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TRUMP, TYRANNY AND THE NEED FOR A PEOPLE’S PROGRAM  
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Richard Rubenstein
September 5, 2025
CounterPunch
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_ We urgently need to create a people’s movement. Meeting locally
and nationally, interested Americans of all backgrounds can form
“committees of correspondence” to develop ideas, programs and
leaders essential for reconstructing American politics. _

, Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

 

Is Donald Trump a tyrant?  A dictator or would-be dictator?  Lots of
anti-Trump politicians and commentators think so.  Minnesota governor
Tim Waltz believes that the epithet is warranted, as do Senators
Padilla of California and Merkley of Oregon, CNN anchor Jim Acosta,
Yale historian Timothy Snyder, and bloggers too numerous to mention. 
Former Veep and presidential candidate Kamala Harris labeled her
opponent a “fascist” and “wannabe dictator.”  And 34 out of
35 legal scholars responding to a recent New York Times survey
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agreed that the current U.S. president is a “lawless
authoritarian.”   

This language raises a tricky question: are we meant to take it
literally, or is it a form of partisan hyperbole, as when Trump calls
ordinary Democrats “radical leftists” or describes media reports
that he doesn’t like as “fake news”?  The answer may seem
obvious, at least to MAGA opponents.  At this moment in my own city,
masked ICE-men are seizing and detaining undocumented immigrants who
work to support their families and have no criminal records, while
uniformed National Guards arrest D.C. citizens, mostly young and
non-white, for driving a car with a broken taillight or smoking a
joint on the corner.  The anthropologist James B. Greenberg
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calls this soft of thing nascent fascism and notes the following
signs: 

Emergency powers used against protest. Justice Department prosecutions
aimed at political opponents. Detention camps expanded inland.
National Guard deployments ordered against demonstrations. Parallel
courts—immigration tribunals or military panels—used to sidestep
ordinary law. These are not abstractions. They have been proposed,
rehearsed, and in some cases already carried out.  

Prof. Greenberg concludes that Trump “is moving steadily toward a
dictatorship, one built less on consent and more on fear and
force.”  But I believe that the matter is more complex than this .
. . and, more important, that branding him a would-be Hitler or Stalin
does not generate a movement that can defeat him.  Although this
president _does_ have tyrannical tendencies and has abused his powers,
he is far from being a dictator, and there is nothing inevitable about
his becoming one.  The great question is how to end his political
career and smash the MAGA movement, and focusing on his alleged
dictatorial intentions does not produce a viable strategy for doing
this.  

Resisting MAGA policies in the courts and in the streets is necessary
and admirable, to be sure, but what Democrats and other Trump
opponents desperately need to do is to catalyze a social movement that
can put MAGA and the Trumpers out of business once and for all.  To
do this requires more than accusations of dictatorship, lawsuits, and
street demonstrations.  It requires an inspiring ideology,
problem-solving programs, and charismatic leaders – three essentials
that the Democratic opposition currently and painfully lacks.

TRUMP THE TYRANT: THE USE AND MISUSE OF HISTORICAL ANALOGIES

If Donald Trump is a genuine tyrant or is determined to become one, we
should probably not be talking openly about trying to defeat him in
the next election.  We should be working to depose him “by any
means necessary,” as Malcolm X used to say.  But no one who brands
the president a tyrant dares to breathe the word tyrannicide or talk
about violent resistance.  This reticence, it seems to me, is not
just a result of fear that uttering such words could get the utterer
arrested, it also reflects the fact that applied to a leader like
Trump, terms like tyrant, dictator, and fascist belong to a category
somewhere in the middle ground between literalism and hyperbole,
something like calling abortion “child murder.”  

These charges also involve a fear that the president’s ideas and
behaviors, if extended to other groups and made permanent, could come
to resemble those of despotic leaders like Adolf Hitler and Josef
Stalin.  This fear, it seems to me, is not ungrounded.  Trump’s
narrow ethno-nationalism, love of coercive power, and disregard for
legal limitations give us plenty to worry about.  Even so, our own
history suggests that in some ways the concern is overblown and
misleading.  

Consider another historical analogy: that between Donald Trump and
Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Of course, in terms of ideology the leaders
of the MAGA movement and of the New Deal are diametric opposites –
but certain structural similarities are striking.  Recall F.D.R.’s
enemies.  Responding to the president’s unprecedented expansion of
executive power and his charismatic appeal, a wide array of
adversaries, from U.S. senators and Wall Street financiers to the
publisher William Randolph Hearst and the “radio priest” Fr.
Charles Coughlin, branded him a would-be dictator, as well as a
socialist and communist.  While he was none of those things, there
were reasons for opponents to worry that he might be.  Elected in
1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, F.D.R. quickly became the
most powerful president in U.S. history – a charismatic innovator
who vastly increased the size and authority of the executive branch ,
created a panoply of federal agencies, persuaded or intimidated judges
to uphold his regulatory schemes, mobilized popular support among
workers and farmers, and used new media (especially radio) to
establish a personal bond with his followers.  

In the end, Roosevelt ran for unprecedented third and fourth terms of
office (another violation of established norms) and led the nation
into and through World War II.  The fear that he might become a
dictator dissipated over time, in part because of his and his wife
Eleanor’s demonstrated faith in democracy, and in part because he
had to negotiate constantly with powerful popular organizations such
as labor and farm unions, immigrant associations, urban machines,
regional interests, and industrial groups.  Even so, to many critics
there seemed little difference between his enormous discretionary
power and that of the fascist and communist leaders then taking over
many other nations. 

Now recall Steve Bannon’s remark in 2016 that if Trump played his
cards right, he could become “the Roosevelt of the Right.” 
Twenty-first century America was not much like America in the
1930’s, when there was a genuine national emergency (the Great
Depression) and the Democrats firmly controlled both houses of
Congress.  Even so, in 2016 there was serious discontent among
working people over a host of economic and cultural issues, and
Bannon’s idea was to convince Trump to play the role of the
_anti-_Roosevelt.  That is, he was to use the expansive power of what
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called the “imperial presidency” to direct
mass anger against the administrative state originally created by the
New Deal.   

Over the next eight years, Bannon’s idea was picked up and developed
by a phalanx of right-wing intellectuals and activists such as John
Marini, Russell Vought, and Christopher Rufo, many of them connected
with the Heritage Foundation.  Trump’s ideological mandate was to
“deconstruct” the administrative state, privatize government
services, deregulate industry, cut taxes, alter the terms of
international trade, and disempower ideological opponents in the
professions, the media, and the universities.  Like Roosevelt, he
claimed to be acting on behalf of the common man against the elite. 
But in Trump’s case the enemy targeted was not he capitalist
oligarchs whose hatred F.D.R. said he “welcomed,” but the
government officials, public service workers, professionals, and
intellectuals branded a cultural (“woke”) elite.  This division
of working people into “oppressed” and “elite” groups based on
their education levels and cultural preferences was the key to
creating a mass-based MAGA movement. 

Trump’s first term in office was experimental, amateurish, and
dominated by the COVID-19 plague.  It took him until his second term
to do a convincing, if perverse imitation of Roosevelt’s First
Hundred Days.  Beginning in January 2025, he proclaimed and enacted a
series of shockingly new policies in a blizzard of laws and executive
orders.  Roosevelt had his “Brain Trust” of left-leaning
economists and social engineers; Trump had the Far Right’s Project
2025 and Elon Musk’s DOGE.  Even though the MAGA mission was to
undo government regulation and cancel progressive social attitudes,
the Roosevelt analogy suggests two insights often overlooked by
anti-Trump forces:

(1)  To MAGA followers, executive actions that anti-Trump forces call
tyrannical are simply innovative responses to the wishes of an
electoral majority.  Yes, these actions do alter established norms of
political behavior.  They often seem hasty, improvised, and
experimental – or, as critics declare, ruthless, reckless, and
inhumane.  But what happens when a movement with a serious program
for change takes power is . . . it changes things!  The fact that New
Deal helped millions of ordinary people to survive and prosper, while
the MAGA program subjects them to domination by a ruthless, selfish
oligarchy makes Trump a misleader who must be opposed and defeated. 
It does not make him more of a “tyrant” than Franklin Roosevelt.
 

(2)  Like Roosevelt, Trump is much more than a lone wolf with
charisma.  F.D.R. led the New Deal: a social movement supported by
vast numbers of workers and middle-class people across the nation. 
Despite his slavish devotion to the oligarchy, so does Trump. 
Opponents who focus exclusively on his charismatic appeal and taste
for personal power forget that while the Democratic Party remains a
collection of competing interest groups and ideological sects, MAGA is
a relatively coherent, highly motivated mass movement.  One can
describe its ideology with much justification as ultra-nationalist,
semi-theocratic, implicitly racist, and even fascistic (in the
Mussolini “corporatist” style).  But Democrats will not defeat a
genuine social movement, no matter how obnoxious it is, by calling its
leader a tyrant, cult leader, or threat to democracy.  It takes a
movement to defeat a movement. 

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO “RESIST” TRUMP?

Here’s what will _not_ work as a strategy to defeat Donald Trump –
repeated complaints about his authoritarianism, and countervailing
promises to “save democracy.”  It may or may not make sense to
call Trump a tyrant, but trying to oust him because he is a disturber
of the Constitutional peace repeats the losing electoral strategies of
2016 and 2024, when the Democrats presented themselves as the party of
respectability and tradition – that is, as supporters of a vanishing
status quo.  This is not how you get rid of a maleficent innovator
like Trump or a regressive popular movement like MAGA.         
   

People support a political leader for many reasons, but three motives
are particularly important: (1) They think the leader understands
their grievances and will solve their problems.  (2) They identify
with the leader personally and feel that he or she speaks for them. 
(3) They recognize the leader as the chief of a movement they believe
in and belong to.  Promising to restore threatened political norms
like states’ rights with regard to public order or the separation of
federal powers does not respond to any of these reasons and is not a
recipe for electoral success.  In fact, a quick look at the three
vote-motivators reveals why the Democrats find themselves up the
political creek without a paddle.

_ __THEY THINK THE LEADER WILL SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS__. _ Trump’s
great advantage at present is that he and the MAGA Republicans have an
innovative, semi-coherent program that purports to solve a wide
variety of social and cultural problems, and they are vigorously
implementing it.  Never mind that the problems are poorly defined,
the solutions won’t work, and the implementation is sloppy and
cruel.  There _is_ a program, much of it described in Project 2025,
and there _is_ implementation, much if it in the form of executive
orders and the misnamed “Big Beautiful Budget” law.  

The next six to twelve months will reveal the consequences of adopting
MAGA views on issues ranging from immigration, crime, cultural
nationalism, and government services to tariffs, taxes, military
expenses, energy policy, and foreign aid.  Meanwhile, if you ask
Democrats to describe their problem-solving policies on any of these
issues, many are likely to respond that Trump is exaggerating the
nation’s problems, or that Joe Biden’s proposed solutions are
still valid.  

The embarrassing truth is that there is no coherent “progressive”
program to speak of – no equivalent of Project 2025 – because to
challenge the status quo from the Left as MAGA intellectuals have done
from the Right would involve talking about topics that most Democratic
chiefs consider taboo.  Shouldn’t oligarchs be prevented from using
massive campaign contributions to buy elections?  In fact,
shouldn’t there be a cap of some sort on their wealth and incomes?
(Too “divisive”).  Couldn’t economic planning be used to
guarantee wage levels and develop a rational, pro-labor immigration
policy?  (Too “socialist”).  How about a Marshall Plan-style
development program to end deep poverty and reduce urban and rural
crime rates?  (Too “Great Society”).  What about slashing the
trillion-dollar military budget (too “unAmerican”) and using
taxpayer funds to finance a shift from fossil fuels to green
industries without sacrificing jobs? (Too “woke”).  

I don’t know the answers to such questions – but I’m certain
that if they are not asked and discussed, the boundaries of American
political thinking will continue to be defined by the MAGA pundits. 
We need a program radical enough to solve systemic problems and
common-sensible enough to command mass support.  In New York, Zohran
Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is pointing in the right direction, but
practical reform ideas like his must be deepened and developed with
other constituencies and systemic problems in mind. 

_THEY IDENTIFY WITH THE LEADER PERSONALLY__.  _This identification
involves the leader’s charisma – a form of authority originally
described by the sociologist Max Weber as based on someone’s
personal characteristics rather than his/her office and as a force
used to transform traditional norms of thinking and behavior. 
Charisma isn’t a form of magical or hypnotic compulsion that somehow
gets people to believe what they formerly considered a lie or to do
what they don’t want to do.  On the contrary, it describes a
relationship in which people feel that a political or religious figure
is expressing their own deep fears, hopes, and ambitions and
“representing” them in a direct, personal way.   

As Trump’s rise shows, charismatic leaders don’t have to live
exemplary lives according to conventional moral standards.  Most of
them have been rebels of one sort or another and have had checkered
careers.  They do have to exhibit a willingness to challenge
traditional taboos and “walk the talk” politically – to run
personal risks and make sacrifices to realize some intensely held
vision of change.  From this perspective, perhaps the luckiest things
to have happened to Trump were to be accused of being a Russian agent
after his win in 2016, then to be prosecuted for questionable crimes,
and, finally, to be almost assassinated before the 2024 election.  He
really does seem to believe that God saved him from the would-be
assassin to permit him to fulfill his vision of change (which includes
punishing those who earlier “persecuted” him).  Trump’s
followers may or may not share his theology, but they clearly
appreciate – almost worshipfully – his all-consuming dedication to
his cause.   

Charisma, in short, does not mean being likeable, making a good
speech, or acting like the CEO of a successful corporation.  It means
convincing large numbers of aggrieved people to follow one’s lead in
making risky, controversial changes.  Rather than being purely
personal, the charismatic leader’s appeal is based on the connection
between his/her personality and program.  Any number of Democratic
politicians have appealing personalities and can make a good speech,
but what has been missing for a long time in that party is the sort of
substantive charisma represented by a figure like F.D.R. – or, more
recently, by the first Bobby Kennedy.  We will have to see if the
Democrats can field such a candidate in time to save the nation from
J.D. Vance in 2028.

_THEY RECOGNIZE THE LEADER AS THE CHIEF OF A MOVEMENT THEY BELIEVE IN
AND BELONG TO.  _The need for a social movement to counter MAGA
brings us directly to the question of resistance.  When anti-Trumpers
talk about opposing Trump’s multifarious “intrusive” policies,
they generally have two strategies in mind: taking the administration
to court to get these policies declared illegal, and mounting street
demonstrations or taking nonviolent actions against them.  Both
strategies are clearly justifiable and are useful within certain
limits.  They publicize and obstruct this regime’s propensity to
commit cruel, divisive, coercive acts of dubious legality.  They
expand the political field beyond lobbying and elections.  And they
bring MAGA’s opponents together in common activities.  But defining
resistance primarily as anti-regime activity of either the legal or
nonviolent action type, or as a combination of lawsuits and
demonstrations, seems to me a serious mistake.  

People are not going to turn away from Trump because he is a
lawbreaker or an embryonic tyrant.  Resisting him effectively means
offering them an alternative to MAGA.

The MAGA movement exists because a great many Americans are aggrieved
and believe that the promises of U.S. systems of politics, economics,
and culture have not been realized.  In two presidential elections
many working people turned to Trump and his cohorts for help because
the Democrats didn’t seem to take their grievances very seriously
and had no credible program to address them.  This failure, in turn,
reflected the fact that the party had been “hollowed out,” as
Philip Rocco
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maintains.  The Democratic Party had become a collection of interest
groups and nonprofit associations allied with oligarchical interests,
and had very little to say about systemic issues such as
deindustrialization, wage stagnation, deep poverty, drug addiction,
unaffordable homes, family instability, and host of other ills
afflicting ordinary people in both cities and rural areas.  So, MAGA
prophets appeared, dreaming of a past (largely fictitious) golden era
when the Land of Opportunity seemed capable of solving all these
problems, and offering an ideology, a program, and a leader that
promised to revive and realize that dream.  

The bottom line: MAGA will not be countered by lawsuits and
demonstrations alone.  To vanquish it will mean offering Americans a
better ideology, program, and leadership than anything manufactured by
Donald Trump and his Far Right backers. 

+ MAGA ideology makes the “administrative state” and “radical
leftists” the villains. Our ideology will target the oligarchy and
show that _more_ powerful, _more _compassionate government agencies,
democratically controlled by strong people’s organizations, can
solve the problems that Trumpers have no way to deal with except by
calling out troops.    

+ MAGA programs feature pseudo-solutions such as sending National
Guardsmen to fight crime.  We will offer credible, imaginative
programs such as an anti-crime effort based on fully funded economic
development, massive aid to schools, violence prevention, and
community-supported policing.  

+ MAGA leadership rests in the hands of a deeply confused man unable
to distinguish between his own personal interests (and those of his
fellow billionaires) and the interests of his nation and the world’s
peoples. Our movement will discover and advance leaders whose
emancipatory programs are in harmony with their personalities, and who
can be trusted to put the people first and their own egos and bank
accounts last. 

Meanwhile, we will resist Donald Trump’s tyrannical initiatives in
the courts and in the streets.  But, understanding that judges alone
will not bail us out, nor demonstrations alone create a movement, we
can get to work now to create that urgently needed people’s
movement.  Meeting in person and online, locally and nationally,
interested Americans of all ages and backgrounds can form
“committees of correspondence” to develop the ideas, programs, and
leaders that are the essential tools for reconstructing American
politics.  

It’s getting late.  

What do you say?  

_Richard E. Rubenstein is an author and University Professor Emeritus
at the Carter School for PEACE AND CONFLICT RESOLUTION. _

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