The Backlash Has Been Ignited

Fan the flames, but with utmost intelligence

March 10-12 2025

By Marc Cooper

I’m neither a clairvoyant nor a fortune teller, but I often make political predictions. They are often wrong but I humbly give myself about a .600 average.

Two months into Trump 2.0, it is now indisputable that God’s hand-picked savior of America aspires to be a full-fledged fascist, or as he puts it—a King. Those who know my writing are aware that, in the immediate period before the election, through the transition, and during his first days in office, I held a position on the darkest side of the anti-Trump spectrum. I argued we were sleepwalking into American fascism.

After two months of Trump 2.0 in power, today I am playing a sort of political Moody’s, forecasting a slight upgrade to my previous position and stating that, as ugly as it has been and as much uglier as it’s going to get, Trump will most likely fail in constructing a fascist America.

Yes, he’s 100% an autocrat, and the current regime most certainly is streaked with a hideous authoritarianism. A lot of damage has been wrought, and there is more to come. I also reserve the right to be wrong and two years from now, there might be a uniformed stormtrooper Trump Youth brawling in the streets and a suspension of all civil liberties. But I doubt it—at least for this week.

There’s a simple reason for upgrading my forecast: Trump, for all his will to be one, simply sucks at being a real fascist. As does the troupe of self-deluded ideologues around him, who continue to believe their own hare-brained propaganda.

Hitler, at least, built the Autobahn, mass-distributed radios, popularized the VW, and his re-armament program severely cut raging unemployment and pulled Germany out of the Great Depression. He even provided subsidized winter vacations for workers.

Mussolini, they say, made the trains run on time and built unifying nationalist support by invading some of the poorest parts of Africa (yes, Ethiopians and Somalis still use Italian as a second language).

Pinochet, when he wasn’t busy tossing dissidents out of helicopters, finished building a world-class subway and began construction on the first highway into Chile’s extremely remote part of Patagonia.

These three criminals, as odious as they were, knew that even holding full state power wasn’t enough to keep the domestic peace—you had to give something, anything, to the masses. Even if much of it was just spectacle: bread AND circuses.

The Trump administration provides mostly trash reality TV as its spectacle, a far cry from the eye-opening, gloriously staged rallies at Nuremberg orchestrated by the Nazis.

What exactly is Donald Trump giving the masses except a constant stream of lies and impossible-to-achieve goals? Canada is not Ethiopia in 1935. He’s not even handing out any bread.

Trump is daily providing uncertainty, fear, higher prices, thousands of layoffs of essential workers, the shuttering of government offices that the masses rely upon, a faltering stock market poised to crash, an uptick in inflation, the breaking of an 80-year Western alliance, a cozying up to the Putin regime that 81% of Americans disapprove of, a snubbing of the rule of law, the appointment of a pack of crazed werewolves as his cabinet members, attacks on a few universities, ignoring a possible measles epidemic, the mostly phantom erasure of a phantom DEI plague, demeaning of LGBTQ Americans, and the promise he will use the Army to suppress mass dissent—though we have no idea if the Army agrees.

He's even letting down his own xenophobic and racist flank of supporters. Sure, he’s dehumanized “migrants” as insane and murderous scum, and the almost sub-verbal thug Tom Homan, who is his belligerent “immigration czar,” grunted out a promise that coming deportations will include green cardholders, i.e., legal permanent residents. That should up the spectacle of horror a notch or two.

The reality is something quite different. Trump’s chest-beating “mass deportation” plan so far is more like a “mas o menos” deportation program. About 11,000 of these bloodthirsty “fer’ners” were kicked out of the country in February—1,000 fewer than the number deported by Biden in February 2024. At this pace, it will take about 25 years to carry out Trump’s promise of a clean sweep of the estimated 15 million “illegals,” counting new daily arrivals.

Why such low numbers? The easy answer: These clowns, as evil as they are, are just plain too inept, too stupid, and too ideologically intoxicated to do any real planning or, God forbid, any serious thinking before Trump shoots out another crackpot command. There might also be a few of his rich backers quietly pleading with him to not deport their main work force.

Trump has, in every way, lowered the quality of life for 95% of Americans, and that’s before he makes the largest transfer of wealth in world history by taking a couple of trillion dollars—anywhere from 4 to 6 trillion—from the bottom two-thirds of Americans and spoon-feeds them to his amoral billionaire pals in the form of the regressive tax cuts they hunger and lick his ass for and which the MAGA House has already approved in the upcoming budget.

Yet, there’s one really big and crucial deliverable that Trump has come up with. And I sort of predicted it over the last few weeks. It wasn’t exactly hard work. Donald Trump has finally ignited the inevitable backlash that is spreading and building, threatening his forward progress. He is for the moment the Number One organizer of his own opposition.

Daily street protests by federal workers, teachers, veterans, and others have spread from Wall Street to Congress to multiple Musk-owned Tesla dealerships and their remote charging stations. Putting forward the richest man in the world as the face of the regime—a sociopath and drug addict who truly can never offer even a full sentence of rationale for his chainsawing of the U.S. government, and who boasts about having no empathy—guarantees only more turmoil. Chaos and disenchantment, even after he is inevitably jettisoned by Genius Don, will still spread as the real honcho here, the President himself, will continue to escalate.

So all those questions last month of “what can we do?” have now been rendered obsolete. Lots of people didn’t ask first; they just did it. And now you can only ask, how can I join them, and what’s the next step? Don’t ask me. Ask the folks you join with.

And keep things in perspective. As soon as Trump was elected, liberals and Democrats wavered between outright hysteria and paralysis. It was like getting a fatal medical diagnosis and turning to heaven, asking, “Why me?” Why? Because Trump won the election and the Democrats lost it.

And as soon as he was seated, the panic of “What can we do?” set in. Allow me a bit of condescension here to inform you that there was and there is no quick fix available to remove Trump or, for that matter, J.D. Vance in case the former ascends to his heavenly throne before 2028. The only two quick remedies are a military coup against a legally elected president or a revolution that overthrows the state. About as likely as hitting Mars or Jupiter with a slingshot. There is the 25th Amendment also available, provided that MAGA congress members somehow evolve into vertebrates, but I wouldn’t count on it. And please do not waste time in some doomed and pointless effort to impeach him. We ain’t got the numbers. Also ignore, please, the sky is falling texts from the Democrats’ fund raising machine. If you want to donate, target it directly to who is the recipient.

We now see a budding outburst of opposition—green shoots that will be daily watered and fertilized by the government itself. Our job is to nurture them and shape them into a fearsome weapon of opposition.

It’s become obvious in the last few weeks that town halls have become a useful tool to hear and channel dissent from actual people, not politicians. They have become so rowdy in red districts, with angry and outspoken farmers, workers, and veterans worried about possible cuts in social insurance programs and the side effects of tariffs, that Republican officials have told their congress members to stop meeting with their constituents.

This weekend, Bernie Sanders and a couple of other Democrats also held a series of town halls in the red upper Midwest. The Sanders gatherings drew thousands to each of his meetings, many coming from hundreds of miles away.

What I don’t know is what will come out of those meetings and if there were any serious attempts to build any organization. I also assume that the Sanders rallies only drew committed Democrats, which is fine but not optimum.

These gatherings, on both sides, are (just) one of the models for “what can we do.” You don’t need a national or even regional politician. These gatherings can be convened by everyday Americans who can put together small committees of three or four, then reach out to local churches and other community organizations to eventually build a large town hall to which local politicians from both sides should be invited and that will attract a mainstream audience. Either the pols show up or not. And then comes the next step: building an embryonic organization to move forward in any way possible.

That’s how you build opposition. Not by dressing in pink or holding up be-sloganed ping-pong paddles. nor modified “messaging,” nor Democrats going onto sports podcasts, nor searching for a “liberal Joe Rogan.” I can’t think of a worse idea. Those acts mount up to a hill of beans.

Fortunately, there’s going to be plenty of fuel along this highway toward a broad and robust opposition. The DOUGE-bags have already announced the closing of 47 regional Social Security offices. The layoffs in Social Security have already begun. Some 80,000 employees of the Veterans Administration are already on the chopping block. Of the 65,000 government workers axed so far by the Muskrats, 6,000 vets are among them. And estimates of the number of government employees to eventually get a pink slip range as high as 600,000.

Just a few minutes ago, I heard Elon Musk asked how the budget-busting tax cuts would be paid for, and he mumbled around and then blurted out: “Entitlements. Those are the big ones that need to go.”

And Musk is right. Despite promises by Trump to the contrary, there is no way to pay for his coming tax cuts other than looting the rich coffers of Medicaid and Medicare—both of which serve more than 80 million Americans.

So, please, no more empty and pointless outrage. Let me save you the time. There are going to be multiple outrages every single day that this crew holds power. Just accept that and know it. Turn the hot outrage into cold and calculated rage that effectively confronts this crew of authoritarian and insane cretins that now govern us, as well as the greedy bloodsuckers who finance and profit from them.

Start to focus more on what the rest of us are doing or planning to do and what you are doing, as we already know what they will continue doing.

As to Plan 2025, instead of being some super-smart playbook for authoritarian rule, it is nothing more than a crude pastiche of every ultra-right program that has been around for years. Don’t get hung up on it. Its most crucial chapter is missing in any case—the one about what sort of popular backlash these retrograde policies will provoke.

We now have the chance to write that chapter. Let’s get crackin’. ++

P.S. One reader sent me a polite note over the weekend asking if I, indeed, am retired, why do I pitch for subscriptions every post? A totally legit question. And a straight forward answer. I. am now in my tenth year of retirement. And while I do almost no freelancing, I do a number of writing projects that are not public but produce significant revenue. I’d rather put that time into this newsletter but it doesn’t work for me economically. Unlike some others, I make no claim that becoming a paid subscriber makes you a politically superior person or that you are somehow making a political statement by doing so. Becoming a paid subscriber simply allows me more time to devote to The Coop Scoop. And, of course, like any writer, the more people see my work the more satisfaction I get. And so do you as every piece of content on this site is public and free to all. The yearly sub is the lowest among substacks, $31 a year, Less than 10 cents a day. So I humbly ask you to pitch in as there is so much to write about and so little time to do so. Thanks.