This is how we beat Trump

A clarifying few days in the fight against fascism

It has been a good news, bad news kind of week for America.

The bad news, of course, is that Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States is entering a new stage of what can only be described (or at least accurately described) as outright fascism. To name just a few developments:

• Trump sent the U.S. military to occupy Los Angeles, where Marines arrested a civilian — an act that is explicitly illegal for U.S. troops to do on American soil.

• A Democratic Congresswoman, LaMonica McIver, was indicted by Trump’s DOJ on utterly specious charges for attempting to visit an ICE detention center.

• A Democratic Senator, Alex Padilla, was forcefully manhandled and placed in handcuffs by Trump’s DHS goons for asking Kristi Noem a question.

• In Minnesota, where Democrats hold (or maybe now held) a one-seat majority in the state legislature, a MAGA extremist murdered a Democratic state representative — the beginnings of what was meant to be a spree of political assassinations, based on his shooting of another state senator and list of 70 additional Democratic targets.

• Perhaps even more chilling than the assassination itself was the right’s response, with MAGA leaders immediately launching an extreme disinformation campaign attempting to frame the shooter — who, according to his roommate, was a “strong Trump supporter” who listened to InfoWars and “would have been offended if people called him a Democrat” — as a leftist.

Let’s not sugarcoat it — this is scary, scary stuff.

And yet, as horrifying as it’s been to watch the MAGA machine swing into increasingly violent gear, this week also lit a spark of hope in me that’s stronger than anything I’ve felt in months.

First, of course, was No Kings. (Shoutout to members of the democracy team at my organization, Public Citizen, who’ve been going all out the last few weeks to support local rally organizers around the country.) With turnout estimates ranging from four to six million, this was almost certainly the largest single-day political protest in U.S. history. In fact, the numbers from No Kings begin to approach the ballpark of the “3.5% rule” — the principle, proposed by social scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, that once a national protest movement engages 3.5% of a country’s population, it becomes increasingly likely to achieve its political goals.

Personally, I got to experience No Kings from a new (for me) perspective. I usually participate in these nationwide protests in Providence, where I live, but for Father’s Day we took a weekend trip to a tiny town in Vermont. Despite having a population of just a few hundred people, at least 150 demonstrators came out to Saturday’s rally, which converged on the town’s single traffic light. (Here you can see my four-year-old son, Asa, showing these nice Vermonters how we belt out our chants in Rhode Island.)

Of course, No Kings also occurred in the aftermath of a week of demonstrations against Trump’s ICE raids in Los Angeles, and the solidarity protests they inspired all across the country.

Looking at these events together, we can now say quite confidently that the resistance to Trump is back to full strength. In fact, the movement may actually be more robust now than it has ever been — we are certainly seeing more protests this year than we had at this point in Trump’s first term.

But it’s not just the renewed vigor of our resistance that’s giving me hope — it’s also the fact that we can increasingly observe some real, hard evidence of its efficacy.

By many accounts, this week saw Trump’s approval sink to its lowest yet this term. A Quinnipiac poll released on June 11th found Trump sitting at a dismal 38-54 approval rating. Perhaps most striking, the poll found Trump with a nine-point net disapproval on his handling of immigration, which has generally been one of his strongest issues. And Quinnipiac wasn’t just an outlier. Trump is now underwater on immigration in poll aggregations, following a six-point drop in the last week — based, presumably, on the L.A. protests and Trump’s dictatorial response to them.

It’s worth noting on the graph above that Trump’s immigration numbers dipped once before, following Senator Chris Van Hollen’s mid-April trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The cause-and-effect political analysis for this pattern isn’t complicated. Trump’s explicitly unconstitutional deportation of Abrego Garcia was an act of cruelty and lawlessness that most Americans would disapprove of — if they were forced to reckon with it. Rather than let this clearly fascistic move slide by unchallenged, Van Hollen took a simple, courageous stand, setting off a media firestorm that greatly raised the salience of this story for the public and, as a result, significantly impacted Trump’s popularity.

Now, I’m realizing I need to briefly correct myself here. Though I just said this isn’t complicated, what I should have said was, “The cause-and-effect political analysis for this pattern isn’t complicated if you have a functioning brain,” because it turns out that this is a difficult idea for many of the most confidently wrong voices in the Democratic establishment.

Take, for example, the WelcomeFest crowd — the latest Big Tech/Big Oil/AI/crypto-funded constellation of centrist organizations, pundits, and Democratic politicians that rallied together in a D.C. hotel basement last week to bash unions, complain about the left, and share with each other the worst possible political advice imaginable. Here’s a good encapsulation of their analysis, from a presentation given by Matt Yglesias arguing that “bad [i.e., progressive] groups create bad incentives for Democrats,” referring to the efforts by Van Hollen and others to bring attention to the Abrego Garcia case.

I really think this Yglesias slide provides a skeleton key for understanding almost all the rot that has settled into the core of the Democratic establishment — an establishment that has lost again and again and yet refuses to take any responsibility or seek any accountability for its massive failures. Because, as is so often the case among this crowd, Yglesias’ argument has it literally 180° backwards. And that’s not my progressive biases talking. This is a question we can determine empirically, and the objective facts here are as clear as they get. The efforts by Van Hollen and others to highlight the lawlessness of Abrego Garcia’s deportation worked; the public’s approval of Trump’s immigration program dropped while Democrats were working to bring attention to the Abrego Garcia case, and only began bouncing back once Democrats — at the urging of geniuses like Yglesias — gave up on this story.

I’m highlighting Yglesias here because the degree to which he’s smugly wrong is always so strikingly vivid. But this perspective — that public opinion is immutable, that an initially positive number for Trump requires Democrats to throw in the towel on the issue in question, and that taking strong stances and mobilizing the public around them is how we lose, rather than the only way we can win — is basically the consensus position of the “moderate” Democratic establishment. (By the way, I’m always going to put “moderate” in quotes, because claiming that it’s moderate to back forever wars, attack universal healthcare, support continued fossil fuel subsidies, oppose a living wage, let Wall Street and private equity run roughshod over working people, etc., is simply propaganda.)

In a recent Wall Street Journal article titled, “Democrats Are Wary of Playing Into Trump’s Hands by Supporting ‘No Kings,’ L.A. Protests,” Matt Bennett, co-founder of the billionaire-funded centrist think tank Third Way, summed up this establishment brainrot well when he said, “The dangers outweigh the potential upsides for Democrats and for Trump, which is not a contradiction. Trump could go too far; he always does. And the protests could also — and already kind of have — go sideways for us.”

I shared this graph already, but I’m going to repeat it here for emphasis. This is what, according to the Third Way crowd, going “sideways for us” looks like:

I’m going to end this post now with one more round of “good news, bad news.”

The good news — and it’s kind of phenomenal news that should give all of us a nice boost of renewed hope and clarity of purpose — is that we actually, at this point, have a pretty good template for how we can most effectively take on Trump.

That proven template is decidely not to assume that Trump will drag himself down if we passively “roll over and play dead,” as centrist Democratic power player James Carville called for Democrats to do, to disastrous effect, back in February. To the contrary, what has consistently worked best has been when Democrats have seized on the Trump regime’s authoritarian overreach to actively create iconic moments, images, stories, and press cycles that powerfully convey to the public the cruelty, horror, and lawlessness of MAGA despotism.

To illustrate this model, let’s return to an event I mentioned briefly at the top — the Padilla arrest. Though I included that story in the “things causing our existential dread to increase” roundup, to be clear, the image of DHS goons pushing a U.S. senator to the ground and cuffing his hands behind his back is not a good look for Trump; it is, in fact, exactly the kind of story that is likely contributing to his declining ratings. So it’s worth interrogating how this moment came about.

The confrontation with DHS did not just happen — this wasn’t a story of Padilla letting Kristi Noem hoist herself on her own petard while he rolled over and played dead. Padilla showed up to Noem’s press briefing. He took the fight to the regime, in person. He didn’t write a strongly worded letter or post a cute meme. He physically stood up for his constituents — something fascists seem unable to stop themselves from overreacting to — and in doing so, he created an iconic image that was able to “show, not tell” the story of this regime’s authoritarianism a million times more effectively than another lifeless Hill press conference in which Chuck Schumer speaks in boring generalities about the threat Trump represents.

So that’s the good news.

The bad news, of course, is that most of the dessicated husks that wield power within the Democratic Party are still very much on the Yglesias/WelcomeFest/Third Way/Carville wavelength.

I mean, Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of House Democrats, earlier this month answered a question about DHS goons detaining an aide to a Democratic Congressman like this: “In terms of how we will respond to what Trump and the administration has endeavored to do, we will make that decision in a time, place, and manner of our choosing. But the response will be continuous and it will meet the moment that is required.” When pressed with a follow-up — the anchor asked, somewhat incredulously, “What exactly does that mean, have you not decided how to respond?” — Jeffries could only manage: “In terms of additional things that may take place with respect to our congressional oversight, authority, and capacity, we will respond in a time, place, and manner of our choosing if this continues to happen.”

What can you even say about such an incredible feat of mealy-mouthed fecklessness? At this point, shit like this doesn’t even make me angry — it just terrifies me. Trump has a gestapo; we’ve got “additional things that may take place with respect to our congressional oversight, authority, and capacity if this continues to happen.”

This is why so many of us who care about defeating fascism see our work not just as taking on Trump. It’s also about clearing out the dead wood that caused the Democratic Party to lose to Trump in the first (and second) place, before we become irretrievably trapped once again in the failed strategies of the past.

For the British to effectively resist Hitler in World War II, they first had to replace Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement faction. For Democrats to defeat Trump today, we need to retire our party’s “roll over and play dead” faction. If we can do that, we can win this fight. The playbook is there — we just need a Democratic Party that’s willing to use it.

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P.S. Hi there! You’re receiving this message because I just started a Substack. (Yes, I looked at the flaming chaos swirling around us and thought to myself, “You know what our world needs right now? Another guy with a Substack.”) I added you to its initial email list because 1) you’re a family member or friend of mine, or 2) you supported a previous campaign of mine, which made me think you might be interested in seeing an occasional piece of political analysis from me.

If that was an erroneous assumption or I incorrectly filtered this list, I sincerely apologize for the mistake. All you have to do to unsubscribe is click here and I promise you’ll never receive another of these messages from me.

For everyone else, thanks for taking the time to read this piece! If we haven’t spoken in a while, a quick update: I’m now working as the director of the Climate Accountability Project at Public Citizen, where I lead a program advocating for the criminal prosecution of Big Oil companies for their climate crimes. I’ve also been doing more writing, particularly about the law, the climate crisis, and the failures of the Democratic Party establishment. I’m a contributing editor at The New Republic, and I’ve also been writing for The Nation, Rolling Stone, The Lever, Jacobin, Newsweek, Slate, Dissent, The Boston Globe, MSNBC, Ecology Law Quarterly, Environmental Law Journal, and The Harvard Environmental Law Review. But I’ve realized that now and then I have things I want to say without the shaving-off-the-hard-edges influence of an editor, which is why I’ve started this Substack.

So, thanks again for checking out my first post. I’m grateful to be in this fight alongside you.

P.P.S. If you know any friends who might enjoy a semi-regular dose of this kind of writing, I’d be grateful for any assistance sharing it around!

P.P.P.S. I wrote this post before the latest Trump saber-rattling — or I guess at this point it’s literal military mobilization — towards war with Iran. I’ll have more on this topic, but for now I’ll just say that in many ways this fits with the larger pattern described above: Trump doing something violent and scary, and Democratic leadership utterly failing to stand up against it.