What happened to the Trump protests?

In the first two months of President Donald Trump’s second term, prisoners convicted of violent crimes were pardoned, important clinical trials were paused, key agencies were decimated, allies were abandoned while adversaries were embraced, war plans were accidentally shared with a journalist, and the price of eggs went up. To paraphrase TS Eliot, this is the way America responds: not with a bang but a whimper.

According to the latest polls, more than half of US adults disapprove of Trump’s job performance. But there have been few protests in the streets, few major campaigns to influence Congress, not even many online petitions gaining steam. Many Americans appear to be thoroughly defeated.

There’s a term for this reaction: it’s called learned helplessness. It’s the debilitating pattern of giving up and accepting our fate when we discover that events in our lives are out of our control.

The concept of learned helplessness was coined in the 1960s by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Mai...
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