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Donald Trump is vying to become a dictator just as the cracks in his rickety regime, and the grave deterioration of his own mind, are showing.
We are witnessing a split-screen moment: the aspiring autocrat has declared a rapidly expanding war against the nation’s cities and is threatening to jail their duly elected leaders. But at the same time, he’s verging on losing what until recently seemed to be his administration’s total dominion over the federal budget as Democrats make headway in their push for the reinstitution of healthcare funding.
These events are not as divergent as they appear. In fact, Trump’s increasingly desperate attempts to incite a civil war within the United States in advance of the midterms and the rejection of his party’s healthcare evisceration each demonstrate growing vulnerabilities of the nascent MAGA tyranny.
The emperor has discolored hands
When they appear on television to mendaciously tout Trump’s purported achievements, Trump’s flunkies frequently seem as uncertain as they are performatively cruel. This in part reflects their well-founded trepidation of angering the leader and then being thrown overboard along with the many other discards.
But the increasingly incoherent leader exhibits similar uncertainties. For months, Trump’s awareness of the shaky nature of his dictatorship was evident in the whiplash characteristic of his rule, including erratic retreats from many of his deeply thoughtless actions and the juvenile trolling of his foes.
Over the summer Trump and his lackeys took their nascent dictatorship past several points of no return. They did this first by creating a militarized domestic police force for the now overt purpose of terrorizing much of urban America, and secondly by gutting popular cornerstones of the federal government, most immediately the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.
As Trump has openly declared, he’s now fully embarked on a “war within” in which the enemy is the American people. Accordingly, any retreats — whether in the Capitol or on the streets of cities — will be seen as akin to losses on the battlefield and threaten to undercut the dictatorship itself.
That is why the apparently split screen events — the GOP’s legislative attempt to destroy the healthcare system and Trump’s (so far failing) efforts to instigate domestic unrest — are actually related. Each is a sign of strains that risk revealing the Trump regime as less than all powerful just as the leader and his lackeys are attempting to consolidate total power.
Backed into a corner
Democrats amplified the political vulnerabilities of a fully extremist GOP by picking a fight over healthcare.
Trump is determined both to create a massive praetorian guard he can use to assault his internal enemies and to enlarge his hugely regressive 2017 tax cuts. To get those goodies for the leader in a closely divided Congress, the stooges Trump installed to “lead” the House and Senate made deals to undermine the nation’s healthcare system with the most extreme members of their caucus, many of whom are fanatically devoted to screwing needy and working Americans.
While much attention was paid to Republicans’ plan to gut Medicaid after the 2026 midterm elections, the GOP has been making other moves designed to quickly upend the entire private health insurance market, including by refusing to extend ACA subsidies while making other cuts to healthcare funding. As a result, obtaining private insurance will become economically crippling for millions of Americans, the largest portion of them living in red states.
It has been clear for months that Republicans will ultimately have to “fix” the disaster they created. This would’ve been accomplished relatively easily in anything approximating normal times. After some posturing, “moderates” in both parties could have reached a compromise, thereby frustrating hopes of unifying the Democratic Party in opposition. Indeed, some GOP operatives — including two of Trump’s own pollsters — began calling for Republicans to reinstitute the ACA subsidies this past summer, warning that the GOP was on track to pay a “political penalty” for its actions.
But a dictatorship can’t acknowledge the power of its opposition by negotiating compromises. Republican “leaders” resolutely refused to even meet with Democrats for weeks as government funding lapsed and the deadline for extending the ACA subsidies approached. When Trump himself finally met with Democratic leaders earlier this month, there was no substantial negotiation. To the contrary, Trump taunted Schumer and Jeffries with “Trump 2028” hats, then posted a xenophobic video portraying Jeffries in a sombrero that seemed calculated both to alienate Latino voters and solidify Democrats’ resolve.
Now, instead of Democrats buckling, congressional Republicans are beginning an inevitable rebellion. As of a month ago, at least 10 House Republicans, largely from swing districts, openly favored extending the ACA subsidies and even sponsored legislation to do so.
The dissension in the GOP ranks is growing. For example, extreme right-wing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently declared that she’s “absolutely disgusted that health insurance premiums will DOUBLE if the tax credits expire this year. Not a single Republican in leadership talked to us about this or has given us a plan to help Americans deal with their health insurance premiums DOUBLING.”
Now, after having made it clear that any negotiations with Democrats will amount to a defeat, it’s becoming clear that Trump and his congressional stooges will be forced to walk back some of their gutting of the healthcare system.
Significantly, if Republicans are forced to give in to Democrats’ overwhelmingly popular demands, Trump will appear to be an emperor who has lost control of his dominion and is stuck exactly where he didn’t want to be — in a democracy.
Leveraging the win
As Sen. Chris Murphy has pointed out, a Democratic victory in the current shutdown fight will only be the beginning. Trump’s exposed vulnerability must be leveraged to attack the pillars of his nascent autocracy, including the militarized police he has assembled to fight his war on America.
The next stage of the challenge to dictatorship will succeed only if Americans are sufficiently repulsed by the actions of Trump’s increasingly massive militia of masked ICE agents, now being supplemented with dragooned National Guard troops and sundry other federal officers. But as in the ACA fight, the forces of Trumpism are intent on becoming their opposition’s greatest political asset because of their performative cruelty and criminality. Each day yields more outrageous videos of parents being ripped from their children, ICE agents brutalizing unarmed victims, and bystanders being kidnapped and assaulted.
As the Trump regime uses more violence against undeserving victims, they are beginning to pay a predictable political cost. Already, 50 percent of the nation says that ICE has been using too much force. Public revulsion will increase not only as the scope of performative cruelty expands, but also as the cost of Trump’s irrational war at home becomes clearer with more accounts emerging of federal agents tear-gassing and shooting people.
As demonstrated by last weekend’s gathering of millions to oppose the Trump regime, Americans are beginning to recognize that he is not just making war against immigrants, but also against entire regions of the country that oppose him. This realization will only become broader as the regime’s urban occupations persist and expand.
Trump, however, relishes the fight. His “strategy,” such as it is, has become increasingly clear: He and his henchmen are using terror to attempt to induce a violent response that can be used to justify the imposition of military occupations of American cities. But Trump’s opponents are refusing to oblige. The state and local leaders who have effectively organized resistance have been successful in maintaining peace in their communities even in the face of relentless Trumpist provocations.
For instance, after Trump and his cronies declared that the No Kings rallies would be “anti-American” and “celebrations of hate,” they were disappointed to discover that the only threats of violence came from right-wing extremists who made unsuccessful efforts at disruption. Trump himself expressed his frustration in the most unhinged and embarrassing way possible, posting a video portraying him wearing a crown and bombing protestors with excrement.
Trump then responded to the massive protests, which reportedly drew a nationwide total of as many as eight million people, with his most notorious tell: lying that the crowds were small.
It is hard to imagine a more definitive admission that the Trump regime is losing its war against democracy.
The good fight
If Democrats continue to center their opposition to Trump around actions that a broad swath of Americans decisively oppose, they have a substantial chance of landing direct hits on the foundations of his nascent dictatorship. And the regime’s authoritarian excesses provide opportunities for Democrats in Congress to synergize with state and local officials by using the budget process to demand the defunding of the most reprehensible elements of the MAGA brownshirt forces.
But with increased success comes increased danger. Trump’s belligerent vow that his war against cities like Chicago is “just at the start” and his unhinged “shit bombing” video make clear that he now views large portions of the nation as enemy territory. He’s been signaling an eagerness to escalate his fight against democracy by bringing up the Insurrection Act almost every day.
As was the case in January 2021, Trump and his supporters are dead-enders, and giving up the power he has seized is that very last thing he will willingly do. So the greater his unpopularity grows, the likelier Trump is to do everything he can to militarize the next elections. Accordingly, the Trump sycophants whose power derives solely from their decrepit leader are if anything likely to be more desperate, given that most of them will far outlive the demise of the regime.
As unfair as it may be, it will remain the burden of the opposition not only to bring down the nascent Trump dictatorship, but also attempt to do so with as little violence as possible. They’re off to a good start — but the struggle to save American democracy is just beginning.
That’s it for today
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This is the paradox of authoritarian drift: the more brittle the regime becomes, the more violently it asserts its strength. What we’re witnessing isn’t just desperation, it’s adaptation. The regime is learning how to weaponize spectacle, uncertainty, and institutional fatigue.
The split-screen is real. On one side: performative cruelty, militarized optics, and erratic decrees. On the other: cracks in the budgetary armor, fraying loyalty, and a public that’s harder to gaslight than before. These aren’t separate stories. They’re feedback loops.
As you rightly note, this all makes him more dangerous, not less. The challenge now is to dismantle the machinery of tyranny without feeding its appetite for chaos.
The resistance must stay strategic, not just symbolic. This isn’t the end of the beginning. It’s the beginning of the reckoning.
—Johan
Trump’s desperation seems transparent—a midterm switch of a majority in the House interferes with the power grab … and might lead to another impeachment(s). So he’s looking to impose martial law or war with Venezuela. And let’s not - nor ever - forget that a credible charge of pedophilia still lurks …