Opponents of MAGA need to make Trump pay a huge price for his escalating violence
Even if Democrats can't quickly deter Trump from harming innocents and arresting elected officials, they must rally public opinion as part of a larger strategy of delegitimizing the president
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
As Donald Trump has escalated his anti-immigration jihad in California via troop deployments, attempted to recruit the military to serve MAGA goals via a birthday parade, and stayed mum as a U.S. senator was thrown to the ground and handcuffed for trying to speak out at a Homeland Security press conference, it’s clearer than ever that the president sees violence and threat as key to exerting power in his second term — a vision that constitutes both actual physical danger to those Americans who stand in his way, and acute political danger as it threatens to replace the rule of law with the law of the strongman.
At the same time, these attempted displays of strength need to be balanced against the fact that Trump is hardly in a position of actual political dominance right now. His overall approval rating is around 45%; the public appears split on his deployment of troops to California; and his numbers have measurably declined in long-time areas of strength like the economy and immigration.
Some observers have convincingly made the point that Donald Trump’s outrageous embrace of threat and violence are at least partly due to his acute sense of vulnerability, not strength, and in fact actually further exposes this weakness to public view. At the New Republic, Greg Sargent asserts that, “Trump is raging at [California Governor Gavin] Newsom—and demanding our applause for putting down this “rebellion”—not because he’s fearsome and strong but because his watch-me-play-fascist-on-TV routine is self-evident overkill, voters suspect the military is not needed here, and it’s all making him appear simultaneously tyrannical and incompetent. Democrats: Proceed accordingly.” And the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie devoted a column to this general argument recently, writing, “The White House clearly believes its actions are a show of strength, but again, they are not. The immediate recourse to repressive force; the inability to handle even modest opposition to its plans; the threats, bullying and overheated rhetoric: They all betray a sense of brittleness and insecurity.”
The idea that Trump is far weaker than many politicos and commentators believe him to be will find no argument from me — particularly if we measure weakness in terms of propagating ideas and policies that fly in the face of public opinion, and that, were they better known, would likely result in even worse poll numbers than we currently see (a point that Sargent made in a recent episode of The Daily Blast podcast). From his coddling of the rich, to his use of the White House for endlessly corrupt self-dealing, to a war on the federal government aimed at gutting veteran’s services, Social Security, and Medicaid, his nativist and plutocratic agenda is simply not popular with most Americans, which is why he and the GOP spend so much time dissembling about it. Specifically, I remain convinced that his true vision of immigration, rooted in a white supremacist vision of racial cleansing, is deeply offensive to a majority of the American people; so while anxiety about immigration has been one of his tent poles of strength with voters, his actual vision for deporting even hard-working, law-abiding undocumented immigrants lacks mass support.
Trump’s vulnerability is even more pronounced the more one grasps his political goals, which overlap significantly with the broader MAGA movement: the replacement of democratic government in the United States with some form of authoritarian rule, in which both Trump’s and the GOP’s hold on power is dominant and permanent through subversion of democratic processes, all in favor of elevating the position of white, Christian, “real” Americans. The notion of “competitive authoritarianism,” as found in nations like Hungary, seems to provide a model — the transformation of the U.S. into a democracy far more in name than in practice, where a variety of methods (gerrymandering, voter suppression, control of the courts and the media) guarantee that Trump and the Republican Party maintain an insurmountable electoral advantage.
To the degree that a president’s power is tied to his personal popularity and the popularity of his policies and governance, then, Trump is indeed arguably a weak president (we might also add in his lame duck status, given that he’s in his second term and cannot run for reelection). He is weak in terms of his own political position, and also due to the vulnerabilities of the democratically-challenged MAGA coalition that put him in office.
From this perspective, both Sargent and Bouie alert us to central dimensions of our political struggle. President Trump has enormous incentives to act in ways that make him appear strong, powerful — and purportedly acting on behalf of the American people (a populace he strives to pretend is larger than just the MAGA base) against radical minoritarian interests. Aware that his true positions on immigration are not popular, he sends troops to California — both to provoke clashes with protestors to justify his over-the-top claims of an immigrant “invasion,” and as proof that his descriptions of reality are true. After all, it would be crazy for a president to dispatch soldiers against a few dozen egg-throwing protestors — what sort of madman would do that? Trump must be on to something! To some degree, his illicit assertions of threat and violence aim to compensate for his unpopular policies, and as such are a ringing reminder to opponents to press him on these weaknesses, rather than be fooled into submission.
At the same time, though, there’s a separate layer of menace in Trump’s recourse to threat and violence that can’t be reconciled with the idea that he’s only working to overcome basic shortcomings in his political position. It’s a menace inseparable from his more general opposition to democracy and quest for unchallenged, dictatorial rule; it’s also inseparable from the anti-democratic inclinations of the MAGA coalition, which at base sees itself as increasingly outnumbered by other Americans (non-white, non-Christian) and so no longer inclined to rely on majority support as its basis for power.
From this perspective, Trump’s embrace of political violence doesn’t just stem from his accurate perceptions regarding the limits of his popular backing. It’s also rooted in an immoral, indeed murderous, strategy for maintaining power: by physically intimidating and, if necessary, by harming opponents. Trump broadcast his comfort with this approach on January 6, 2021, when he incited a mob to attack Congress as part of a scheme to overturn the presidential election results. And in the intervening years leading up to his return to the White House, he and his allies have been open about their eagerness to use force to cow their opponents in a second term — a strategy that was readily apparent once he won, and began placing at the heads of the military, the FBI, and Homeland Security unqualified lackies who shared his eagerness to break heads and spill blood.
The rapidity with which he federalized National Guard troops and sent in the Marines based on bogus claims of insurrection in California reflect this plan being placed into action.
So while Trump may be resorting to violence out of an appreciation of his relatively weak political standing, and opponents are right to draw a line between his insane military escalation and a lack of popular support for, say, deporting law-abiding immigrants, this is not the only reason he is doing so — that is, it is not merely for the purpose of huffing and puffing himself into dominance. Trump and key advisors also view violence as a practical way of asserting power, by transforming American political dynamics from a contest of ideas and votes into a contest of violence and intimidation — a contest in which he has reason to believe that, given the president’s key role vis-a-vis the state’s monopoly on violence, he would prevail.
So while Sargent and Bouie are both correct to note the degree to which Trump is relatively weak, and behaving like a strongman to compensate for this weakness, two preeminent dangers still remain. The first is that Trump will continue to escalate state violence, both as part of the effort to round up immigrants, and to harass protestors and political opponents like California Senator Alex Padilla, but without engaging in outright bloodshed. In a second, more ominous scenario, Trump’s encouragement of violence directly results in bloodshed, such as in National Guard soldiers shooting protestors or DHS heavies injuring or even killing an elected representative.
In either case, continuing to make the case that violence is a sign of Trump’s political weakness becomes more fraught, as Trump would more clearly be entering a political space in which he sought to fully replace rule by popular support with rule by force and intimidation. The danger isn’t just that innocent Americans would lose their lives, though that is in fact a horrifying (and impeachable) possibility; the larger threat is that Trump’s approach would succeed, by physically harming a large enough number of opponents, by scaring enough ordinary citizens and Democratic politicians into submission, or through some combination of the two.
So when Bouie writes that, “The Trump administration seems to have exactly one tool at its disposal — blunt force — and it’s clear that it has no plan for what happens when Americans do not fear being hit,” my worry is that Americans actually will “fear being hit,” particularly if “hit” involves being shot, beaten, or killed. Likewise, when he writes that a “smarter White House might try to isolate its opponents with a performance of responsible stewardship. Instead, the White House might have given its opponents the ammunition they need to persuade the public of their cause,” he’s most directly speaking to the present moment, when Trump has deployed troops in a display of what Sargent correctly describes as “self-evident overkill.” But what does it mean for opponents to “persuade the public of their cause” if Trump decides to escalate the violence, up to and including ordinary citizens and/or Democratic politicians? How does public sentiment function to rein in Trump if the public becomes scared of bloody retribution, or bullied Democratic politicians decline to represent the full breadth of public opposition?
I’m not setting out these bleak scenarios to make a case that Trump is all-powerful or otherwise can’t be stopped, or to cast aside his very real political vulnerability. But I do think that the opposition, including both the general public and elected Democrats, need to be clear-eyed right now about how to cultivate and leverage mass rejection not only of Trump’s unpopular policies (I am thinking specifically of immigration, though his insane economic maneuvers are a close second), but also of his moves towards violence, that, if severe enough, could potentially negate the power of public pressure. Bouie tells us that “Power, real power, rests on legitimacy and consent. A regime that has to deploy force at the first sign of dissent is a regime that does not actually believe it can wield power short of coercion and open threats of violence.” This is all true as a general proposition; but while I wouldn’t disagree that the firmest basis of power is indeed “legitimacy and consent,” there are too many examples around the world of real enough power resting on brutal repression and violence. Perhaps such power has an expiration date, and is indeed ultimately brittle, but it is power nonetheless, and frightening power at that.
America needs concrete plans to maximize the possibility that Trump’s dictator-like behavior really does turn Americans against him (particularly in light of the vast waves of propaganda and disinformation the MAGA universe is capable of) — and it also needs a plan for how such outrage can then be turned into tangible political damage to the president, beyond the general idea that the greater his unpopularity, the weaker he becomes.
After all, it’s conceivable that Trump’s exertions of violence might actually convince a lot of people that he truly is powerful, out of fear for their own safety and also because of his staggering willingness to engage in violence in the first place (thought these two reactions are deeply intertwined). A second, even more disturbing, possibility is that he engages in violence and repression that nullifies current routes for public pressure to make itself known. Examples include the extreme (killing prominent Democratic politicians, federalizing the National Guard to prevent Americans from voting) and the less extreme (arresting Democratic elected officials, engaging in mass detentions).
What I’m getting at is that not only should the opposition hit hard against Trump’s weakness now, as he founders in this period of so-far inept attempts at violent repression, they also badly need to have strategies in hand for if and when Trump escalates the violence in a way that makes the operation of popular pressure more tenuous. Not only might this (on the optimistic end of the spectrum) deter Trump from escalation, by signaling the very real ways Democrats and other opponents would extract a severe political price for his actions — it’s also essential to ensuring that this severe political cost can actually be implemented, in order to preserve the United States as a democracy. I would add that to be credible, this price arguably needs to include possible ways to force Donald Trump from office, or at least to cripple his presidency for the remainder of his term.
In other words, both the public and the Democratic Party need strategies and practical plans for responding to truly terrible but increasingly plausible scenarios. To not do so would constitute a form of unilateral disarmament before an obvious threat to our democracy and our freedom.
To put my cards on the table, I think the moment of crisis has arrived, certainly with respect to the Trump administration’s assault on the Democratic Party. The manhandling and arrest of Senator Padilla was the crossing of a red line in MAGA Republicans’ effort to deny the legitimacy of elected Democrats, and to normalize violence against them. Its gravity is due in part to this incident being just one of multiple recent aggressions against Democrats, including bogus Justice Department charges against Representative LaMonica McIver for an alleged assault outside an ICE detention facility, and a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney’s investigation of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy on spurious charges related to non-cooperation with immigration enforcement.
The assault on Senator Padilla suggests the different directions this wave of repression can still go: on the one hand, it was shocking enough to gain massive public coverage and attention. On the other, the Trump White House has shown no regret over the incident, and those involved with mistreating Padilla appear to be escaping punishment (including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, whose claims not to have recognized Padilla are laughable). Yet Democrats cannot hope to remain a credible or effective opposition party if they cannot figure out a way to eventually exact a steep cost from Trump and the Republicans for what happened to Padilla. If the White House perceives that it has paid no price, then it has every incentive to repeat the offense, perhaps on an even more audacious scale. Perhaps next time, the security agents will beat up the targeted Democrat and peremptorily throw him or her in jail. At a practical level, this can hamstring the Democrats by seeing members imprisoned, increasing the Republicans’ relative advantages in the House and Senate; more generally, it would send an unfortunate signal to the American people that they shouldn’t expect to be defended by a party that can’t even protect its own elected officials.
Ultimately, whether or not Donald Trump’s attempts at violent repression succeed or fail depend on whether the opposition can deter them, is energized rather than cowed by such attempts, and is able to leverage any such outrages into meaningful mass opposition to the Trump White House and MAGA more generally. By strategizing responses now, opponents of Trump both maximize their chances of deterring him, and of using his own displays of supposed strength against him. In some ways this is a deeply asymmetric conflict, between lawless state violence on the one hand, and peaceful but implacable resistance on the other. Leveraging Trump’s authoritarian violence against him will require organization, discipline, creativity, and solidarity — but this effort is absolutely essential to protecting American democracy. So while Democrats and others should hammer away at the bully’s bluffing when appropriate, and decry his anti-democratic strongman threats of violence, they also need to stay a step ahead as the bully starts taking bigger and bigger swings.