Trump Is Using Fear To Cover His Weakness - It May Be His Undoing

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.

Schumer Details What American Jews Fear Most

 The following post is by Senator Chuck Schumer in The New York Times:

Fifty-three days ago, citizens of Israel suffered a horrendous attack orchestrated and executed by Hamas.

The solidarity that Jewish Americans initially received from our fellow citizens in the aftermath of Oct. 7 has since waned, drowned out by other, more disturbing voices, even from some we considered allies, while hate crimes against Jews have skyrocketed.

Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.

Since Oct. 7, Jewish-owned businesses that have nothing to do with Israel have been boycotted and vandalized. Jewish students on college campuses have been harassed and assaulted with alarming frequency. A Jewish high school teacher in Queens told me about being forced to hide in a locked office from student protesters who were demanding that she be fired because she attended a rally supporting Israel.

These are just a few examples, but they point to a troubling trend. Too often in Jewish history, legitimate criticism of Israeli policies or even older disputes over religious, economic and political issues have often crossed over into something darker, into attacking Jewish people simply for being Jewish.

What happened last week at the Queens high school is an example of crossing that threshold. Walking out of school to march in support of Palestinians is completely legitimate. But forcing a Jewish teacher to hide because she had attended a rally in support of Israel is antisemitism, pure and simple.

For many Jewish people today, the rise of antisemitism is more than a crisis — it’s a five-alarm fire. That’s why I feel compelled to speak out, especially considering the growing disparity between how Jewish people understand the rise of antisemitism, and how many of my non-Jewish friends regard it.

While American Jews have always been wary of the hatemongers lurking on the edges of our society, we are proud to be American, because in this country, unlike so many others, our ancestors were able to put down roots and flourish.

Take my own family story. Only in America could an exterminator’s son grow up to be the first Jewish party leader in the Senate.

But many of my family members elsewhere met more tragic ends.

When I was a boy, I learned what happened when the Nazis invaded my family’s town in Ukraine. The Nazis ordered my great-grandmother to gather her extended family on the porch of her home. When the Nazis told her to come with them, she refused, and they gunned her down, along with 30 members of her family, from 85 years old to 3 months old.

When I heard the story of what Hamas and its allies did in Kibbutz Be’eri, killing more than 120 Jews, from the elderly to babies, it struck me on a deeply personal level.

Most Jewish Americans have similar stories — stories we learned at a young age, and that will stay imprinted on our hearts for as long as we live.

We see and hear things differently from others because we understand the horrors that can follow the targeting of Jewish people. We’ve learned the hard way to fear how such attacks can easily erupt into widespread antisemitism if they are not repudiated. I am sure Arab Americans have similar fears when they see the rise in Islamophobia and horrific crimes like the gut-wrenching murder of 6-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume.

Of course, criticizing the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic. Over the years, I have vehemently disagreed with many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies, especially his administration’s encouragement of settlements in the West Bank, gravely harming prospects for a two-state solution, which I support. I have also been among those who have said Israel must act according to international law, and that humanitarian assistance for Palestinians is critical.

But when criticism against Israel is allowed to cross over into something different — into a denial of a Jewish state in any form, into open calls for the very destruction of Israel, while at the same time the self-determination of other peoples is exalted — that is an example of the discriminatory double standard Jewish people have always found so hurtful. And we worry about what could come next.

Because for centuries, what is good for everybody else has been too often denied to the Jew. Jews could live here but not there; Jews could hold this job but not that.

And to declare that only the Jewish people cannot have their own state, in any form, is a glaring example of that double standard Jewish Americans so fiercely object to.

I implore every person and every community and every institution to stand with Jewish Americans, and to denounce antisemitism in all of its forms. Americans are stewards of the flames of liberty, tolerance and equality that warm our melting pot and make it possible for Jewish Americans to prosper alongside Palestinian Americans as well as every other immigrant group.

America has always been exceptional. But when it matters most, are we still a nation that can defy the course of human history, where the Jewish people have been ostracized, expelled and massacred over and over again?

I believe the answer can and must be a resounding yes.

And I will do everything in my power — as Senate majority leader, as a Jewish American, as a citizen of a free society, as a human being — to make it so.

Afraid Of The Bully? - An Allegory

The United States (and other democracies) refuses to step up and stop the Russian bully. Is it because we are afraid of him? The following allegory of the situation is by Robert Reich: 

It’s like watching a three-hundred-pound bully beat up a kid half his size, for no reason — bloodying the poor kid, pulverizing him. Yet you don’t dare try to stop the mayhem because the bully has a gun that he’ll use on you if you intervene. 

You look for police, but there are none. 

You round up your friends, who join you in shouting at the bully. But he pays no attention. They threaten that if he doesn’t stop they’ll no longer go bowling with him or invite him out for drinks. Their threats have no effect. The bully continues beating up the kid. 

Your friends refuse to take further action. They don’t want to provoke his wrath. They’re as afraid of the bully’s gun as you are.

By now the kid is desperate. You give him some water. He pleads for a knife. You slip him some brass knuckles. 

The kid puts up a good fight. You marvel at the kid’s courage and stamina in the face of such brutality. Maybe he can hold the bully off for a while, you think.

But the kid’s resistance infuriates the bully even further. The bully clobbers the kid with everything he has. 

The barbarism is occurring in front of your eyes. It’s revolting to watch. Every moral fiber of your being shouts “do something!” Yet you’re paralyzed. It’s suicide if you intervene, but it’s moral suicide if you don’t. 

You want to believe the kid can force the bully to retreat, but you know the kid doesn’t stand a chance. 

You can no longer bear witness to this slaughter. You have to avert your eyes. Or you have to act. What do you do?

Fear Rises Of The Year 2022

The chart above is from the new Axios / Momentive Poll -- done between December 14th and 16th of a national sample of 2,602 adults, with a 2 point margin of error. 

It shows that people have an increasing fear of 2022.

Trump Is Waging A Campaign Of Fear And Division

Most presidents run on their record when trying to get elected to a second term. Donald Trump can't do that. He can'y do it because his first term was marred by incompetence, dishonesty, and corruption.

So, he's taking another path -- a campaign of fear and division. He's trying to scare White voters into believing that other races, religions, and ideologies are going to replace them. He's a bigot, and he's counting on Whites to be so frightened that they will accept his bigotry.

Here's part of what Roger Cohen says about Trump's campaign in The New York Times:

Donald Trump has been all about the fear of replacement, or as it’s sometimes called, “the great replacement.” His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites.

Of America-first nationalists against migrants; of straight people against L.G.B.T.Q. people; of the gunned-up against the unarmed. Of Trump against all those he believes would replace the likes of him.

All means have been used — lies, brutality, incitement. But fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War. . . .

America is particularly susceptible to fear today because the world has changed in unsettling ways. Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50 percent of the population.

It is frightening to see an industry disappear, like coal in Kentucky. Trump understood that he could be the voice of that fear. He would build a wall to keep those brown people out!

He is an impostor. He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done.

Less than 20 days.

America will decide whether to opt for the future or burrow self-destructively into some warped fantasy of the past. It will decide whether to reinvent itself again or turn mean and further inward.

As Edward R. Murrow remarked, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

That was in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. For Senator Joseph McCarthy, the danger to the Republic came from Communist infiltration of American life. The real danger came from his obsessions. From the purges and blacklists that branded countless Americans as un-American.

Murrow, a great journalist, stood up to McCarthy.

Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and L.G.B.T.Q. people.

As with McCarthy, however, the real danger comes from Trump’s obsessions, not from these imagined enemies. . . .

Is it unreasonable to see renewal in a 77-year-old man, Joe Biden? No. We live in the real world, where the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Indecency demands the restoration of decency. That’s ground zero of this election. The choice was starkly evident in the televised town hall events Thursday as Trump spouted wild far-right conspiracy theories while Biden had the self-deprecating honesty to say that if he lost, it could suggest he’s “a lousy candidate.” Biden is not a lousy candidate; he is a good man, a brave man. I doff my hat to any parent who survives with such dignity the loss of two of his four children.

Of McCarthy, Murrow observed: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”

The fault is in ourselves. Time for Americans to look in the mirror — and realize their America is irreplaceable if it is lost.

GOP Practices A Politics Of Fear - But Offers No Solutions

(Cartoon image is by Clay Jones at claytoonz.com.)

The only thing today's Republicans have to offer is fear. They want you to be afraid of everything except rich white men (their true constituency). But they no solutions beyond inaction, and of course, thoughts and prayers.

The following is an op-ed from Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post:

It’s almost funny, in a twisted sort of way. Election after election, Republicans have based their core political appeal on fear.

And yet — as dual gun massacres this weekend starkly illustrate — they refuse to offer solutions to any of the mortal threats Americans actually face.

President Trump’s closing (losing) message in the midterms was “Be afraid, be very afraid”; he and his co-partisans have lately doubled down on it for 2020. Of course, the perils that Republicans promise to rescue us from are often fictional, or of their own making.

We must fear the coming scourge of socialism (no matter that Trump himself so often advocates command-and-control-style economic policies). Trump likewise stokes public anxiety over “a Market Crash the likes of which has not been seen before” if “anyone but me takes over in 2020” (never mind the market sell-offs triggered by his own trade wars, including on Monday).

 Trump and allies urge us to cower in trepidation from helpless parents and children seeking asylum, a threat so grave they needed to be separated from one another and caged. We must also fear the supposed Muslim and Latino hordes, who threaten to wipe out Anglo-European culture and displace white babies with their own.

These are hardly the only foreigners who should inspire existential dread, according to right-wing fever dreams. Rogue nations should, too, thus justifying enormous increases in our defense budget. Of course, all the nukes and jets in the world won’t protect us from the assault our enemies abroad are currently waging against us, and that Republicans resist confronting: the one on our electoral system.  

Health care likewise tops Americans’ list of worries, and has for the past five years, according to Gallup surveys. But as Americans ration their insulin and panhandle for co-pays on GoFundMe, Republicans offer plans that will reduce lifesaving coverage and shift more costs onto sick patients.

Which brings me to the uniquely American epidemic of gun violence, particularly that perpetrated by white supremacists and other far-right terrorists.

This year alone, there have been at least 255 mass-shooting incidents, according to the Gun Violence Archive . Americans cannot worship, dine, shop, browse a food festival or pass notes in homeroom without worrying about being gunned down: As of 2017, 4 in 10 Americans said they feared being a victim in a mass shooting.

Immigrants and members of other minority populations have heightened reason for fearing firearm violence given the murderous anti-immigrant attacks in El Paso on Saturday that left 22 dead; the slaughters at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., that together took 12 lives; and other recent hate-filled attacks targeting blacks, Muslims and members of the LGBTQ community.

But when it comes to addressing this mortal fear — as with the others — Republicans suggest there’s simply nothing to be done.

No, Republicans say: We mustn’t admonish political leaders (ahem) whose fearmongering about immigrant “invasions” and “infestations” is echoed in the manifestos of alleged murderers.

Nor should we try to undertake common-sense gun-reform policies that voters from both parties support, such as universal background checks or bans on high-capacity magazines. Recall that Trump threatened to veto two background check bills that passed the House back in February, and that congressional Republicans overwhelmingly opposed.

The real thing to fear, according to Republicans and the gun lobby that controls them, isn’t gun violence but rather liberty-crimping policies that might curb gun violence.

The best effort Republicans make to address American fears of gun massacres involves appeals to mental health improvements. Or, as Trump put it in his speech Monday morning: “Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.”

But even this suggestion rings hollow, given that Republican officials across federal and state governments are actively working to reduce access to mental health care. A federal suit brought by 20 red states and supported by the Trump administration seeks to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, which extended behavioral health coverage to millions through Medicaid and the essential health benefits required in individual market plans.

Republicans thrive on imagined menaces. Yet when a real-life menace demands action, they dismiss it. What, pray tell, is the party so afraid of?

The Root Cause Of White House Chaos/Lies Is FEAR

(This caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

We know that the Trump White House is in chaos, and has been since the day he was sworn in. It is a place where the truth doesn't matter, and lying is actually encouraged.

Now, with the release of the Mueller Report, we also know that Trump repeatedly tried to obstruct justice by interfering with the investigation. He likes to say he was "exonerated", but that's just another lie. Mueller found plenty of evidence of Trump's obstruction, and the only reason Trump wasn't charged in because of the silly Justice Department policy that a sitting president can't be indicted.

Why does Trump constantly lie, and encourage his aides to do the same? It's FEAR. Trump is afraid that if the truth is known, then he will be viewed as an illegitimate president -- who won only because of collusion with Russia. And his rampant narcissism cannot take that.

Here is just part of what Maureen Dowd wrote on this subject in The New York Times:

After 675 days, more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants, $30 million spent, endless jaw-jaw on cable and countless whiny Trump tweets, we have come down to one fundamental truth.

And it’s the same truth that has been terrorizing us all along: Donald Trump’s dirtbag machinations are driven by insane vanity.

The First Narcissist’s all-consuming blend of braggadocio and insecurity has turned Washington and its rickety institutions into a dystopian outpost of his id.

President Trump obstructed on nearly every page of Volume II of the Mueller report, even though Robert Mueller was too lost in legalese to throw the book at him. The report counts as the Worst Exoneration Ever, replete with incrimination.

And Trump’s motivation for trying to subvert justice and turn the White House into a writhing nest of liars? His ego.

He did not want people to think that the Russians were responsible for his election and that he was an illegitimate president.

And why was this the burr under his sociopathic saddle? Obviously, because he thinks he is an illegitimate president. He never expected to win.

The idea that he is in the Oval Office under false pretenses plays into his twisted sense of victimhood. The spoiled scion of Fifth Avenue somehow always finds a way to be aggrieved, a victim of the media, the deep state, “dirty cops,” note-taking aides and the elites — all out to get him.

It’s the same reason he is still talking at rallies about that “beautiful map” of his Electoral College victory, with its large swaths of red. And the same reason he focuses on ratings and crowd sizes and subscription numbers and all the other puerile citations of his ego arithmetic.

We can’t know for sure if there is a more sinister reason for Trump’s obstruction because Mueller didn’t put him under the interrogation lights. The special counsel did not provide any insight into whether Vladimir Putin has something on him.

All we know for now is that Trump’s advisers, talking under oath to federal prosecutors, attributed his actions to his fear of being seen as illegitimate.