At last – a fitting monument to Trump
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
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This Trump surrender was the worst yet
Lindsay Graham says he believes Donald Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy if that country’s leader, Vladimir Putin, doesn’t agree to peace talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Trump believes that if Putin doesn’t do his part, that he’s going to have to crush his economy,” the US senator told reporters in South Carolina last week. “Because you’ve got to mean what you say.”
This is an amazing thing to say.
Just three days prior, Trump met with Putin in Alaska for three hours. Beforehand, he said there would be “severe consequences” if Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine. Trump said he “solved six wars in six months,” implying that this one would be no different.
Then he choked.
His demands melted into the air. He was all smiles, all handshakes, all deference verging on reverence. The leader of the world’s most powerful military emerged from his meeting with a cut-rate tyrant as if he’d been dogwalked. It was so bad even a Fox reporter had to admit it looked like “Putin came in and steamrolled, got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left.”
The Washington Post’s George Will, who is not a liberal, also saw the plain truth.
“The former KGB agent currently indicted for war crimes felt no need to negotiate with the man-child,” Will said (my stress). “The president’s thunderous demands — a 50-day deadline, a 10-day deadline, 'severe consequences,' a ceasefire before negotiations — all were just noise."
So yes. Senator Graham is right. You’ve got to mean what you say. Trump doesn’t. Indeed, he never does. That’s why he choked.
Because of that, he and other Trump allies have spent their time in the days after that disastrous “summit” trying to rewrite history in order to protect the president from the consequences of his own weakness.
Graham now says Trump is ready to “crush” the Russian economy, as if Trump really were the big strong man he portrays himself to be, rather than the milksop who actually called Putin “the boss” and later phoned him during a meeting with European leaders, as if getting permission.
But Graham isn’t alone.
“The president has this uncanny ability to bend people to his sensible way of thinking,” US envoy Steve Witkoff told Sean Hannity last night.
“He does it each and every time,” he said. “I've never seen anything quite like it and I've been around some master dealmakers. He is the legend as far as I'm concerned. His policy prescriptions are so pragmatic and so sensible and in a distorted world, he’s recalibrating it all. It’s simply remarkable. And every single leader that I have met in my travels, they say the same things I do. Every single one of them.”
Witkoff is the envoy who Anne Applebaum said was “an amateur out of his depth” who “misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful.”
On Fox, noted international relations expert Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke said: “President Trump has done an unbelievable job against long odds,” before speculating, oddly, that “it'll end up probably with a land bridge between the Crimean peninsula and Russia.”
He also said that Trump “hasn’t changed where his mission focus is. It’s peace.”
Peace through surrender.
Isn’t that the most striking thing? The US is unrivaled in its military and diplomatic might. We could end this war, now. As Applebaum said, “arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.”
But Trump chooses weakness.
He chooses to look strong, not be strong.
And no matter what his Republican allies in the Congress do to cover up that fact, they themselves cannot make him. They, too, are weak.
Graham said the clock is ticking and that Trump must “impose steep tariffs on countries that are fueling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by buying its oil, gas, uranium, and other exports,” according to the AP, and such threats might push Putin to the negotiating table.
“If we don’t have this thing moving in the right direction by the time we get back, then I think that plan B needs to kick in,” Graham told the AP.
Plan B would be Congress acting without Trump.
Which means there is no plan B.
The Republicans are weak, because they surrendered their power, first to the rightwing media apparatus, then to Trump, who surrendered his power to Putin, who dominates the rightwing media apparatus.
And has for a decade.
We can speculate about the dirt Putin has on Trump, but fact is, he could mortally wound the president by turning the world’s biggest firehose of disinformation away from his “woke” enemies and toward him. Trump’s base is already confused by his refusal to release “the Epstein files.” Russian propaganda could be deployed to savagely widen the already broad gap between him and the MAGA faithful.
More likely, though, the Kremlin could sow doubt about Trump’s alleged strength. He’s all talk, no walk. We saw it. Russian state media brags about it. Echoes are now bouncing around mainstream media.
While Graham was shielding Trump from his weakness, the UK’s biggest conservative paper ran this hed and dek: “European rearmament is pushing Trump into irrelevance on Ukraine. This vain, vacillating, gullible US president no longer commands the West.”
The importance of the rightwing media apparatus to the Republicans is evident in their efforts at damage control. Trump showed his whole ass. Now it’s up to allies to persuade his supporters that they did not see what they saw or if they did, it was the most amazing thing ever.
They have a lot of work to do. The Economist reported that Americans have a -14 approval rating of his handling of foreign policy. The public knows next to nothing about global affairs, but we know what fear looks like. After meeting Putin, Trump looked scared. And I think he looked scared, because Putin reminded him of something important.
He who can destroy a thing controls it.
So Trump chooses weakness.
And the rest of his party follows.
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Be assured, Trump is doomed — and here's how
The neofascist takeover of America — of our cities, universities, media, law firms, museums, civil service, and public prosecutors who tried to hold Trump and Trump’s vigilantes accountable to the law — worsens by the day.
As I’ve traveled across the country peddling my book, trying to explain how this catastrophe happened and what we can do about it, I’ve found many Americans in shock and outrage.
“How could it have happened so fast?” they ask. I explain that it actually occurred slowly and incrementally over many years until our entire political-economic system became so fragile that a sociopathic demagogue could bring much of it down.
Some people I speak with are still in denial and disbelief. “It’s not as bad as the press makes it out to be,” they say. I tell them that it is — even worse.
Others are in despair — heartbroken and immobilized. “Nothing can be done,” they say. I tell them that hopelessness plays into the hands of Trump and his lackeys who want us to think that the game is over and they’ve won. But we can’t let them. The stakes are too high. Hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Rest assured. The seeds of Trump’s destruction have already been sown. He will overreach. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of birthright citizenship, for example, and Trump announces he’s not bound by the Supreme Court, the uproar will be deafening.
Or the economy will bite him in the butt. As prices continue to rise and job growth continues to slow — due to Trump’s bonkers import taxes (tariffs), his attempt to take over the Fed, and his attacks on immigrants — America will fall into the dread trap of “stagflation”: stagnation and inflation. After months of this, his base is likely to turn on him — remember, many voted for him because he promised to bring prices down — and he and his Republican lackeys in Congress will be toast in the 2026 midterms.
Or his brazen corruption will do him in (he’s personally raking in hundreds of millions from crypto, for example). Or Putin will do him in (if Ukraine falls to Russia or an emboldened Russia strikes Lithuania). Or the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
He no longer has any truth-tellers to advise him — he has purged all of them. And a president who’s flying blind, without anyone around him to tell him he’s about to crash, will inevitably crash. Many innocent people will likely suffer “collateral” damage. But at least the nation will see him for who he is and consign him to the dustbin of history.
None of this argues for complacency. We must continue to fight — demonstrate, phone your representatives and senators, boycott corporations and organizations that are caving in to tyranny, protect the vulnerable, make good trouble.
But please do not fall into denial or despair, and don’t let anyone else.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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This disorder explains the full horror of Trump
Unlike those people gathering together at either end of the anti-MAGA and MAGA continuum to engage in conflict over what looks like an emerging authoritarian, dystopian, back-to-the-future America, there are still some 40 percent of the electorate who are going about their lives undisturbed, as though nothing unusual was happening.
This trichotomous reaction to the sadomasochistic world of Donald Trump has much to do with his lifelong and chronic condition. We can blame most of the avarice and self-aggrandizement by Trump 2.0’s complot on his unacknowledged antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).
In this commentary, I do not focus on the mental states of those MAGA folks who are attracted to and support Trump, or on those anti-MAGA folks who are repelled by and resist him, or on the largest group of people who for whatever reasons choose to ignore him.
Instead, my attention is focused on delineating Trump’s instances of ASPD as a means for better understanding the president’s behavioral motivations and transactional reactions in relation to his political and policymaking decisions.
ASPD is key to explaining why Trump is perpetually breaking institutional norms to save his own ass or to go after somebody else’s — as in the weaponized Justice Department’s selective releasing of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Meanwhile, the president’s corrupt FBI Director, Kash Patel, along with Vice President JD Vance and crooked Attorney General Pam Bondi each inappropriately tweeted about searches of John Bolton’s home and office, seeking classified records.
This type of public disclosure had always been a DOJ no-no. But this performative display of anti-constitutional power on behalf of a vengeful Trump occurred so he could inflict pain upon Bolton, intimidate other critics, and derive pleasure for himself.
Whatever harm may come to Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor, is due to his having written a negative book about the president’s first term, and having become one of Trump’s most credible and formidable critics.
ASPD has also been critically central to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, which could not have been any uglier and less supported by the American people.
This examination of Trump’s ASPD helps reveal many other quandaries in which the president finds himself, in particular when it comes to his alleged dealmaking and peacemaking skills. Say, like diddling around for eight months without coming close to ending wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
Earliest and latest signs
Before I turn to Trump’s racist policies on crime control, his antihuman executive orders, and his counterproductive tariffs, as derivative and illustrative of his ASPD, it is incumbent to lay out the very dangerous and unfortunately ignored dynamics of Trump’s condition.
Trump’s ASPD first publicly appeared when six-year old Donnie got up from his desk, walked over to his male teacher and in front of the whole class hit him upside the head — because the first-grader did not care for the teacher’s taste in music.
Trump’s parents would send him to a military academy for “straightening out.” It obviously failed. Then, some 66 years after Trump was sent to military school — and about 57 years after he dodged the Vietnam draft by way of his bone spurs — a very different intervention occurred.
This was when President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up at the White House on August 18, 2025. Six months after Trump and company’s earlier brutal attack on Zelensky, and a few days after Trump’s suck-up meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the Ukrainian president brought with him seven of Europe’s top leaders, all for the purposes of appeasing the president.
With the cameras rolling, the world witnessed a political intervention to stop a superpower leader spouting “old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.”
More important than merely correcting Trump’s ignorance of history, this intervention stopped him doing something really stupid like negotiating a resolution to the war that would have been harmful to the U.S. and its Ukrainian and NATO allies while benefiting Putin.
Just three days earlier, Trump had rolled out the red carpet for the dictator who invaded Ukraine — the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, for war crimes including the kidnapping and re-educating of more than 19,000 Ukrainian children.
Psychopathy and sociopathy
As used by the National Library of Sciences, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders characterizes those with ASPD as having “a pervasive and enduring pattern of disregarding and violating the rights of others, typically emerging in childhood or early adolescence and persisting” throughout their lives.
Lacking empathy and seldom feeling any remorse, these individuals tend to manipulate others, usually for personal gain. Those suffering from ASPD may regularly engage in lawless behavior and “struggle to learn from the negative consequences of their actions.”
Besides failing to conform to societal norms, other common symptoms or tendencies characteristic of those diagnosed with ASPD include aggressiveness, deceitfulness, egocentrism, entitlement, impulsivity, irritability, irresponsibility, narcissism, recklessness, revengefulness, self-aggrandizement, and superiority.
While “psychopaths” and “sociopaths” are two of the more common names for sufferers from ASPD, these diagnoses are not interchangeable. However, doing so in the case of Trump may not actually be wrong, because the 47th president does exhibit a mixture of both forms of ASPD.
Clinically, these two groups of ASPD sufferers are distinguishable by origins, traits, and behavioral patterns.
Psychopathy is typically attributed as having to do with genetics or early brain development issues affecting areas of the mind related to emotions and impulse control.
Sociopathy is typically attributed to environmental experiences such as early childhood trauma, neglect, or abuse.
As Mary L. Trump, a psychologist and niece of the president, detailed in her first book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), Trump’s ASPD has been an etiological mixture of these two illnesses.
As for behavioral actions and social interactions, psychopaths tend to be more controlling, calculating, and manipulating than sociopaths. Psychopaths expend much energy planning their lawlessness and they also employ manipulative actions to avoid detection. Psychopaths can be very charming and blend into society.
Sociopaths are less adept at concealing their antisocial tendencies. They are more impulsive and erratic. Sociopaths are prone to emotional outbursts, anger, and aggression.
As for violence, lawlessness, and crime, both high-functioning (HF) psychopaths and sociopaths like Trump are less likely than low-functioning (LF) psychopaths and sociopaths to engage in personal violence such as murder or felonious assault.
Deviating a bit from these patterns, the president has an extensive record of allegations of sexual assault and was found liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll by a jury of his peers.
Psychopaths are viewed as more dangerous than sociopaths because of their acute lack of empathy and overly calculated actions. HF psychopaths are more likely than HF sociopaths to engage in serial offenses, such as financial fraud and corporate exploitation.
Finally, because of a greater impulsivity and propensity for recklessness, sociopaths engage in more violent outbursts or poorly executed coverups of lawlessness or corruption than do psychopaths. On the other hand, sociopaths prefer not relying on violence, rather preferring lying, extortion, and intimidation.
Whatever benefits or inflates and animates Trump’s egomania or detracts from his sense of self-worth shapes, if not determines, his cruelly irresponsible actions.
Not to be overly reductive or to oversimplify Trump’s decision or policymaking production, but these have little to do with advisers — “the last person that the president talked with” — or anything to do with whether a piece of legislation or a judicial verdict is “good “ or “bad” for the nation, the rule of law, representative democracy, or even the interests of Trump’s constituents, billionaires excepted, including the MAGA base.
I contend that Trump’s actions or decisions are purely a matter of what in any given moment he perceives to be the most beneficial and least detrimental to him.
For example, here is what the president had to say in praise of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2017, when he toured the museum, led by Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch and with his daughter Ivanka Trump, U.S. Senator Tim Scott, Alveda King, and the then Secretary of Housing, Ben Carson:
“It’s amazing to see. I could stay here for a lot longer. Believe me, it’s really incredible … I’m deeply proud that we now have a museum that honors the millions of African American men and women who built our national heritage…”
This May, Trump reversed course. Six years after Bunch, the first African American and first historian to lead the Smithsonian, was hired, Trump tried to fire him, against the wishes of the Board of Regents.
No longer were anti-racists and racists alike both “good guys,” to paraphrase Trump’s comments during his first administration about the killing in Virginia of an anti-racist protester by Nazi demonstrators, some of whom shouted “Jews will not replace us.”
Just the other day, in a Truth Social post, the president showed his deep contempt for the coverage of slavery in museums:
“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ Like the Smithsonian museum, they are all OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.”
As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, Abraham Lincoln “urged Americans to move past the Civil War ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ unlike Trump who “has malice for all, charity toward none.”
Fascistic in nature
As a general rule, correlation should not be confused with causation. However, as an integrative criminologist with a decades-old clinical background in counseling adolescent and adult offenders and nonoffenders, I would more than suggest that Trump’s racist, sexist, and xenophobic agendas are the consequences of his ASPD intertwined with his family history and socialization and the wider processes of cultural assimilation.
Trump’s biosocial or cultural conflict encounters predate “wokeism” and the undoing of 60 years of civil rights reform, diversity, equity, inclusion, and multiculturalism that may turn out to be his ugliest legacy. Trump’s pre-coming-of-age experiences were subject to and reflective of an age of gender polarization and of ethnic exclusion and racial segregation.
As I argued in a recent commentary on the militarization of policing in DC and the emergence of Trump’s police state, the Outlaw-in-Chief “could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure.” Similarly, the deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles “had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence.”
Most everything else Trump is doing in the name of “law and order” or “crushing crime” has been fascistic in nature and antidemocratic in practice. These norm-breaking actions of militarism, as well as illegal plays by ICE agents, are simply about consolidating Trump’s executive power and desire to nationalize local and state law enforcement, as in the upcoming deployment of the National Guard and most likely active duty troops to Chicago.
All of this normative or institutional deviancy is consistent with Trump’s framework of doing away with the post-Nixon Department of Justice as well as the post-Hoover FBI, and replacing them with a Department of Retribution and Star Chamber-like “Federal Bureau of Inquiry.”
As for Trump’s antihuman executive orders to eliminate “nearly $4 billion for USAID to spend on global health programs and more than $6 billion for HIV and AIDS programs,” they could leave millions of people, mostly children, dead.
And since Trump’s tariffs will only result in what economists agree will be higher costs, slower economic growth and investment, global trade disruption and retaliation, as well as sectoral harm to U.S. manufacturing and agriculture, inquiring minds might want to know what could possibly motivate the president to pursue such a disastrous and counterproductive course of action?
Turns out it has little to do with Trump’s iconoclastic love of tariffs and much more to do with the psychologically complex interplay of dominance, personality traits, negotiation tactics, narrative construction, and cognitive biases rooted in his ASPD.
These defensive psychological projections in combination propel Trump through his destructiveness and cruelty, allowing him to transcend the pain these tariffs cause everybody. At the same time, they are not enough to prevent Trump from having to lie about the tariffs’ effects.
Other than losing the Congressional elections in 2026, the egocentric Trump could care less about the Nineteen Eighty-Four-like American dystopia he is fabricating with assistance from ICE, the National Guard, and the military.
One might even consider that the psychopathic side of the Commander-in-Chief is indeed looking for a fight, and an excuse to replace the civilian government with martial law. In all likelihood, the Boss and his gang of sycophants are already planning for it.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.
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'Something bigger': Trump attorney says FBI raid is over 'conspiracy to overthrow Trump'
Christina Bobb, former attorney for President Donald Trump who was indicted for her involvement with Trump’s 2020 fake electors plot, said that she believed the Friday morning raid on John Bolton’s home was “certainly part of a larger conspiracy” to overthrow the president, contrary to reporting that it was related to classified documents.
Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security advisor during his first term, saw his home descended upon early Friday by the FBI, with limited reporting on the raid suggesting it was part of an investigation into the mishandling of classified documents, documents that, as a former top official at the White House, he would have had regular access to.
But Bobb, who represented Trump amid the Justice Department’s 2022 probe into the then-former president’s mishandling of classified documents, suggested that the raid on Bolton’s home was likely much “bigger” than what reporting suggested.
“I don’t think this is just about his handling of classified materials, I think this goes to something bigger,” Bobb said while appearing on Newsmax Friday.
“They've got very big fish to fry, and John Bolton certainly was part of a larger likely conspiracy; I'm assuming this is about a conspiracy to overthrow Donald Trump. So I want to see what the probable cause is and what they're going after on this, but this is a real one! I went through it when it was fake; this looks like it's a real one.”
Leading up to the FBI’s 2022 raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, Bobb had falsely told the FBI that Trump had returned all classified documents over to the Justice Department. The DOJ later raided Mar-a-Lago and discovered a trove of classified documents, a raid that ultimately led to Trump’s indictment in federal court.
Newsmax host Marc Lotter presented his own theory as to the cause of the raid on Bolton’s home, suggesting it could have stemmed from a 2020 book penned by the former national security official, a book that detailed Trump’s diplomatic bungling.
“According to the Associated Press, it relates to the handling of classified information,” Lotter said. “(It) possibly also may relate to his book that apparently the White House pushed back on because it potentially contained classified information.”
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Trump's new backtrack enrages MAGA: 'I don't know a single Trump voter in favor of this'
President Donald Trump infuriated some of his own most influential supporters this week with a new, eye-popping plan to admit students from China, Newsweek reported on Tuesday.
"I hear so many stories about we're not going to allow their students," Trump told reporters the day before. "We're going to allow their students to come in. We're going to allow. It's very important, 600,000 students. It's very important. But we're going to get along with China."
This would be a massive reversal from Trump's policies so far, which have threatened international students' ability to enter the country and jeopardized the admissions of many top institutions — and it also contradicts his prior moves to revoke visas for Chinese students. But the new pledge, which was backed up by Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, provoked instant fury from the MAGA world.
"We should not let in 600,000 CHINESE students to attend American colleges and universities that may be loyal to the CCP," wrote Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). "If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15 percent of them to fail then these schools should fail anyways because they are being propped up by the CCP. Why are we allowing 600,000 students from China to replace our American student's opportunities? We should never allow that."
"If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations?" wrote far-right influencer Laura Loomer, a frequent influence on the Trump administration's hiring decisions. "Do the math. We will never get rid of the millions who came in under Biden. It's basic math."
"Did Lutnick really just argue that Trump is letting 600,000 Chinese students into America so Americans will go to worse schools and keep them from closing?" wrote right-wing commenter Chase Geiser.
"I don't know a single Trump voter in favor of this," wrote Marina Medvin, a right-wing attorney.
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This giant backlash reveals how Trump will lose
As I travel around the country flogging my new book Coming Up Short (which, please remember, you can order here, and the audiobook here), I’m seeing a groundswell of revulsion against Donald Trump.
His economy is a disaster. He promised to bring down prices, yet the prices of most goods are rising. Food prices are soaring. Job growth has stalled. American manufacturing has contracted for six straight months.
Trump’s poll numbers are dropping like stones.
The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein continues to haunt him.
He’s now trying to deflect attention from his failures by renaming the Defense Department the War Department and threatening to occupy if not go to war with Chicago. (“Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” read a White House post.)
Yet most Americans don’t want federal troops in our cities and don’t want a war-mongering America. His immigration dragnet is deeply unpopular.
He surrounds himself with sycophants and lapdogs who tell him only how wonderfully he’s doing — he fires anyone who tells him the truth — which means he’s flying blind and doesn’t know how badly he’s doing.
Trump’s rampage is inadvertently teaching many Americans the importance of things we once took for granted: democracy, the rule of law, due process, federalism, checks and balances. As well as the value of several programs we took for granted, such as Medicaid, food assistance, and child vaccines.
A new cohort of progressive young candidates is catching on with voters. They include Zohran Mamdani in New York and Senate candidates Graham Platner in Maine, Dan Osborn in Nebraska, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and Nathan Sage in Iowa.
The federal courts are doing a commendable job refusing to go along with what Trump wants.
In just the last 10 days, they’ve said no to Trump’s taking tariff authority away from Congress, no to Trump’s withholding research funding from Harvard, no to Trump’s firing an FTC commissioner, no to his effort to deport Guatemalan children, no to his use of the wartime Alien Enemies Act to speed deportations, and no to the deployment of the National Guard for law enforcement purposes in California.
Don’t get me wrong. We remain in grave danger. The Oval Office is occupied by a sociopath. His twisted lackeys Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and RFK Jr. are doing terrible harm. His congressional enablers in the Republican Party have relinquished their integrity and kissed his derriere to remain in office. An authoritarian if not neofascist takeover of America is still occurring.
But across America I’m seeing the stirrings of a giant backlash. The people are rising. Americans are catching on. Our fight — the fight you and I are waging for democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and decency — is gaining ground.
Trump will lose. We will win.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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These two factors — and no others — will lead to Trump's defeat
Despite the inarguably awful actions this administration has taken during its first eight months in office, Donald Trump remains largely impervious in the polls — low to be sure but hardly politically threatening, right in his zone. This despite taking some of the most unpopular and undemocratic actions in generations.
Yes, for a brief period, during his first week or two in office, he peaked above a 50 percent approval rating. But since then he has gracefully found the glideslope to his comfort zone, anywhere from 42-46 percent aggregate approval, 50-53 percent disapproval.
Even given the number of unpopular decisions that he has made — DOGE cuts to essential services, masked mauraders kidnapping the innocent, hiding the Epstein files, tariffs, health care cuts — the dynamic remains the same. There is almost nothing the man can do to fall into dangerous, sub-38 percent approval.
But there is are two elements on the horizon, one that likely shouldn't play a huge role but does, another that always does.
First: there are exploding questions about his health.
Is there any there "there?" Seems so. Looks matter, especially within cults of personality. Trump's age — 79 now — matters in the polls.
Much of Trump's mystique among MAGA revolves around his seeming indestructibility, whether concerning his wealth, litigation against him (meagre attempts at criminal accountability, throwing out the award in a major New York civil case), or just his simple, unpleasant aggression.
The dynamic can even seep over to political independents, who see Trump as at least "doing something" and doing it well for himself. It must be working, some think. This is his real superpower.
So indications that Trump's health may be teetering pose a major threat to the perception of invincibility. It's important. If he ever loses the "cape," it is all but impossible to get it back.
Both hands now show severe bruising. Fattened ankles have led — finally — to the admission that he does have some cardiovascular disease, whether just venous insufficiency or something more. There is the swinging gait that comes and goes. And there does seem to be a greater propensity to simply meander from topic to topic, on an ever-looser tether to linear thought.
He also just looks old: see pictures from the Oval Office meeting last Friday. Trump may never have looked worse.
The thing about cults is that the leader is absolutely invulnerable, the hold on people impermeable, right up until they are not. Once a leak springs, it is impossible to hold water back.
Yes, it is utterly infuriating that there has been so little pushback against troops in cities, threats to former allies, cutting Medicaid, the racism, the "cruelty as the point," and even the Epstein files, which will now never amount to anything, a "Democratic hoax," unless several victims come forward with direct knowledge of Trump's actions, and they don't seem to be in a hurry.
But it doesn't appear that any of the above can puncture Trump. Anyone in doubt needs to revisit the polls that refuse to move or simply spend a half-hour on X. Nothing has changed, except Trump's acceleration in his push to fascism.
In a post-truth America, where Trump can claim 70 percent approval rating with a straight face, dismiss a mediocre jobs report with a termination and declaration the numbers are fixed, make baseless claims to being the "hottest country in the world," claim crime as a national emergency and only himself as the savior, Trump's opponents are left searching for a leveling truth.
Enter the appearance of diminishing health.
Whatever is going on with his hands, it cannot be hidden. Whatever it is about his ankles, it cannot easily be cured. The doddering goes way back, but it means more now after all the attacks on Joe Biden.
It's a fact that Trump is getting older and appears to be getting worse. The best his followers can do is write it off to simply aging. Precisely. It leaves them uneasy, seeing Trump vulnerable for perhaps the first time — that being time itself.
And then there's the other wild card — the economy.
Inflation is just getting going. But in the same way it is impossible to hide a black spot on the back of a hand or slurred words going nowhere, no makeup can cover a bag of potato chips over $5, beef approaching $20 a pound for a decent cut and getting higher, along with other goods rising and rent to pay — all without any commensurate increase in pay.
Put the two undeniables together, Trump's health and his sickening economy, and there are two paths to sinking Trump to polling levels that will leave him and the GOP extremely vulnerable in 2026.
The country is largely unmoved by troops invading cities, masked men kidnapping working undocumented migrants (and some Americans) off the streets, stolen legislative seats, threats to the vote.
All of it screams fascism, but all of it has too many people simply yawning.
Anyone doubting that Trump acutely feels the vulnerability need only look at his responses to his major problems: hiding the hand, firing people over numbers, the constant and humiliating talk about the country being "hot.” And yet too many simply don't care. His supporters rely on him for entertainment and have their own lives to worry about. The marauding menace in Washington D.C. does little more than appear on screens as an owning of the libs, which is what he was hired for.
Nothing touches the man … except for indications that he's weaker, going downhill, unable to fight like he once did. That and chips, for $5.50.
It's the little things, things that don't have to make sense.
Trump won't get younger. Energy prices show no sign of going down. Chips and bread seem destined to jump. He promised to reverse such trends but he threw gas on the fire with tariffs. It isn't turning around.
Cults are invulnerable until they're not. The things that make them teeter don't have to make any sense. Watch these developments. They just might work, which might be enough.
Keep an eye out for black and blue hands, puffy eyes and swollen ankles. And prices on chips and sirloin.
Two small pins, sharp enough to pop the balloon. He knows it.
- Jason Miciak is a former Associate Editor at Occupy Democrats, an American attorney, author, and contributer to Politizoom. He can be contacted as JasonMiciak@gmail.com and is available for speaking engagements and consulting.
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