Resistance to Trump's shock and awe takes root

As President Trump explained to a reporter after he imposed his historic tariff regime in early April, “sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.” Trump’s shock therapy treatment is having the opposite effect: the patient is getting much sicker and suffering greatly, pleading for relief. There is no guarantee that the patient will survive another 100 days of this “medicine.” Surviving many more months or years of this shock therapy treatment is likely impossible.

As shown by the large and growing number of polls, Trump’s approval among the American people across almost every issue, most notably the economy and tariffs and inflation, his gutting of the federal government and defiance of the Constitution and the rule of law, is rapidly falling to levels not seen for an American president in the last 80 years. In a new essay at The Hill, leading Democratic Party pollster Mark Mellman describes this as, “Trump is suffering a broad-based crash. Never before has a president presented so broad an agenda, so thoroughly rejected by the public. If you’re a Republican who won by less than 10 points, you are either frightened or foolish.”

Donald Trump is a high-dominance leader who is ruling as an autocrat with de facto near-unlimited power. He has no intention of pivoting or changing his approach to his shock and awe politics and shock treatment of the American people and their democracy and society.

To that point, in a recent interview, Donald Trump told The Atlantic magazine that “I run the country and the world.” Trump is in his personal glory during this second time as president: “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do…. You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”

As I chronicle and try to navigate the long Trumpocene and Donald Trump’s return to power, I have been rereading Chinua Achebe’s “How Things Fall Apart.” So I keep returning to Achebe’s reflections on the stool and trouble: “When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”

The American people (and the mainstream news media with its obsolete norms, the centrists and hope peddlers, the corporate Democrats, and other “respectable” leaders and members of the political class and elites) invited this trouble into their homes, twice, and gave it not just a stool but a comfortable chair and bed.

In an attempt to gain a better perspective and insights on Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in power, what may happen next, and what has already been lost, I reached out to a range of leading experts. I also asked them the following question: If these first 100 days of Trump’s administration are indeed the good times as compared to what will come next, what do they want to prepare the American people for?

This is the second part of a three-part series.

Steven Beschloss is a journalist and author of several books, including "The Gunman and His Mother." His website is America, America.

I haven’t been surprised that the unfolding horror of Trump, his second term regime and agenda, has been a hostile frontal attack on migrants, democratic institutions and the rule of law, driven by arrogance, cruelty and hostility toward anyone who does not believe in a white nationalist future. Nor have I been surprised that elected Republicans and particularly Republican senators would forsake their obligations to advise and consent, abandon the Constitutional separation of powers, and bow down to their ruler. But it has been sickening to witness the speed with which Trump — whose bad behavior and what appears to be a deeply troubled mind have only intensified with his near-total immunity to act without consequence — has demolished so much that Americans who believe in government, justice and democracy hold dear. That has surely been aided and abetted by a sycophantic Cabinet that fails to grasp that America is a nation of laws and has long benefitted from intersecting democratic alliances. Like so many Americans and other people around the world, I wake each morning with dread as I check what new thing Donald Trump has trashed today.

I make an effort to spotlight the defenders of democracy and the good and decent people who oppose Trump’s gleeful arson and the forces that applaud the flames. That’s not easy with refugees and American citizens kidnapped and taken out of the country without due process, including to a heinous El Salvador prison; the blatant spectacle of a Wisconsin judge’s arrest; the abandonment of meaningful foreign aid programs that kept people alive and provided soft-power respect for American values; insane tariff “policies” that are untethered from factual reality and steal retirement savings and ignite unnecessary trade wars; the transformation in record time of an economy that was described by The Economist as “the envy of the world” to one teetering on recession; the reckless and often illegal removal of tens of thousands of public servants who dedicated their lives to government and making lives better; the stripping away of funding for scientific research and education; and the immoral attacks on war-torn Ukraine and the dismantling of democratic alliances that have compelled former friends to abandon and gird themselves against Trump’s America.

We have every reason to expect that it will get worse with the bottomless, immunized Trump in the Oval Office. Trump is intoxicated on power and is acting to further enrich himself by securing his own Putin-style, kleptocratic oligarchy. We no longer hear, like we did during the first term, about people in the administration who provide guardrails. We are getting fully unleashed Trump, courtesy of the 77 million Americans who voted for him and all the others who stayed home, ensuring that we learn what “mess around and find out” really means.

The number of law firms, billionaires, and others who have capitulated to Trump is appalling, although the pushback in the courts remains a reason for hope. I also take strength from the rising tide of foreign leaders who are speaking out against Trump and his hostile regime and for democratic values and principles.

And while I believe that there are far too many elected Democrats whose response has been tepid or, worse, non-existent, I am uplifted to see leaders like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Sen. Cory Booker, Chris Murphy and Bernie Sanders, and Representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jasmine Crockett grasp the urgency of this dangerous time. But the road ahead cannot rely on elected officials to stem this authoritarian spiral: I am looking to millions of Americans demonstrating in the streets to say they’ve had enough. That cannot be an occasional thing but an ongoing effort to ensure the survival of our centuries-old democratic experiment.

Matthew D. Taylor is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies. He is the author of “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy.”

Along with everyone else, I’m feeling overwhelmed from trying to drink from the Trump news firehose. I’ve spent most of the last two years warning about the growing problem of political radicalization among evangelical Christians and highlighting the danger of a second Trump term, so I think I was as emotionally prepared as anyone for what we're seeing, but it is still disheartening to watch so many of our American democratic and civil society institutions falling down on the job. Our democratic muscles have atrophied, and I hope they can be reinvigorated before it's too late.

In terms of making sense of things, in the short term and the day-to-day, Trump is very unpredictable and an expert in media provocations and distractions. In the long term, he’s actually pretty predictable: He wants to enrich himself, consolidate power, and “win” according to his internal metrics. He is also a much more bitter and vengeful person than he was in his first term, because his interpretation of the interregnum between his two administrations was that he was unfairly victimized by the Biden administration and cultural elites.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on how much Trump resembles the vast majority of kings, emperors and rulers throughout history: obsessed with unlimited power, fickle, self-absorbed, quarantined against reality. That might sound like cold comfort, but it helps me to remember that the freedom and rights we’ve had for most of American history — and especially for the past 100 years — are more the exception than the rule in human history.

A lot of what I expected has come to pass because my expectations were shaped by listening to the actual promises Trump was making to his base at rallies and in right-wing media during the campaign. I was also closely watching his inner circle of religious advisors, so I anticipated many of the religious messages they’ve used to “sell” Trump’s agenda.

The most surprising thing has been the pace of it: If you read Project 2025, a lot of what has transpired in the past three months was prefigured or suggested in there, but on a much more gradual timeline.

Another surprising thing to me has been Trump’s expansionist rhetoric around annexing Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, etc. We got a little bit of that in the first term, but most of Trump’s rhetorical mode in the first term was nationalistic. He was driving toward a sort of America First isolationism and shoring up the boundaries of the U.S., whether literal borders or conceptual boundaries of American identity. What’s different this term is that Trump seems to have realized that he has the largest economy in the world and the most lethal military ever assembled at his command, so he’s got a lot of weight to throw around internationally. I’m very concerned that he’s gotten out of nationalist mode and unlocked imperialist mode, and that’s a very dangerous sign. It is well within the realm of possibilities that Trump’s provocations could lead to a war of expansion in the Western Hemisphere, not unlike what Putin has done in Ukraine.

Here is a warning about this “first 100 days” framework. It is a media construct that Trump and his people play along with because it’s a Washington convention that they don’t hate. But Trump and his people have no intention of slowing down after the first 100 days. I understand that Trump is currently demanding that his staff keep bringing him more executive orders every day because he finds handing down diktats from on high so gratifying.

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I’ve also noticed that Trump’s own religious rhetoric (something I try to track pretty closely) has been ratcheting up. He’s constantly referencing the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, and he talks about it with a constant refrain of “God saved me to make America great again.” In doing that, he’s playing off of many of the evangelical sentiments and literal prophecies about him that have built this quasi-messianic spiritual ethos around him. Go and read his Easter proclamation or listen to his remarks during the White House Easter Egg Roll, and you’ll hear him communicating in a religious register that was not present in the first term. He seems intent on keeping the hard-right Christian coalition on his side, because they are his most diehard supporters. I expect we’ll see him continue to ramp this up, blending church and state in ways we haven’t seen in American history.

At some point, I expect we will see widespread protests in the streets as Trump continues to bare his authoritarian fangs. At some point, I expect he will defy a Supreme Court order or precipitate another constitutional crisis, because that’s just how his personality is bent. What happens then?

Federico Finchelstein is a professor of history at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York. His most recent book is "A Brief History of Fascist Lies."

I don’t feel surprised at all about this clear authoritarian direction of this new, even more radical and vulgar form of Trumpism. No more “adults” in the room. On a personal note, as a citizen, it is depressing to see (and yet not surprising) that American society, and many of its media and politics seemed to be numbed or accommodating. In other words, many are normalizing what is not normal at all.

Trump’s return to the White House is not surprising, but it is shocking. It has been so easy for a disruptor in chief with fascist ambitions, messianic leadership and outdated and highly ideological economic whims and practices to deform and attack the most basic principles of democracy. The result is the expected path from right-wing populism to authoritarianism and fascism that we are witnessing, but this, of course, can be stopped.

Citizens need to prepare for more forceful attacks on their rights, namely on democracy, and they need to defend their principles via electoral decisions, peaceful protests, and support for universities and independent media sources.

The fact that Trump wants unlimited power does not mean he will win. This is not a sprint, but Trump would like it to be. It depends on the American people to pause and delay these anti-democratic attempts.