reminding us—optimistically—that “the way to challenge the bully is at the ballot box.”

A hopeful manifesto for a renewed democracy.