Back in February, I shocked a Bikini Day* workshop by reporting about what could only be described as fascist assaults on U.S. constitutional democracy. Unfortunately, I was not exaggerating. Trump and his MAGA allies are in the midst of fighting a counterrevolution to consolidate white supremacy, to multiply the obscene wealth of the richest oligarchs—especially Trump and his family—in the tradition of monarchs and feudal lords, and to impose the structures and repression necessary to maintain a plutocratic, and potentially military, dictatorship.
Drawing on the foundation of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 report, from day one of Trump 2.0 ambitious and opportunistic operatives and incompetent but loyal cabinet members, Trump has excelled in further enriching himself and his cabinet while doing his best to deliver punishing retribution to all who have or will challenge him, including leading celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce. With a firehose of Executive Orders—many either unconstitutional or illegal—Trump has sought to remake U.S. government in the kleptocratic tradition of the 1890s Gilded Age, spiked by nostalgic efforts to recreate Jim Crow apartheid, and smash-and-grab imperialism (think Greenland, Panama, and Gaza).
Trump is no intellectual shining light, but he rules in the autocratic, but less enlightened tradition of former French President De Gaulle. In 1950, soon after assuming power, De Gaulle humiliatingly upbraided a member of his cabinet by saying that the official had been appointed to his position because he was stupid, and that his stupidity ensured his loyalty.
On the subject of stupidity, just the other day Kristi Noem—the current head of Homeland Security and former governor of South Dakota who once boasted about shooting her dog—revealed her dangerous ignorance. This is the beautiful cabinet member who recently and obscenely posed in a tight sweater, pin up style, in front of hundreds of jailed and dehumanized deportees in a El Salvador gulag jail that has been compared to Nazi concentration camps. She demonstrated the truth of the Gaullist model of Trump/MAGA rule when she was asked during a Senate hearing if she knew the meaning of habeas corpus. She failed that basic test, saying that it is a law that allows the president to deport immigrants. She didn’t flinch when she was then corrected with news that it is the 13th century’s most essential and founding principle of Anglo-Saxon governance. Referred to as “show us the body,” the writ of habeas corpus established the right of anyone who has been imprisoned to come before a judge for adjudication of the legality of his or her detention. And it was written into the U.S. Constitution 250 years ago in direct response to the abuses of King George III. Without the right of habeas corpus, we are all vulnerable to arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and of being disappeared.
But clearly Trump is not all powerful. In the tradition of a schoolyard bully, he is brutal to those he sees as weak, but he retreats when those with as much or more power stand up to him. He retreated when Putin and Netanyahu refused his efforts to win ceasefires in Ukraine and Gaza and when China embarrassingly forced him to back down from threatened 145% tariffs.
Our good fortune is that despite Republicans clicking their heels and saluting every Trumpian whim or executive order and the business-as-usual instances of most Congressional Democrats, three hopeful guardrails—in the form of the stock market, the courts, and a popular opposition movement—have emerged. Trump measures his political standing and survival by the daily Dow Jones average (which dropped 800 points the other day, losing a LOT of people a LOT of money). And the courts have almost consistently ruled against his illegal deportations, shuttering government agencies, and withholding funds from universities.
The outstanding questions on which our future depends are whether Trump will obey Supreme Court decisions, and if martial law will be declared to prevent the 2026 Congressional elections, which Trump and MAGA likely will lose. Vice President JD Vance (it hurts to refer to that lost soul as vice president) has said that the Trump government need not obey court rulings. As the saying has it, the Supreme Court has no army to enforce its decisions, and as we saw with Trump’s January 6, 2021, attempted coup and his more recent pardoning of insurrectionists, Trump, MAGA, and their armed goons do not feel bound to honor electoral democracy.
The good, if not happy, news is that millions here have not rolled over and played dead. In a worst-case scenario, those of us committed to constitutional democracy and the rights and freedoms that flow from it may need to insist on popular sovereignty via a massive and nationwide general strike.
An estimated five million people came out to protest in major cities and smaller towns on April 5, and there have been almost daily demonstrations ever since. These actions give us affirmation, stoke our courage, and prepare the way for the future. It is my sense that if we are prepared, Trump’s refusal to fulfill a particularly significant Supreme Court order or the cancellation of the 2026 election could serve as the trigger for a general strike.
We have a lot of organizing to do between now and then and recalling the past some of us are stressing the absolute importance of remaining and calling for NONVIOLENT resistance. Dictators, kings, and autocrats from time immemorial have inserted violent agents provocateurs into popular movements to discredit them. The history of the Nazi 1933 Reichstag fire hangs over us, and the Palestine rights movement just suffered significant blowback when a frustrated and lost soul assassinated two Israeli embassy employees in Washington, D.C.
It is an uphill struggle and hardly an entirely new situation. I’ve been reminded how the masters of wealth in Germany in the 1920s and 30s believed that they could use and control Hitler and his Nazis to reinforce their privilege and power. They were quickly swallowed up by Nazi totalitarianism once they’d bought the 1933 election for Hitler. Trump’s father was a Ku Klux Klan slumlord. The roots of MAGA lie in racism and in the myth of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy during our civil war. And over the last couple of years several compelling histories have been written about the failed U.S. coups of the 1930s and that era’s American Firsters who were manipulated by German agents.
Moving from abstractions, histories, and systems analyses, let me provide the texture of detail, we can turn to the May 21 edition of last week’s New York Times. More than 100 days into the Kakistocracy (the word for a corrupt, incompetent autocracy) we could read the following headlines in that paper:
- “Justice Dept. to Halt Its Oversight of Local Police Accused of Abuses” (Freeing police to be as brutal as they want to be outside of the law - especially targeting people of color, but we are all vulnerable.)
-
“U.S. Formally Accepts Plane from Qatar” (As Trump accepts the most obvious bribe and attempts to circumvent the constitution’s emoluments clause which was written to preserve national independence.)
-
“Trump Ally Embraces a Plan to Name and Shame Enemies” (If the Justice Department can’t prosecute some “enemies” like James Comey, Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce, it will do its best to harass them.)
-
“With Inquiry into Cuomo, Justice Dept Singles Out a New Political Target” (As in most autocracies and dictatorships, opposition politicians are threatened with jail or imprisonment.)
- “G.O.P. Aims to Cut Clean Energy Perks Flowing to its Own Turf” (Funding for clean energy initiatives for Republican as well as Democratic Congressional districts is being slashed.)
-
“Public Health School at Harvard is Reeling as U.S. Pulls Funding” (Labs and scientists who play essential roles in the national health system are being shut down.)
-
“Energized by Kennedy, Texas ‘Mad Moms’ Chip Away at Vaccine Mandates” (The way is being prepared for the next epidemic or pandemic.)
-
“Trump Broadside Embroils Leader of South Africa” (As he deports hundreds of thousands of people of color and provides military and diplomatic support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Trump attempts to humiliate South Africa’s ANC president and welcomes white South Africans with the false claim of a white genocide.)
-
“Trump Wants DOGE Records to Stay Secret” (How and why thousands of essential government workers and congressionally approved spending were cancelled at great cost to the country’s future.)
-
“Florida Sets Pace for Education Overhaul” (Privatization of education is being pressed, while the clock is turned back on racial and gender justice, and 1984 memory holes are imposed.”
-
“Aide Had Intelligence Report Rewritten Because It Contradicted Trump” (The senior aide to the Director of National Intelligence, who is Trump’s nominee for the Dept. Of Counter Terrorism Intelligence, demanded the rewrite of a report that contradicted the false claim of a Venezuelan gang “invasion.”)
-
“Farm Chemicals Debate Riles Republican Senator” (Some in MAGA are crazier than Kennedy and are fighting to protect cancer causing fertilizers.)
-
“Israeli Soldiers Fire in Air to Disperse Western Diplomats in West Bank” (This atrocity was carried out while Trump supports the Israeli genocide and no public criticism was made by the Trump Administration.)
-
“U.S. Bill Might Revive a Global Feud Over How Corporations are Taxed” (Reversing a Biden era policy, the goal of zero taxes for wealthy corporations and their owners.)
-
“Way U.S. Left Afghanistan Prompts Call for Inquiry” (Trump failed to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan in his first term, and did they expect roses for the departing Americans?)
-
“U.S. Debt Soars Toward a Record, Entering a New Realm of Risk” (Moody’s has reduced its U.S. credit rating, and the dollar is no longer assured to serve as the world’s reserve currency which has boosted U.S. prosperity for 80 years.)
That was all in a single day’s depressing paper. And if that wasn’t enough, the day ended with the Times reporting that in a classical dictatorial action, the Trump administration banned Harvard University from enrolling foreign students. Ninety years ago, during the Great Depression and Jim Crow apartheid, the liberal theologian and later Cold Warrior Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that a critical method used by those exercising illegitimate power to retain their ill-gotten privilege is to deny education and knowledge to those they are committed to exploiting. The attack on Harvard and the other pinnacles of U.S. academia is being pursued under the false flag of antisemitism. Harvard’s president is Jewish, and Secretary of Defense Hegseth just appointed an openly antisemitic woman who shares neo-Nazi posts as the Pentagon’s spokesperson.
Fortunately, those who skipped to a Times op-ed page last week in order to preserve their sanity and to contain their fears came to an excellent and encouraging article by Nicholas Kristoff. “Well-Tested Ways to Undermine Autocrats.” It drew heavily upon and shared the scholar Gene Sharp’s studies of nonviolent actions to fight for democracy: humor and mockery (Czechoslovakia and China,) call out their corruption (Navalny in Russia as the outstanding example,) and focusing on the power of one: “individual tragedy rather than the sea of oppression (the abused fruit seller in Tunisia who sparked Arab Spring or Iranian women who refuse to wear the hijab.)
Lani and I, who as white citizens are not yet especially vulnerable, will be outside the Massachusetts State House on Monday at an Indivisible rally. Our demand: Massachusetts’ lackluster Democratic governor should order the police to arrest masked and unidentifiable ICE (Immigration, Control and Enforcement) operatives who are kidnapping our immigrant neighbors and even some U.S. citizens from our streets.
More than a few of us take heart and courage from African Americans’ centuries of struggle for freedom and dignity and from resistance to fascist dictatorships around the world. How could we not be inspired by the European women and men we knew in the 1970s who had engaged in resistance to Hitler’s rule or by your compatriots who were harassed and jailed for refusing to kowtow to 1930s and 40s Japanese militarism? And I take heart from an Argentine friend who over breakfast remarked that her mother had survived and “lived through two coups.” And then there are the Hibakusha* who say, “Never Give Up!”
P.S. There is also the reality of Trump’s acceleration of the American Empire’s decline. In high school and college, we were taught that there was a taboo against naming our country an Empire, but we were instructed there is a straight line from the Greek, Roman, and British empires down to our land of liberty. Two years ago, I finally read Mary Beard’s SPQR Roman history. She argues that the Roman republic was corrupted and brought to an end after roughly 500 years by too much wealth, deluging Rome’s political system, and by militarism brought home from Rome’s foreign conquests and colonial rule. Oh, so familiar!
*For U.S. readers with whom this letter is being shared Bikini Day is an annual commemoration of the 1954 Bravo H-Bomb test, 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb. It decimated Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Island, poisoned Japanese fishermen and much of Japan’s food supply, and sparked the creation of Japan’s peace and disarmament movement. And Hibakusha are A- and H- Bomb victim survivors.
Stanford University encampment on May 5, 2024. (Photo by Christine Mrak)