Democrats must make Trump's violence central to their case against him
There is no beating the president and MAGA without a strategy for defeating the political violence they are inflicting on American society
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
For reasons that are both sinister and banal, Trump and his MAGA allies see threats and violence against political opponents as central to their authoritarian ambitions. They seem to believe that if they can make enough people afraid to engage in politics and afraid to speak out, then they can “win” at the ballot box while preserving a veneer of democratic legitimacy. If this requires actually hurting some people, or even a whole lot of people, so be it — the violence is worth it, particularly if much of your base thrills at it, you lack basic human capacities like empathy, and the perceived political payoff will insulate you from being held accountable for your crimes. And if this violence provokes some opponents of Trumpism to engage in violence of their own, then it’s all the better, as the administration can then justify even more brutal crackdowns.
Three main categories of violence come to mind. First: the widespread ICE raids that are currently terrorizing and injuring immigrants, but which are increasingly also sweeping up American citizens in the harm they inflict. By providing a constant background buzz of state violence, they not only cause direct harm to those living within our borders, but threaten to potentially normalize and numb us to unprecedented levels of mayhem in our cities and towns. The paradigmatic example to date may be the military-style raid that ICE and other agencies conducted against resident of a Chicago apartment building last week, in which citizens and immigrants alike were treated as if they lacked basic rights — children and adults zip-tied, citizens detained without cause, agents wantonly ransacking and damaging residences. But there are dozens if not hundreds of other examples, of ICE agents beating and even shooting their victims, of attempting to intimidate and even harm those simply attempting to record their actions.
Second, and connected to the first category, are the Trump administration’s deployment of troops and federal agents to Democratic-governed cities like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Portland. In doing so, the administration is clearly seeking to provoke bloody confrontations with protestors, which would in turn enable even more widespread martial crackdowns on American citizens and state governments. In some ways, the troop deployments are both less and more ominous than the ICE raids; as Josh Marshall noted in a recent podcast, they seem intended both to “overawe” opponents while ICE goes about its dirty work, while also preparing a layer of intimidation against anti-Trump voters in future elections.
Third, I would count the infliction of harm on Democratic elected officials, which may seem smaller-scale than the other two categories, but rates being called out for the ominous implications for opposition politicians’ capacity to resist an increasingly authoritarian regime. Under this category, I would include such incidents as the man-handling of California Senator Padilla when he attempted to pose a question to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem at a press conference, and the body-slamming of Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh by federal agents.
As Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, the pace of violence in the city of Chicago is already staggering, with the apartment raid I noted above merely the largest scale among many noxious violations of basic rights. There is every reason to believe that the challenge of confronting MAGA violence will continue so long as President Trump is in office; this is not anything that can be wished away, ignored, or minimized. But not only is MAGA violence ongoing and substantial, there is good reason to believe that these various threads of violence will continue to escalate in the months ahead. President Trump appears determined to carry out troop deployments to Chicago and Portland, despite the objections of the Illinois and Oregon governors, and despite adverse court rulings to date. His administration’s efforts here in Portland are particularly perverse and eye-popping, and are illustrative of the obsession with stoking conflict as a pretext for government violence. Though protests at a single ICE facility have been minuscule, the Trump administration has worked overtime to construct an alternate reality in which Portland has been torn asunder by Antifa violence, fires consume entire neighborhoods, and municipal authorities are actively attempting to hide evidence of mayhem from visiting administration officials. Even a visit by Kristi Noem, in which her own videographers showed her staring out over a peaceful city, was parlayed into further evidence of mayhem, literally against the evidence of her (and our own) eyes.
The widespread state violence directed by the Trump administration presents a daunting challenge to Democrats. The basic horror and challenge of our crisis is that there is no easy, direct way for the Democratic Party to stop Trump and his henchmen from threatening, and inflicting, violence and terror on both non-citizens and citizens. When federal agents engage in violence against immigrants and against citizens, under the authority of President Trump, Democratic elected officials are arguably losing a political fight that they cannot afford to lose, given that it means they are failing to defend the basic security that a free and open democracy requires, and which is a baseline responsibility of those elected to positions of power. When Donald Trump sends troops into American cities in an effort to dominate the citizenry and provoke bloodshed, Democrats are likewise failing to defend the local autonomy, freedom, and safety for the cities and states they represent. And when the violence is aimed against them personally, such as with Senator Padilla and congressional candidate Abughazaleh — well, the threat is obviously even more direct to the party and its members. Democrats are in a position of being unable to stop an authoritarian regime from using violence and intimidation to achieve its political goals, for the basic reason that the Trump regime is willing and able to deploy such tactics, and possesses sufficient control over the federal security apparatus to do so.
Yet political violence is the enemy of American freedom and democracy, and must be countered effectively and decisively. And so there is no defeating Trump and MAGA without a strategy for defeating the political violence it is inflicting, and will continue to inflict, on American society. This violence fundamentally challenges and subverts the principle that majority rule and the rule of law guide our polity, and instead substitutes the idea that power derives from the ability to intimidate and physically harm your opponents into submission. In place of superior numbers ruling the day, it substitutes those with a greater capacity and willingness to inflict pain on their fellow humans.
I am not laying this all out as part of a counsel of despair or defeat, but I do worry that some elected Democrats do see despair and acceptance of defeat as reasonable, rational responses. But while I don’t believe most Democratic politicians are at a point of such fecklessness, I do increasingly think that the severity of this challenge has led to widespread denial — there isn’t anything Democrats can do about Trumpist violence, so it’s either enough to keep pursuing legal fights to stop troop deployments, or even to ignore the severity of what we’re plainly experiencing. But relying on the courts to protect us from is obviously insufficient, given the Supreme Court’s great deference to this administration; and pretending it isn’t so serious is little different than outright surrender. There has been far too little thought given to how to respond, and win, against a presidency willing to maim and kill to maintain power; this stasis must change.
So what is to be done when one of America’s two major political parties embraces tactics that are poison to democracy, and which in fact are aimed to cement authoritarian MAGA rule across the nation? First, Democrats should assert the total illegitimacy of political violence (including threats to commit such violence) by Trump and his administration; and, second, do all in their power to make MAGA violence into a political anvil that might eventually drag down Trump and the GOP. Though they currently lack the power that would allow them to put an outright stop to MAGA mayhem and intimidation, Democrats must still do all that they can to leverage MAGA acts of violence into a potent weapon against Trump and his fascistic movement. They must use the abuses blessed by Trump as prime exhibits in a combined pro-democracy, anti-MAGA strategy: for building public outrage in the hopes that enough pressure may slow or even stop Trump’s abuses; for building public support for a Democratic Party that clearly stands against political violence and in defense of the public; and for working to delegitimize Trump’s presidency, as he continues to operate in violation of his oath of office and as a de facto enemy of the American majority.
Turning Trumpist violence into a weapon against the president will require a consistent and relentless message from elected Democrats that the president has already unleashed disqualifying violence against the American people, and against its undocumented population, and threatens far more of the same, all in pursuit of amassing dictatorial power and reducing American politics to rule by force and intimidation. It will require propagating video and other documentation of the ongoing depredations conducted by ICE, and via coordinated warnings of what dangers are yet to come should Trump coerce the military into acting on his behalf against the American people. And it will require making credible assertions that, though it may take time, the law will surely come for those who are currently breaking it. The violence must be portrayed as unacceptable, lawless, and deserving of criminal sanction. Overall, it will require a determination not only to counter any normalization of MAGA violence, but to increasingly convince Americans of its utter abnormality and danger.
And against the massive weight of MAGA propaganda that attempts to portray innocent Americans as “terrorists” and Democratic-governed cities as “hellholes,” Democrats must convey and illustrate a truthful narrative regarding the role of state violence in Trump’s second term. There are some early, hopeful signs that some Democrats grasp this, and are starting to counter MAGA untruths. For instance, a recent piece by The New Republic’s Greg Sargent describes how Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Califonia Governor Gavin Newsom “see it as a defining challenge of this moment that Trump is consolidating authoritarian power daily, and using it to subjugate and dominate blue America as if it’s akin to an enemy nation within”; in response, they are seeking to describe the actual danger. With “urgent moral language, [Pritzker] has told his state’s residents that Trump represents a dangerous threat to their way of life,” while “Newsom has done the same. After Trump tried to dispatch California’s National Guard into Portland, Newsom warned: “America is on the brink of martial law.”” These are good starts, and emphasizing the outrage of Trump’s deployment of violence will need to be a key part of such narrative truth-telling.
Relatedly, turning its own violence back against MAGA will also require highlighting MAGA’s most extreme and pernicious language — that in which Trump and his allies refer to all who oppose them as “terrorists,” “domestic extremists,” and the “enemy within,” and which aims to prepare the ground for violence via dehumanization and “othering” — and tirelessly painting this language as deranged and dangerous, revealing an authoritarian mindset in which those who don’t support MAGA are deemed to be its literal enemies. The connection between such language, and real-world atrocity, must be a key rhetorical aim of Democrats and other opponents of Trump.
And though I’ve concentrated on threats and acts of violence, a counter-strategy must also include hammering the lawlessness that is the twin of state violence: from threats to arrest elected Democrats to the elimination of due process for thousands of immigrants, which in turn is leading to escalating abuses of American citizens caught up in the frantic dragnets and military-style raids of ICE. Violence, threats of violence, and lawlessness exist on a mutually-supporting continuum that aims to cow the American majority.
The very tactics that Trump and his allies believe will secure them unparalleled power over American government and society — violence, intimidation, the criminalization of opponents — are also the very things that render the MAGA movement both illegitimate and vulnerable under American democracy and our constitutional order. With Trump in control of the national security apparatus — the FBI, Homeland Security, the U.S. military — stopping him will require framing these abuses of power as horrifying and disqualifying. Democrats must turn what he views as strength into a fatal weakness; they must have faith that most Americans understand that we are not a nation destined to succumb to rule by gunmen, but also must do all they can to rouse that faith, and a righteous collective fury that can derail Trump’s gathering insurrection against our nation.