_{BY: Andrew Springer, NOTICE News co-founder}

A message from our CEO: Today we’re doing something different. I felt I wanted to write something from the heart—so we’ll deviate from our normal format. We’ll return to our normal daily news digest tomorrow. Read time 5 minutes, 30 seconds.

If I’m being honest with you, lately, the news has been completely overwhelming: chaotic, relentless, and impossible to keep up with.

And I feel like I’m not alone. Since the beginning of September, the open rate on this daily email has dropped by about 20 percent. That tells me a lot of us are struggling to even look at the headlines.

The feeling sharpened after the death of Charlie Kirk. The public’s reaction made clear just how far we’ve slid as a country. People I once thought of as decent showed they had no capacity to call a spade a spade—or a fascist a fascist.

That’s part of why I want to zoom out for a moment. Not just to ask what comes next this week or this month, but what might happen in the long run. Because the truth is, nobody lasts forever, and democracies don’t die in one fell swoop. They weaken, yes—but they can also grow stronger.

Now, I need to be clear: talking about “the long view” is a privilege. I’m a cis white guy with a stable life. Millions of people here and around the world don’t have that luxury. They are already suffering, and many will die because of Donald Trump’s abject cruelty.

Still, two things can be true at once. Trump is a fascist who inflicts real harm. And yet, over the long arc of history, things can and do get better. Naming both truths matters. Because if we give in to hopelessness—if we believe that nothing we do will change the future—then we won’t fight back at all.

And that’s exactly what Trump wants. He wants us numb. He wants us overwhelmed. He wants us too exhausted to resist.

The act of hope—the belief that things can, should, and will improve—isn’t naive. It’s the ultimate form of defiance. Hope in the face of hopelessness is courage. Hope is rebellion.

So where can we actually find hope? Let’s start with a blunt truth: nobody lives forever. And Trump is a 79-year-old in poor health. If he even finishes this second term, he’ll be the oldest president in history—older than Biden, older than Reagan.

When he’s gone, his fragile coalition will almost certainly splinter. Trump has stitched together unlikely allies: rural white voters angry at capitalism (without realizing capitalism fuels their misery), evangelicals, other working-class people who just want life to be affordable again—and billionaires.

The problem is their interests collide. Workers want cheaper healthcare, housing, and food. Billionaires want lower taxes, higher profits, and compliant labor. Those goals can’t coexist for long.

Trump has papered over this contradiction with personality, shamelessness, and the TV-honed image of a fake CEO. His slogan—burn it all down, make America “great” again—resonates with people gutted by late-stage capitalism. Never mind that his policies enrich billionaires while hurting workers.

That kind of sleight of hand is hard to sustain. No one waiting in the wings has his combination of celebrity, brazenness, and cash. More than one political analyst has predicted that his coalition will collapse once he’s off the stage—and that’s good news for democracy.

You can see the fragility of this coalition in the numbers. So far, Trump has signed only five bills into law. By the same point in his first term, with “adults in the room” who knew how to work with Congress, he had signed 28. Trump is forced to use executive orders because he lacks both the intelligence and the political capital to make permanent legislative change.

And that matters. Much of what he’s done—dismantling USAID, hollowing out the Department of Education, weaponizing the Justice Department—rests on norms, not law. A future president can reverse it. More likely, a future Congress will shore up the guardrails to prevent it from happening again.

That doesn’t erase the damage Trump is inflicting. But it does mean much of it isn’t permanent. In a strange way, his chaos may end up strengthening the system he’s trying to destroy.

We’ve seen this scenario repeat itself in modern history.

For nearly a decade, Poland’s far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) looked unstoppable. They packed courts, politicized state media, and chipped away at judicial independence. Many feared the damage was irreversible.

But their attacks on democracy, harsh social policies, and corruption scandals eventually caught up with them. In the 2023 elections, opposition parties united and together won enough seats to take power.

A centrist, Donald Tusk, returned as prime minister and immediately began undoing the authoritarian playbook—restoring judicial norms and reconnecting Poland with the E.U. What looked permanent turned out to be fragile.

Brazil tells a similar story. Jair Bolsonaro rose on nationalism, evangelical fervor, and anger at corruption. His rhetoric echoed Trump’s, but the pandemic exposed the costs of his governance and fractured his coalition. By 2022, Brazil voted him out in favor of Lula da Silva, a leftist who had once been jailed in a case tainted by judicial bias.

But Spain may be the clearest example of democracy’s long arc. After Franco’s death in 1975, Spain transitioned from dictatorship into one of Europe’s most progressive democracies—dominated by socialists and opening its doors to immigrants from around the world.

These stories show that even when authoritarian leaders look immovable, their coalitions rarely survive them. Fear, resentment, and personality cults aren’t enough to sustain power forever. Eventually, people push back. Eventually, cracks appear.

That’s the opportunity in front of us now. Trump’s coalition is fragile for the same reasons: it’s held together by spectacle, not shared vision or interests. And just like in Poland, Brazil, and Spain, his successors won’t have the same charisma or machinery to keep it intact.

The spell will break. The real question is what state our democracy will be in when it does.

That’s where we come in. The lesson from abroad isn’t that we can sit back and wait for the collapse. It’s that change happens when citizens organize to force a different future. Poles united across party lines. Brazilians rejected a failed leader at the ballot box. Spaniards rebuilt institutions after decades of dictatorship. None of it happened automatically.

If we want an America that emerges stronger, not weaker after Trump, we have to do the work now.

That means refusing to become hopeless when the news cycle feels crushing. It means remembering that cynicism is a luxury we can’t afford. It means turning anger into organizing, exhaustion into persistence, and grief into solidarity.

The truth is this: Trump will pass from the stage. His coalition will fracture.

The deeper question is whether we’ll be ready to build what comes after. That’s the challenge in front of us: not just to outlast him, but to shape a democracy that’s stronger, fairer, and more resilient than the one he tried to break.

Hope, then, isn’t naive. It’s the foundation for action. We can’t lose it—because what comes next is up to us.

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Thank you for reading! - Andrew & Anthony