Kyle Green/AP Photo
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) waves while onstage with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during his “Fighting Oligarchy” event at the Ford Idaho Center in Nampa, Idaho, April 14, 2025.
There are two movements in American politics right now. The country is big enough for both of them to predominate at the same time. It is simultaneously true that we’re seeing the most powerful authoritarian movement in American history and the rise of an emerging opposition that has the raw material to become even more powerful. The difference between these two movements is as old as politics: One is entrenched on the inside and the other is building from the outside. Will the outside agitation be able to prevent the insiders from demolishing everything decent about America in time? That’s the main thing worth pondering today.
With a single Oval Office press availability, the president of the United States ended America’s place among democratic nations. Defying a unanimous Supreme Court ruling by breaking wide open the loophole left by conservative justices, Donald Trump and his vassal Nayib Bukele asserted the right to illegally kidnap a man off the street, transfer him to a gulag in El Salvador, admit that he was taken mistakenly, and then do nothing about it. They’ve decided to sprinkle the magic words “foreign affairs” on this kidnapping to evade accountability for any challenge to this power. The implication is that nobody is safe from being disappeared, and it’s not even an implication, as the president openly pined for dispatching American citizens to Salvadoran prisons in the exact same manner. (It is a uniquely Republican position that even our concentration camps are being outsourced to lower-wage countries.)
This is not the first defiance of the federal judiciary in Trump’s second term. The administration has ignored deadlines to restore foreign aid funding. It secretly withheld disaster relief to blue states in violation of a judge’s ruling. Literally yesterday, at the press avail with Bukele, the White House blocked the Associated Press from the event despite a court order requiring entry. None of this should be surprising; top officials at the Justice Department, some of whom were Trump’s personal lawyers, openly mused about defying court orders in their confirmation hearings.
But the invocation of the right to kidnap, the right to disappear, goes many steps further. It is not being done in service of a broader desire to protect the country from unauthorized migrants; deportations have been flat relative to the Biden administration. This is more akin to the elimination of dissidents that you see in despotic regimes worldwide. People who disagree with the regime, including green card and student visa holders, are targeted for removal, due to vague “sympathies” with perceived enemies, picked up at citizenship appointments or just off the street, flown across the country to avoid unsympathetic legal venues, and held as the courts play things out.
Making people fear being next is the bigger goal than the actual deportation. In this sense, the shuttling of 250 migrants, most of whom had no criminal record, to El Salvador’s most notorious prison was really just a show of what could be done, a warning to self-censor or self-deport. This is turning the United States into a place where the only real enforcement in the country is filling political prisons with those guilty of thought crimes.
Trump’s movement relies on speed rather than popularity, because his resources of will are not renewable.
An elite system devoted to deference and impunity for decades cannot handle someone eager to abuse the privilege. Supreme Court rulings to stop the disappearances have made it easier for them to continue, whether by downgrading a demand to “effectuate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release to a suggestion to “facilitate” one, or requiring due process for political prisoners kidnapped under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 but only on an individual basis, while making it nearly impossible for those already denied due process to assert their rights. Sixty Democrats in Congress, many of whom are expressing revulsion at the deportation of anyone the president decides is a criminal, voted in the Laken Riley Act to give the president that very power, and set us on this slippery slope from undocumented alleged criminals to documented people expressing their speech rights to disagree with their government.
And that’s where we get to the movement on the outside, in many ways as much an expression of distaste for the ineffectual nature of opponents on the inside as it is the rejection of an increasingly dictatorial leadership. Yesterday, in Nampa, Idaho, an arena was filled to capacity to hear Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talk about preventing oligarchy from taking hold in America. The day before, it was over 20,000 in Salt Lake City; before that, it was 36,000 in Los Angeles, 19 months before any national election that could change the balance of power in Washington.
A week earlier, around three million people took to the streets to register dissent against virtually everything the Trump administration is doing, from tariffs to renditions, from the destruction of government agencies to the attempt to memory-hole our history. People are finding the connection in being together, feeling like they must become part of something bigger than themselves if we are to emerge from what for many is an American nightmare. You certainly come across cynics who believe that this mass movement has no plan, no theory of taking powerful men down and stopping the slide into despotism. What they forget is how mass publics can tip over dominoes that get larger forces in motion to act.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) is traveling to El Salvador this week to try and force Abrego Garcia’s release, and while the pressure of one senator doesn’t amount to the president, it’s a reminder to Bukele that the situation in the U.S. can change for him, rapidly, if there’s a transfer of power. Harvard, nobody’s idea of an anti-establishment institution, has gone into full resistance against the White House’s attempts to turn it into another vassal, and that courage is contagious, as we see with MIT following Harvard’s lead and faculty senates banding together to fight. Where at one point the Senate was content to wave through Trump’s partners in authoritarianism, now all nominees face formal holds, making it harder for the Senate to function. As Brian Beutler reports, a Democratic staff memo details parliamentary tools to grind down the House as well, to signal to the public that business is not as usual and they recognize that.
It may be true to some degree, as Jeet Heer claims, that the street activism is not being reflected in the will of the elites. Seeing law firms and universities and members of Congress buckle is irritating. But not only is that changing; the activists have power all of their own. It is quite incredible that, after a steady diet of Democrats falling over themselves to agree with Republicans that immigration is a problem to be solved, the public has seen the consequences of disappearing dissidents and has decided they don’t like it. Trump is underwater on immigration and deportations, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, despite acting like he is following a mandate and Democrats until recently largely agreeing.
Trump’s movement relies on speed rather than popularity, because his resources of will are not renewable. You will notice that he has yet to hold a single rally with the public as president, despite it being his favorite activity. Trump needs to break everything fast because he won’t have the ability to do so for long. And he knows it. That foundation is rickety, and people power can upend it.
I took a lot of heat for declaring pretty early on, amid falling Trump approval ratings and town hall debacles for conservative members, that “The Coup Has Failed.” I’m more confident in the assertion, because my precise meaning was that a quick-strike end to democracy was not going to be accepted by the public. It’s not. The task at hand is to reassure elites who oppose Trump that the public is behind them, and instill in them the will to fight.
