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Tipping points and what could be next [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-28
In the midst of these everything-everywhere-all-at-once kind of times with daily stock market drops, seismic shifts in the news or social media posts or dictatorial decrees that have and could again blow up into economic disaster, public health emergency or even state-sponsored violence on its own citizens, it’s starting to look like public support is hitting tipping points that could collapse Trump’s vacuous credibility. As we reach the 100 day mark into this disaster, we wonder where we are and what could happen next.
On existential level, we wrestle with knowing how fascist rule has overtaken other countries and see it growing here. We remember what it was like when he was last in office. We remember that he is a convicted felon but still sits in the oval office. So as it has all come into focus but we also keep searching, anxiety and rage ridden, for what will it take to effectively fight this takeover. We live in a cursed in-between of disbelief, demanding answers to how we got here, who let this happen, who could have stopped it, and why it did. We also are demanding that Democrats in office realize the moment, step up and deploy strategic messaging, and bring the fight to this regime.
Questions swirl throughout our days: What will happen with the economy, with the apparent destruction of social security, with the measles outbreaks? Will more citizens, residents, tourists and even children be seized like in Nazi Germany by federal agents in illegal rendition like Kilmar Abrego Garcia , or harassed and detained by ICE ? Will more countries put out travel advisories against travel to the US, tanking tourism and college enrollments? If we travel outside the U.S., do we all risk the same fate, or is all this fascist bullshit based on the bigotry and scapegoating this regime so craves? How are we and our elected officials even tolerating any of it?
But we also wonder, why in the hell did all this happen in the first place? How can it even be justified, especially with so little public support ? How is the government, with our tax dollars, able to get away with this?
At this point, public support for his bullshit is collapsing. He’s now losing in the court of public opinion but also being stopped by our legal system. Even SCOTUS is being forced to stand up to him. And now a network of universities, following Harvard’s lead that stunned the White House , have formed a defense pack that has exploded to over 500 schools across the country. That has also, finally, started to happen with law firms: nine of the biggest firms bent the knee, but four are fighting him in court and have, so far, seen little push back from Trump or the DOJ . Let’s hope we see attorneys organizing like universities and stand up for the rule of law.
It also looks like his PR could be failing, as evidenced by the boomerang blowback of his attacks on Jeffrey Goldberg from the Atlantic and the interview that Trump then requested and got with Goldberg late last week.
Given all this, given where we and this country are at now under this obvious lurch toward tyranny, what could happen next? At what point does the narrative shift and we all admit that Putin’s puppet no longer has credence and he is an abject failure as a president? At what point do a majority of news outlets stop giving credence to him and his minions and start fact checking them in real time? At what point does the loyalty and cultish following break? At what point does the strongman leader narrative break in the face of all the failures and incompetence?
Likely everyone in this community is surprised that a threshold wasn’t reached long ago. But for presidential power to be actually checked now, the Republican voting base and elected officials would need to come out against the destruction. The right wing dam is already showing cracks, as rural and usually more conservative voters are being hit harder economically than blue areas and are blowing up Republican town halls and national protests extending into red states.
Those factors are happening alongside increasingly tenuous support from Republicans in office and the thankless task for media outlets to gloss over or deny all the deception and disastrous dictates that spew forth like so much projectile vomit out of this regime. At some point, that dam will break. As dissent becomes more visible and reported on, as protests proliferate and the economy tanks, I believe the narrative will shift. Something will then feel different, like something in the air, and it will suddenly be seen for what it is: we are no longer a free society. And that if any politician is seen to be a collaborator with this wannabe dictator, they will also be seen as… complicit, no longer credible themselves and likely threatened with violence by MAGA extremists that are responding to Trump’s stochastic terrorism.
The ridiculous regime’s list of failures and incompetence are piling up, and that is one thing Americans don’t well tolerate in our leadership. Trump’s options for maintaining power and legitimacy and for feeding his narcissistic need for adulation are narrowing, and he could start to become desperate. That could be when his full sociopathic, dictatorial nature could amplify his unstable and erratic behavior and no one would be able to deny it. Project 2025 and the autocratic playbook then points toward the use of state violence or a military boondoggle that autocrats have used in the past to rally the troops and stamp out dissent.
In laying out these possibilities, we don’t mean to be alarmist. In the face of this regime’s racist campaign of fear and retribution, we all should be clear-eyed about these possibilities but resolute and confident in standing up to them. We need to, as Timothy Snyder points out in On Tyranny and just last week , “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Do not fall for it.”
More on this later this week. Stay tuned, sign up for updates on Substack.
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