With the U.S. Pitching Into Open Authoritarianism, Strategizing Trump and the GOP's Defeat is Essential
Despite their bluster and real danger, Trump and MAGA have glaring weaknesses that opponents should exploit relentlessly
For all who believe in American democracy, the overriding goal in our politics is to stop and reverse what has, over the last seven months, been an accelerating slide into authoritarian rule. Under this Republican authoritarianism, democratic accountability, the rule of law, and the underpinnings of a free and open society have come under sustained and damaging assault. It is clear, both from his words and actions, that Donald Trump views himself as a dictator, and is treating the American government and the American people accordingly. All the while, Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court have assented to his abuses of power.
In a stomach-churning essay at his Doomsday Scenario blog, journalist Garrett Graff assesses that the U.S. has, in the last week or so, passed through a nebulous line into clear authoritarian rule. He brings multiple ominous developments together in a single, devastating indictment: troop deployments to U.S. cities; abductions by masked agents of the state; government stakes in private businesses as the fruit of extortion; business leaders competing to show loyalty to the president; the purging of government agencies of competent bureaucrats and their replacement with regime loyalists; and an unprecedented effort for government control over our history and culture.
Taking full stock of our situation can feel nauseating, even overwhelming; yet without first grasping the entirety of the assault that MAGA is mounting against our country, we won’t be able to engage in the types of politics or formulate the strategies adequate to save our democracy and our freedoms. In this spirit, I strongly encourage everyone to read Graff’s piece.
But, somewhat paradoxically, full consideration of our danger can lead to a second, more optimistic conclusion: that many of the things MAGA and Trump are doing to endanger America carry the seeds of this movement’s demise; that this president is not nearly as strong as he tries to look; that in seeking to impose a form of government on America fundamentally alien to our traditions, the Republican Party has set itself up for a dire reckoning at the hands of a determined opposition. A basic truth of our political crisis is that Trump and MAGA would not be moving to demolish our democracy if they had anything like majority support for how they wish to rule the country. At the most basic level, their antipathy to democracy marks them as losers in the only form of government that anyone in the U.S. is obligated to consider as legitimate.
In short: Trump and MAGA are far from unstoppable (a point Graff has made, and which is implicit in his argument that authoritarianism arrives by degrees, not all at once), but this will require that we truly understand what we’re up against, and what it would really mean to stop it. In commemoration of the grim milestone Graff notes, what follows are some suggestions for taking aim at the heart of the threat we face, exploiting its vulnerabilities, and laying the groundwork for revived American democracy that can stand strong against any future movements to end it. This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide, but rather an attempt to highlight some big-picture perspectives that are top of mind right now as I continue to mull over Graff’s piece. (For previous articles that delve into strategies fully neglected or only highlighted here, please check out my writing at The Hot Screen or Flux, including these particular pieces.)
We Need to Defeat Trump’s Dictatorship, But Also the Reactionary Movement That Put Him in Power
First, Trump’s open attempts to make himself into a dictator, while frightening, are simply antithetical to most Americans’ core understanding of this country. “No kings” isn’t just an organizing meme, it’s in the DNA of our (for the moment) discarded Constitution; it’s in our basic understanding of what this country is about. And while this understanding may be a bit rusty, it stands ready for full excavation and deployment in our collective defense. It’s worth noting that Trump himself is increasingly bringing up the dictator label, for example suggesting that lots of Americans want one; and just this week, speaking about deploying the National Guard to Chicago, he asserted that, “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States.” Indicting Trump as a want-to-be dictator alerts the public to the danger we’re in, even as it highlights how alien his ambitions are to commonly-held understandings of American government.
While defeating President Trump’s centralization of power is essential to any revival and restoration of American democracy — including blocking him from remaining in office after his four-year term — this success alone would be insufficient. The notion that we are dealing with an American president who holds authoritarian power due to the cowardly obeisance of other GOP politicians is a point that Graff makes, but I have to break with him on this point. We need to bear in mind that those politicians are hardly passive victims in this American nightmare. Rather, most of them actively support Trump’s power grab — and the right-wing policy and cultural goals his power would presumptively given him. He is their instrument of power far more than their oppressor. Defeating MAGA will necessarily involve inflicting massive electoral defeats on his elected enablers.
Moreover, neither Trump nor many of these politicians would be in power today if they didn’t have the backing of tens of millions of hard-right MAGA voters who have congealed into a mass reactionary movement — a movement that, in the words of historian Thomas Zimmer, seeks “to restore white male domination in all spheres of life and recenter the social and political order around strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion and wealth.” To be blunt, these millions have decided that they’d rather have power, even via dictatorship, than continue living in a democracy that lets their alleged enemies hold power. Limiting the damage Trump does, and electing an opponent of MAGA in 2028, should not be confused with defeating the larger movement that currently empowers him.
This Is Inevitably a Culture Fight, and Opponents Should Hit MAGA on Multiple Fronts
This means that any restoration of democracy and an egalitarian, open society will require direct engagement with, and refutation of, the retrograde worldview that fuels the right in this country. Opponents of MAGA need to get back to basics, down to the very studs and floorboards of our bedrock, collective understandings of our government and our world, if we are to build a sustainable and dominant majority dedicated to liberal democracy. I suppose the shorter version of this is that anti-MAGA Americans damned well need to engage in and win what too many dismiss as secondary culture war fights. They need to open up explicit discussions about how citizens think about their place in society and how they construct meaning. For instance, Democrats shouldn’t just be fighting to restore the right to abortion and reproductive freedom; rather, this fight should be anchored in a larger assertion of female equality, bodily autonomy, and the broader meaning of a free society. This is not to say that Democrats and other should fight authoritarian bullets with Ph.D. dissertations; but it is to say that they need to engage the rancid ideas propelling such violence with common sense appeals to our shared humanity, inherent dignity, and unquestionable equality — all while anchoring these ideas in their real-world implications.
While we’re ultimately talking about a political struggle when we talk about defeating Trump and MAGA, there are huge vulnerabilities for MAGA that are either partially or not directly political. Personally, I think RFK, Jr.’s war on vaccines and medical science more generally from his perch at the Department of Health and Human Services should be understood as an imminent threat to the lives of thousands, if not millions, of Americans. Trump and Republicans may be waging war on democracy, but they’re also waging war on our ability to simply be alive. Similarly, the wrecking ball that the president has taken to the economy via tariffs, along with efforts to control the Federal Reserve and to subvert basic data about jobs and so much more, are easily grasped as destructive and self-serving. And though Americans’ attitudes towards health and the economy have certainly been politicized, they are also realms where it’s possible to break through both to middle-of-the-road and even some Republican voters. Opponents need to hit hard on such important areas where public opinions is already largely on their side, and where Trump’s actions so clearly endanger life, limb, and livelihood.
The Goal Should Not Just Be to Beat Trump and MAGA, But to Discredit and Delegitimize Them
Opponents will not be able to beat Trump and the authoritarian GOP through half-measures, playing defense, or downplaying the full-spectrum threat we face. We cannot treat Republicans any longer as a democratic political party; we cannot treat Trump like a normal politician. Above all else, remember this: the last time Trump lost an election, he staged an insurrection to overturn his defeat. And now that he’s back in office, he’s working hard to ensure he can stay in power as long as he wishes, while doing whatever he wants, deploying the power of the state against his opponents in thoroughly illegal and anti-democratic ways. We can’t simply rely on Democrats re-gaining Congress in 2026 to serve as our salvation; the damage is too rapid, too severe, and we certainly can’t behave as if we will survive intact through an entire four-year presidency.
So although it may seem impossible now, Democrats and others must act with an assertiveness that contemplates the possibility of driving Trump from office before his term ends. And as I suggested in the paragraph above, it also means working to discredit and delegitimize Trump and the larger Republican Party based on their assault to date and their clear intentions for further authoritarian escalation. The goal should be to drive the current Republican Party from power for a generation or more. This may sound wild, but the alternative — living indefinitely under lawless authoritarianism — should strike most people as wilder still.
Opponents of Trump and MAGA Must Find Ways to Use Their Lawlessness Against Them
This means, perhaps above all else, that many of the assumptions under which American politics have long operated no longer obtain. In particular, in an environment in which the rule of law has been nullified (but where most people don’t realize it yet), opponents must internalize that they are deeply reliant on deploying Trump’s and Republicans’ lawlessness as a weapon against them. While we should still fight along legal avenues to stop what we can, we cannot rely on this as anything but an extremely limited solution, and must do so as much with an eye to establishing a public record of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable, that leaves the president and MAGA clearly on the wrong side. Similarly, should the GOP attempt to subvert the 2026 midterms, Democrats need to find ways to communicate the illegitimacy of an election stolen by the GOP. They cannot allow Republicans to use a hollowed-out democracy to pretend they have the consent of the governed. Just as no one has the right to ask Americans to consent to be ruled while pointing a gun at them, no one has the right to ask Americans to agree to their own disempowerment via a rigged election, or to pretend that it’s their free choice.
Picking up a point made above: given the GOP’s trifecta of power in Washington, Democrats need to find ways to use Republicans’ exercise of power against them. Practically speaking, this means that a central front will be getting the word out to ordinary citizens, which means rapidly working to rectify the major media imbalance between the GOP and the right, on the one hand, and Democrats and progressives, on the other. But on a substantive level, it means highlighting abuses of power and threats to the citizenry that will help rouse and anger millions of Americans into political action. As ICE agents abuse unarmed and unresisting immigrants in pursuit of Trump’s racial purification project, video of such arrests should be disseminated widely to alert the public to what’s being done in their name; ditto for abuses of actual citizens. As Trump tries to look powerful by ginning up false charges against political opponents, both the public and politicians need to stand in solidarity with those so targeted. As Republicans strip millions of Americans of Obamacare subsidies, opponents need to remind citizens of who preferred to give tax cuts to a handful of billionaires rather than healthcare to millions.
Defiance Should Be the Order of the Day — Nothing But Democracy Has Legitimacy in this Land
Finally, a general posture of defiance should guide the pro-democracy majority. We are not the “resistance 2.0” — we’re the sovereign people whose right to self-rule is under attack by anti-democratic forces whose claim to rule is fundamentally illegitimate. Our situation is increasingly similar to one in which the U.S. had somehow been invaded and occupied by a foreign power; while the occupiers might pretend to have the authority to rule, it would be rooted in force and lies, rather than the requisite ground of constitutionality, democracy, and the rule of law. That those forces hold major levers of power that allow them to abuse the citizenry does not magically make their actions legitimate; rather, it makes them insurrectionists exercising illicit power against the U.S. constitution and its citizenry as they attempt to transform our government into a monstrosity clearly proscribed by our founding documents.
And though this might seem a minor point, I would guess that it will grow more salient in the coming months and years: What the authoritarian GOP is doing to the country isn’t just an offense against the pro-democracy majority, it’s an offense against many or even most Republican voters as well, even if the latter don’t (yet) think so. While some MAGA rank-and-file may gain an emotional payoff from seeing their enemies (i.e., fellow citizens) dominated by troops in blue cities and stolen elections, Trump and his allies have set the U.S. on a course that will diminish us all, regardless of party affiliation. As increasing numbers of Trump voters are learning to their chagrin, electing Trump is not automatically resulting in better jobs or better lives for them, let alone anything like true empowerment. Rather, they have stumbled into the authoritarian trade, wherein they surrender their political agency in exchange for false promises from their leader. Call it a con or call it a dictatorship, but it’s not an arrangement that ever benefits more than a handful of grifters at the top of the pyramid.