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Reading Donald Trump’s endless and nauseating prime time address to Congress last Tuesday night, I was struck by how completely and weirdly willing he is to alienate broad swaths of the US populace.
“I Will Increase Your Grocery Bills and Slash Your Retirement Income!”
What normal US president would get up in front of the nation and advocate an insane policy – including 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico and 20% on Chinese important – that is certain to increase prices across the board for a US population that is already agitated over inflation and that voted for him over Kamala Harris at least in part because they thought he would act to curb it?
And then there’s the economic recession or perhaps even depression his tariffs could set off.
Check your 401Ks, middle-class America! And learn where the best and closest food pantries can be found.
What normal US president would do this and also launch absurd attacks on Social Security, which a great majority of Americans want protected and properly funded, while applauding a demented multi-billionaire sociopath and fellow malignant fascist/narcissist (the Sieg-Heiling oligarch Elon Musk) he has illegally empowered to attack anything and everyone remotely decent in the federal government?
Yes, he attacked Social Security. That’s what Donald “I See Dead People” Trump’s ridiculous Big Lie claiming that millions of deceased Americans are receiving Social Security checks is all about – this while his government-whacking Nazi Musk calls the Social Security system “a Ponzi scheme.”
Dead voters elected Joe Biden in 2020 and dead people are getting Social Security. Notice a pattern here?
As Robert Reich recently noted on Facebook: “Trump keeps lying about Social Security as an excuse to gut the program. Despite promising not to touch it, he’s planning to shutter SSA offices and fire 7,000 employees who help distribute benefits. All to pave the way for privatization and more billionaire tax cuts.”
All of this and more – the funding and staff cuts and the sociopath Musk’s role in the government – polls badly for Trump and his party.
A Coup Attempt Predicted
But of course Donald Trump has never been a normal US president. I can’t stand Timothy Snyder politically, academically[1], or personally, but he had Trump understood pretty damn well in early 2017 when he told Salon‘’s Chauncy de Vega that Trump45 would likely try to stage a coup:
De Vega: “you discuss the idea that Donald Trump will have his own version of Hitler’s Reichstag fire to expand his power and take full control of the government by declaring a state of emergency. How do you think that would play out?”
Snyder: “I think it’s pretty much inevitable that they will try. The reason I think that is that the conventional ways of being popular are not working out for them. The conventional way to be popular or to be legitimate in this country is to have some policies, to grow your popularity ratings and to win some elections. I don’t think 2018 is looking very good for the Republicans along those conventional lines — not just because the president is historically unpopular. It’s also because neither the White House nor Congress have any policies which the majority of the public like. This means they could be seduced by the notion of getting into a new rhythm of politics, one that does not depend upon popular policies and electoral cycles…Whether it works or not depends upon whether when something terrible happens to this country, we are aware that the main significance of it is whether or not we are going to be more or less free citizens in the future. My gut feeling is that Trump and his administration will try and that it won’t work. Not so much because we are so great but because we have a little bit of time to prepare. I also think that there are enough people and enough agencies of the government who have also thought about this and would not necessarily go along.” [2]
Consistent with Snyder’s analysis, Trump45 never made any serious effort to win the 2020 election in “conventional” ways, that is, by trying to develop and run on a popular policy record. He openly flouted public opinion on the pandemic, civil rights, police-statism, tax policy, environmental policy, and the rule of law, helping keep his approval rate in the low 40s and Joe Biden well ahead of him in national polls. This was nothing for his critics and opponents to celebrate however, for, when combined with his clear desire to stay in power, it suggested strongly that he was going to try to keep the presidency in undemocratic, anti-constitutional, and violent (“Reichstag”) ways. Also consistent with Snyder’s April 2017 take and especially with Chauncy de Vega’s view of Trump as a fascist, the terrible events of January 6, 2021 were just the last in a long line of proofs that there was indeed a fascist in the White House. One could argue that 2020 Trump tried and failed to make the George Floyd Rebellion into his Reichstag Fire Moment[3].
“If You Think I’m Being Hysterical, I’m Sorry, It’s You Who is Being Naïve”
Here we are eight years later. The “most dangerous criminal in human history” — as Noam Chomsky described Trump in January of 2020 (with a special emphasis on the militantly fossil-capitalist Trump’s eco-cidal nature) – is back in the world’s most dangerous job. And he’s doing it again – acting in ways contrary to public opinion and harmful to his political party.
What’s it all about this time? One theory is that the Constitution’s two-term presidential limit (under the 1951 22nd Amendment) means that Trump no longer needs to worry about re-election. By this explanation, his constitutional ineligibility for a third term means that he has no political incentive to honor public opinion.
This view of the matter does not impress me. Look at how Trump conducted himself during his first term, when he wasn’t term-limited: just as Snyder predicted, he acted in brazen defiance of majority opinion and with the authoritarian intent of not accepting defeat in the next election.
I think it’s more likely that Trump47 sees himself as a candidate to be an Amerikaner Fascist Strongman for Life. I don’t think he’s “joking” about blowing through the Constitution’s two-term limit. My guess is that he intends to try for a third term and indeed to rule until he dies. I agree 100% with the liberal editor of The New Republic Michael Tomasky:
“Trump wants to be president for life – and he’s already preparing for it…When this [Trump’s threat to go for a third term through any means at his disposal including force] comes up on cable news, the host typically asks the guests whether Trump is just trolling the libs or should be taken seriously. It’s a silly question, because the answer is obviously both. He’s always trolling. But if you’ve watched these first four weeks and think he’s not capable of finding a way to suspend the Constitution and stay in office, well, you’re not watching the same show I am…If you think I’m being hysterical, I’m sorry, it’s you who are being naïve. Trump has already orchestrated a coup against the United States in which he wanted to see his own vice president hanged. What more proof of his intentions do you need? Yes, he ultimately backed down and left office as scheduled. Privately, he knew he lost. Now, as he’s constantly telling us, he legitimately won—in what he falsely refers to as a ‘landslide.” He obviously believes he’s been given a mandate to do whatever he wants.”
What “mandate”? Only 29% of the nation’s adults for Trump last November, Trump’s 1.5 percent official popular vote victory is one of the smallest ever in the history of US presidential elections, Trump’s victory in the Electoral College is due to just 0.15%of the US electorate; Trump would have lost to Harris in both the Electoral College but for stepped-up neo-Jim Crow racist voter suppression across the country.[4]
But I digress. As Tomasky points out, the Senate-approved confirmations of abject Trump loyalists to head the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Justice Department, and the National Intelligence Service have given “Trump personal control over the country’s legal and intelligence services.” Trump has also successfully placed fascist subordinates atop the Department of Homeland Security (the noxious dog-killer Kristi Noem), the Department of Defense (the open Christian white nationalist Pete Hegseth) and the Joints Chiefs of Staff (the ridiculous MAGA general Dan “Raizin” Caine). This time, unlike during Trump’s first term, there will be “no one around to stop Trump from declaring martial law and suspending the Constitution or even an election.” And Trump will count on fascist paramilitaries — including a bunch he let out of prison — to help keep him in power by force.
And, really, why shouldn’t Trump think he can blow through the 22nd Amendment? His return to the White House stands in bold defiance of the third section of the 14th Amendment, which explicitly forbids a former insurrectionist from holding any public office in the US unless Congress has exempted him or her from this prohibition by a two-thirds vote. And the Trump-crafted Supreme Court has granted him (in last July’s The United States v. Trump verdict) blanket immunity from prosecution (during or after his time in the White House) for any crime – yes, any crime, including the murder of one’s political opponents – he commits in connection with his “official presidential duties”!
The Dismal Dems
Does the orange-sprayed Dear Leader need to worry that the Democrats will spring into action to arouse the masses to stop the new Trump fascist regime before it consolidates to the point where Trump can stay in power until he dies? Know any other good jokes? The liberal anti-fascist commentator and former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich rightly implored Democrats not to attend last Tuesday’s Trump rally in the US Capitol. “Democrats should boycott Trump’s address tonight,” Reich wrote. “ If they feel they need to attend, they must not signal to the nation that we’re living in normal times. Make good and loud trouble. Disrupt the speech. When he lies, boo loudly! Anything less will legitimize Trump’s coup.”
The dismal, demobilizing, dollar-drenched Weimar Dems, the nation’s party of “inauthentic opposition” (as Sheldon Wolin aptly labelled them during George W. Bush’s second term), did relatively little of that. They were given an opportunity during Trump’s sick speech to rise up in defiance to protect one of their nonwhite colleagues in the Democratic House delegation. But when the Christian Fascist House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered Rep. Al Green’s removal from the Congressional chamber for properly denouncing Trump’s false claim (see above) to have been given a “mandate” last fall, the House Dems sat there like scared school children as this proud Black man was physically expelled from “the people’s house.” Ten Weimar-to-Vichy House Dems have actually joined with the Republi-fascists in voting to censure Green for interrupting Mein Trumpf.
A small number of Democratic Congresspersons either boycotted the speech altogether or left in the middle and, but most attended and sat there passively, thereby helping, in Reich’s words, “legitimize Trump’s coup.” Truth is, not a single Democrat should have been present in the Congressional chamber when the malignant orange-sprayed ogre Mein Trumpf spoke two nights ago.
Endnotes
1. See Daniel Lazare’s devastating review of the virulent anti-communist Snyder’s most heralded book: “Timony Snyder’s Lies,” Jacobin, September 9, 2014, https://jacobin.com/2014/09/timothy-snyders-lies/
2. Chauncy de Vega, “Historian Timothy Snyder,” Salon, May 1, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/05/01/historian-timothy-snyder-its-pretty-much-inevitable-that-trump-will-try-to-stage-a-coup-and-overthrow-democracy/
3. For a review of Trump’s first presidency, see Chapter 3, titled “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21,” in Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (New York: Routledge, 2021).
4. Paul Street, “There’s No Popular Mandate for this Fascist Madness,” ZNet, February 1, 2025, https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/theres-no-popular-mandate-for-this-fascist-madness/
The post Why Trump is So Willing to Defy Public Opinion appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.
Paul Street | Radio Free (2025-03-07T06:56:53+00:00) Why Trump is So Willing to Defy Public Opinion. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/07/why-trump-is-so-willing-to-defy-public-opinion-2/
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