During his address to Congress last week, Donald Trump threatened and promised that he is “just getting started." Trump is America’s first elected autocrat. His “just getting started” means an escalation in he and his allies' neofascist campaign to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy and turn the country into a version of Orban’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia, nullify the rule of law, ignore and stain the Constitution (and especially the Bill of Rights), make the country into a White Christian authoritarian state, betray America’s allies and friends, take even more of the American people’s money and give it to the richest corporations and individuals, and pull apart an already threadbare social safety net — which will include gutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
In all, Trump is a personalist leader and an American strongman. But at his core, Trump’s political vision and style are driven by political sadism. Trump’s will to power and his personality demand that he not stop his “shock and awe” campaign against American democracy and a humane society.
(Some) of the American people are starting to rise to the challenge of Trumpism. For example, at town halls across the United States, thousands of people have been demanding that the Democrats take a more aggressive posture and become a true opposition party. By comparison, the Republicans are no longer holding town hall-style meetings because of the public’s growing hostility in response to the harm that the Trump administration’s policies are causing (and will cause) huge swaths of the country.
The growing discontent with Trump has not yet translated into a large change in American public opinion. President Trump’s base of support remains stable: approximately 47 percent of Americans approve of his performance so far.
Civil society organizations are using the courts to slow down some of the Trump administration’s most egregious assaults on the rule of law and the Constitution. Unfortunately, in what appears like a concerted effort to force a constitutional crisis, the Trump administration is refusing to fully comply with many of the courts’ judgments against it. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party continues to be unfocused and lacking a unified strategy and vision for how best to oppose President Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and the larger American fascist movement and their allies.
Donald Trump is more than a man; he is a symbol and a character. But Trump, both the man and the symbol and the almost mythic leader for his MAGA followers and others who are so devoted to him is not a supervillain or all-powerful God or prophet (despite how many of his followers would like to believe that he is).
At The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner highlights how Trump’s recent pivots "suggest a certain vulnerability" that presents an opportunity for Democrats:
Having to repeatedly countermand your own incoherent policies is a sign of weakness. It invites more pushback. Republican critics of Trump, European allies, federal judges, and Democrats facing a big budget battle should all keep that in mind. Trump is far from invincible.
Ultimately, Donald Trump is a high-dominance leader. To have any chance in a political battle against such a leader and his authoritarian populist MAGA movement, the Democrats, the so-called Resistance and other defenders of democracy and American freedom and honor need to get some momentum and move from being on the defense to the offense — immediately.
In an attempt to make better sense of the Democratic Party’s low-dominance leadership style, ineffective approach to political battle in the Age of Trump (and beyond), and their ongoing failures of strategy and messaging — and potential ways to correct them and win victory — I recently spoke with M. Steven Fish, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Fish has appeared on BBC, CNN, and other major networks, and has published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, among others. His new book is “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”
This is the second part of a two-part conversation.
For Trump’s Cabinet and the rest of his appointees, fealty to Trump is all that counts. Trump’s Cabinet is an extension of his high-dominance leadership style. Your thoughts on this?
I agree with your assessment, but it’s important to bear in mind the implications of your observation that Trump has turned the whole show and the whole government over to lackeys. Because their authority and identity are just extensions of their Dear Leader’s, the government is now staffed mostly by supplicants, people who lack strength. Much the same can be said of the multitude of Republican members of Congress who have sacrificed every last bit of their dignity and principles to follow Trump into the darkness.
What this all means is that if the Democrats can take down Trump himself, the whole MAGA operation is left rudderless, bereft of figures with minds, principles or expertise of their own.
The Democrats can’t just stand by and hope Trump sabotages himself or suffers a fall in public approval. They’ve got to overmatch his dominance and bring him down themselves. Whether it’s FDR taking on the plutocracy and whipping its Republican abettors, JFK confronting America’s foreign enemies and challenging Americans to sacrifice for the country, or LBJ and MLK smacking down bigots and dismantling a centuries-long edifice of racial injustice, the Democrats have plenty of high-dominance role models to inspire us.
How did you read Trump’s meeting with Zelenskyy? Trump attempted to publicly humiliate Zelenskyy and make him beg for America’s continued assistance in Ukraine’s freedom struggle against the Russian invaders.
Trump, Vance, Rubio, and the rest thought that they’d humiliated Zelenskyy, but that’s not what at least half of Americans and most of the rest of the world saw. They saw a mighty man of consummate integrity and courage defend his country, decency, and democracy in the face of a farcical onslaught. They saw Trump and Vance forfeiting their own nation’s power, honor, and global leadership to please a man, Vladimir Putin, whose greatest career passions have been to undermine American power and prestige in the world and conquer former Soviet territories, starting with our staunch ally, Ukraine.
Trump’s antics are not popular at home; in the Russia-Ukraine war, 52 percent of Americans support Ukraine while 4 percent back Russia (the rest register neutrality). A slight majority supports continuing to supply Ukraine with weapons, and 96 percent consider West European countries as “allies” or “friendly” powers, while four percent consider them “unfriendly” or “enemies.” Trump’s foul attacks on Zelenskyy are intended for an audience of one: Vladimir Putin.
Donald Trump is determined and will not stop, which is why his followers and MAGA followers love him so much. His resilience and compulsion to power and his mastery of being “Donald Trump,” the character. His sense of humor and timing make him very compelling. What Trump is doing to the United States (and the world) is contemptible and unconscionable. But as a main character in a story –- a horror movie political thriller drama and dark comedy all in one — Trump is very compelling. He is also honest and direct. I don’t think the Democrats and other pro-democracy Americans can defeat him and the larger authoritarian and fascist project unless they accept these facts and get past their normative priors and outside their “Trump is bad and how could anyone support him!” echo chamber. Why are these aspects of Trump’s appeal so difficult for many liberals, progressives, centrists, and other normal politics types to understand?
Among the Democrats’ normative priors you mention, I think the most significant and damaging is the notion that high-dominance politics is essentially anti-democratic since Trump is both illiberal and high-dominance. Specifically, goes the story, since Trump is always on the offensive, “we”, here meaning the Democrats and “the resistance” should avoid aggression. Since he plays us-versus-them politics and treats opponents with disdain, we must avoid “othering” our opponents. Since he’s an entertaining showman, we should avoid drama and spectacles. Since he goes “low,” we must go “high.” Since he makes it all about himself, we need to shun personalism and charisma in our ranks and make innocuous policy engineers and personnel managers like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies the faces of the Democratic Party.
"On language and broader messaging: Let’s shut down the pablum about 'defending the middle class,' 'sticking up for working families,' and other such drivel."
But this mentality — or to be more specific, what you aptly call Democrats’ “normative priors” — makes for purely reactive politics. It hands Trump the laser pointer while we play the cats. It also ignores the fact that high-dominance politics is innately neither virtuous nor wicked. It’s just a tool you need if you want to win, all the more against high-dominance opponents. You can wield it like FDR and Churchill did to crush autocrats and would-be autocrats, or you can use it to crush democracy like Putin and Trump are doing.
I have a prediction that seems more and more likely based on the growing amounts of evidence. Donald Trump is going to be given a third term because the Constitution and rule of law increasingly no longer apply. He is going to declare a holiday in his own honor. It will be called “American Renewal Day” or “MAGA Day” or the like. Some of his MAGA Republican supplicants are already proposing something this. Trump will also give the American people more “stimulus” money with his face and name on it — $1000 dollars at least. Most Americans do not have $500 dollars for an emergency. Trump easily “wins” a third term and is regarded by many Americans as one of the country’s greatest presidents ever.
When the Supreme Court ruled for Trump in Trump v. United States to effectively immunize him from violations of the law, it trashed the Founders’ intentions and destroyed our democracy’s most important institutional safeguard, that being constraints on executive power. The decision was 6-3 in favor of Trump; had Biden been under indictment for or at risk of indictments, the decision of course would have been 9-0 in favor of the United States, with the six Republican justices siding with the rest. That decision, along with a host of other Supreme Court rulings and congressional Republicans’ refusal ever to stand up to even Trump’s more egregious acts, leads me to agree that the Constitution and the rule of law increasingly no longer apply.
But enabling Trump to stand for a third term would require amending the Constitution to void the 22nd Amendment, which states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Getting two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of state legislatures to approve of Trump’s scheme would be impossible, so the only clear route to a Trump third term would be Congress passing a law allowing it, and then when the law is challenged, the Supreme Court declaring it constitutional. The decision would effectively end even the pretense of the court’s status as a guardian of the Constitution, which makes me skeptical that any of the justices besides Alito and Thomas would back it. As for Republican governors, members of Congress, and other elites, being the Trump supplicants they are, many will at least feign support for such an authoritarian move for a time, but the fact remains that many of them want to run for president themselves in 2028, and retiring Trump is key to their ambitions.
I think there are reasons to doubt that Trump, stimulus checks or not, is going to be popular enough to be reelected in 2028, though it can’t be ruled out. Remember, too, that voiding the 22nd Amendment means that Obama could run again. For now, at least, I think we should treat Trump’s third-term threats as another attempt to drive the libs to distraction, and my hope is that they don’t take the bait.
The Democrats are floundering in their search for a new message. Any suggestions?
I think the Democrats should forget about having a “united message” and drop the idea that everyone in the party must be on the same page before we can step out with a message at all. That’s never going to happen, and whatever compromises party elites could make to try to force it would amount to nothing more than a pile of platitudes. In 2016, the Republican Party’s message could not have been less “united,” since most Republican leaders still couldn’t stand Trump, but he was elected anyway. The Democrats dominated politics during the middle third of the 20th century, even as the party couldn’t even agree on whether to let Black people vote.
Take DEI and trans issues, which the Republicans bludgeoned the Democrats with during the election and are now using as a distraction from Trump’s autocracy-building project. Democrats are tearing themselves to pieces over how to respond to Trump’s attacks and to grapple with polls showing, for example, that most Americans think that people who are born male shouldn’t compete in girls and women’s sports. Goodness me, what’s our party to do?!
The best course of action is for the Democratic Party’s leaders to speak their own truths. For example, a Democratic Party leader who is genuinely tired of what she sees as woke excesses can stick up for everybody’s right to be protected from discrimination while also poking fun at universities and government agencies changing “breastfeeding mothers” to “lactating employees” in their statements on maternity leave policies (presumably to avoid excluding “chest-feeding” trans men).
As we did before the election, if the Democratic Party’s leaders asked you for concrete advice about what they should do right now to slow down Trump and get some momentum back, what would you tell them?
I’d say the same thing I said in my book "Comeback", which was published in May of last year. First, instead of treating Trump as a terrifying, offensive beast who’s bound to eat us all alive, treat him as being ridiculous, insecure, and hostile to the best of what America is and should be. As long as the Democrats make it all about big bad Trump, they are sticking with the low-dominance strategy that has cost them election after election and now threatens to cost us our democracy. Second, and relatedly, quit reading polls and feverishly adjusting the message to them. Trump tells people what he thinks and aims to change the way we think, while the Democrats wait for polling results and tell people what they think they want to hear. Consequently, Trump seems like a real leader and armed with that reputation, he has literally bent the arc of history toward injustice. The Democrats look like anxious, reactive petitioners and panderers who need polls to tell them how to define justice. Seize the flag and hammer at Trump’s betrayal of our allies, national interests, security, and devotion to Putin.
On language and broader messaging: Let’s shut down the pablum about “defending the middle class,” “sticking up for working families,” and other such drivel. Democratic elites are addicted to this language, and it has demonstrably done nothing to win anyone over. Do you swell with pride at being a member of “the middle class”? Are you ready to go to the barricades to fight for “the middle class”? Do you think working-class people exalt in the pity parties that well-heeled, overeducated liberals throw for them? Why not take a page from FDR, who said on the eve of his first landslide reelection: “Most of us whether we earn wages, run farms or businesses, are in one sense businessmen. All they seek and all we seek is fair play based on the greater good of the greater numbers.” Imagine that! Calling wage earners “businessmen” instead of “struggling working families.” In that same speech, FDR also defended each of his progressive reforms as nothing more than “the American thing to do,” repeating the refrain over and over. Never mind that his radical reforms had never been tried in America — or anywhere else, for that matter. In the minds of his listeners, Roosevelt made them the “American thing to do” — much like Trump is now tragically making stripping people of their rights and joining with America’s enemies the American thing to do.
Further: Stop talking to Black people primarily as Black people and Hispanics as Hispanics and Asians as Asians and women as women and immigrants as immigrants and LGBT people as LGBT people. How much more evidence do we need that the Democrats’ identity-group-targeted messaging doesn’t work, still more when it’s tinged with pity? Liberal elites don’t seem to know it, but the data show that Black Americans are as proud to be Americans as whites are, and nobody is prouder of being American than first-generation Americans from all over the world. Speak of and for America as a whole and address everyone, first and foremost, as Americans. Then we can talk about specific groups’ concerns — but here we’ve got to avoid any hint of the condescension that so often seeps into our message.
Above all, the Democrats need to avoid demoralization and remember that our country is still the greatest experiment in self-government, the greatest cultural and technological innovator, and the most prosperous nation in the history of humankind. It is still the light of the world. The main reason the world seems to be darkening dramatically right now is that the light of America is flickering.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that Viktor Orban runs Hungary.
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