President Donald Trump continues to claim that he won the 2024 election by a "landslide" when, in fact, he won the popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent. And Trump is claiming that the No Kings Day protests held in cities all over the United States on Saturday, October 18 were small, marginal and poorly attended; in fact, there were millions of participants in protests that, organizers said, totaled around 2500.
According to MSNBC reporter Antonia Hylton, the No Kings protest in New York City turned out to be even larger than predicted. The turnout, Hylton reported, "far exceeded" the original estimate of 200,000 people.
During an interview with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg for The New Republic's podcast, "The Daily Blast," host Greg Sargent emphasized that the more Trump feels threatened, the more he angrily lashes out. And right now, according to Sargent, Trump is feeling very threatened thanks to recent polls — including a CNBC poll showing that only 34 percent of Americans approve of his handling of inflation.
In the interview, posted on October 20, Rosenberg told Sargent, "I think that there are two things that are happening simultaneously that we have to keep in our minds. One is that Trump is doing incredible harm to the country and breaking things that are going to be difficult, if not impossible, to repair. And we must act with incredible vigor to mitigate the damage and to win back power."
Rosenberg continued, "But the second thing that's happening, and that's equally important, is that he's in physical, cognitive, and political decline, and that he's growing, I think, ever more distant from the American people. He's struggling to rally even his own voters behind major parts of his agenda. And as a political project, he's failing."
The Democratic strategist warned that "the more there’s a perception that his government and his political project have failed," the more one is seeing a "greater escalation toward authoritarianism" from the Trump Administration.
Rosenberg told Sargent, "And that's because they're growing to believe that winning the elections, staying in power through winning the elections next year, is starting to become difficult, if not impossible. And so, therefore, they're going to Door 2 — which is greater illiberalism, crushing their opposition…. I call it the vicious cycle of a failing strongman — that the more he fails, the more he grows distant from the public, which encourages him to become more of an illiberal strongman and to crack down on his opposition. And I think that he's in that dynamic right now. And unfortunately, what it's doing is accelerating his experimentation with becoming a total autocrat."
Trump, according to Rosenberg, is acting like a "full-on authoritarian."
"They're losing," Rosenberg told Sargent. "They don't feel like this stuff is working. They know the economy isn't going well. So what it's causing them to do, Greg, is a version of what you were saying — which is for him to have to restore his strength and his manhood and his manliness through these other extraordinary means, right? Through the use of the military, through killing fishermen in the Caribbean, through the saber-rattling that he does against the Democrats every day, to putting (former FBI Director) James Comey into jail."
Rosenberg added, "These are ways of him restoring strength that he actually doesn't have. It's like drinking the blood of virgins in order to restore the decline that he's going through…. He's also doing things such that I don't know that you can argue that America lives in a democracy, that we live in a democracy, any longer.
Listen to the full podcast at this link or read the transcript here.