Rebecca Solnit
Cheering (for us, not them).
Garrett Graff writes: Trump may want to be a dictator and emulate Franco and Orban, and — who knows — maybe the ridiculous White House ballroom he’s building is an indication he doesn’t plan to leave peacefully on January 20, 2029, but time tells us that he’s never going to be Franco, the dictator who reigned in Spain from 1939 until 1975. The reality is Donald Trump is 79 and not well — and probably less well than the media is willing to dig into — and his reign as president and America’s would-be king will be measured in years, not decades.
Whenever and however Donald Trump exits the stage, there just isn’t anyone who will step into the MAGA movement’s shoes — there are plenty of people who will try, from JD Vance to Marco Rubio to Ron DeSantis to Don Jr. to Ted Cruz, but the thing we’ve seen over and over across the last decade is that no one is Donald Trump. Vice President JD Vance, an incredibly awkward and unfunny Trump-lite who is widely despised by both sides, is most certainly not Donald Trump.
Trump has built in MAGA not a movement but a personality cult — a fragile coalition of anti-government extremists, white nationalists, conspiracists, disaffected people hurt by globalization, and a lot of low-information voters whose brains have been fried by right-wing media and social media algorithms.
Post-Trump, the MAGA cult will likely splinter and fracture into bitter power-hungry factions, many of which will be terrified about their own culpability to criminal, civil, or other public accountability. That fragile coalition is unlikely to survive months past Trump himself — and if and when that collapse happens, the reality of #1 (“there are more of us than of them”), powered by the history and mission of #2 (“the dream of America is a country that gets more just and more free”), will have an important opening and opportunity.
[elsewhere in the piece] Many days it seems like Trump is on an unstoppable roll; he’s not. He is historically unpopular. The percent of Americans saying the country is on “the wrong track” has hit a new high. The increasingly unhinged Republican taking points are losing the public opinion battle in the government shutdown. Democrats are overperforming in countless contests this year and are looking strong in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races for next month. ABC had to cave on letting Jimmy Kimmel come back to the air. Many of Trump’s actions are getting turned back by the courts; even Harvard has gotten most of its federal funding back. Democratic governors and states are having success turning back some of Trump’s excesses and organizing around the federal government. And the costume-heavy protests outside ICE facilities in Oregon, Chicago, and elsewhere are helping to display the absurdity of the administration’s attempted crackdowns.
More of “Official America” would do well to recognize that Trump’s actions stem more from weakness than strength. As G. Elliott Morris, one of the only prognosticators of public opinion I bother to listen to anymore, argues, “A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is.” Greg Sargent wrote yesterday, “ICE's military raids and masked kidnappings are resonating deeply/negatively in the cultural spaces we keep hearing Dems need to reach: Manosphere, Joe Rogan, country music, disengaged voters. That’s rare and it gives Dems a big opening to engage.”
Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the other corrupt cronies and would-be fascists of this administration are in many ways racing the clock. As Paul Krugman wrote last month, “Trump is nakedly following the playbook of autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. As his poll numbers fall, he is rushing to lock in permanent power by punishing his opponents and intimidating everyone else into submission… Yet Trump has a significant problem that neither Putin nor Orban faced. When Putin and Orban were consolidating their autocracies, they were genuinely popular. They were perceived by the public as effective and competent leaders. Just nine months into his presidency, Trump, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. He is increasingly seen as chaotic and inept.”
[Three Reasons I Still Have Hope for America]