I was out of the country the last several weeks enjoying northern Italy. While I was away I was aware of the news back home, but my attention was mostly focused elsewhere. Now I’m back. A lot happened during my absence, but in a real sense, not much has changed. In some ways that’s a good thing. Let me explain.
We’ve been lucky that when fascism came to America it did so with an incompetent Führer leader. Trump’s vast incompetence remains on display in matters large and small, from the disaster in Iran to the debacle at the national swamp reflecting pool. His dustup with Georgia Meloni is another spectacular own goal.
The staggering magnitude of his incompetence is not something he can fix. He’d be a more effective authoritarian if he were able to heed advice or criticism, but that’s not within his wheelhouse. In addition, his interests are narrowly focused on proving how powerful he is, making money, and revenge over personal grievances and he has zero interest in the sorts of things politicians and statesmen usually care about.
That personal power he cares so much about continues to wane, however, as his popularity falls, the courts hem him in, and—in the post-primary season— Republicans find greater reason to distance from him. In recent weeks Republicans resisted the appointment of Bill Pulte as Director of Intelligence, dissed the Iranian M.O.U., and declined to redistrict in Georgia. In addition, Trump’s name was forcibly removed from the Kennedy Center for the Arts (although said removal is obscured by a tarp), and the N.S.F. reversed its decision to dismantle the deep sea monitoring system. In short, Trump’s authoritarian takeover is faltering, the resistance is alive and well, and the odds of saving our democracy are better than even.
This is not to deny the continuing danger. Trump will do everything he can to stack the 2026 midterm results in his favor or otherwise interfere with them—challenging results, refusing to seat electees, placing ICE at polling stations, seizing ballot boxes, and whatever other mischief he can devise. We will have to organize and energize turnout, fight him six ways ‘til Sunday in the courts, and demonstrate en masse. But the good news is that the electoral system is a state and not a federal system which makes it harder for him to rig, and that when it comes to court cases concerning electoral results, Trump always loses. The fact that the Democrats are currently 6-7 polling points ahead in generic congressional ballots makes it even harder for him to fix the results. The factors that are driving the Democratic advantage —the cost of living, disgust over ICE excesses, the unreleased Epstein files, Trump’s foreign misadventures, and his massive corruption—are already baked in and unlikely to improve.
This is also not to deny the continuing harm his administration is causing. Although ICE is often gone from the headlines, Steven Miller’s anti-immigrant onslaught continues unabated. Tens of thousands remain imprisoned in cruel private for-profit detention centers. The administration is trying and sometimes succeeding in depriving migrants of services they previously had access to including access to publicly subsidized housing, commercial drivers licenses, small business loans, Head Start, and community health centers. It’s aim is to make life so difficult that migrants opt to “self-deport.”
We could also list continuing substantial harms to the rule of law, scientific research, the arts, the universities, the media, the climate, the healthcare system, and the transgender community. And we haven’t even gotten to the harms to the third world (and potentially ourselves) caused by cutting of aid for global disease monitoring, prevention, and treatment.
So in expressing my optimism about eventually defeating authoritarianism, I am not forgetting the damage done and yet to be done. On July 5th I will be speaking at an on-line alternative United States Semiquicentennial observance organized by Sensei Morris Doshan Sullivan in which the names of 108 persons who died as a result of Trumpian policies—dying in either ICE detention, murdered by Homeland Security, or killed in the war with Iran—will be read aloud. Information about the event is on our BCD Events Calendar.
In the meantime, keep on keeping on. Know that what you are doing is having an impact. Don’t get discouraged.
We are in the majority, and if we keep up our efforts we shall overcome.