President Trump is winning.
Universities retreat under pressure, law firms submit to extortion, scientific and medical research funding has been decimated, federal employees face ideological purges, tariffs are imposed as political weapons, the military has become a domestic police force and the administration is demanding that cultural institutions mute or even eliminate criticism of the worst aspects of America’s past.
The president targets each constituency in isolation, leaving all divided and vulnerable.
In his assault on liberal American values and institutions, Trump is claiming the powers of a wartime president against a fragmented opposition bound by the traditional rules of political engagement.
An 8,000-word report issued in April by the Center for American Progress, “Trump’s First 100 Days: Creating an Imperial Presidency That Harms Americans,” captures the scope of Trump’s teardown of American democracy.
“President Donald Trump,” the report’s two authors, Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky, write:
is aggressively implementing a far-right, multipronged plan to create an imperial presidency. Acting far more aggressively than he did in his first term, Trump is casting aside the U.S. Constitution and federal laws, shattering long-established guardrails designed to protect the system of checks and balances, and using government power to stifle dissent.
The authors add that Trump
is asserting his primacy over Congress, the courts, the federal bureaucracy, the media, universities, and civil society, while incorporating elements of oligarchy and systemic corruption. Without more pushback against Trump’s unprecedented power grab, the United States could ultimately resemble modern autocracies around the world, such as Hungary and Turkey, with Americans’ safety, prosperity, and fundamental rights suffering the consequences.
It is an asymmetric struggle without precedent in American political history, creating a predicament for all those opposed to a president who acts without regard to law, constitutional limits or congressional authorization, who disdains due process, prosecutes political adversaries and weaponizes regulatory agencies to attack the media, academia, the legal profession and liberal democracy itself.
While Trump thrives on the wreckage he leaves in his wake, he is guided by Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Vought and Miller are coldblooded, ideologically driven strategists who have spent nearly a decade developing the foundations for this MAGA takeover of what was once a familiar American way of life.
Vought has explicitly declared that his primary goal is to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”
Paul Winfree, deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy in the first Trump administration, told Politico, “Russ knows how to manage both up and down, and he also knows how to use the levers of government and how to think more broadly about legislative strategy and working with Congress, basically the way that things get done in this town,” adding, “He is a master at this.”
I asked Steven Pinker — a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, where he has been in the forefront of debates over university reform and the Trump administration’s attacks on the university — for his assessment of the power imbalance between Trump and his adversaries:
“The shock in the second Trump administration,” Pinker wrote,
is how ruthlessly organized the movement became during the four-year interregnum. This time his administration was prepared with surgical strikes on all the zones of resistance. Apparently this planning came from the architects of Project 2025. The resistance appears to have no corresponding defensive plan.
Pinker stressed his view that
The coordinated defense of democracy has to come not just from the center to the left, but from the center-right to the left, including the never-Trumpers, Project Lincolners, Weekly Standard refugees, National Review holdouts, Andrew Sullivan readers and so on.
The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Pinker noted, “was accompanied by an intellectual movement (national conservatives, integralists, Claremonsters, Silicon Valley NRX neo-reactionaries) that gave it some heft, conviction, energy and enough coherence to back up court briefs.” In contrast, “the center and center-left have not articulated a positive vision for the anti-Trump resistance other than opposition to MAGA in one direction and wokeism in the other.”
Pinker, like a number of others I communicated with, was particularly critical of “the Democratic Party, which ought to be the center for this resistance, but appears to be clueless, captured by its identity politicians and unable to formulate a coherent battle plan for winning elections or fighting in court.”
Without an election to unify the opposition to Trump, critics of the administration face what Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale who is working on a book about the future of American democracy with Paul Pierson, a political scientist at Berkeley, describes as a
Fundamental problem — one that is widely recognized yet devilishly difficult to overcome — the collective action dilemma faced by those who would fight back against the erosion of American democracy. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have amassed considerable coercive power; they face almost no pushback from members of the Republican Party in Congress or Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court (who are aligned with the MAGA movement even when they are not actively spearheading its efforts).
Without a stronger collective resistance, it is depressingly rational to try to stay out of the spotlight or strike some kind of not-too-catastrophic deal. But, of course, every decision of this sort strengthens MAGA’s hand.
The Democratic Party, Hacker argued,
has proved extremely ill suited to the present challenge. It is a party built for electoral and governing resilience in the face of “normal” political swings and inside-the-Beltway battles over often-incremental policy advances. But today’s crisis calls for a broad-based organizational presence, encompassing grass roots political activity alongside national-level mobilization.
I wrote to Bob Bauer, a professor of practice at N.Y.U. law school and a Democratic expert in the structuring and financing of political organizations, asking for his views on the strategic options available to opponents of the MAGA agenda.
He replied by email, arguing that “There is an urgent opposition to be mounted and effectively articulated.”
Bauer described what he called “a key requirement for success in this vital project”:
The mechanics matter, but first must come the message: How does such a movement/organization expect to be persuasive? To build a pro-democracy coalition across party and ideological lines requires showing how democratic institutions are necessary to effective governance — and not, as Trump and allies suggest, an impediment to the meaningful change that much of the electorate is demanding.
Trump has always banked on winning the “change” argument and connecting change to the imperative of norm-busting, law-skirting or law-violating governance strategies. The opposition has to meet, head-on, this pernicious claim and show how these strategies are producing failed government.
Trump, Bauer wrote, is
a president who claims the right to do as he pleases without regard to rules or norms, a president who is pleasing himself. The 2024 electorate did not vote for a president’s claims of unlimited authority to start global trade wars, or deploy the military in domestic law enforcement, or decide who is an American.
There is no reason to believe that a majority of the electorate is prepared to trade a better economy, affordable health care or good schools for a politics of revenge, insults and self-glorification in which a president can do whatever he chooses “for the good of the country” on his say-so.
The Trump opposition has to be able to show the connection between governing failure and the trashing of democratic norms, values and institutions.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociologist at Princeton who has studied the competition between autocracy and democracy in Poland and Hungary, wrote by email in response to my query:
Yes, those opposed to autocratic capture need to organize, build infrastructure and stop being polite. Most of those who believe in democracy and the rule of law tend to put their faith in litigation and elections and that’s what we’ve seen in the first seven months of Trump 2.0.
So, Scheppele continued, “we should have organized a broadly pitched political movement long before this to push back.” If we do so now, she argued, there are crucial steps to avoid adopting autocratic practices:
I’ve worked on this in other countries, and my advice has always been: Whatever you propose to do to recover from an autocratic power grab, commit yourself to doing it with benchmarks you announce in advance to show your commitment to the rule of law.
It does mean committing to a set of principles so that those who are watching — and why not commit to nonpartisan monitors — can distinguish the autocrat’s power grab from similarly disruptive actions that restore the rule of law.
Some of the others whom I contacted cited the difficulties of trying to mobilize a unified opposition to Trump.
Mike Lux, a co-founder of Democracy Partners, a political consulting firm, who is a longtime supporter of liberal causes, raised a crucial issue in an email: “To be brutally honest, I fear fragmentation less than a consolidated approach driven by the same establishment power players who have failed us before.”
If you put the same kind of establishment strategists in charge, Lux added, “I would be opposed to a consolidated approach, because I think it would fail and waste a huge amount of money.”
That’s not to say that Lux is optimistic about the immediate future:
The Trump regime’s lawbreaking will get worse as we head into the election year. The redistricting battle is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the way they will throw the 2026 elections into disarray and claim the wins we do have are illegitimate.
A second criticism is that the creation of a new organization does not address the imbalance of institutional power built into the system.
Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century, a pro-Democratic PAC and advocacy group that spent $97.5 million in the 2023-24 election cycle, emailed me to say:
The asymmetry is simple: Trump has more capacity to act as the leader of the government and of a party that controls both houses of Congress and a large fraction of the judiciary and media; we have less.
It’s a power problem. Where we control levers, such as in California, Democrats and allied institutions have shown plenty of will to power; where we don’t, what’s been attributed to a lack of will is better attributed to a lack of ability.
Support for an encompassing organization to oversee and direct anti-Trump forces, Dennis argued, grows out of
the desire to have somebody in charge. We can all see the scope of the problems, but any one of us can only directly influence our piece of the pie. We want somebody to be looking at the whole pie and calling the shots. Some wanted the D.N.C. to fill this role. But it cannot. To me, however, that leader will inevitably come in the form of the 2028 nomination fight. In the meantime, we all need to do our part of the work as effectively, strategically and ruthlessly as we are able.
At this stage, Dennis contended, what’s
equally important is what not to do. Don’t chase a unifying policy blueprint beyond broad values; detailed planks fracture a coalition whose true adhesive is negative partisanship. A charismatic leader can build a charismatic vision; a faceless organization cannot.
For Jennifer Mittelstadt, a historian of 20th-century America at Rutgers, a project that attempts to unite anti-Trump forces across the ideological spectrum, financed in part or whole by wealthy donors, is doomed to failure:
“I have little hope for any rich-guy-based solution of a new, invulnerable corporate entity of the center/left (what that would even be I cannot envision),” Mittelstadt wrote by email. “Having rich people fund a rebound might be a path to a one-cycle win, but not to taking back the country. It’s a surefire way to lose the country in the long term,”
Mittelstadt said she spoke at the Aug. 14-15 conference on Liberalism for the 21st Century sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, where many participants supported a strategy of “never Trumpers, liberals, libertarians all agreeing on a lowest common denominator of a ‘rules-based-order’ of some kind, and fighting on that basis. While most on the center or left would of course endorse a rules-based order, I’m not certain it will capture the imagination of people who can’t pay for college or find a place to live affordably.”
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, replied by email to my queries:
A greater willingness to break laws (and support lawbreakers) is a predictable outcome of high levels of affective polarization. When you hate the other side and see it as an immediate threat to the existence of the nation, then the ends seem to justify any means. Hence Trump’s famous and awful tweet: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Continuing this line of argument, Haidt wrote:
A greater willingness to support authoritarians and authoritarian policies is a predictable result of the perception that the moral order is crumbling, or that someone or something is attacking or undermining the moral order.
When people see homeless drug addicts sprawled out on their local sidewalks, when they hear of carjackings, when they see videos of smash-and-grab shoplifters, or of immigrants climbing over border fences, it triggers an authoritarian reaction in about a third of the population.
They are much more willing to see a forceful and even violent government response to suppress crime and restore order. Even if levels of mayhem are declining in reality, when videos are shared on social media they can be much more compelling than any graph or chart.
Further complicating the debate, Haidt pointed out, is the fact that Democrats and liberals do not have clean hands:
Even though the scale of dirty tricks and the Trump administration’s use of government to intimidate is unprecedented, I have found that whenever I talk with people on the right or read their writings, they are able to point to something that the Democrats did, at some point in the past, that was structurally similar (even if the scale is now so much bigger).
For example, I am horrified that the Trump administration is holding universities hostage by threatening immediate cutoff of already allocated research funds to force them to adopt elements of Trump’s ideological agenda.
Trump is wreaking havoc, much of it irreparable, and he has three and a half more years — at a minimum — to continue his wrecking-ball presidency. The disunity of the opposition has enabled Trump to proceed without the public fully understanding the range and scope of his destruction.
Every day Trump sows confusion and uncertainty as his overall strategy of drowning voters in a sea of chaos keeps a majority of Americans in the dark, unable to distinguish truth from fiction amid the cacophony of political and legal charges, countercharges and — because Trump is a master prevaricator — lies.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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