We know what Trump is made of. But what about us?

The authoritarian regime is now here, What are we gonna do about it>

Jan 31 2025

By Marc Cooper

After only 10 days in office again, we now clearly know what Donald Trump is made of. Ten days that shook the foundations of the republic. Ten days that dispelled any doubts that he is an aspiring dictator. Ten days that reveal him to be a clown with a blazing flamethrower. Ten days that validate the assertion that the Republican Party as a whole is now a radical and subversive insurrectionary organization, backed by a base of irrational know-nothings, and has no connection to traditional conservatism.

Now that we know what MAGA is made of, the looming existential question is: exactly what are the American people made of? The time for speculating, dawdling, wish-casting, denialism, and indifference has come to a crashing halt. The rubber has hit the road, the battle lines are clearly drawn, and now it remains to be seen if there will be any battle at all—or if we and our republic are destined to be no more than roadkill in the Trump juggernaut.

I will now venture to define exactly what kind of regime we are now facing, albeit in its infancy. It’s not exactly fascism but rather Bonapartist (if you don’t know what that means, look it up). Indeed, my friend Steve Wasserman quotes UC Irvine scholar Catherine Liu on this subject:

“Trump is a Bonapartist putting the last nail in the coffin of the post-World War II expansion and reconfiguration of the US government, and the liberals didn’t know how to defend it because they barely believe in it themselves… He takes the mantle of a revolutionary (Bonaparte/Reagan), creates a cross-class alliance (lumpens plus billionaires) to own the libs and destroy liberalism (the National Assembly, US Constitution) in order to destroy working-class militancy.”

There may be a whiff of Marxist academese in the statement, but it is nevertheless spot on. Translating it into simpler English: Trump wants to acquire as much personal power as possible, establish a form of Presidential Dictatorship, limit, neuter, and quash democratic institutions, and, like Bonaparte, fast-track a transformative road to a post-constitutional regime. We can split hairs and say it is not fascism per se, but the outcomes are quite similar.

I might also add that he has achieved his primary goal and incentive by keeping his fat ass out of prison. And, like a 19th-century emperor, he is using his office to levy frivolous billion-dollar lawsuits against the media, forcing them to settle for millions of dollars that he simply pockets as a civilian plaintiff. The unspeakable little creep Mark Zuckerberg just paid him off $25 million in a tribute settlement in a ridiculous suit claiming Facebook did irreparable harm by banning him in the wake of his failed 2020 coup d’état. It’s a lot more profitable than peddling worthless crypto and golden tennis shoes.Listening to the addled president’s press conference just hours after the DC plane crash, and before the dead were even recovered, would be enough alone in many other countries to force his dismissal, impeachment, or resignation.

Using the strongman’s playbook, he squarely and like a babbling madman blamed the crash on DEI—in other words, on people of color or some other undeserving incompetents that Democrats had planted in the FAA. Never mind that it was Trump himself who, in 2018, introduced a program permitting the disabled to work in the FAA.

His racist and slanderous dog whistle was immediately echoed by a chorus of GOP lackeys and sycophants. Even the supposedly more intellectual VP, J.D. Vance, threw himself into this pile of horseshit and, in a phantasmagorical and stomach-turning statement, said that even if none of the culpable parties were in fact DEI hires, the overall atmosphere created by DEI could easily have stressed out the pilots enough to throw them off course. This is what a Harvard education produces. Roll over, Joseph Goebbels, you have some tough competitors.

The news conference was a vile and repugnant national embarrassment and an insult to every sentient American who is not yet completely brain-dead.

Let us now quickly review the destruction wrought in Trump’s first ten days.

He pardoned the 1600 January 6 hooligans and violent nutcases who beat up, tased, and bear-sprayed cops, which led to several deaths in the following days. He also sprung out of jail the claque of neo-Nazi Proud Boys and Three Percenters serving long prison terms for seditious conspiracy—i.e., traitors.

He halted the work of the Civil Rights Department of the DOJ and purged the DOJ’s top leadership, along with the prosecutors who built the criminal cases charged against him.

More than a dozen watchdog Inspectors General of federal agencies were bumped off in a midnight massacre, freeing his newly appointed stooges from anyone looking over their shoulders. He suspended several members of the National Security Council pending Stalinist “loyalty checks.”

On Friday, six top officials of the FBI were told to resign or be fired.

All civil servants had several layers of job protection stripped. And the civil bureaucracy was told literally to report any colleague sympathetic to DEI, or they would face punishment.

With acolytes of Elon Musk now running the Office of Personnel Management (the federal HR office), the 2.2 million civil servants were all sent an ultimatum nearly word for word of the one sent by Musk when he took over Xitter, offering them 8 months of pay if they simply typed “resign” in their email reply by February 6th. The whole gambit makes no sense, is of questionable legality, and is likely to have little acceptance or impact. Yet it’s a chilling warning about what kind of power is being allotted to the Nazi-saluting and mentally unstable billionaire.

The federal security details attached to former government officials facing material death threats had been removed. This included Dr. Fauci, who committed the crime of saving countless lives during the Covid pandemic.

Trump put the National Labor Relations Board effectively out of business, making it near impossible for workers to unionize.

His yes-men at the FCC are opening investigations of NPR and PBS that could put them off the air.

The inebriate retired Major with German tattoos who wrote a book declaring Democrats the Enemy Within, and is now chief of the DOD, took his first action by removing the portrait of retired General Mark Milley—Trump’s head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who became a Trump critic—from the Pentagon and opened an investigation to see if he could be stripped of one of his four stars, which would reduce his pension. General Milley, a figure loathed by MAGA, also had his security detail fired by Secretary Hegseth. It’s a petty and puerile act by a blithering moron who, until a few months ago, was a weekend TV host on the Fox propaganda network.

Trump closed the border to 100% of asylum requests, including those who were already in the process of applying in legal form.

In a brutal piece of political theater aided by the loathsome huckster Dr. Phil, he unleashed the dogs of ICE to start rounding up for deportation not only migrant criminals but also migrant cooks, gardeners, and laborers. Just as Stalin did during the Great Purges when he sent orders to regional NKVD agents to round up X number of people to meet arbitrary quotas, Trump just bumped up the ICE daily quota from 1200 to 1500 arrests per day.

The president has also ordered the construction of a 30,000-bed complex at Guantanamo to house detained migrants, raising serious questions about any due process. There would be nothing anybody knows about that would prevent these migrants from being held indefinitely in conditions yet to be defined.

There was also the tragi-comic 45 hours of confusion last week over Trump’s attempt to smash-and-grab a chunk of congressional power by freezing all federal grants to states, nonprofits, and community organizations that totaled $3 trillion dollars.

That was true shock and awe for a boatload of Republican governors and congressmembers who could foresee peasants with pitchforks and torches descending on them as meals for wheels, veteran resettlement, and other basic services shut down. A federal judge immediately blocked the outrageous decree, and Trump, under pressure from his own party and the courts, had to completely back down. Though even that is still not 100% clear. His new press spokesperson, a bubble-headed talking Barbie doll wearing a very big crucifix, further muddied the waters the day of the reversal, saying that the policy was not really totally reversed.

But make no mistake. Crucial social welfare insurance and medical programs that benefit scores of millions of Americans are still in dire peril. Somebody is going to have to pay for the hundreds of billions that Trump plans to bestow on the top one percent in tax cuts this year, and the only way to pay for that is by slashing social programs. NYTimes reporter Jason DeParle lays this out in stark black-and-white print. Link to article.

All that said, Trump is not an invulnerable Superman. He takes office with the lowest favorability numbers in recent memory. After only 10 days, he is already underwater at 46-47. He has no mandate, but he has something the rest of us don’t have: an organized mass movement of support. That might weaken, but not if there is no attractive alternative.

This across-the-board freeze was a big fug-up by Trump, and it belies the consensual media myth that, after four years out of office, Trump and MAGA have learned how to better operate the machinery of government and there won’t be the chaos of Trump 1.0 (insert laugh track here).

Trump himself remains a towering imbecile and an unstoppable, scrambled insult machine. He has surrounded himself with a coterie of bootlicking zealots, extremists, and other miscreants who believe their own propaganda. Yeah, they did have time to pre-prepare a barrage of dozens of presidential decrees that, despite being written by AI, were full of typos, absurd legal reasoning, and politically performative rather than fully enforceable actions.

Some of them were written to intentionally provoke a showdown with the Supreme Court. He has little to lose if he gets rebuffed and a world to win if the court caves, like it did on unfettered immunity. I make no bets on this one.

It's still too early to tell, but I would wager that Trump will eventually pay a political price for the January 6 mass pardons, which polls tell us have about 20% support.

His cabinet is going to be a full-time distraction, as it will be stocked with true crazies: Bobby Kennedy, who doesn’t know the difference between Medicaid and Medicare, and who, given a dozen opportunities, would not say vaccines are safe; or Kash Patel, who, when asked five times if Trump lost the 2020 election, would not give a straight answer; and the robotic testimony of Tulsi Gabbard, who required Russian-to-English simultaneous translation during her confirmation hearing. Whether these folks make it or not makes for entertaining television, but in the end, it makes no difference. This is a Bonapartist regime, and all policy decisions come from the top guy as counseled by the Rasputin figure of Elon Musk. No Trump cabinet member will have any agency and will be nothing more than obedient errand boys for The Boss. They are all dispensable, interchangeable, and replaceable by a pool of other MAGA fools.

Some brief takeaways:

• No more speculation. The authoritarian government is very much in power. Those who believe they are “safe” because they live in a blue state are ignoring the power of the federal government, which overrides most state laws. A national abortion ban applies in all 50 states. So do social welfare cuts and immigration raids. As does the FBI and the U.S. military,

• The nihilists who fancy themselves as the cutting edge of leftism have been proven fools by their insistence that it would make no difference which party held the White House. They should be roundly ignored.

• The Democrats are weak and confused as to how to respond. The botched national spending freeze did seem to wake some people up and at least lit a match, if not a bonfire, under the seats to which Democratic lawmakers are bonded. But continuing to look at the Democrats for leadership or lamenting the lack thereof is a monumental waste of time. Even if Bernie Sanders and AOC were running the party, it would still be politically powerless because, in the minority, it has almost zero power. A progressive Democratic leadership would only materialize if it arose from an organized mass movement. Power must flow from the bottom up, not top down.

• We must not confuse mobilization with organization. Mass marches and rallies accomplish nothing unless they are strategic. And they are only strategic if they arise from an organized movement or help build one. Otherwise, they evaporate an hour or two later.

• Identity politics is poison to a mass movement. Your identity is about yourself; a mass movement is about everybody. When you shoehorn any particular race, gender, or national origin into a fixed category, you become blind and indifferent to the plurality of thought within that artificial category. Single-issue campaigns are just as impotent when facing the monolith of authoritarianism.

• Millions are disgruntled with Trump and fearful. Fear only paralyzes. “Resistance” implies only fear of a negative. Much better is proactive hope. Listening to others instead of preaching to their “category.” We must oppose Trump while offering positive alternatives. Outraged denunciation alone won’t cut the mustard.

• You begin building the opposition not by looking upward to Congress, the courts, or nonprofits. Begin by looking sideways to find others who share your values, and build upon that person by person, group by group.

None of this is going to happen overnight, though we are already seeing some scattered green shoots of real community organizing.

But the clock is ticking. I believe we have a two-year window that closes at the 2026 midterms. This is our moment of truth. During this period, those who oppose Trump must stop searching for those who will build the opposition. We must assume the responsibility of understanding WE are the opposition. And we must begin to coalesce to build our capacity and influence in an organized, ecumenical non-sectarian and democratic manner.

If we can take back the House in 2026, it will be a mortal blow to MAGA. It will strip the aspiring dictator of his power to legislate, and he will be an aging lame duck with waning power, opening up room for political renewal.

If we fail in 2026, we can look forward to gangs of Trump Youth with sticks and guns enforcing the will of the Great Leader.

Now is the moment to see what Americans are made of. +++

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