Trump and his allies threaten America as we know it, but they are acting from a position of weakness, not strength
A closer look at the goals of Trumpism can help us get perspective and devise strategies that aim straight at its vulnerabilities
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
A basic tension haunts millions of Americans who oppose the presidency of Donald Trump: the more they become aware of his various assaults on our government, on our safety, on our economy, and on the international order, the more helpless they tend to feel. Trump’s lawlessness seems, by its very nature, to be impossible to counter; the more they know about his war on America, the more unstoppable he seems. There are nuances to this picture, of course: many still hold on to the hope that the courts will somehow limit Trump’s destruction of the government, or that a backlash among his own voters may result in retreat. But at base, Trump’s willingness to break the law serves to give him an aura of invincibility, and to fill his opponents with a sense of despair.
These feelings of disempowerment are understandable: they reflect a correct intuition that the rule of law in this country has begun to break down — or rather, that Trump has begun to break it down — and a logical extrapolation that if Trump can do such things a mere two months into office, he can be expected to do far worse as time goes on. Beyond the mass firings of federal employees directed by Elon Musk, Trump has provided plenty of other fodder to fire the imagination: talking of taking over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada; running the economy into recession and inflicting pain on the U.S. population in pursuit of a phantom rebirth of the economy; using federal funds to back rip-off cryptocurrency schemes to enrich himself and his cronies; abandoning European allies to Russian sabotage and invasion; sacking the Social Security Administration, with the resulting fear and pain inflicted on millions of seniors; impounding funds for cutting-edge science, including for vital medical studies and treatments that keep people alive. And this list barely scratches the surface.
In such circumstances, we need to do what we can to re-gain a sense of orientation, as a necessary step to opposing and reversing the ravages of Trumpism. But what do you do when you seem to be faced by an overwhelming barrage of offenses and bad news, and when, as I said, there seems to be no way to comprehend the news without feeling disempowered? One enormously valuable tool is to find explanatory frameworks for understanding events as they unfold before us. This is hardly a cure-all, but I think that it can accomplish a few interrelated ends: providing a small but crucial perspective on our situation, and opening the door to figuring out how to specifically fight back. This is particularly important because we are actually facing a handful of interrelated crises that, occurring together, add up to more than the sum of their parts:
First, there is the threat of Trump himself, a man who aims to attain dictatorial powers and to overturn American democracy. Because Trump is a sociopath bent on retribution against a host of perceived enemies arguably broad enough to encompass the entire American population, he himself is a danger to the republic.
Second, Trump has been propelled to office in part due to the allegiance of a far-reaching reactionary movement that seeks to restore traditional hierarchies of power (racial, sexual, religious), and that views him as an ally. Including white nationalists and conservative Christians, this movement’s goals go beyond the political, into a desire for a vast reshaping of a modern society that has imperfectly tended towards greater equality and freedom for most. This movement has achieved tremendous political influence both through its alliance with Donald Trump, and through Trump’s thorough takeover of the Republican Party.
And third, we’re experiencing an uprising of the wealthy against ordinary Americans, embodied most concretely in Elon Musk’s self-serving rampage through the federal government. We could say that these forces seek to accelerate the inequalities of American society by funneling ever more money (and power) to those who are already hideously wealthy, and to further reduce the power of American workers.
Much more could be said about these interrelated threats to American democracy and freedom, but this brief sketch helps us understand a few basic points. First, that we are experiencing not only a crisis of democracy, but of our free society and of an economy that serves the great majority of Americans. And more than this — we are not simply experiencing a crisis, but a crisis perpetuated by malevolent actors whom we can identify and by discredited ideas that we can refute. It is not only a political crisis, but a moral crisis, and an economic crisis. Unless we reckon with its multi-faceted nature, attempts to reckon with it are akin to fighting with one arm tied behind our backs.
While developing strategies for taking on these interrelated threats will require a collaborative effort among millions of Americans, I wanted to share one particular way I’ve been thinking about them, as a down payment on my general argument that we are hardly in a hopeless situation: specifically, how the very things that appear to be their strengths are, seen from a different angle, actually indications of weakness and vulnerability that opponents can exploit.
Let’s start with Donald Trump. His sociopathic personality permits him to act in a shameless, self-obsessed, and conscience-free fashion, to the point that he is doing what he can to install himself as an American dictator. Yet he is also a deeply flawed person, unable to admit error, possessed of a sense of an alienating grandiosity and aggression. One upshot is that he is vulnerable to psychological manipulation to a degree that few, if any, of his predecessor have been. We got a real-time view of this during his debate with Kamala Harris, where her taunts about his crowd sizes proved akin to waving a cape in front of an enraged bull. But apart from Harris’s effective and highly public goading, Democrats in general have been oddly reticent about trying to exploit such an obvious vulnerability. This needs to change — and Donald Trump’s apparent obsession with annexing Canada seems like a perfect testing ground for a more assertive approach to manipulating the president for political gain.
While Democrats have largely viewed his Canada spiel as a distraction from meatier issues, this badly underestimates the craziness of his talk and how unpopular it already is with a significant chunk of the public. I would bet that a more aggressive approach to Trump’s dreams of northern expansion could push the president to double-down in fruitfully self-destructive ways. A calibrated strategy of mockery, coupled with matter-of-fact assertions about how Trump is alienating one of our country’s closest allies, could lure Trump into spending yet more time and energy pushing for some sort of takeover of our northern neighbor. And if some Democrats worry that they might help push Trump into doing something concretely harmful, like actually invading Canada? — well, that seems like a totally self-defeating approach to handling this deranged man. Democrats should see their job as destroying Trump’s presidency, not protecting him from self-owns, and such a strategy will inevitably carry risks. Personally, I think that the likely mass revulsion of the American public against actual moves to annex Canada would be well worth the cost, exposing Trump as a cretin and a monster in one solid blow. Democrats’ job is not to cower like the abused members of an alcoholic’s household, but to demonstrate to the American people what a singularly repulsive and unqualified figure Donald Trump is.
When we look at various strands of the reactionary movements that have powered and intertwined with Trump’s rise, one grand weakness leaps out: they advocate for regressive ideas opposed by most Americans. It is no surprise that they see federal power as necessary for enforcing their discredited white supremacist, misogynistic, and homophobic vision on American society: because over the last several decades, most Americans have increasingly rejected what they’re peddling. While the power that Christian nationalists and bigots now possess to inflict their backwards values on their fellow citizens is frightening, and will inflict real harm on their targets, we can’t lose sight of the fact that such real-world demonstrations of their values can also be made to work against them. There are many possible current examples, but the insane “anti-DEI” purge at the Pentagon strikes me as particularly egregious, and particularly galling to all people of good conscience.
Under a supposed desire to get rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the U.S. military, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched a widespread purge of personnel and programs that quickly revealed a far more sinister intention. The Trump administration has made clear that its true goal is to neutralize those who challenge a vision of the U.S. military as an organization dominated by white men. And so the African-American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was fired, along with the first female head of the Coast Guard. Trans service members are being drummed out of the military, their very existence a purported affront to military cohesion. And Hegseth has made it clear that he believes women are unfit for combat roles — a throwback to discredited stereotypes about what females are capable of.
And though it might initially seem less offensive, attempts to purge from public-facing military records references to various female, minority, and gay service members are deeply troubling. They include:
the removal of a web page honoring a Vietnam War-era African-American Medal of Honor winner (with the url changed to “deimedal of honor”).
the removal of web pages celebrating a Pima Indian who participated in the iconic flag-raising on Iwo Jima, along with other pages describing the work of Navajo code talkers who helped the U.S. win the war in the Pacific theater, as well as “a profile of a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox toward the end of the Civil War.”
the removal of web pages on female and LGBTQ+ service members.
the removal of information from Arlington National Cemetery’s website including “histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery.” A list of graves no longer accessible online includes "dozens of Black veterans and other high-profile Black Americans with ties to the military or high government posts, including Gen. Colin Powell, boxing champion Joe Louis and Supreme Court Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as references to groups such as “the Contraband militia of freed slaves, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Spanish American War, and the Tuskegee Airmen and 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of World War II.”
also removed from the Arlington site are descriptions of women buried at the cemetery, including "Dr. Ollie Josephine Prescott Baird Bennett, a medical doctor who joined the Army in World War I, Maj. Gen. Marcelite Jordan Harris, the Air Force’s first African American female brigadier general, Lt. Kara Spears Hultgreen, the Navy’s first female carrier-based fighter pilot who flew F-14s, and Maj. Marie Therese Rossi, the first American woman to fly helicopters in combat, when she commanded a CH-47 Chinook helicopter company during Desert Storm.”
Efforts to erase the memories of deceased service members speak for themselves; words fail to capture such depraved racism and misogyny. But the damage is to our present defense as well, as the military is effectively telling a majority of the U.S. population (women, minorities, gays) that they do not belong in the military, that their contributions are not valued, and that their sacrifices are not respected. Together with efforts to cashier qualified minority and female leaders, the supposed “anti-DEI” push is indistinguishable from an effort to purify the armed forces in favor a white, male population. Such fantasies of natural dominance, apart from being morally bankrupt, will have the very real effect of weakening the military by driving out and alienating those who don’t fit this old boy’s club vision. Making war on women and minorities, MAGA makes war on America’s ability to defend itself.
And what of the third strand of the attack on America, the way that powerful corporations and ultra-wealthy Americans see the Trump administration as a way to maximize the power of capital against American workers? Here, too, the battle is between a retrograde minority and a besieged majority — only in this case, there are far, far more of the latter than the former. In some ways, though, it may be the hardest threat to beat back, as those with tremendous hordes of money automatically wield disproportionate political power due to the country’s lack of campaign spending limits and their control over the livelihoods of millions of workers.
Yet the Lord, as they say, works in mysterious ways, and in this year 2025 has delivered to us the execrable Elon Musk, as if to remind Americans of all they despise about entitled billionaires who look down on the rest of us.
Empowered by Donald Trump to destroy vast segments of the federal government and its ability to serve the American people, Musk has stayed his hand or struck more viciously, depending on whether he might personally profit from the outcome of his anti-government destruction. At Trump’s behest, he has targeted agencies and departments, like US AID and the Social Security Administration, that provide life-giving medicines to the impoverished and sustenance to the aged. In doing so, he has shown a lack of conscience that we might otherwise associate with a cigar-smoking, mustache-twirling 19th century robber baron — or an Apartheid-era South African president. The irony of the world’s richest man telling Americans that even the minimal support they get from the government is too much appears not to have been lost on the public, as Musk’s approval ratings show him to be persona non grata for much of the country.
Democrats and other opponents of Trump cannot let go of this unique opportunity to tar Musk as an avatar of a broader class of the ultra-rich, who see the government’s sole purpose as helping them make as much money off a defenseless public. Some have already seized this line of attack; more need to join in. It almost defies belief that we have been subjected to such a cartoonish fate, with literally the world’s richest man authorized to decide which parts of our democracy live and which parts die, yet such is our lot.
Trump and MAGA won’t just be defeated at the ballot box; rather, opponents need to wage a fight that pushes back against the full spectrum of threats — political, social, economic — that have combined to endanger America. Trump’s lust for power; the anti-democratic animus of reactionary groups that wish to usher in a backward new era of awful old ideas; the avarice of the rich that leads them to desire ever more obscene levels of wealth at the expense of everyone else: we need to strike at their vulnerabilities now, by picking fights that remind Americans of the real stakes of our time, and that demonstrate that for all their lawlessness and malice, they are acting out of a position of weakness, not strength.