Donald Trump has only been president for eight weeks yet it feels much longer. Time distortion is a common response to the type of extreme stress and anxiety that he and his administration’s policies are causing the American people. During these first two months, many Americans (and people around the world) have likely found themselves saying some version of the following:
Are you kidding me?
WTF!?
Can he do that?
What about the law?
Why don't the Democrats fight back?
Will I get my Social Security check?
Why is this happening?
I am exhausted.
Please make it stop.
If these words and statements were part of a drinking game, the American people would likely be blind drunk like they were drinking bathtub gin during the Prohibition era.
Many public voices — especially those who are committed to American democracy and the American project — feel the same way. At the Guardian, Arwah Mahdawi writes, “Trump has only been president for a couple of weeks and things are already far worse than I had imagined they could be…Almost nobody in the US has escaped the chaos that Trump and Musk have already unleashed in such an incredibly short time.”
Since his return to power Donald Trump has done many things that the “respected” and “establishment voices” and the professional centrists deemed to be extremely improbable if not impossible — or had (willfully) failed to imagine. Here are a select few examples:
The Trump administration appears to have engaged in unconstitutional and likely illegal actions such as usurping Congress’ power over the budget by ordering the government to stop paying trillions of dollars in grants, loans and other financial obligations. Trump also ordered an end to the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship as part of his mass deportation plan and larger assault on American democracy (the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law). Trump has also purged independent non-partisan inspector generals and other officials whose responsibility is to ensure that the rule of law and the Constitution are obeyed. The Trump administration is also refusing to fully abide by the courts’ rulings against it. This too is unconstitutional.
Trump’s Cabinet appointees, meanwhile, have been approved with little resistance from Republicans in Congress. Their “qualifications” are loyalty to Trump and a willingness to do whatever he commands even if it violates the law and the Constitution. Trump has also rapidly taken control of the national security state and its centers of power by putting in place his loyalists.
Trump has basically allied with Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Trump is also threatening and appears likely to withdraw the United States from NATO.
Trump is threatening that the United States will occupy Gaza and forcibly remove the Palestinian people. This will be done by force if necessary. Once Gaza has been taken over and emptied of Palestinians, Trump wants to turn the area into a resort area, a type of vacation “paradise” where, of course, his hotels will be featured attractions.
Donald Trump wants to annex Canada and Greenland — by military force if necessary. Trump is very serious about his new American Manifest Destiny: during a meeting Wednesday in the Oval Office with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump again shared his desire to conquer Greenland. Trump has also ordered the United States military to develop plans to seize the Panama Canal.
At The Conversation, political scientists Daniel Drache and Marc D. Froese explain how authoritarian leaders like Trump wear various “masks of command.” The idea of Trump as a charismatic leader who is uniquely capable of accomplishing impossible things is central to his power and appeal over his MAGA diehards and those other Americans who support him:
Each authoritarian leader is different, bound only by their anti-liberalism, Dark Triad traits and their celebration as the ringleader of a populist circus.
In our recent book, Has Populism Won?, we show how charismatic leaders encourage a form of totalitarianism in which blind allegiance creates a feeling of partisan belonging. To carry it off, leaders wear what we call “masks of command” to rally their followers.
In our assessment, leaders who spin webs of lies wear the mask of “conspirator-in-chief.” The conspirator uses favours, relationships and money to destabilize institutions and erode the norms that stand in the way of autocracy….
These politicians play to jaded electorates and captive audiences who reward grandiosity and xenophobia because partisanship fills the void left by an absence of genuine national community.
These shamanistic masks have long been a mainstay of populists.
When Trump does the heretofore impossible, he is emotionally training and conditioning the American people to accept a new reality by challenging if not breaking their expectations of what is normal and acceptable in their society and lives. The result is a great amount of collective fear, anxiety and disorientation. As these expectations of what is normal are repeatedly shattered, a type of collective exhaustion and state of learned helplessness sets in.
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The new abnormal and unhealthy reality — what Yale University psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton refers to as “malignant normality” — will become the norm across American society. As has occurred in other societies whose democracies have collapsed, most Americans will surrender to (or outright support) Trumpism and American fascism once they realize that no one is coming to save them, thus resolving their cognitive dissonance between what they believe reality is and should be versus what reality has now become. The cognitive, intellectual, emotional, psychological, spiritual and physical load of sustaining such extreme cognitive dissonance is too difficult for most people to sustain for a long period of time. The malignant reality that has been created by Trump’s repeated shattering of expectations and norms and what is possible in the United States — a country that is imagines itself as the world’s “greatest democracy” and “leader of the free world” — is made possible by an assault on rationality and critical thinking.
In a 2024 interview with the International Honor Society in Psychology, social psychologist Sheldon Solomon explains this process in detail:
All these ideas play into the way fascist leaders are, and they render their folks incapable of making rational decisions. The cognitive theory we use is based on Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between fast thinking and slow thinking:
Fast thinking is our default mental apparatus. It is what we use when we walk around on autopilot, enveloped in our cultural worldview. It operates automatically and effortlessly through heuristic shortcuts. It works quite fast and often useful, however, prone to error.
Slow thinking is what we use to solve specific problems. This is our rational, logical, higher order thinking. It requires effort, exercise, education, and self-control. It is genuinely fairly accurate and precise. While slower, it is reliable.
Both systems are fundamentally critical and ideally operate in a coordinated fashion. Fascists, however, work to cripple the slow thinking system by essentially lobotomizing their followers intellectually and mangling them emotionally. Fascists operate by disabling the capacity for rational thought. Essentially, when people are frustrated and anxious, maybe because of economic or psychological insecurity, they crave for something or someone to live for. When that happens, they are particularly prone—and when I say they, I mean all of us—to become devoted to a leader who confidently proclaims that they’re singularly able to rid the world of evil.
Solomon continues, “Then, these leaders build a fact-proof screen between their followers and the realities of the world by disabling the capacity and motivation for critical thinking. By doing this, they imprison their followers in the context of what is, ultimately, a warped and malignant worldview. This is how fascist followers become incapable of discerning falsehood and making rational decisions.”
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What can be done to slow down and stop Donald Trump’s power as a kind of master of the impossible who so easily shatters norms and expectations?
The Democrats need to become a real opposition party that fully resists Trump’s agenda and does not legitimate him and his rule. To accomplish this and maintain public support the Democratic Party needs to develop a compelling story and brand beyond “Trump is bad.” Trump is a high-dominance leader. When the Democrats are passive and weak they are legitimating and encouraging Trump and his MAGA movement’s assaults on democracy, a humane society, reality, facts and truth itself.
Civil society organizations need to resist Trump in the courts and across the public sphere. Dozens of lawsuits and other legal actions have been filed against the Trump administration. Although Trump is trying to control the legal system and courts, he is still being slowed down by injunctions and other rulings. Each one of these judgments pierces the appearance of Trump and his administration’s ability to act with impunity like a king or dictator.
The American people need to engage in mass protests and other forms of corporeal politics. Autocrats and authoritarians do not care about public opinion and voting and will generally disregard the public will. However, protests and other forms of civil resistance will inspire others by showing that they are not alone and that (restoring) democracy is indeed possible.
The mainstream news media — especially the elite news media — are engaging in anticipatory obedience and surrender to the Trump administration and the MAGA movement. This is normalizing Trump’s autocratic rule and enabling his power (both real and perceived) over the impossible. Independent news media outlets, investigative reporters, documentary filmmakers, artists and other creative workers, independent journalists and other social critics will have to fill that void, to the degree possible, by speaking truth to power and going around the gatekeepers and censors.
At The Guardian, Andy Beckett makes a critical intervention about the paradoxical nature of Trump’s power and ability to make his fantasies of eternal power a reality:
Why exactly is Donald Trump’s new presidency so disorienting? So far, explanations have tended to focus on its manic pace, contempt for political conventions and blatant subversion of supposedly one of the world’s most robust democracies.
But all these elements were also present in his first presidency. Meanwhile, other features of both his terms, such as his cult of personality, scapegoating of immigrants and accusation that liberal elites have caused national decline, are standard practice for hard-right strongmen, and have been for at least a century.
Yet still he baffles and wrongfoots people, both opponents and more neutral observers, political professionals and voters, Americans and foreigners. There is an underexplored reason for this. Trump’s presidency, and particularly his second term, is a deeply paradoxical project. In some ways, it’s an epic political fantasy, a promise that every dream of US reactionaries and nationalists can be rapidly fulfilled. But in other ways, it’s a frightening intrusion of reality – into the rose-tinted picture many liberals still have of how America works and how America relates to the rest of the world….
Trump may seem dizzyingly strong now. Yet soon he will be just another incumbent, in an anti-incumbent world. The problem then, for those who don’t support him, won’t be his dominance of the discourse, which may be slipping, but how much of the American state he controls.
James Brown’s “It's A Man's Man's Man's World” is one of Donald Trump’s favorite songs. It is a fixture at Trump’s rallies. When I hear James Brown’s iconic song at Trump’s rallies I remix the lyrics in my mind as “It’s Trump’s World.” Given what is known about Trump’s personality and mind, he likely hears the song the same way.
Donald Trump will likely attempt to become president for a third term. He is already signaling this desire. Trump’s MAGA Republicans are already discussing a bill to circumvent the Constitution to allow him to do so. Other MAGA Republicans and right-wing propagandists are endorsing a national holiday to honor Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. There are also discussions among Trump’s MAGAfied Republicans about putting his face on Mount Rushmore. If the collapse of American democracy continues at its current rapid pace, Donald Trump will likely be given all these things and much more.
A collective failure of imagination by America’s responsible elites — as well as everyday Americans — enabled Trump to win the 2024 election and act as a de facto dictator on “day one” as he promised. Trump and his MAGA movement and its leaders and visionaries see no real limits on what is possible for them and their revolutionary project to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy. Instead of being passive and reacting, the Democrats, the so-called resistance and other Americans who believe in real democracy need to dream big and then do the work to make that dream real. Unfortunately, the Democrats and the mainstream liberals and progressives dreamed too small, their vision was too narrow and limited and the long Trumpocene was the result.
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