The epic challenge of a second Trump era: providing safe harbor for MAGA regrets

President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA regime have promised revenge and retribution against a range of targeted groups such as the Democrats, “the deep state” and “the globalists,” “the Left,” “liberals,” “Woke,” the news media, i.e. “the enemy of the people,” nonwhite “illegal aliens," the LGBTQ community (specifically transgender people) and a range of other groups. Trump’s selections for his Cabinet are distinguished both by their personal loyalty to him as well as ferocity in pursuing his personal and political “enemies.” Trump has repeatedly threatened to remove these “enemies within” from society by using the Alien Enemies Act, the Insurrection Act and other means including prison. All indications suggest that Trump’s dictatorial presidency will begin by targeting those groups and individuals who are “the enemy” on day one.

On the other hand, Trump has repeatedly promised to pardon his followers who attacked the Capitol as part of his coup attempt on Jan. 6. They will likely serve as Trump’s personal MAGA street enforcers and paramilitaries.  

Central to Trump and his agents’ plans to impose their authoritarian vision on American society is Nazi legal theorist and jurist Carl Schmitt’s concept of a state of exception and the distinction between “friend and enemy” in a permanent state of emergency where the ruler, i.e. Trump and his regime, possess what is essentially unlimited power. In this model of citizenship and national belonging, support for Trumpism and MAGA is synonymous with being a “real American.” The enemy, however defined, is to be marginalized and oppressed as the Other.

In a must-read article at The New Republic, Nina Burleigh provides a roadmap and warning for how Donald Trump and his fascist regime will attack the core tenets of American democracy and civil society — and how there is little that normal politics and the institutions can do to stop him and his forces:

We are headed into uncharted territory as a people and a nation. Trump and his allies have promised to initiate their radical right-wing agenda the minute after he takes his hand off the Bible on Inauguration Day. We are about to experience an unprecedented assault on the Constitution and our civil liberties related to speech and assembly, and an abandonment of norms related to the military, the Justice Department, and government contracting that will make the first term look, well, normal….

In May and June, the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law invited 250 participants to take part in five tabletop exercises aimed at gaming out how a Trump presidency might use existing weaknesses in the American legal and constitutional system to implant an autocratic regime.

The results were disheartening at best, and at worst, frightening. The exercises demonstrated repeatedly that an authoritarian in control of the executive branch with little concern for legal limits holds a structural advantage over any lawful effort to restrain him. “None of the exercises left us sanguine,” the organizer, Bart Gellman, later reported. “Participants were almost uniformly sobered by the paucity of effective constraints on abuse of power.”

In a new article that not too long ago would describe life in a banana republic and not “the world’s greatest democracy,” The Washington Post examines how some of the high-profile targets of Trump and the MAGA movement are preparing for his return to power:

A retired U.S. Army officer who clashed with senior officials in Donald Trump’s first White House looked into acquiring Italian citizenship in the run-up to this month’s election but wasn’t eligible and instead packed a “go bag” with cash and a list of emergency numbers in case he needs to flee.

A member of Trump’s first administration who publicly denounced him is applying for foreign citizenship and weighing whether to watch and wait or leave the country before the Jan. 20 inauguration.

And a former U.S. official who signed a notorious October 2020 letter suggesting that emails purportedly taken from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden could be part of a “Russian information operation” is seeking a passport from a European country, uncertain about whether the getaway will prove necessary but concluding, “You don’t want to have to scramble.”

All spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid undermining their own preparations. The planning, they acknowledge, responds to a hypothetical worst case in which a second Trump presidency ushers in systematic suppression of free speech and criminalization of dissent. Trump’s victory alone has set off alarms among some of his most outspoken critics, as well as within parts of the intelligence and national security communities he denigrated as the “deep state” and accused of subverting his agenda.

Their anxiety has intensified amid the drumbeat of picks for critical Cabinet posts.

The Democrats and other pro-democracy Americans are going to have to quickly recalibrate their strategy and understanding of the core fundamentals of politics in the Age of Trump and American fascism if they are to find a way to take back the White House and country’s other governing institutions before it is too late and MAGA is widely synonymous with that it means to be a “real American” both here and around the world.

In an attempt to make sense of Trump’s victory, our collective emotions in this time of trouble and dread, what this election reveals about American values and character and what comes next when Trump takes power in January, I recently spoke with a range of experts. 

Randolph Hohle is a professor of Sociology at SUNY Fredonia and author of "Racism in the Neoliberal Era" and "American Housing Question: Racism, Urban Citizenship, and the Privilege of Mobility." He studies the nexus of racism and political economy.

I’m feeling a bit taken back and a little alarmed. It's not that Trump won, but how much the country moved to the right. To see Trump win 45% of the vote in New York State and sweep every swing state is telling the direction the US is heading. I won’t do anything special to manage the feelings. I’ll just continue to lift weights and exercise like I normally do. I don’t experience elections as trauma.

America’s mainstream news media and pundits got this so wrong because they don’t see that MAGA appeals to poor white men, uneducated white men and working-class white men because they don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s not about power or domination because they don’t have any power. It’s about them trying to find a place where they belong. They are socially isolated from mainstream institutions and MAGA gives them a purpose –- although I’m not sure what that purpose is. In the 1980s and 1990s, we talked about the need to create institutions to keep kids off the streets and out of gangs. MAGA is the streets for marginalized white men. “Owning the libs” is just a middle finger back to mainstream society. There is no ideology. Just a gang mentality.

The media and punditry’s other problem is their need to reduce social groups into simple binaries and abstractions that can provide a clean narrative but impose an incorrect logic on how America’s polity votes. They insist on reading the American polity through the lens of white/not-white. This creates a false impression that all non-white people are the same and opposed to whiteness (which is never defined) and only makes sense to someone whose knowledge of race and ethnicity comes from college seminars instead of actual people. They would be better served to read the polity as Black/not-Black and look for regional and economic differences between racial and ethnic groups.

This is also true in how the media class and pundits insist on viewing women as a unitary identity. The conservative movement and conservative women have their idea of feminism that views gender equality as possible without changing the system and does not see supporting abortion rights and voting for the MAGA movement as a contradiction. Race and gender matter, just not how they think it does.

I am not surprised by Trump winning. I would describe my reaction as being one of revelations. To say that the election revealed America as a racist and or sexist place is a lazy “analysis.” Instead, the election revealed that America’s political realignment is just about settled and that the neoliberal project, as we know it, has run its course.

There are three reasons. First, big tech replaced big finance as the primary driver of capital accumulation. This ushers in a new set of elites, still white, but with a disdain for neoliberal institutions that no longer serve their purpose. I think you can see this in their language of disruption in how they start new business plans and existing changes in K-12 and higher education at the state level right now. It’s apparent in how American Tech moguls want looser regulations on I-9 visas but also tariffs to protect America’s tech industry from China.

Second, Big Tech created a class affinity between elites, upper-middle-class professionals and working-class people away from coastal areas. Lastly, and perhaps the most important, is what and who counts as “white” that has been changing since 2000 and has incorporated some Asian and Hispanic citizens into the fold. The debates 25 years ago over a majority-minority nation that would usher in Democratic Party dominance were rooted in a belief that white was a fixed group classification. They ignored the history of immigration and ethnicity that pointed to the shifting notion of who gets to be white in America. There is still a normative account of good and bad whites, good and bad immigrants, etc. These groups don’t contrast themselves to whites, they contrast themselves to Black people and try to reflect good white citizenship.

What do I want to prepare the American people for? The first 100 days will be a whirlwind of policy proposals and changes. The Republicans have control of the House and the Senate. Don’t be distracted by anti-trans rhetoric. Trump will be set on removing regulatory agencies over the environment to appease the billionaires and corporations. Trump will likely abolish the Department of Education and federal education funding will switch to block grants to the states, which many will use to fund school voucher programs. I don’t think he will replace income taxes with tariffs, but there will likely be tax cuts and programs for businesses. The big one to watch out for, however, is that I think Trump and the Republicans will have their eyes on privatizing Old Age Insurance, what we commonly call Social Security. It may be a phased-out plan that keeps it for existing beneficiaries but replaces it with a private 401k plan for people younger than 50 or younger than 40. Be prepared for that fight.

Jason Van Tatenhove served as the national media director for the Oath Keepers. He documented his experiences with the Oath Keepers in his book "The Perils of Extremism: How I Left the Oath Keepers and Why We Should be Concerned about a Future Civil War."

Right now, I feel like I’ve woken up from a punch-drunk, handle-of-tequila dream, teetering between a bone-bruise sadness and a sharp, rising emotion I can’t quite label yet. Fear is right there too — fear for my daughters, for democracy, for this battered experiment of a country we still call home. Fear for the threat of actual repercussions, violent or otherwise. Maybe this is it — the beginning of the end we’ve all sensed creeping closer, even if we tried to shove it into the shadows.

So, what now? I’ll do the only thing I know: I’ll keep writing because that’s all I’ve got — the only way I know to get through the muck and the madness.

I think the mainstream news media and punditry get it so wrong because they’re looking through the wrong damn lens. They want to analyze Trump like he’s a series of scandals or controversies to unpack on a whiteboard — something logical, manageable. But that’s not what he is. His appeal isn’t rooted in reason or fact; it’s a gut-level, emotionally charged force, a dark mythic archetype tapping into America’s discontent. He embodies that seething, alienated rage of people who feel like they’ve been left to rot in the dark corners of the country, unseen, unheard and hopeless for far too long.

The media can’t see this because they’ve insulated themselves from those shadows. They still don’t understand how deep that wound goes, how raw the resentment is. Eight years in and they still haven’t learned that facts and figures don’t shake a movement like this. People don’t rally around data. They rally around a voice that echoes their own anger, their own sense of betrayal. Someone drowning will reach out to any hand that offers hope (or even just survival) for a better future, even if it’s all lies and hatred. Until the media understands that we’ll be right back here, election after election, wondering how they missed it — again. I think we’re digging out for generations, not years

But even in the thick of it, there’s this weird glimmer of hope I can’t shake. It’s the idea that maybe — just maybe — we writers and storytellers can chip away at this. It’s up to us to hold up the mirror, to start thawing those stone hearts with stories that peel away the layers of fear and hate. It’s a long shot and something that will take years, but if we storytellers don’t try, who the hell will?

When Trump and his crew take the reins again, I expect the machinery of power to run on revenge, to silence those who dissent, to remake this place in a darker image. This won’t be a country of ideals and debates. It will be a land of hard lines and harsh realities where loyalties and allegiances revolve around one man Donald Trump. But this is where our work begins. In the face of that coming storm, it’s time to write harder, speak louder, dig deeper.

Hal Brown is a clinical social worker and was one of the first members of the Duty to Warn group. He has extensive expertise in working with multiple personality disorder (now called dissociative identity disorder).

There was always a part of me that knew Donald Trump might win. I have been psychologically preparing for this outcome even as much as I wanted to avoid that reality. At 3 AM the morning after the election, I felt myself already having moved from flight into fight mode. Earlier I watched MSNBC trying to put a semblance of a hopeful spin on the results but by 10 PM here in Oregon they had nothing but bad news as they reported results for Kamala. Once I saw she was doing as many as 10 points worse than Biden did in 2020 in the counties he easily won I knew she was doomed.

I expect I was not alone in feeling numb at first when the news hit and sunk in Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning with all the other feelings, especially anger and grief under the surface. These feelings haven't been overwhelming because I never succumbed to the flight impulse. Instead, I knew I had to figure out the best way to fight. I moved almost immediately into fight mode realizing that part of this was to do what I am best able to do, which is keep writing. Writing on how there are very few aspects of politics that can't be explained psychologically and that psychological understandings of behavior are often the best weapon I can share with others who want to figure out the best ways they can defend democracy.

Trump's power doesn't come from some kind of single enriched core like an atomic or hydrogen bomb. Too many of the people we call pundits looked at him and his ridiculous digital trading cards and saw the phantasmagorial grandiose delusions of someone with superpowers not to be taken seriously. In fact, many of his supporters looked at these images and didn't see the real Trump. They actually really did see him as Superman or Rambo. 

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Trump’s power to sway people has always been multifaceted. The so-called experts, with some exceptions, missed the fact that added together his powers could reach a critical mass.

I do not believe that this election was a referendum on the morality, ethics, or essential qualities of the American people as a whole. To look at it this way is like looking through a kaleidoscope and seeing a harmonious landscape. The feral genius of Trump was that he was able to do the equivalent of corralling cats into a huge enclosure and locking the gate so even though there were numerous cohorts with different dispositions and desires when it came time to vote they decided to support him.

We will have to wait to see whether Trump makes good on all his bellicose threats once he has realized that he has won and doesn't have to exact revenge on as many people as he possibly can with the power of the presidency. Trump, who revels in sadistic fantasies and disparaging his enemies with crude nicknames and descriptions and making threats against them may decide he's been vindicated and can find some comfortable way, the psychological term would be an “ego syntonic” way, to integrate this into his self-image. On the other hand, Trump may be totally committed to revenge and destruction because of his core personality and how his mind and emotions work.

Democracy-loving Americans have two things in their favor for surviving Trump and Trumpism. One is that even though Trump has won the popular vote not all of the voters are cut from the same fascist or bigoted cloth. Some were gullible, many were low-information voters getting their news, to the extent they paid attention to the news, from Fox and right-wing social media. There are millions of them but there are also millions of us.

What we know with some certainty is that in time millions of Trump supporters will discover they have been lied to and made into suckers, again. Those of us who can muster the strength to fight against Trumpism need to be able to be ready to reach out to the disaffected Trump voters as they realize his promises to better their lives were nothing but lies. We need to provide a safe and compassionate harbor for them.

Peter McLaren is Emeritus Professor of Education at University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of the architects of critical pedagogy and the recipient of numerous international awards for this work in education. He is the author of over forty books and his writings have been translated into twenty-five languages.

In November 2016, I developed an autoimmune condition that plagues me to this day and likely was brought on by the trauma of a Trump victory. It appeared to be a betrayal of the body as profound as the one unfolding on the nation’s political stage. My condition seemed to echo the larger affliction overtaking the land, a reminder of the profound toll that tumultuous times exact upon both body and spirit. Since that fateful day, I have been writing about the extraordinary dangers Trump poses for the country. Determined not to be blindsided a second time, I steeled myself for the return of this relentless specter in 2024. And indeed, the outcome, however disheartening, held no surprise. As in 2016, the people seemed unready for the transformative potential of a woman’s leadership, much less a woman of color — a vision that remains, tragically, beyond the nation’s collective horizon. Someday, history’s gaze will fall upon this chapter and in that mirror the nation may confront its own failures, enduring an international shame too deep to erase. As someone who has been an educator for over 50 years and who has lectured throughout the world, I know this reckoning will one day find its way to the nation’s conscience, a judgment as unavoidable as it is searing.

When I think of how the forces of MAGA are destroying human rights, I am inspired by the moral courage of anti-fascists such as Sophie Scholl, one of the most luminous figures of resistance within the darkness of Nazi Germany who was a member of the White Rose, a clandestine group dedicated to non-violent opposition to the Third Reich. She was executed for scattering leaflets at the University of Munich, decrying the inhumanity of the war. I am thinking of Las Treces Rosas, the 13 young women who were executed on Aug. 5, 1939, for their involvement in the socialist youth organization, Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas. I am also thinking of Walter Benjamin and Paul Robeson. They steel my resolve.

The mainstream news media, in its detachment or perhaps in its denial, missed a momentous transformation unfolding in the heart of American democracy: the rise of a potent and insidious fascist movement, wrapped in the flag and wielding the cross.

Rather than confront the gravity of this shift, the media seemed to avert its gaze from the depths of the MAGA phenomenon, misjudging the power that such a movement could unleash. In its neglect, it unwittingly allowed the floodgates of far-right rhetoric to burst open, giving a voice and platform to ideologies that once lingered in the corners of society. What might have remained on the margins has surged forward, rushing with alarming speed toward the centers of influence and power. Thus, a volatile mix of nationalism, conspiracy and exclusionary dogma has been carried not only into the streets but into the highest offices of the land, where it festers and reshapes the landscape of American governance in its attempts to create a more permanent, far-right populist order. 

Downplaying Trump’s incendiary threats of violence until just a few weeks before the election, provided both tacit and explicit sanction to xenophobic, racist and authoritarian impulses that have long simmered in the American undercurrent. Through its anti-woke crusade, the MAGA movement weaponized, naturalized, normalized and reified its crude, anti-intellectual punditry across the landscape of social progress, darkening ideals of fairness and equality until they became battles for survival on a field now extremely hostile to dissent. No longer mere debates, these ideals have been dragged into the public square, put on trial, accused of treachery and of fracturing the nation's unity. Thus, America now stands at a crossroads, where visions of a forward-looking nation clash violently with an ironclad grip on a past remembered more than it ever existed — a reckoning for the very soul of the republic.

I would also acknowledge that it took far too long for media pundits to use the term “fascist” to describe Trump. That was a fatal mistake. The cowardice of the press to compare Trump to fascist leaders of yesteryear has helped to normalize his words and deeds.  As long as the press remains shackled by the gilded chains of billionaire overlords, freedom lies in chains as well, leaving us in a world of corporate domination. 

The election reinforced my conviction that the majority of American voters were far from immune to the socio-political and historical forces at play that enabled them to become ideologically and emotionally seduced into a quasi-religious cult, a MAGA movement whose catechism consists of a toxic mixture of hatred, violence, misogyny, racism, homophobia and conspiracy theories — all crystalized into a swindle of revenge fierce enough to motivate them to elect a fascist for president of the United States. As a consequence, much of the world will view this election as a world-historical calamity, placing the international reputation of the US on the slaughter bench of history, especially insofar as the election of Trump revealed the American public to be complicit in the election of an authoritarian plutocrat, if not a die-hard fascist.  Am I surprised? Not at all.

In addition, the election revealed the extent that Trump’s escalation of the so-called “culture wars,” positioned him with his followers as a self-styled defender of reactionary values against the tide of progressive reform. His persistent vile, aimed at movements for racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights and accountability in policing worked. They made Trump an unstoppable force.

Let’s be clear, Trump’s victory is no “unprecedented mandate”; it is a dire warning, a narrow escape for the evangelical forces of Christian nationalism, one that lays bare how deeply fascistic thinking — rooted in race, gender and cultural supremacy — still festers within the body of this nation. This is a stark reminder of how seductive hollow patriotism and manufactured pride can be, especially in times of economic uncertainty.

The Trump administration will use its Project 2025 to dismantle every step we have taken toward a more just, inclusive society, striking at the very pillars of our constitutional republic. The Trump administration will villainize those artists, educators, influencers and writers who are fearless enough to acknowledge that this election was the calculated outcome of a strategy to hand America over to its wealthiest few.  

In the end, Trump may destroy America as a functioning democracy. Social Security will be at risk. Trump could very well change the Constitution to enable himself to remain on as president after his term expires. As the world warms and the seas rise, those who have committed themselves to meaningful climate action, aware that the health of the planet is tied inextricably to their own, will be drowned out by Trump’s populist refrain: “Drill baby drill.” We also need to understand that the war on “wokeness” will continue to intensify and the threat to social justice movements will increase. The fascist threat is, at its core, an assault on democracy itself — an anti-democratic force seeking to dismantle the protections hard-won by marginalized groups, to silence dissent and to dismantle institutions meant to uphold justice and equality.