The following is part of an excellent post by Thomas Hartmann at The Hartmann Report:
Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he’s the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don’t believe it.
The reason he’s rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he’s so extraordinarily weak.
— It’s why he’s breaking laws left and right, from laws against bribery to the Hatch Act to Posse Comitatus.
— It’s why he’s trying to provoke a military confrontation with Venezuela, the same as Reagan did with Grenada two days after the Beirut Marine barracks bombing.
— It’s why he’s trying to distract us from the Epstein Files and the reality that a third of America’s states are in or nearly in recession.
— It’s why every time a report comes out about inflation continuing to spike, unaffordable housing, or job growth stalling out, he comes up with some new outrageous shiny object to dangle in front of the media.
Trump, in fact, is pretty much unique among both modern and historic figures who rode elective office to power and then turned their nations into dictatorships.
Nonewere as weak as Trump is today when they succeeded in consolidating enough power to eliminate their challengers and lock down the populace. . . .
Trump’s approval rating is consistently low, even though he keeps lying about it as he claims a broad mandate. He didn’t even break 50% of the popular vote in 2024, and lost the popular vote in 2016.
As of October 20, 2025, 44.2% approved and 52.1% disapproved of his presidency, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin. The RealClearPolitics average gives him around 45%, while Gallup finds 40%, making him one of the least popular U.S. presidents at this stage in all of our history.
His economic approval has sunk to 34%, with 62% disapproving of his behavior amid inflation and federal shutdown unrest. Unlike his predecessors or authoritarians in other countries that lost their democracies, his base remains intense but small; there’s no evidence of majoritarian enthusiasm existing outside of his core partisan bloc.
The few Republicans willing to defy him and speak up about Trump’s unpopularity (and that of his policies) are often blunt and even see their own popularity increase because of their resistance. . . .
So, how does Trump hold onto power and the loyalty of Republican politicians?
Fear, it turns out, is the cement that’s holding the GOP together under Trump.
His indictment of lifelong Republican James Comey and his pardon of criminal grifter George Santos were unambiguous messages to every Republican politician in the nation. He was saying, in effect
“Stay with me and keep licking my boots and I’ll keep you safe even if you commit horrible crimes; cross me and I’ll destroy you.”
So far, it’s working. . . .
But politicians like Trump (and his lickspittles) eventually find themselves trapped by the very fear they’ve used to paralyze their party members into compliance or silence. As Winston Churchill famously said:
“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”
This is why Trump, as noted above, is building such a massive police and military presence, along with constructing hundreds of new concentration camps across America. . . .
Fearful men always lean on violence and the threat of violence because eventually the spell of the fear they’re trying to cast across the nation is broken. . . .
When enough people stand up against state terrorism to hit a critical mass (3.5% of the population, according to political scientist Erica Chenoweth), others quickly join them. The turnout for the No Kings marches suggest we’re close to that. . . .
So, take heart. The No Kings marches proved both Trump’s widespread unpopularity and the fearlessness of an American public echoing over two centuries of our nation standing up to tinpot despots and wannabe dictators.
We Americans have never tolerated a king or a dictator, and we’re not about to start now.
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