‘You Can’t Despair. Because That’s What They Want’

Donald Trump will be president again.

Far more dispiriting than what the election says about Trump, is what his win says about the American body politic. We are a house divided on a fault line of decency. Trump’s venality, his bigotry and racism, his fondness for dictators, and his disregard of truth were on flamboyant display for American voters — with his former top general even decrying Trump as “fascist to the core.” 

Campaigning for the White House, Trump was a peacock with fetid feathers. And others flocked with him: Ostentatious oligarch Elon Musk made a mockery of our democratic system by seeking to buy off voters with small checks and million dollar prizes. “Comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe was there — making 1950s jokes about blacks eating watermelons, Jews being tight with money, and Latinos making too many babies, while casually blasting Puerto Rico as a swirling island of garbage. 

Trump openly touted his dictatorial aims and his plans for a “bloody” mass deportation — even as he courted white supremacists with a blood libel against Haitians and spouted eliminationist language about Congolese refugees being a pestilence. And more than half of American voters didn’t recoil. Whether they relished in Trump’s vicious spectacle or simply abided it, they did not turn away. They used their ballots to punch a ticket for Trump — with his dozens of felonies and a sexual abuse adjudication — to return to power, and to absolve him of the consequences of his Jan. 6 coup attempt. 

In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, standing before a wall of red-white-and-blue banners, Trump cast his win as divine will: “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” he said: “Now we’re going to fulfill that mission.” Never has the old saw, “when fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” seemed more prescient.

Deflating Their Confidence

In advance of the 2024 election, Rolling Stone interviewed experts in authoritarianism, fascism, and presidential power. They offered advice for resisting what is coming, but offered few assurances that the damage created by installing an American authoritarian — who is now effectively unchecked by criminal law — will be quickly or easily reversed.
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Timothy Snyder is a Yale professor of totalitarian European history and author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Published in 2017, it gave shape to popular resistance of the first Trump term. “You can’t despair,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Because that’s what they want. They want you to think that it’s hopeless. It’s never hopeless.”

Snyder’s first rule in On Tyranny is “don’t obey in advance.” He emphasizes that Americans opposed to Trump’s designs should take stock, and action, now. “The period of November, December, January, becomes very important,” he says, and “not just for ordinary citizens,” but for people entrusted with providing checks on executive power. Snyder issues a clarion call to members of the judiciary: “There’s going to be a lot of cases really quickly, in which the only thing that’s going to stop some kind of dreadful federal act of violence is going to be a judge.”

For normal people, Snyder insists the key is “to get out in protest” — now and through the inauguration. The understandable impulse of “keeping your head in,” Snyder says will only embolden Trump’s reactionary team. “You’re giving them even more confidence that they’re gonna be able to do what they want in January.” What’s demanded of activists in this moment is to “deflate that confidence,” Snyder says, and you do that by “showing that you’re not afraid, by cooperating with your neighbors, and by organizing.”
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Snyder emphasizes a lesson of the “Wall of Moms” in Portland in the late summer of 2020, who helped drive up the political cost and terrible optics for Trump’s most heavy-handed crackdown on public dissent. Launching tear gas at Black Lives Matter protesters looked different on TV when the feds were brutalizing a wall of white mothers in gold shirts, locking arms at the front of the crowd. “It’s about corporeal politics,” Snyder says. “Getting your body out where there are other bodies — with people who are maybe not like you or maybe less privileged than you.”

Seeing the Threat Clearly

Experts in authoritarianism insist that Trump’s dictatorial threats need to be taken with gravity, because he’s already done “things that autocrats do,” says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who is an expert in Italian fascism and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. 

“He has been able to domesticate a very old, storied party, and truly make it his personal tool,” she tells Rolling Stone. “He instigated a violent coup attempt,” and — instead of “having to go into exile or going to prison, like in Peru” — he “managed to paint it as a positive thing” or to make “a lot of Americans shrug their shoulders at it.” These are “preconditions for autocracy,” she insists.

Trump may have a “highly problematic, decompensating personality,” Ben-Ghiat adds, “but the guy is a master propagandist,” who has used those skills in a campaign against the American system of checks and balances. “He’s taken people step by step … for almost a decade now to view democracy as an inferior system — a system of crime and anarchy, weak government … and to see versions of authoritarian rule, with him at the head, as preferable.”

Ben-Ghiat warns that Project 2025, the conservative policy and personnel program, is the roadmap “to finish the job” Trump started in his first term. The intent is to “destroy the governing structures and norms of liberal democracy through mass purges of civil servants who are not loyalists — and create something else. And that something else is autocracy.”

Jason Stanley is Yale professor and author of How Fascism Works. He says Trump is pursuing a well-worn playbook. “He’s going to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists.” The next thing “autocrats do is go after the courts, the press, and the universities.” Many of our compatriots have grown up with a false confidence that the United States is immune from this kind of democratic corrosion. “Americans have to grow up,” Stanley says. “A lot of people live under these situations.”

Project 2025 will take time to implement. Sen. Bernie Sanders warns Rolling Stone to watch out for Trump’s use of national “emergencies” to produce a power grab, emboldened by allied partisans in the judiciary: “He will create emergencies, state of emergencies. You know, ‘The world is falling apart. I have got to do A, B, and C.’ And the courts will say, ‘Yeah, of course you have the right to do it. You’ve defined an emergency.’” Sanders says. “There’s a real danger of us losing the rule of law.”

Mixing Orbán with Pinochet

What will Trump’s model of authoritarianism look like? Experts point to Hungary as a prime example, where Viktor Orbán, the long-serving strongman, has undermined the country’s courts, press freedoms, and minority rights to create what he touts as an “illiberal democracy.”

“I don’t think we’ll be as bad as Russia,” Stanley says. “It’s Orbán, who’s visiting and giving advice.” Stanley notes that Orbán’s mechanisms for controlling dissent are milder than Vladimir Putin’s. “They’ll probably do the Orbán thing where they go after your taxes. They go after your livelihood, your job,” he says of Trump. “They’re not going to start assassinating people.”

Ben-Ghiat agrees that Orbán is a model for MAGA governance, but cautions that what Trump has in store “will be far more violent.” The Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is part of her calculus: “Orbán didn’t stage a violent attack, sending lawmakers running for their lives.” 

Trump’s openly stated aims, she warns, bring a South American strongman to mind: “He’s already talked about using the military against protesters, and in that sense, it would be more like Pinochet,” she says. “I’m not saying it’s going to be a military dictatorship, but there are elements of what he would like to do in terms of domestic repression that hark back to” the Chilean dictator.

Enabling Enemies Abroad, Targeting the Enemy Within

Perhaps Trump’s darkest ambition is to shift part of America’s prodigious military might from geopolitical adversaries abroad to political targets at home. Trump has indicated he’ll let Putin lay claim to parts of occupied Ukraine in the name of “peace,” and has treated Taiwan as far less than an ally, suggesting it needs to pay for America protecting it from China.

“Trump’s whole thing is that he would stand back,” says Ben-Ghiat, from America’s traditional role of providing a bulwark against expansionist autocrats like Putin and Xi. “What he would like to do is partly reorient military power to be used for domestic repression.” She points to Trump’s mass deportation plan for the undocumented, involving rounding up and removing the equivalent population of Sweden or Belgium from the United States, calling it a “vast repression” on “a historic dictator scale.” 

Trump has preemptively offered police officers immunity from prosecution (in what Ben-Ghiat calls an “authoritarian bargain”) and he’s repeatedly expressed his desire to use the National Guard and even the Army to enact his deportation scheme — as well as to suppress the “enemy within” that opposes his designs.

Here, Snyder insists, is where the American public has its most important, and perhaps most challenging role to play. “The Trump-Vance initiatives can only work by getting the population involved — and basically corrupting us,” he says. Snyder argues that even Americans who might share anger with Trump about immigration, may yet be recruited to block the border camps promised by Stephen Miller. 

“That’s the kind of active thinking that folks have to do — am I going to become the kind of person who takes part in this sort of thing? Am I going to become the kind of person who denounces my neighbors because they are not documented?”

“If Their Rights Are On The Line, My Rights Are On The Line”

A key to resisting authoritarianism, Snyder says, is standing up for the rights of the least powerful first. “If protest comes down to the people who are protesting only because they have to, then you always lose,” he says. “It has to be people who are one, two, three, four, even five steps away from being directly affected who show solidarity — and who also show pragmatism and wisdom by getting out early.” 

“If you’re more privileged, you should be thinking, ‘What can I do for the least privileged people?’” he says. “If their rights are on the line, my rights are on the line. That’s not just a moral position. It’s actually, politically, 100 percent correct.” 

Even as he insists that “the more privileged people have to lean out,” Snyder recognizes that early returns on such bravery are bleak. He points to the “disturbing” choices of the owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to block their newspapers from endorsing Kamala Harris in an apparent attempt to curry favor with Trump. “That’s an example of the most privileged people saying, ‘I’m going to act like the least privileged people. I’m going to pretend that I’m the one who’s going to be hurt here, and I’m going to run away.’”

Clawing Democracy Back

The most predictable part of Trump’s effort to rule as an authoritarian is a supercharging of corruption and cronyism. The blowback to that will help build and strengthen opposition.

“The economy is going to be based on, are you friends with Trump? Are you connected to him in some way,” says Stanley, who predicts federal contracts will be “tilted” toward FOTs, or “friends of Trump.” One measure of how bad it gets, Stanley says, half in jest, is what happens to Mark Cuban — the billionaire who campaigned most vigorously for Harris. (After Harris’ loss Cuban tweeted his congratulations to Trump and Elon Musk.)

Snyder, whose latest volume is called On Freedom, insists that brazen corruption can erode support for a cult of personality like Trump’s. “Folks have this fantasy that if you have a dictator, then the dictator is going to solve problems.” But under Trump, he says, “you’re going to have oligarchy, and a handful people are going to do much better — and everybody else is going to do worse, because the whole system is going to be corrupt and sticky” and run by “incompetent cronies.” 

“That’s going to be bad for almost everybody,” Snyder says. “And you can get a lot of support by pointing out how corruption is economically stupid, how corruption hurts everyday people in their everyday lives.”

Both Snyder and Ben-Ghiat point to the recent example of Poland, which has slowly beaten back an Orbán-style far-right takeover, as a model that can give Americans hope. “In Poland, the other side didn’t give up,” says Snyder. “They kept running, even when the elections [appeared] unfair. And they kept coalitions going, and people took risks.”

Dictator for Life?

Stanley and Ben-Ghiat expect Trump will seek to stay in office for as long as he lives, despite the constitutional prohibition against him serving a third term. “He’ll stay in office till he dies,” Stanley predicts, “whether that’s two years, four years, eight years, 12 years, like any other autocrat.”
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In the meantime, Snyder advises, America’s system of federalism offers hope for democracy at the state and local level. “Many things are going to be terrible. But controlling the federal government doesn’t mean you’re controlling everything,” he says. He exhorts Americans to support the institutions closest to them that uphold democratic norms — “whether that means some civil society organization, or state government, or a local mayor” — and collectively try to strengthen those bodies.

Defending those institutions will give proponents of America’s democratic experiment their best shot at recovery, when the MAGA movement stumbles. Here, Trump’s age and lack of a clear successor offers some hope. “He’s old, so at some point, age is going to make a difference,” Stanley says. “There will be a power struggle. The next opportunity,” he says, “will be when he dies in office.”