Opinion
This fuel is essential to Trump's survival. Here's how we cut it off
Hate killed a state legislator in Minneapolis, nearly killed Paul Pelosi with a hammer, and fuels the same violent rage that burned through Charlottesville, stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and has been stalking school board meetings and statehouses across America for the past two decades.
Hate brought Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) to his knees. Does anybody believe that if he’d been white he’d have been dragged out like that and beat to the ground? It inspired Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Elon Musk to essentially congratulate a would-be mass murderer. It just arrested the Comptroller of New York City for trying to defend a man seeking asylum in the United States.
Hate blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, took down the twin towers on 9/11, and keeps loading the chambers of mass shooters while whispering lies about enemies and conspiracies until blood spills in schools, synagogues, churches, and supermarkets.
So why does Donald Trump — and why do his followers, including those elected to federal and state office, and his cabinet members — so vigorously embrace hate?
Trump is the first president in American history to explicitly use hate as a campaign tool and then embrace it as the central focus of his rule. He launched his first campaign by calling Mexicans “rapists,” proposed a Muslim ban, called for violence at his rallies, and used dehumanizing language to describe immigrants, women, and political opponents. For Memorial Day, he posted a social media message calling the half of Americans who voted against him “scum.”
This wasn’t political strategy in the traditional sense — it was a revival of something far more dangerous: the politics of hate as a tool for seizing and maintaining power.
It works, in part, because hate can be intoxicating. It reduces complex issues to simple binaries grounded in scapegoating the hated. Economic anxiety becomes the fault of immigrants. Cultural change becomes a conspiracy by elites. Personal failures become the result of a rigged system designed to benefit “them” at the expense of “us.”
And Trump’s use of hate is unprecedented in American presidential politics. Previous presidents, even those who harbored prejudices or implemented discriminatory policies, worked to maintain a veneer of dignity and unity in their public messaging.
They understood that the presidency — the ultimate parental figure and role model for the nation, its citizens, and its children — demanded a certain moral authority, even when their actions fell short of their rhetoric.
Trump shattered that norm, showing other Republicans that explicit appeals to grievance and animosity — and the amplification of them by right-wing hate-based media — mobilized his base more effectively than traditional appeals to shared values or common purpose.
Why, after all, bother to fix things and make the country run better when you can hold power and massively enrich yourself by simply and constantly churning the rancid pool of hate that’s always deep in the underbelly of any nation?
This has worked for Trump because hate is intoxicating; it provides a rush of righteous anger that feels empowering to those who feel powerless. It creates a sense of belonging among those who’ve been marginalized by 44 years of Reaganism gutting the middle class.
Most dangerously, it absolves the haters of personal responsibility by moving the blame for society’s usually complex problems onto designated enemies like immigrants, trans people, and racial or religious minorities.
Authoritarian leaders throughout history have used hate as a unifying force; indeed, it’s the key to authoritarians seizing power in the first place. When a population is afraid, divided, or economically insecure, hate becomes a shortcut to loyalty.
“It’s not your fault you’re struggling,” the demagogue whispers. “It’s their fault — the Jews, the immigrants, the Blacks, the Muslims, the queer people, the intellectuals, the journalists, the protestors.”
Hate simplifies the world into “us” and “them,” and in doing so it becomes a weapon of distraction that keeps working people too angry at each other to realize they’re being ripped off and exploited by the very people stoking the flames.
That’s exactly what’s happening in America today.
While Trump and the GOP rage about immigrants, trans kids, and university protests, they’re shoveling trillions in tax cuts to billionaires, gutting environmental protections, slashing Social Security and healthcare funding, and selling off public lands to oil and mining companies.
This reinvented GOP — this party of hate — wants you looking at your neighbor with suspicion so you don’t notice the donor class that’s buying your government out from under you. Hate stood in a press conference last week and declared its mission was to “liberate” Los Angeles from its mayor and governor.
But there’s a deeper, psychological layer to this too. Hate feels powerful. It produces adrenaline, a rush of certainty, a sense of purpose. It gives people who feel small and angry a story where they’re not just victims; instead, they’re righteous warriors.
In a society where inequality has exploded because we still haven’t overturned Reagan’s neoliberalism and raised taxes on rich people, hate offers the illusion of control.
And Trump — with his narcissism, his need for revenge, and his boundless craving for applause — knows how to serve that illusion with a smile and a sneer. He doesn’t just deploy hate cynically. He needs it. It’s his fuel. It fills his rallies. It lights up his social media posts. It drives his movement. It’s intrinsic to his personality and has driven him throughout his life.
Tragically for the rest of us, the consequences are very real.
Black churches are being burned again. Jewish people are being murdered in synagogues. Asian American elders are being assaulted in the streets. Hispanic families are being torn apart. Queer teens are dying by suicide. Public servants — from school board members to election workers — are being harassed, threatened, and driven from their posts.
We’ve been here before. The Ku Klux Klan used Christianity and nationalism to justify lynching. Hitler used “traditional values” and economic anxiety to justify genocide. Rwanda’s broadcasters spent months using radio to call their political enemies “cockroaches” before the slaughter began. The pattern is always the same: dehumanize, divide, and destroy.
And it can happen here again — if we let it.
Already we see Republican governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott rewriting textbooks to whitewash slavery and justify bigotry. We see state legislators introducing laws that would imprison librarians, ban books, silence teachers, erase trans people, and outlaw protest. We see a Supreme Court that’s blessed voter suppression and gutted civil rights law. We see vigilantes armed with AR-15s patrolling polling places and border towns.
And we see a growing movement, led by Trump, that is explicitly preparing for violence. His allies talk about using the military against American citizens. They’re calling for mass deportations, camps, loyalty tests, and the criminalization of dissent.
This isn’t rhetoric. It’s a roadmap.
But hate is also fragile. Its political utility contains the seeds of its own destruction. Societies built on hatred eventually consume themselves: As we’re all experiencing right now, the energy required to maintain constant vigilance against enemies exhausts populations.
The paranoia that fuels hate movements creates internal fractures as former allies become new targets, something we’ve seen repeatedly among Trump’s lieutenants. No society based in hate can last long; just ask the ghosts of the Confederacy.
History provides numerous examples of this pattern. The French Revolution devoured its own children as revolutionary fervor turned to internecine purges. McCarthyism eventually collapsed under the weight of its own excesses. The Cultural Revolution in China destroyed countless lives before the leadership recognized its destructive trajectory. In each case, societies paid tremendous costs before finding ways to step back from the brink.
The antidote to hate isn’t silence or appeasement. It’s not cowardice or cynicism. It’s courage, as we saw during the No Kings Day protests.
Demonstrators protest against U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
It’s the courage to speak out, even when your voice shakes. It’s the courage to stand with your neighbors, especially the most vulnerable. It’s the courage to vote, to organize, to protest, and to tell the truth about the haters, even when the truth is unpopular and the haters threaten you.
America is not a perfect country. But we are a country with a long tradition of fighting back against hate, from the abolitionists to the Freedom Riders, from labor organizers to marriage equality activists. Every inch of progress this nation has seen over the past 250 years has come from people refusing to let hatred have the last word.
Now it’s our turn to confront and defeat hate. Our opportunity to remake America with compassion and the embrace of our fellow human beings, regardless of their race, religion, gender identity, or politics. It’s our obligation in this new century that’s been so badly despoiled by Trump’s pathetic attempts to turn us against each other.
Trump is betting that Americans are too numb, too tired, or too divided to stand up to the hate machine he’s building. He’s betting that we’ll be distracted by his and Fox’s manufactured outrage while he consolidates power behind the scenes.
But we can prove him wrong. We can show up — in the streets, at the ballot box, in our neighborhoods and online communities — and remind each other that decency still matters, that democracy still matters, that love and solidarity are stronger than hate and fear.
Our Founders remind us that this great country belongs to the people. All of us. United not by race or religion or ideology, but by a shared commitment to democracy, liberty, and justice for everyone.
Let’s make that commitment real. Let’s reject hate. Let’s choose courage. And let’s fight like hell for the America we still believe is possible.
Pass it along, speak out, and get active; tag, you’re it!
This under-the-radar Supreme Court case could upend Trump's plans
This view is only strengthened when Americans see most of the justices of the court dividing along ideological lines on decisions related to some of the most hot-button issues the court handles. Those include reproductive rights, voting rights, corporate power, environmental protection, student loan policy, worker rights and LGBTQ+ rights.
But there is one recent decision where the court was unanimous in its ruling, perhaps because its holding should not be controversial: National Rifle Association v. Vullo. In that 2024 case, the court said that it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment’s free speech provisions for government to force people to speak and act in ways that are aligned with its policies.
The second Trump administration has tried to wield executive branch power in ways that appear to punish or suppress speech and opposition to administration policy priorities. Many of those attempts have been legally challenged and will likely make their way to the Supreme Court.
The somewhat under-the-radar – yet incredibly important – decision in National Rifle Association v. Vullo is likely to figure prominently in Supreme Court rulings in a slew of those cases in the coming months and years, including those involving law firms, universities and the Public Broadcasting Service.
That’s because, in my view as a legal scholar, they are all First Amendment cases.
Why the NRA sued a New York state official
In May 2024, in an opinion written by reliably liberal Sonia Sotomayor, a unanimous court ruled that the efforts of New York state government officials to punish companies doing business with the NRA constituted clear violations of the First Amendment.
Following its own precedent from the 1960s, Bantam Books v. Sullivan, the court found that government officials “cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.”
Many of the current targets of the Trump administration’s actions have claimed similar suppression of their First Amendment rights by the government. They have fought back, filing lawsuits that often cite the National Rifle Association v. Vullo decision in their efforts.
To date, the most egregious examples of actions that violate the principles announced by the court – the executive orders against law firms – have largely been halted in the lower courts, with those decisions often citing what’s now known as the Vullo decision.
While these cases may still be working their way through the lower courts, it is likely that the Supreme Court will ultimately consider legal challenges to the Trump administration’s efforts in a range of areas.
These would include the executive orders against law firms, attempts to cut government grants and research funding from universities, potential moves to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status, and regulatory actions punishing media companies for what the White House believes to be unfavorable coverage.
The court could also hear disputes over the government terminating contracts with a family of companies that provides satellite and communications support to the U.S. government generally and the military in particular.
Despite the variety of organizations and government actions involved in these lawsuits, they all can be seen as struggles over free speech and expression, like Vullo.
Whether it is private law firms, multinational corporations, universities or members of the media, all have one thing in common: They have all been targeted by the Trump administration for the same reason – they are engaged in actions or speech that is disfavored by President Donald Trump.
Protecting speech, regardless of politics
The NRA, an often-controversial gun-rights advocacy organization, was the plaintiff in the Vullo decision.
But just because the groups that have been targeted by the Trump administration are across the political divide from the NRA does not mean the outcome in decisions relying on the court’s opinion will be different. In fact, these groups can rely on the same arguments advanced by the NRA, and are, I believe, likely to win.
Vullo isn’t the only decision on which the court can rely when considering challenges to the Trump administration’s efforts targeting these groups.
In the wake of World War II, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson took a leave from the court and served as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. Prosecuting them for their atrocities, Jackson saw how the Nuremberg defendants wielded government authority to punish enemies who resisted their rise and later opposed their rule.
Once he returned to the court, Jackson wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, where the court found that students who refused to salute the American flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at school could not be expelled.
Jackson’s opinion is a forceful rejection of government attempts to control what people say: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
If some of the cases testing the state’s power to force fidelity to the executive branch reach the Supreme Court, the cases could offer the justices the opportunity to, once again, speak with one voice as they did in NRA v. Vullo, to demonstrate it can be evenhanded and will not play politics with the First Amendment.
Ray Brescia, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Albany Law School
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Three scenarios that could unfold after Trump drags U.S. into war with Iran
These strikes have to be viewed as part of an overall continuum that began with the Gaza war following Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and then continued with Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah (the Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon) and the fall of the Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria.
Iran has never been weaker than it is now. And when Trump said it may take two weeks for him to decide whether to bomb Iran, the Israelis likely pushed him to act sooner.
We can assume there was a lot of Israeli pressure on Trump to use the massive ordnance penetrators, the 30,000-pound (13,600-kilogram) “bunker buster” bombs that only the US can deploy with its B2 bombers.
Now that Trump has taken the significant step of entering the US in yet another Middle East war, where could things go from here? There are a few possible scenarios.
1. Iran strikes back
The Iranians know they don’t have the strength to take on the US, and that the Americans can do enormous damage to their country and even put the Iranian regime’s stability at risk.
This is always the prime consideration of the clerical regime led by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – everything else is subordinate to that.
To gauge Iran’s possible reaction, we can look at the how it responded to the first Trump administration’s assassination of the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, in January 2020.
Iran said there would be a major reaction, but all it did was launch a barrage of missiles at two American bases in Iraq, which caused no US fatalities and very little damage. After that token retaliation, Iran said the matter was closed.
Iran’s reaction to the new US strikes will likely be along these lines. It probably won’t want to get into a tit-for-tat with the US by launching attacks against American facilities in the region. Trump has promised to respond with force:
Iran, a bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.
It’s also unclear how long Iran will be able to prosecute this war. This depends largely on how many ballistic missiles and launchers it has left.
There are various estimates as to how many ballistic missiles Iran may have remaining in its stockpiles. It was believed to have about 2,000 missiles capable of reaching Israel at the start of the war. Some estimates say Iran has fired 700 of them; others say around 400. Whatever the number is, its stockpiles are dwindling quickly.
Israel has also destroyed about a third of Iran’s ballistic missile launchers. If Israel is able to destroy all of them, Iran would have very limited ability to fight back.
2. Iran backs down
Before the US got involved in the conflict, Iran said it was prepared to negotiate, but it wouldn’t do so while Israel was still attacking.
So, one scenario is that some sort of compromise can now be worked out, in which Israel announces a ceasefire and Iran and the US agree to resume negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program.
The big problem is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he doesn’t trust the negotiating process and he doesn’t want to stop Israel’s military actions until all of Iran’s nuclear facilities have been completely destroyed. He’s also been bombing Iran’s oil terminals and gas facilities to put even more pressure on the regime.
But the regime has shown itself to be incredibly determined not to lose face. It was under great pressure at different times during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and never considered surrendering until a US missile mistakenly took down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 people.
Iran then agreed to a UN-brokered ceasefire. But the Iran-Iraq war lasted eight years, causing an estimated one million deaths. And when the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, agreed to the ceasefire, he said it was “worse than drinking poison”.
Given the state of Iran’s military capabilities, Khamenei, the current supreme leader, might surrender simply to try to preserve the regime. But this would be quite a climbdown as far as he’s concerned, and he has been very obstinate in the past.
The regime is very unpopular, but the Iranian people, in my experience, are strongly patriotic – loyal to their country, if not the regime. Though it’s difficult to gauge opinion in a country of 90 million people, a lot of Iranians would not want to be ordered to do anything by the US or Israel, and would rather fight on.
Netanyahu has said he wants to create the conditions for the Iranian people to rise up against the regime.
But it’s worth bearing in mind that the opposite of autocracy is not necessarily democracy. It could possibly be chaos. Iran has a number of different ethnic groups and there may be huge disagreements over what should take the place of the clerical regime, were it to fall.
At this stage, the regime will probably be able to hold together. And even if Khameini were to die suddenly, the regime will likely be able to quickly replace him.
Though we don’t know his probable successor, the regime has had plenty of time to plan for this. Those in senior positions will also know that a post-Khamenei succession struggle really would put the regime at risk.
3. The US engagement is limited
According to the new polling by The Economist and YouGov, released on June 17, 60% of Americans were opposed to joining the conflict between Israel and Iran, with just 16% in favour. Among Republicans, 53% opposed military action.
So, these strikes were not an obviously popular move among Americans at this stage. However, if this is an isolated event and succeeds in bringing a swift end to the war, Trump will probably be applauded by a majority of Americans.
If the US has to go back with more bombers – or there are serious attacks on US interests in the region – there could be more adverse reactions among Americans.
Another question is whether Iran’s 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium have been destroyed in the US attack.
If it hasn’t been destroyed, and depending how much damage has been done to its centrifuges, Iran may be able to reconstruct its nuclear program relatively quickly. And it could have more incentive to further enrich this uranium to 90% purity, or weapons-grade level, to build a nuclear device.
Ian Parmeter, Research Scholar, Middle East Studies, Australian National University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.