{"id":302570,"date":"2025-09-08T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=302570"},"modified":"2025-09-05T23:26:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T22:26:31","slug":"trump-tyranny-and-the-need-for-a-peoples-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/09\/trump-tyranny-and-the-need-for-a-peoples-program\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump, Tyranny, and the Need for a People\u2019s Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is Donald Trump a tyrant?\u00a0 A dictator or would-be dictator?\u00a0 Lots of anti-Trump politicians and commentators think so.\u00a0 Minnesota governor Tim Waltz believes that the epithet is warranted, as do Senators Padilla of California and Merkley of Oregon, CNN anchor Jim Acosta, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, and bloggers too numerous to mention.\u00a0 Former Veep and presidential candidate Kamala Harris labeled her opponent a \u201cfascist\u201d and \u201cwannabe dictator.\u201d \u00a0And 34 out of 35 legal scholars responding to a recent New York Times survey agreed that the current U.S. president is a \u201clawless authoritarian.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 (https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/28\/opinion\/trump-constitution-rule-of-law.html<\/a>)<\/p>\n

This language raises a tricky question: are we meant to take it literally, or is it a form of partisan hyperbole, as when Trump calls ordinary Democrats \u201cradical leftists\u201d or describes media reports that he doesn\u2019t like as \u201cfake news\u201d?\u00a0 The answer may seem obvious, at least to MAGA opponents.\u00a0 At this moment in my own city, masked ICE-men are seizing and detaining undocumented immigrants who work to support their families and have no criminal records, while uniformed National Guards arrest D.C. citizens, mostly young and non-white, for driving a car with a broken taillight or smoking a joint on the corner.\u00a0 The anthropologist James B. Greenberg calls this sort of thing nascent fascism and notes the following signs:<\/p>\n

Emergency powers used against protest. Justice Department prosecutions aimed at political opponents. Detention camps expanded inland. National Guard deployments ordered against demonstrations. Parallel courts\u2014immigration tribunals or military panels\u2014used to sidestep ordinary law. These are not abstractions. They have been proposed, rehearsed, and in some cases already carried out. (https:\/\/jamesbgreenberg.substack.com\/p\/forgetting-fascism-trump-orban-and?utm_<\/a> )<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Prof. Greenberg concludes that Trump \u201cis moving steadily toward a dictatorship, one built less on consent and more on fear and force.\u201d\u00a0 But I believe that the matter is more complex than this . . . and, more important, that branding him a would-be Hitler or Stalin does not generate a movement that can defeat him. \u00a0Although this president does<\/em> have tyrannical tendencies and has abused his powers, he is far from being a dictator, and there is nothing inevitable about his becoming one.\u00a0 The great question is how to end his political career and smash the MAGA movement, and focusing on his alleged dictatorial intentions does not produce a viable strategy for doing this.<\/p>\n

Resisting MAGA policies in the courts and in the streets is necessary and admirable, to be sure, but what Democrats and other Trump opponents desperately need to do is to catalyze a social movement that can put MAGA and the Trumpers out of business once and for all.\u00a0 To do this requires more than accusations of dictatorship, lawsuits, and street demonstrations. \u00a0It requires an inspiring ideology, problem-solving programs, and charismatic leaders \u2013 three essentials that the Democratic opposition currently painfully lacks.<\/p>\n

Trump the tyrant: the use and misuse of historical analogies<\/strong><\/p>\n

If Donald Trump is a genuine tyrant or is determined to become one, we should probably not be talking openly about trying to defeat him in the next election.\u00a0 We should be working to depose him \u201cby any means necessary,\u201d as Malcolm X used to say.\u00a0 But no one who brands the president a tyrant dares to breathe the word tyrannicide or talk about violent resistance.\u00a0 This reticence, it seems to me, is not just a result of fear that uttering such words could get the utterer arrested, it also reflects the fact that applied to a leader like Trump, terms like tyrant, dictator, and fascist belong to a category somewhere in the middle ground between literalism and hyperbole, something like calling abortion \u201cchild murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

These charges also involve a fear that the president\u2019s ideas and behaviors, if extended to other groups and made permanent, could come to resemble those of despotic leaders like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. \u00a0This fear, it seems to me, is not ungrounded.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s narrow ethno-nationalism, love of coercive power, and disregard for legal limitations give us plenty to worry about.\u00a0 Even so, our own history suggests that in some ways the concern is overblown and misleading.<\/p>\n

Consider another historical analogy: that between Donald Trump and Franklin D. Roosevelt.\u00a0 Of course, in terms of ideology the leaders of the MAGA movement and of the New Deal are diametric opposites \u2013 but certain structural similarities are striking.\u00a0 Recall F.D.R.\u2019s enemies.\u00a0 Responding to the president\u2019s unprecedented expansion of executive power and his charismatic appeal, a wide array of adversaries, from U.S. senators and Wall Street financiers to the publisher William Randolph Hearst and the \u201cradio priest\u201d Fr. Charles Coughlin, branded him a would-be dictator, as well as a socialist and communist.\u00a0 While he was none of those things, there were reasons for opponents to worry that he might be.\u00a0 Elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, F.D.R. quickly became the most powerful president in U.S. history \u2013 a charismatic innovator who vastly increased the size and authority of the executive branch , created a panoply of federal agencies, persuaded or intimidated judges to uphold his regulatory schemes, mobilized popular support among workers and farmers, and used new media (especially radio) to establish a personal bond with his followers.<\/p>\n

In the end, Roosevelt ran for unprecedented third and fourth terms of office (another violation of established norms) and led the nation into and through World War II.\u00a0 The fear that he might become a dictator dissipated over time, in part because of his and his wife Eleanor\u2019s demonstrated faith in democracy, and in part because he had to negotiate constantly with powerful popular organizations such as labor and farm unions, immigrant associations, urban machines, regional interests, and industrial groups. \u00a0Even so, to many critics there seemed little difference between his enormous discretionary power and that of the fascist and communist leaders then taking over many other nations.<\/p>\n

Now recall Steve Bannon\u2019s remark in 2016 that if Trump played his cards right, he could become \u201cthe Roosevelt of the Right.\u201d\u00a0 Twenty-first century USA was not much like in the 1930\u2019s, when there was a genuine national emergency (the Great Depression) and the Democrats firmly controlled both houses of Congress.\u00a0 Even so, in 2016 there was serious discontent among working people over a host of economic and cultural issues, and Bannon\u2019s idea was to convince Trump to play the role of the anti-<\/em>Roosevelt. \u00a0That is, he was to use the expansive power of what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the \u201cimperial presidency\u201d to direct mass anger against the administrative state originally created by the New Deal.<\/p>\n

Over the next eight years, Bannon\u2019s idea was picked up and developed by a phalanx of right-wing intellectuals and activists such as John Marini, Russell Vought, and Christopher Rufo, many of them connected with the Heritage Foundation. \u00a0Trump\u2019s ideological mandate was to \u201cdeconstruct\u201d the administrative state, privatize government services, deregulate industry, cut taxes, alter the terms of international trade, and disempower ideological opponents in the professions, the media, and the universities.\u00a0 Like Roosevelt, he claimed to be acting on behalf of the common man against the elite.\u00a0 But in Trump\u2019s case the enemy targeted was not he capitalist oligarchs whose hatred F.D.R. said he \u201cwelcomed,\u201d but the government officials, public service workers, professionals, and intellectuals branded a cultural (\u201cwoke\u201d) elite.\u00a0 This division of working people into \u201coppressed\u201d and \u201celite\u201d groups based on their education levels and cultural preferences was the key to creating a mass-based MAGA movement.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s first term in office was experimental, amateurish, and dominated by the COVID-19 plague.\u00a0 It took him until his second term to do a convincing, if perverse imitation of Roosevelt\u2019s First Hundred Days.\u00a0 Beginning in January 2025, he proclaimed and enacted a series of shockingly new policies in a blizzard of laws and executive orders.\u00a0 Roosevelt had his \u201cBrain Trust\u201d of left-leaning economists and social engineers; Trump had the Far Right\u2019s Project 2025 and Elon Musk\u2019s DOGE.\u00a0 Even though the MAGA mission was to undo government regulation and cancel progressive social attitudes, the Roosevelt analogy suggests two insights often overlooked by anti-Trump forces:<\/p>\n

(1)\u00a0 To MAGA followers, executive actions that anti-Trump forces call tyrannical are simply innovative responses to the wishes of an electoral majority.\u00a0 Yes, these actions do alter established norms of political behavior.\u00a0 They often seem hasty, improvised, and experimental \u2013 or, as critics declare, ruthless, reckless, and inhumane.\u00a0 But what happens when a movement with a serious program for change takes power is . . . it changes things!\u00a0 The fact that New Deal helped millions of ordinary people to survive and prosper, while the MAGA program subjects them to domination by a ruthless, selfish oligarchy makes Trump a misleader who must be opposed and defeated.\u00a0 It does not make him more of a \u201ctyrant\u201d than Franklin Roosevelt.<\/p>\n

(2)\u00a0 Like Roosevelt, Trump is much more than a lone wolf with charisma.\u00a0 F.D.R. led the New Deal: a social movement supported by vast numbers of workers and middle-class people across the nation.\u00a0 Despite his slavish devotion to the oligarchy, so does Trump.\u00a0 Opponents who focus exclusively on his charismatic appeal and taste for personal power forget that while the Democratic Party remains a collection of competing interest groups and ideological sects, MAGA is a relatively coherent, highly motivated mass movement.\u00a0 One can describe its ideology with much justification as ultra-nationalist, semi-theocratic, implicitly racist, and even fascistic (in the Mussolini \u201ccorporatist\u201d style).\u00a0 But Democrats will not defeat a genuine social movement, no matter how obnoxious it is, by calling its leader a tyrant, cult leader, or threat to democracy.\u00a0 It takes a movement to defeat a movement.<\/p>\n

What does it mean to \u201cresist\u201d Trump?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what will not<\/em> work as a strategy to defeat Donald Trump \u2013 repeated complaints about his authoritarianism, and countervailing promises to \u201csave democracy.\u201d\u00a0 It may or may not make sense to call Trump a tyrant, but trying to oust him because he is a disturber of the Constitutional peace repeats the losing electoral strategies of 2016 and 2024, when the Democrats presented themselves as the party of respectability and tradition \u2013 that is, as supporters of a vanishing status quo.\u00a0 This is not how you get rid of a maleficent innovator like Trump or a regressive popular movement like MAGA.<\/p>\n

People support a political leader for many reasons, but three motives are particularly important:<\/p>\n

(1) They think the leader understands their grievances and will solve their problems.<\/p>\n

(2) They identify with the leader personally and feel that he or she speaks for them.<\/p>\n

(3) They recognize the leader as the chief of a movement they believe in and belong to.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Promising to restore threatened political norms like states\u2019 rights with regard to public order or the separation of federal powers does not respond to any of these reasons and is not a recipe for electoral success.\u00a0 In fact, a quick look at the three vote-motivators reveals why the Democrats find themselves up the political creek without a paddle.<\/p>\n

\u00a0They think the leader will solve their problems<\/strong>. <\/em>\u00a0Trump\u2019s great advantage at present is that he and the MAGA Republicans have an innovative, semi-coherent program that purports to solve a wide variety of social and cultural problems, and they are vigorously implementing it.\u00a0 Never mind that the problems are poorly defined, the solutions won\u2019t work, and the implementation is sloppy and cruel.\u00a0 There is<\/em> a program, much of it described in Project 2025, and there is<\/em> implementation, much if it in the form of executive orders and the misnamed \u201cBig Beautiful Budget\u201d law.<\/p>\n

The next six to twelve months will reveal the consequences of adopting MAGA views on issues ranging from immigration, crime, cultural nationalism, and government services to tariffs, taxes, military expenses, energy policy, and foreign aid.\u00a0 Meanwhile, if you ask Democrats to describe their problem-solving policies on any of these issues, many are likely to respond that Trump is exaggerating the nation\u2019s problems, or that Joe Biden\u2019s proposed solutions are still valid.<\/p>\n

The embarrassing truth is that there is no coherent \u201cprogressive\u201d program to speak of \u2013 no equivalent of Project 2025 \u2013 because to challenge the status quo from the Left as MAGA intellectuals have done from the Right would involve talking about topics that most Democratic chiefs consider taboo. \u00a0Shouldn\u2019t oligarchs be prevented from using massive campaign contributions to buy elections?\u00a0 In fact, shouldn\u2019t there be a cap of some sort on their wealth and incomes? (Too \u201cdivisive\u201d). \u00a0Couldn\u2019t economic planning be used to guarantee wage levels and develop a rational, pro-labor immigration policy? \u00a0(Too \u201csocialist\u201d). \u00a0How about a Marshall Plan-style development program to end deep poverty and reduce urban and rural crime rates? \u00a0(Too \u201cGreat Society\u201d). \u00a0What about slashing the trillion-dollar military budget (too \u201cunAmerican\u201d) and using taxpayer funds to finance a shift from fossil fuels to green industries without sacrificing jobs? (Too \u201cwoke\u201d).<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know the answers to such questions \u2013 but I\u2019m certain that if they are not asked and discussed, the boundaries of US political thinking will continue to be defined by the MAGA pundits.\u00a0 We need a program radical enough to solve systemic problems and common-sensible enough to command mass support.\u00a0 In New York, Zohran Mamdani\u2019s mayoral campaign is pointing in the right direction, but practical reform ideas like his must be deepened and developed with other constituencies and systemic problems in mind.<\/p>\n

They identify with the leader personally<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 <\/em>This identification involves the leader\u2019s charisma \u2013 a form of authority originally described by the sociologist Max Weber as based on someone\u2019s personal characteristics rather than his\/her office and as a force used to transform traditional norms of thinking and behavior.\u00a0 Charisma isn\u2019t a form of magical or hypnotic compulsion that somehow gets people to believe what they formerly considered a lie or to do what they don\u2019t want to do.\u00a0 On the contrary, it describes a relationship in which people feel that a political or religious figure is expressing their own deep fears, hopes, and ambitions and \u201crepresenting\u201d them in a direct, personal way.<\/p>\n

As Trump\u2019s rise shows, charismatic leaders don\u2019t have to live exemplary lives according to conventional moral standards.\u00a0 Most of them have been rebels of one sort or another and have had checkered careers.\u00a0 They do have to exhibit a willingness to challenge traditional taboos and \u201cwalk the talk\u201d politically \u2013 to run personal risks and make sacrifices to realize some intensely held vision of change.\u00a0 From this perspective, perhaps the luckiest things to have happened to Trump were to be accused of being a Russian agent after his win in 2016, then to be prosecuted for questionable crimes, and, finally, to be almost assassinated before the 2024 election. \u00a0He really does seem to believe that God saved him from the would-be assassin to permit him to fulfill his vision of change (which includes punishing those who earlier \u201cpersecuted\u201d him).\u00a0 Trump\u2019s followers may or may not share his theology, but they clearly appreciate \u2013 almost worshipfully \u2013 his all-consuming dedication to his cause.<\/p>\n

Charisma, in short, does not mean being likeable, making a good speech, or acting like the CEO of a successful corporation.\u00a0 It means convincing large numbers of aggrieved people to follow one\u2019s lead in making risky, controversial changes.\u00a0 Rather than being purely personal, the charismatic leader\u2019s appeal is based on the connection between his\/her personality and program.\u00a0 Any number of Democratic politicians have appealing personalities and can make a good speech, but what has been missing for a long time in that party is the sort of substantive charisma represented by a figure like F.D.R. \u2013 or, more recently, by the first Bobby Kennedy. \u00a0We will have to see if the Democrats can field such a candidate in time to save the nation from J.D. Vance in 2028.<\/p>\n

They recognize the leader as the chief of a movement they believe in and belong to.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>The need for a social movement to counter MAGA brings us directly to the question of resistance.\u00a0 When anti-Trumpers talk about opposing Trump\u2019s multifarious \u201cintrusive\u201d policies, they generally have two strategies in mind: taking the administration to court to get these policies declared illegal, and mounting street demonstrations or taking nonviolent actions against them.\u00a0 Both strategies are clearly justifiable and are useful within certain limits. \u00a0They publicize and obstruct this regime\u2019s propensity to commit cruel, divisive, coercive acts of dubious legality. \u00a0They expand the political field beyond lobbying and elections. \u00a0And they bring MAGA\u2019s opponents together in common activities.\u00a0 But defining resistance primarily as anti-regime activity of either the legal or nonviolent action type, or as a combination of lawsuits and demonstrations, seems to me a serious mistake.<\/p>\n

People are not going to turn away from Trump because he is a lawbreaker or an embryonic tyrant.\u00a0 Resisting him effectively means offering them an alternative to MAGA.<\/p>\n

The MAGA movement exists because a great many North Americans are aggrieved and believe that the promises of U.S. systems of politics, economics, and culture have not been realized.\u00a0 In two presidential elections many working people turned to Trump and his cohorts for help because the Democrats didn\u2019t seem to take their grievances very seriously and had no credible program to address them.\u00a0 This failure, in turn, reflected the fact that the party had been \u201chollowed out,\u201d as Philip Rocco maintains (https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2025\/08\/democrats-ngos-jeffries-schumer-dealignment<\/a>). \u00a0The Democratic Party had become a collection of interest groups and nonprofit associations allied with oligarchical interests, and had very little to say about systemic issues such as deindustrialization, wage stagnation, deep poverty, drug addiction, unaffordable homes, family instability, and host of other ills afflicting ordinary people in both cities and rural areas.\u00a0 So, MAGA prophets appeared, dreaming of a past (largely fictitious) golden era when the Land of Opportunity seemed capable of solving all these problems, and offering an ideology, a program, and a leader that promised to revive and realize that dream.<\/p>\n

The bottom line: MAGA will not be countered by lawsuits and demonstrations alone.\u00a0 To vanquish it will mean offering US citizens a better ideology, program, and leadership than anything manufactured by Donald Trump and his Far Right backers.<\/p>\n