Of rope-a-dopes and opossums

Hanging back is not always surrender, but a fight for what's right can't be avoided

Is there reason to emulate this creature in Donald Trump’s America? (Photo by Jack Bulmer on Unsplash)

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There are two compost piles at our place — one near the house, for kitchen scraps, and the other, much larger, on the edge of the woods out back, for garden and yard detritus. It was on the larger pile one afternoon last spring that I found a dead critter that I couldn’t quite identify. I didn’t get too close, because I figured it might have been the intended lunch of a nearby predator. It seemed like a good moment to take care of something important on the other side of the property.

But when I returned to the pile at dusk, the animal was gone, at which point I realized that it hadn’t been dead at all. It was, of course, an opossum engaged in what scientists call “tonic immobility,” or thanatosis, a term derived from the name of the Greek god of death. You and I would say it was playing dead. Opossums do that, you know, when they think a lethal threat is nearby — like, maybe, a human intending to dump some brush on a compost pile. It enables them to save energy and avoid attack. Once I had retreated to my other chores, the opossum probably had rolled back onto its feet and scampered away.

That opossum has been on my mind lately because playing dead is basically what the noted political consultant James Carville has suggested opponents of Donald Trump ought to do for a while. In a New York Times opinion piece this week that has drawn a lot of attention, he urged a “strategic political retreat” by Democrats, like what an outgunned Army troop might do to regroup. “You won’t win or achieve anything meaningful going toe to toe with the Trump administration right now,” he wrote. He said Democrats should take a page from Muhammad Ali’s famous use of a “rope-a-dope” strategy to win prizefights, and hang back from attacking until Trump is weakened.¹

Plenty of people who are appalled at what has happened in the first weeks of the second Trump administration are trying to figure out how to stop what’s going on, so Carville’s prescription was controversial because it sounded to some like surrender. One left-wing analyst said the argument was immoral, calling it “a death knell for democracy,” and another suggested that since “modern politics is a 24/7 war,” delay could backfire by letting Trump’s misdeeds take hold.

Notably, though, the critics didn’t offer a lot of actual alternative strategies. Nobody has yet suggested a solid plan to end the worst of Trump 2.0, including the widespread carnage across the federal bureaucracy, the upending of our allies’ security as the U.S. realigns with authoritarian regimes and the degradation of scientific efforts to combat climate change and fight disease. We also don’t have a playbook for preventing the economic chaos that’s likely to follow Trump’s tariff and tax policies, or a plan to save the millions of deaths that seem sure to result from the cruel withdrawal of life-saving food and medicine aid globally. (Topic for a future column: How did cruelty become an American value?)

Even so, it seems counter-intuitive for Trump’s opponents to stand aside, to “let the Republicans crumble,” as Carville suggested, as “disorder and a broken economy” descend on the country — to “wait until they need us to offer our support.” With a president who seems eager to bargain away America’s leadership of the free world and turn away from the democratic norms that have been our democracy’s core value for generations, playing possum seems irresponsible.

But Carville is a pragmatic guy, and there’s something to be said for his suggestion that Democrats emulate Ali’s opossum move. I’m no scholar of boxing, but I dug a bit into Ali’s career for a piece I wrote a couple of years ago, which led me to think twice about what Carville had to say. It occurred to me that he might have missed an important part of Ali’s routine — because there is more to rope-a-dope than letting yourself be a punching bag.

There were two big bouts when Muhammad Ali memorably used the technique of laying back on the ropes and letting his opponent hit him until the foe was too exhausted to fight back. Carville cited the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” when Ali knocked out the defending champion, George Foreman, in the eighth round. Foreman had thrown hundreds of punches by that point of the fight, many of them missing wildly or being deflected by Ali, leaving him vulnerable to that sudden Ali attack in the eighth, which left him crumpled to the mat and Ali, hailed for pugilistic smarts, with the championship belt.

Just 11 months later, Ali defended his title in what he called the “Thrilla in Manila,” and he again took to the ropes for a beating. His opponent in the Philippines was Joe Frazier, another former champion; the two had split their earlier two fights. This time it wasn’t until the 14^th round that the rope-a-dope gave way to a fusillade of fists. Frazier, nearly blinded, didn’t rise from his stool when the bell sounded to start the 15^th round.

What made the difference for Ali in each bout, however, wasn’t just rope-a-dope; it was what he did before he stepped into the ring: He had trained harder than his opponents, it turns out. Frazier, for example, had spent the weeks before the fight resting in a lush mountain retreat, often meditating for hours. Ali had stayed in the city, training daily, urging his sparring partners to hit him relentlessly so that he would be prepared to keep standing during an onslaught. It was the preparation that gave Ali the edge.

As a metaphor for contemporary American politics, a boxing championship a half-century ago is imperfect. For one thing, the consequences of what Trump is doing are far greater than anything that might result from a prizefight. But there is both a useful agenda and a comforting reality in the notion that training and preparation can make the crucial difference in a critical fight ahead, even if the present is tough.

Americans cannot turn away from today’s political reality, any more than Ali would run away from his fights. Yet I’m vulnerable, as many people are, to the anguish that comes from simply following the news these days. It sometimes feels like our emotions are getting a heavyweight pummeling. (Really, he is siding with Russia over the brave people of Ukraine?) So we need to be in good shape, first, and then have a plan that might offer us hope that we’ll be standing at the end of the fight.

So we are all in training for the rounds ahead. That “we” includes the public figures in position to challenge Trump; we should insist that they do more than complain about what he is up to. They must offer clear alternative visions. America needs opposition figures to behave more like the so-called “shadow cabinet” ministers in parliamentary democracies, to make clear the stakes of these battles.

Each of us, meanwhile, needs to support local political organizations as they recruit great candidates and raise money to elect them. We need to take on the weak-willed officeholders at every level who are kowtowing to Trump or echoing his hate-filled rhetoric.

Importantly, too, we must train and engage ordinary citizens in today’s communication techniques, including how to create digital content that can capture the public imagination on vital issues. The mass media nowadays is not TV networks and newspapers, but millions of potentially influential content creators — including each of us. Elon Musk’s digital platform, flooded as it is with his half-truths and outright falsehoods, can’t be left as our nation’s agenda-setter.

While we’re preparing for the next fight, though, we each need to do our part to be in shape. So as we engage with the crucial issues facing our communities and our nation, we must sustain ourselves generously. That is, as we’re doing whatever we can to mount an alternative to Trumpism and its way of thinking, we can’t ignore what is restorative for ourselves and each other: life-affirming encounters with the arts, perhaps; recreation that rebuilds our spirits; reading that expands our empathy and understanding; time with friends and loved ones. To face the challenges ahead, we need all of that.

Then we will be ready for what will surely be a weakening of Donald Trump’s capacity to lead as the results of his excesses take effect. Lies and pettiness and the messy execution of duties will eventually diminish Trump’s reach. It is happening already: Last month, Americans told pollsters by a wide margin that they do not approve of Trump’s plan to deport two million Palestinians so the U.S. can turn Gaza into a resort zone. Likewise, they don’t like the tariffs he wants to impose on Canada and Mexico, which will inflate prices here, nor his unconstitutional order ending birthright citizenship, nor his ceding of vast authority to Elon Musk. And they’re disappointed overall in his economic stewardship, with less than one-third giving him positive marks on handling inflation.²

Trump now reigns, and he struts like a man with a championship belt. But the mighty fall. Ask George Foreman and Joe Frazier. They ran into a better-trained fighter.

After Ali won the Thrilla in Manila, he said on several occasions that he had thought during the fight that he was close to death. He never really recovered; the estimated 200,000 hits he took in his boxing career hobbled him, surely contributing to the Parkinsonian syndrome that left him unable to speak in the years leading up to his death, at age 74, in 2016. But he understood not only that effort must precede success, but also that adversity is sometimes inevitable.

The great composer Gustav Mahler sometimes wrote the word schwer — German for “difficult” or “heavy” — next to passages in his musical scores. It was an acknowledgement to the musicians who would play his work that he understood what he was requiring of them. Even the greatest virtuosos are able to create beautiful music only because of hard work. That is a responsibility of musicianship. It is schwer.³

So, too, is good citizenship these days schwer. If rope-a-dope seems like surrender, it’s likely because we’re only looking at the first rounds of what will be a long and tough bout. These days are emotionally difficult for many of us, certainly, as we confront the realities of the Trump regime — the abandonment of our friends abroad as Trump embraces dangerous authoritarians; the trashing of human rights at home as he and his MAGA supporters use fear and ignorance as political weapons, especially aimed, with cruelty, at the LGBTQ community; the destruction of institutions set up to protect our health, educate generations to come and encourage better lives for us all. Taking punches on the ropes is inevitable, but it’s not the same as doing nothing if we’re ready to fight in the later rounds.

But to be clear: We are not opossums. They’re ancient mammals, considered “living fossils” because they lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Opossums have changed little over the past 65 million years, wonderfully. Yet while they know how to survive, our task is greater than theirs: We need to do nothing less than all we can, individually and together, to help all of humanity to thrive. Yes, we can save our fight for the right moment — but only if, as we wait, we do what’s needed to be ready. We are in the early rounds. We must be strong.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/opinion/democrats-trump-congress.html

2. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-approval-rating-polls-inflation.html

3. This discussion of schwer is taken from a passage in Michael Ondaatje’s remarkable 2018 novel Warlight (published by Penguin Random House).

WHAT’S YOUR VIEW?

This essay argues that the adversity of the moment may give us an opportunity to prepare to take on Donald Trump’s wholesale attack on some fundamental American principles and institutions. Do you agree? What do you think of James Carville’s embrace of rope-a-dope? How should we respond to today’s challenges?

(Note: Substack accepts comments only from paid subscribers on The Upstate American site.)

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MORE FROM THE UPSTATE AMERICAN

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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.

-Rex Smith