Donald Trump’s first weeks back in office have been a whirlwind of chaos and political destruction. This is by design and one of the central features of the “shock and awe” strategy that Trump and his allies have been planning for years, as detailed in Project 2025 and Agenda 47, to undermine American democracy and replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright authoritarianism. This strategy is being rapidly enacted through such actions as the almost 100 executive orders that include voiding the 14th Amendment, declaring a national emergency for Trump’s mass deportation plan, gutting the Department of Justice, seemingly as part of a plan to get revenge on his personal “enemies,” firing inspectors generals en masse, reversing 60 years of progress in civil and human rights and freezing federal loans and grants.
The Democrats, mainstream news media and the American public have been left flummoxed, confused and overwhelmed, as Rolling Stone details:
Late last year, as Donald Trump and his transition staff crafted executive orders, pardons, and a multi-front policy blitz designed to create “shock and awe” at the dawn of his second term in the White House, they were confident that the American people would ultimately let them get away with it — no matter the initial media or political backlash.
According to two advisers who spoke with the president-elect in advance of his inauguration, Trump was betting that a “flood the zone” approach could overwhelm a demoralized Democratic Party and oversaturate the media ecosystem. Trump and his officials were confident the general public would grow numb — and stay numb — to this opening onslaught.
So far, the judiciary has responded as an initial check. Its effectiveness in standing against Trump's assaults, however, remains very much in doubt.
Trump’s followers and allies are excited by the chaos because to them it is an example of him being a man of action and vitality and in all a great leader who is channeling the will and energy of the MAGA movement. The appearance of constant action, of being human dynamos, is a common tactic of authoritarians and fascist leaders.
Writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, Jon Allsop summarizes the difficulty the mainstream news media is facing in responding to Trump’s unprecedented attacks on the Constitution, the rule of law, the country’s institutions and the American people’s collective sense of normalcy:
But journalistic attention... is not in practice an infinite resource, and so the more of it that Trump seeks, the less of it there is to go around; in other words, if he benefits from ruling our attention, so he does from dividing it. Whether this is intended or not, it has the effect of slipping historically radical and abnormal policies and behaviors past us before we can get a firm grip on them — and Trump, as I’ve written before, certainly seems to have an instinctive, decidedly old-school grip on the finite nature of journalistic attention.
Donald Trump and his administration and its enforcers are only going to increase the rapidity and ferocity of their efforts to remake American society in service to their revolutionary project.
Ultimately, Donald Trump is having fun at the literal expense of the American people. For him, as for other autocrats and those in their orbit, the cruelty is the point.
In an attempt to make sense of Trump’s historically disruptive first weeks in office and what happens next, I reached out to a range of experts.
What is going on was to be expected but this does not mean that it is less striking or horrible. I don’t feel surprised about this Trumpist mix of lies, stupidity and extremism. As experts on fascism and populism know, these kinds of leaders typically use their first days in power to downplay legality, increase demonization and in the case of fascists, or wannabe fascists like Trump, even deportation and persecution. What we are witnessing is an attempt to set the tone to render acceptable what is usually in normal democracies regarded as unacceptable. They want to numb the population to idiotic statements, fascist types of lies and unpredictable and illogical actions.
Trump won with 49% of the vote. This, of course, cannot give the legitimacy to be unconstitutional and a wannabe dictator and yet he tries. This is something they know, and this is why they regard these first weeks as so important. American Greenland? Gulf of America or the taking of the Panama Canal? This is the kind of stuff we can expect from Trump: extreme nationalist propaganda and lies that possibly can become a reality if nobody else cares. Eventually, lies are confronted with reality and more citizens will be confronted with this. In other words, Trump was supported because of fake promises and propaganda when this is more evident, his legitimacy will decrease.
Belief is driving the Trumpist cult. Not evidence but belief. Belief is key to this extreme political religion. . . . . But many did not vote for Trump for this but actually for economic reasons. I think sooner or later many of them will realize how they believe in fake promises and lies. The question is how soon…
As I stated recently, the new big lie is that Trump won in a landslide and this authorizes him to turn the world upside down. This is the big confusion being promoted right now. In a democracy, winning elections does not give you a blank check to erase the past or legality. Trumpism launched a coup, and illegality cannot be erased by votes or pardons or the fake rewriting of history. When this happens, democracy is downplayed and dictatorship is on the horizon. This is what Trump promotes, the new big lies of his full legitimacy.
Part of the very big problem is that the guardrails are off and all the people in charge of them are being fired. You should not expect business as usual. Third, with all of the agencies being siloed or silenced, expect food issues to become more prevalent, you won't know the status of bird flu or any other pandemic. Trump has discussed dismantling FEMA right before the tornado and hurricane season and in the wake of the fires in Los Angeles.
Trump is incapable of compassion and that signals great danger for American lives in his second term. He remains at best a very paranoid, immature person now holding an office that demands thought and care. But for him, the priority is mostly about personal vendettas. He refuses — or is unable — to stop and think, which is the source of genuine strength of character. He appears to be motivated primarily by hurting people.
Americans were sleep-marched into fascism. Those who ignored the election are finding out about the dire reality and stakes of this situation. This is a life and death matter. Where I live in Southern California we just suffered through the worst fires in our history and the response from the Trump administration was to weaponize our tragedy against our Democratic leaders. They are coming for any politician with empathy, who takes their public servant oath seriously — anyone who gets in their way of unbridled greed. Welcome to West Russia, where the oligarchs run the politicians and all are bandits who steal from the poor to give to the rich.
The real problem is America has not been occupied by a foreign military so there’s no lived experience of what happens when oligarchs sink their fangs into a country. I documented 22 countries attacked by Russia in the exact same way America has been attacked — each of these countries has a main oligarch and multiple oligarchs beneath them whose job is to destroy democracy. America is not unique, just really naive.
We’re going to have to go through some things as a nation and a people. As I wrote in an elegy for my country, we got here because people don’t read history books anymore, which led to collective amnesia about reality. They like their politics and professional wrestling reality TV show, featuring supervillains behaving badly. They won't like it when their neighbors start disappearing.
It’s a mistake to think the majority of people are bad or wanted this, Trump won with less than 32% of all eligible voters. About a third of any population wants authoritarian leaders, they want their strongman to tell them what to do. The majority that doesn’t want billionaires to deliver them to austerity, or tell them what to do, better learn to get along and start working together. The regime will last as long as the people tolerate it.
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