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Trump's Goal Is to Break You. Here’s How to Stay Whole and Effective. [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-16
Cycling between overwhelm, cynicism, and scattered activism is exactly what Trump wants you to do. Here's how to recognize you're stuck and then move from reactivity to strategic engagement.
You know this pattern: Last Friday I was monitoring ICE raids to see if it was safe to go grocery shopping. By afternoon I was texting dark jokes about how nothing we do will matter. By evening I was frantically responding to all the activist calls to action that hit my inbox that week. Three different unhelpful reactions to the same chaos.
Maybe your reactivity looks different - endless doom-scrolling while your inbox fills up, or avoiding all news then feeling guilty, or saying yes to every activist event while your body begs you to stop.
You're Not Losing Your Mind
You're being systematically destabilized by a regime that profits from your reactivity. With the “Big Beautiful Bill” gutting everything from Medicaid to voting rights while ICE budgets triple and the Supreme Court green lights the dismantling of democracy, they're cranking up the pressure. That disorienting feeling when systems you thought were solid turn out to be sand - that's institutional vertigo, and it's a normal response to abnormal times.
MAGA needs you spinning - overwhelmed, detached, or burning out. That sick feeling when you realize you're bouncing between these states? You have not failed, it's exactly what Trump and his enablers intend with their strategy of engineered chaos.
And you know what? Fuck their strategy.
Here's what they don't want you to know: once you see how this cycle works, you can start steering instead of being dragged around. This is part of my ongoing work helping people stay human, stay strategic, and shape tomorrow during this authoritarian period.
Let me show you the three states they're cultivating to keep you reactive...
The Three States They're Using Against You
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