How Bad Will It Get? Some Possible Mitigating Factors

Once again, we’re back in the same situation as eight years ago.

Since the nightmare on election night many, myself included, have been catastrophizing the possible scenarios beginning on January 20. We’re all aware of the awful threats from Trump and his agenda: Mass deportation. Attacks on reproductive freedom at the federal level. The use of the military under the Insurrection Act to suppress public protests. The resurrection of Schedule F to pack the most important administrative offices with obedient party hacks. Moral support, at least, for state- and local-level movements like “Moms for Liberty,” anti-trans and anti-LGBT policies. Likely informal alliances with paramilitary street thugs like Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and Three Percenters, and with supporters in the military and police (e.g. “Constitutional Sheriffs’ Association”).

Most or all of these threats are plausible — at least attempts at them — with varying degrees of likelihood and intensity. But there are also countervailing or mitigating tendencies which may offset or impede the authoritarianism of the Trump administration. None of what I write below is meant to minimize the terrible human cost and misery that will be inflicted by the policies he is able to carry out. My intention, for whatever small consolation it offers, is to show factors which may prevent him carrying them out to his full intent and inflicting the degree of harm he envisions.

This is far from the end; his victory is far from guaranteed. My gut, and heart, tell me that he will fail. But fighting effectively requires a real assessment of both an enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. The point of the analysis below is not to provide comfort or reassurance, but to point to genuine weaknesses — of which Trump has many — that can be exploited.

1. Trump himself is lazy, unfocused, and easily distracted. Even in his previous term, Trump had relatively low energy; he had, and has, little object permanence beyond his personal grievances, personal enrichment, and ego aggrandizement. He repeatedly approached the actual fulfillment of his grandiose campaign promises by taking a few swipes at something, declaring victory, and moving on to the next shiny object. As Dr. Alex Cruikshanks put it:

1) Trump absent-mindedly mentions some idea ad hoc without a thought 

2) RW media circulates it, justifies it as great wisdom

3) Trump sees this, now seriously comes to think it’s a good idea and starts to modestly pursue it

4) It becomes apparent this is hard

5) Trump gives up on the idea, but declares victory anyway, asserting either that he has actually achieved it, or that he could but doesn’t need to

6) RW media again circulates this, praising Trump’s skill/grace in closing this issue

Despite his claims of building “500 miles of border wall,” the first Trump administration built only about fifty miles of actual new wall — the “virtually impenetrable” structure turned out to be shoddily designed, and easily thwarted by smugglers with simple tools. Nine-tenths of the construction went to replacing existing wall. His approach to tariffs was sporadic and ad hoc, with his promises of sweeping trade barriers often working out in practice as some other country promising to buy more corn from Iowa farmers or the like, and Trump taking it as a win. Healthcare isn’t the only policy area in which he has the “concept of a plan.” 

The last thing I want to do is minimize the immense human suffering that will result from the amount of ethnic cleansing and deportation that Trump is actually able to carry out. But as cold comfort as it may be, he will likely be unable to do it on a scale greater than a fraction of what he has promised. Building contractors, farmers, and owners of other local labor-intensive businesses — core constituencies in Trump’s petty bourgeois base — are heavily reliant on undocumented migrants for their labor force, and would be unable to replace them. Given his record on things like tariffs, his likely approach will be to accept a payoff with a wink and a nod, and give their migrant workers and families an exemption.

Regarding immigration in particular, Tom Homan — a previous acting director of ICE who was just chosen as Trump’s “border czar” — previously suggested the approach would be more targeted or retail than wholesale:

“It’s not gonna be – a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous,” Homan told CBS News in an interview that aired last month.

“They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous, you know, investigative processes,” he added.

I want to make my purpose clear in citing such statements. 

Aaron Rupar characterized a statement by Mike Johnson on CNN as “walking back” Trump’s promise to deport as many as 20 million people, saying “I’m not sure that’s what’s gonna happen. I think what the president is talking about is beginning with the dangerous persons that we know are here. There are criminals, known criminals.” Jonathan Katz responded:

He isn’t walking it back. Note what he says: “start with,” “begin there.” They’re going to start by rounding up cases who it will be hard for liberals, the media, etc, to defend. Then they’ll start testing to see how far they can go….

Then they’ll go for something squishier — immigrant drug addicts or people with mental health issues, perhaps. And they’ll see if they can get away with that.

It’s quite literally the point of the Niemöller confession.

Anyone who takes the possibility that Trump’s deportation policy will start out modest, or will lack the resources to carry out his most grandiose promises, as cause for relief is drawing the wrong conclusions. The proper lesson to be taken from such predictions is that the early stages should be resisted with all resources at our disposal, so that they see they cannot “get away with that.”

The worst news on immigration was Trump’s choice of Stephen Miller — not only an immigration hawk, white nationalist and sadist, but a skilled bureaucratic infighter — as his Deputy Chief of White House Staff for Policy. This is mitigated by the facts that he is in a staff position and not in the operational chain of command over deportations, and that Susie Wiles — Trump’s White House Chief of Staff — will occupy a rung between him and Trump (more about this below). 

In addition to all this, there are signs that some Democratic governors are preparing to refuse cooperation with Trump’s deportation agenda and deny their law enforcement resources to the feds. The degree of non-cooperation and resistance will probably vary from state to state. In addition to California Governor Gavin Newsom, the governor of Massachusetts has made fairly strident noises to the effect that she will not cooperate. At the most extreme end, Denver’s mayor has promised that not only will the Denver Police Department be stationed at entrances to the city to block the military, but thousands of civilian demonstrators will join them. Such actions by Democratic mayors, or by Democratic governors posting National Guard or state militia units athwart approaches to their jurisdictions, would most likely result in mass desertions or mutinies by regular Army and federalized Guard units. 

Again, none of this is meant to minimize or dismiss real human suffering. Just as reason to believe, for what it’s worth, that as bad as it is, it probably won’t be as bad as it could be.

Finally, Trump is far more debilitated now than in his first term, and continuing to decline rapidly. So he’s apt to be even more preoccupied by public spectacle, and less attentive to policy, than he was then.

2. Not only is Trump himself lazy and unfocused; he quickly sours on, and resents, the energetic ideologues surrounding him, if they push him too hard or appear to be stealing his limelight.

We got a taste of this last summer, when Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 — not just because of its toxicity to the public, but in all likelihood also because he was annoyed by its self-promotion:

I think Project 2025 thought that it wanted the whole world to sort of know what its agenda was and draw as much attention to it as possible and hold all kinds of high-profile events to promote that. And that turned out to be a strategic mistake. President Trump — he generally likes to be the center of the show and likes to be the one seen to be driving the bus and takes not particularly kindly to groups that want a bit of that spotlight. And whether fairly or not, he began to feel, it seems, that Project 2025 was getting too much spotlight, was making too much noise and was becoming kind of an annoying sort of gnat flying in his ear and distracting him from what he wanted to do.

The tendency toward brief tenures for senior officials in the first Trump administration was notorious; the term “Scaramucci unit” was coined to describe it. Trump went through four chiefs of staff, four press secretaries, two attorneys general, and too many communications directors to count.

Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, widely perceived at the alt right mastermind behind the first Trump administration, barely lasted seven months. That perception — Bannon was constantly framed as Trump’s brain, puppeteer, or babysitter in media like Saturday Night Live — likely contributed to his downfall.

There are signs the vocal hard-right celebrities around Trump are once again starting to raise his hackles. Immediately after the election, Bannon — just a few days out of jail — got a sharp rebuke from the Trump campaign for once again causing embarrassment and hogging the limelight. Following extended remarks from Bannon on the retribution and “rough Roman justice” coming for Trump’s political enemies and his critics in the media, Corey Lewandowski responded:

No one speaks for the President but the president, and what the president said and as he said it last night on the stage is that he’s going to be a president for everybody, and we’ve got an opportunity right now to unify the country to bring this country back together.

The campaign, likewise, appeared to distance itself from RFK Jr. and some of his nuttier anti-vaccine claims. And Elon Musk is apparently the only person alive who is too obtuse to perceive that he’s getting on Trump’s last nerve.

As Seth Cotlar sums it up:

Every organization Trump has ever run has been a disaster, riven by internal dissension and low morale, staffed by a small number of competent people and a huge surfeit of profoundly stupid, fame-seeking sociopathic grifters. Such organizations can cause great harm, but they’re also prone to failure.

Trump’s choice for Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, is a master at playing the bureaucratic power game. While running his 2024 campaign, she developed a reputation for building networks of loyalists around herself. She also has a history of success which, if limited, is nevertheless better than anyone else’s at “talking Trump out of certain reckless ideas” and helping to “control Trump’s worst impulses.” She also has a plausible chance of controlling access to him — especially by the most godawful members of his policy team. 

CNN reported earlier Thursday that Wiles was considered the front-runner for the job but had some reservations about the role and had expressed to Trump certain conditions before she accepted, a source said. At the top of the list was more control over who can reach the president in the Oval Office.

“The clown car can’t come into the White House at will,” the source said. “And he agrees with her.”

During Trump’s first term, his chiefs of staff struggled to prevent a roving cast of informal advisers, family members, friends and other interlopers from getting inside the White House to meet with him. Trump is often influenced on an issue by whoever he speaks to last, a fact that is well known within his circle and one that made life difficult on his top aides.

Wiles was widely credited for running what was seen as Trump’s most sophisticated and disciplined campaign, which included keeping many of the fringe voices in his orbit at bay.

3. The great majority of Trump’s nominees so far are highly motivated ideologues. They’re also ineffectual buffoons, who might as well be calculated to fail at consolidating Trump’s control over their bureaucratic domains and alienate everyone whose expertise they need to do so. Ken White (aka Popehat) puts it eloquently:

All of these people are ostentatiously evil and shame the institutions they will lead and are a disgrace to the Republic and so forth but do they have the skills or patience to achieve their weird goals? Institutions are very difficult to change. The populist sentiment “send in an outsider and have them clean house” requires an outsider smart and disciplined enough to overcome the fact they don’t understand what they’re changing. Otherwise the inside stubbornly and passive-aggressively thwarts the outsider. You can burn the institution to the ground but that doesn’t leave you with an institution you can use effectively as a weapon.

As of the last edit of this piece (November 22), Trump’s cabinet appointees have been an absolute carnival freak show. They consist almost entirely of weird extremist ideologues (Gaetz for Attorney General, RFK Jr. for HHS, Tulsi Gabbard for CIA, Kash Patel for FBI), or TV personalities who caught Trump’s attention thanks to his obsessive television viewing (Fox News host Hegseth for DOD Secretary, and a professional wrestling executive for Education). 

This aggregation of comic ineptitude is the perfect foil for a divide, obstruct, and delay strategy. As Dave Karpf writes: 

We amplify the infighting and incompetence within his own administration. Stoke the divisions, exacerbate the tensions, and do not obey in advance. Invite the Trump goons to get in each other’s way. Amplify the basic mistakes that leave them placing blame on one another.

Here’s an example: one headline that I keep seeing of late is “Elon Musk: shadow President.” Substantively this annoys me. It’s yet another exercise in Elon mythmaking. But strategically I think it’s great. Enough of those headlines will eventually trigger Trump’s fragile ego. The minute Donald Trump feels overshadowed by Elon is the minute he starts shutting Elon out. And Elon Musk won’t be cool about that. (One thing that Elon Musk has never been is cool.)

3. Trump’s rapid decline, which has been quite visible over the past few months, will be severely destabilizing to his movement.

I saw someone on social media refer to the likely character of the Trump administration as a “court of competing Grima Wormtongues,” and that’s perfect.

There’s a high likelihood that some number of Trump’s ambitious underlings will attempt to invoke the XXV Amendment; or more likely still, to simply establish an informal regency with Trump as figurehead, as happened under Woodrow Wilson and to some extent under Reagan’s second term. This will be complicated by the likes of Vance, Musk, and RFK Jr. attempting not only to supplant Trump, but to betray one another. If Trump’s paranoia and vanity eight years ago were such that he could be manipulated into firing Bannon, they’ll be off the end of the scale today; it’s a virtual certainty that, if he suspects such machinations are in play, he’ll appeal to his base for support. If anything, he’s apt to see plots even when they aren’t there. To quote Karpf again, Trump

will not be running for another term. (He’ll gesture at it plenty. But the guy is going to be 82 in four years, and he is not aging well.) This could be a source of significant chaos, because he has no clear successor. (Sorry JD Vance. You ain’t it.) Trump’s last administration leaked like a sieve — or, more precisely, like a reality tv show. The leaks and infighting could easily be more intense this time, because all of his lieutenants will be fighting a zero-sum game for power and influence in the coming post-Trump years.

It won’t just be chaos in the White House. It will be chaos in Congress as the GOP caucus fragments over which of the contending successors to support, or is paralyzed by fear of antagonizing a paranoid Trump who’s still capable of lashing out and undermining anyone’s hopes of ruling in his stead.

4. The task of consolidating dictatorial control is far more daunting in America than in countries under similar regimes.

Compared to other countries like Hungary and Turkey in which authoritarian autocrats have seized power, the United States is characterized by what political scientists call a “lack of state capacity.” That is, unlike many other countries, where provincial and local government administrations, police forces, and the like, are subject to control from the center, in the United States state and local governments possess the overwhelming bulk of administrative and enforcement resources. Those of the federal government are miniscule by comparison. 

The election machinery, in particular, is run almost entirely at the state and local level. A majority of states have either Democratic trifectas — the Democratic Party in control of all three branches of government — or Democratic control in one or more branches. 

The court system is similarly polyarchic. Roughly a quarter of federal judges are Trump appointees. The Supreme Court is much more strongly pro-Trump — witness Dobbs and Trump vs. the United States. But it would be incorrect in my opinion to view it simply as an extension of Trump’s will. Three of the justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — are likely to be in the bag for Trump in virtually any case involving presidential powers. But Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett, while genuinely conservative to reactionary in ideology, are genuinely motivated more by ideology than by personal allegiance and can be expected to rule on presidential powers based on some semblance of principle. 

The War on Drugs relies heavily on state and local law enforcement — witness all those drug bust stories on local TV news, with cops displaying tables of seized meth. Even when federal drug prohibition remains in force, it is a virtual dead letter in states where decriminalization forces the feds to rely entirely on their own resources.

A European-style social democracy failed to emerge under FDR, in large part, not only because of the need to carve out exceptions for the South to placate its elites (a major part of the Democratic coalition), but because the US government — with its lack of state capacity — depended on state and local governments to administer New Deal programs. 

The same will almost certainly be true of any attempt to recreate European-style fascism or a strongman regime like Orban’s in the United States. For all these reasons, Cas Mudde, a scholar who specializes in the the careers of strongmen like Orban and Erdogan, considers the actual elimination of electoral democracy and full consolidation of power by Trump in four years — “the full capture and dismantling of U.S. democracy” — to be unlikely.

As one social media commenter noted: “This isn’t a question of norms, it’s a question of logistics and decentralization of power, where we are actually in a better place than we were in 2016.”

Asli Aydintasbas, a journalist who spent years reporting from inside Turkey, notes similarly:

As someone who lived through the birth and growth of authoritarianism in Turkey, I’m something of an expert on the subject — and no, another four years of Trump is not enough time to turn America into a dictatorship.

What I saw in Turkey over the course of two decades of Tayyip Erdogan’s rule — working as a journalist for much of that time — is that building a dictatorship takes a long time. Similarly in Poland and Hungary, illiberal governments have needed years to chip away at the rule of law. There is a particular rhythm and process to dismantling a democracy, a kind of incubation period for despotism: There are laws to change, institutions to dismantle, alliances to build. With a concerted effort by Trump, the incubation period could be squeezed into eight more consecutive years, but not four.

Rather than the consolidation of a full-blown dictatorship, the likely outcome is a slow-motion or broken-back civil war in which edicts from the executive branch are obeyed, or ignored, resisted, and sabotaged, in varying degrees from state to state and from agency to agency.

Adam Gurri calls for a Blue State agenda to “sandbag the implementation of fascism.”

State and local governments controlled by Democrats have the most potent institutional and legal levers available for this fight. A great deal of what we think of as federal policy in fact relies upon state and local administrative capacity. This provides leverage to a huge number of actors outside of the federal government. Protestors and activists must focus on applying pressure to these officials in order to act at key moments: to engage in strategic acts of opposition that reduce the ability of a Trump-dominated federal government to achieve its goals.

The effectiveness of Trump’s deportation effort will also likely be hindered by federalism. Democratic state and municipal administrations are likely to offer varying degrees of non-cooperation with federal immigration policy and other forms of authoritarianism.

Two Blue State governors, Pritzker of Illinois and Polis of Colorado, have created an organization of governors, Governors Safeguarding Democracy, 

to resist “increasing threats of autocracy” and potential power grabs by a second Donald Trump administration. Members of the new “Governors Safeguarding Democracy” will harness their collective powers to “catalyze collaboration across state lines….”

Trump’s plan to reinstitute Schedule F, which would reclassify tens of thousands of higher-level civil service workers as political appointees subject to firing at will, is quite concerning. In the best case scenario, it will reduce the administrative state’s ability to resist Trump’s agenda, and likely seriously degrade the effectiveness with which federal programs are carried out as well. 

The worst effects may be mitigated by the fact that it will likely take several months to complete the replacement of the targeted 50,000 or so officers, and there will be continuity in the majority of lower-level workers who carry out the day-to-day administrative tasks that keep things running. That creates a scenario in which it’s quite likely that the new political hacks will to some extent “go native,” to the extent that they are forced to acknowledge at least the most basic facts about what is necessary for things to continue functioning.

That being said, the level of corruption in regulatory enforcement will go through the roof. And agencies like the IRS will almost certainly be weaponized, on a case by case basis, against Trump’s most prominent enemies.

In any case, even with the full implementation of Schedule F, a bureaucracy must be governed by basic procedural rules for its day-to-day functioning if it is to function at all. This opens up numerous opportunities for delay and sabotage just by exploiting the rule book. Or as Gurri put it, “delay, delay, delay”:

Even totalitarian regimes run on a personalist basis cannot move on the basis of every little whim from Dear Leader. Any political and legal system of sufficient scale is weighed down by the basic requirements for keeping a large organization going at all; something that brings with it significant inertia in terms of the practices of street-level staff. And the American system, for all its faults, is as far from totalitarian as it gets. While the presidency has, from its inception, always struggled to pull the system towards personalism, it has never truly succeeded. The fragmentation of American political authority, though lessened after the Civil War and especially after the growth of the federal executive branch in the 20th century, has on the whole persisted. And the massive growth of the federal executive branch, while nominally increasing the president’s authority, in fact has created numerous institutions that vary greatly in their responsiveness to the president’s demands. Some are not very responsive at all, often by design.

There’s also the question of how compliant the military will be, or how much pushback there will be, in the event of attempts to use them for mass deportation or suppressing demonstrations. The senior military leadership and high-ranking career officers — despite a disproportionate number being Republicans — have been notably hostile toward Trump’s past attempts at seizing power. Even for diehard, hawkish conservatives, subordination to the Constitution and laws is an ingrained reflex among most career officers. According to a CNN report, 

Pentagon officials are holding informal discussions about how the Department of Defense would respond if Donald Trump issues orders to deploy active-duty troops domestically and fire large swaths of apolitical staffers….

Officials are now gaming out various scenarios as they prepare for an overhaul of the Pentagon.

“We are all preparing and planning for the worst-case scenario, but the reality is that we don’t know how this is going to play out yet,” one defense official said.

Trump’s election has also raised questions inside the Pentagon about what would happen if the president issued an unlawful order, particularly if his political appointees inside the department don’t push back.

“Troops are compelled by law to disobey unlawful orders,” said another defense official. “But the question is what happens then – do we see resignations from senior military leaders? Or would they view that as abandoning their people?”

It’s unclear at this point who Trump will choose to lead the Pentagon, though officials believe Trump and his team will try to avoid the kind of “hostile” relationship he had with the military during his last administration, said a former defense official with experience during the first Trump administration.

“The relationship between the White House and the DoD was really, really bad, and so … I know it’s top of mind for how they’re going to select the folks that they put in DoD this time around,” the former official said.

I suspect those “informal discussions” are considerably more concrete and substantive about possible scenarios and their range of options than the public statements convey. And if the transition team’s goal is genuinely to avoid bad feelings from the military leadership, systematically purging the officer corps based on dossiers of their loyalty is a very bad way to accomplish that. Further, the bureaucratic process of replacement itself would be quite time-consuming and disruptive, so there is apt to be a large contingent of the military leadership whose loyalty will be a question in Trump’s mind.

There’s a draft executive order circulating that would create a review board to expedite Trump’s firing of generals he considers too “woke” or insufficiently loyal, which is cause for alarm. If Trump signs the order, it’s anybody’s guess how large the scale of purges would be. But I expect any review process would be of limited use in vetting generals for loyalty in extraordinary situations like martial law, or the use of the military to suppress mass demonstrations or impose their will on Democratic states under the terms of the Insurrection Act. That ingrained attachment to constitutional norms mentioned above is pretty widespread, but — thanks to an equally ingrained reticence about making political statements — it’s also tacit, and apt to be revealed at times and places most inconvenient to a would-be strongman. It’s unlikely that many generals have made things easy by leaving a paper trail proclaiming their future intentions in the event of an executive power grab. That means that, if Trump does force things to a head, there will be large numbers of “false negatives”: quiet dissenters in the military leadership that the purge never detected. And it’s fair to say that all those dissenters who survived undetected, and quite possibly a majority of the officer corps as a whole, will be extremely pissed off and resentful.

The creation of this review board and the proclaimed intent of purging the officer corps based on loyalty to Trump, along with the choice of Fox News nitwit Pete Hegseth as DOD Secretary, could not have been more likely to offend neocon Senate Armed Services hawks if it had been deliberately calculated.

In addition to everything else, both the implementation of Schedule F and the replacement of the senior officer corps with loyalists will be a months-long process. Given the mindset of Trump and his minions, there’s a non-negligible chance that they will bring things to a head before they have fully secured a compliant military and administrative state. That will spell disaster for them.

And military seizure of power is not just something you do, in any case. Smart would-be autocrats know better than to force a crisis before they’ve laid the groundwork, or — even after having consolidated power — to take actions that will piss off a clear majority of their people. With or without reliable generals on his side, an early power grab by Trump would likely end in disaster. To quote Aydintasbas again:

what finally gave Erdogan the control he wanted was his declaration of emergency presidential powers after a failed coup attempt in 2016 that allowed the president or Turkish Justice Department the right to dismiss or move judges at will.

Can Trump claim similar emergency powers? Not without first gaining institutional and social consensus. Even in Turkey, it took a bloody military coup attempt for Erdogan to assume the type of powers he wanted. Trump would need a dramatic event of similar nature that would serve as a force-majeure and convince U.S. society that it would be OK for the president to take control of the judiciary [and presumably other institutions].

In short, Trump is going out of his way to disrupt and alienate the military officer corps and federal law enforcement agents without whose help he cannot carry out domestic repression.

To put the icing on the cake, Trump seems to be doing his best to sabotage his influence over Congress. The nomination of Gaetz as Attorney General, aside from provoking successful defiance from Senate Republicans who are struggling to hold on to some vestigial shred of dignity, will — along with appointments for Stefanik and Waltz — cut into a House GOP majority that can already be counted on one hand; and the vacancies won’t be filled for the months until special elections can be organized. Mike Johnson flat-out asked Trump to stop poaching on his razor-thin majority. Meanwhile, two House Republicans were yes votes on the Trump impeachment, and even a handful of other traditional pre-Trump conservatives will amount to a Freedom Caucus in reverse. 

Likewise the Senate already refused to elect Trump’s horse (aka Rick Scott) majority leader, and instead chose a plain vanilla-flavored conservative of the sort that might have been picked by Romney or Jeb. And Romney, Murkowski and Collins hold three of the seats in the GOP majority of 2 or 3 seats. They aren’t profiles in courage, but it’s fairly unlikely ACA repeal or Social Security evisceration will pass Congress.

Trump’s general approach to Congress — attempting to force an immediate show of submission by demanding it adjourn so he can railroad all his nominees through via recess appointments — also violates the number one rule for would-be autocrats who desire to consolidate power: Don’t bring things to a confrontation until you already know how it will turn out. As it turns out, Trump’s demand for a recess has become a dead letter. And the withdrawal of Gaetz and likely Hegseth is already an early show of weakness that will almost certainly embolden moderate Senate swing voters for further defiance. It’s anybody’s guess whether Patel, Kennedy, or Gabbard will be the next domino to fall; but one of them almost certainly will.

5. Trump’s policies are likely to generate massive backlash. The golden rule for authoritarian regimes consolidating their power is to maintain a prevailing atmosphere of either passive support or apathy, keep people preoccupied with their lives in the private sphere, and above all to avoid actions that will piss off large swaths of the population.

It’s important to bear in mind that the 2024 election results don’t represent an ideological realignment. Trump got fewer votes than in 2020; millions of 2020 Biden voters just stayed home. And the swing voters who broke for Trump were extremely low-information did so as part of a massive global anti-incumbency backlash driven by post-Covid inflation. That means, as Seth Cotlar argues, that

when Trump’s tariffs drive up inflation, making gaming consoles hundreds of dollars more expensive. Or when his deportations deplete the agricultural workforce and the price of groceries skyrockets. What will those “I hate inflation” voters think about that?

Out of office, Trump benefitted from voters’ willingness to project on to him all of their hopes for better economic futures for themselves. The right wing propaganda machine also helped further that impression. But if he tanks the economy, voters will notice.

Authoritarian propaganda can be very effective (as we’ve seen), but at some point it reaches the limits of its ability to boss reality into whatever shape it wants. Every past authoritarian regime has learned that.

On top of this, Trump’s position vis-a-vis his base seems to be unique. It’s not transferable from Trump to the GOP: witness the bizarre down-ballot behavior of Trump voters who also voted for Democratic governors, legislators, and members of Congress. Especially notable is the contingent of Trump-AOC dual voters in New York.

There’s no one else in the wings waiting to inherit Trump’s support. There will be no Trumpism after Trump. As Ned Resnikoff put it, “the electoral strength of the Trump coalition does not outlast Trump. If it retains national power after he leaves the stage, it will be because they’ve succeeded in totally insulating themselves from democratic accountability.” And as we’ve already seen, the ability of Trump or his would-be successors to insulate themselves from the backlash is limited, because of his inability to destroy the electoral system before 2026.