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“Donald Trump gets less popular every day, and more powerful every hour.” 

This appraisal has become something of a toss-off — one of those clever mots we read or repeat without giving much if any thought to its real meaning and ultimate implications.

Its accuracy is easy enough to test. Trump’s slow but steady decline in the polls — “Fake,” according to Trump, who late last month boasted, “I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s” — directly testifies to his eroding popularity. 

Of course, polls are subject to fluctuations and reversals; but largely because of his own powerfully polarizing impact and the tribal nature of US politics in the Trumpocene, Trump’s numbers have varied less than those of other presidents, even in response to dramatic events — a high floor and a low ceiling reflecting his singular immunity to ordinary political vicissitudes.

But that polarization is now working against Trump: Nearly twice as many Americans strongly disapprove of him (46 percent) as strongly approve (24 percent). Another way of looking at these latest numbers is that 84 percent of those who don’t like Trump really don’t like him, while only 59 percent of Trump fans have comparably strong feelings. That’s a massive, growing, and politically perilous gap.

Passionate disapproval, now characterizing nearly a majority of Americans, tends to be hard to reverse. Barring the equivalent of a 9/11, which rocketed George W. Bush from barely treading water to the stratosphere, it is hard to imagine the kind of developments that would reverse Trump’s downward creeping trend or alter the thumbs-down judgment of roughly 156 million Americans.

Team Trump’s real energy has been devoted to amassing more and more power — over the executive itself; over the other branches of the federal government; over state and local governments; over the military and the ancillary wielders of deadly weaponry; over businesses, universities, media; and, of course, over perceived “enemies” and potential sources of resistance.

On the other side of the equation, while there are no comparable quantifiers of Trump’s growing power, there’s the simple eye test and, for those who keep up with the news, a cascade of power flexes on just about every imaginable front.

The Trumpmanian Devil

Anyone who naively thought or hoped that Trump would settle into his second term as a lazy grifter, satisfied with his cut of the trillions of dollars passing annually through the federal till, has gotten a very rude awakening. 

Trump and his family are grifting away at levels that would be shocking if shock were still a possibility. But Team Trump’s real energy has been devoted to amassing more and more power — over the executive itself; over the other branches of the federal government; over state and local governments; over the military and the ancillary wielders of deadly weaponry; over businesses, universities, media; and, of course, over perceived “enemies” and potential sources of resistance. 

Few, if any, stones have been left unturned, as Trump vigorously executes the Project 2025 Authoritarian Playbook, attempts to intimidate and stifle all dissent, and hints darkly at his power over the upcoming elections.

This is what the wags mean when they say that Trump gets more powerful every hour: The wheels of his dictatorship machine are always turning, night and day.

Much, though not all, of that activity has been reported and dissected. Trump’s battle with the courts (most of them) is ongoing — as is the expansion of military power on domestic soil and the unprecedented recasting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as a masked latter-day cross between Hitler’s brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA) and his dreaded Schutzstaffel (SS).

Extrapolating the Two Trends

What most interests me — as an inveterate, catastrophizing, and too often validated crystal ball gazer — is where these two divergent trends will take us. Given drooping popularity and cresting power, what is the endgame?

I’m afraid my crystal ball, tinted no doubt by the events and trends of the Trump era to date, augurs darkly in answer to that query.

Trump, as unpopular as he now appears to be, is still very much a creature of his times. Tens of millions of our fellow Americans have, it appears, grown tired of democracy and seem to be cheering its demise like a spoiled child who tears apart an old toy that no longer delights or interests him. And tens of millions more seem to have better things to do than to put up any sort of a fight to save that toy — shrug, too much trouble, yawn, and there’ll be some new toy for us to play with; there always is. 

Granted that our democracy has always been imperfect, too often falling short of meeting everyone’s conflicting needs and expectations. Granted, too, that, since the Reagan revolution of the 1980s, there has been a gradual but persistent retreat from the promises of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement — a retreat abetted by often unremarked and poorly understood changes of procedure: the opening of floodgates to Big Money and Dark Money in politics, courtesy of Citizens United (2010) and related Supreme Court decisions; the green light given to extreme partisan gerrymandering by the court’s decision in Rucho (2019); the gradual gutting, beginning with Shelby, of the protective provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the computerization of our elections under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, to cite just a few examples.

As this gradual crippling of democracy predictably and inexorably drove the US to increasingly obscene and punishing levels of income and wealth inequality, our soil became fertile for some sort of dramatic overhaul. 

That this overhaul came neither in the form of GOP-blocked democracy-fortifying reforms — the nuts and bolts of how we choose our leadership and thereby set our national direction — nor even in the form of Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism, but rather as the MAGA populist desire for a “strongman” to smite the “elites,” tear down institutions and safeguards, and thus purportedly restore the stolen dignity of ordinary Americans, is a complex twist of fate that only a few Cassandras saw coming. 

That the strongman would be a faux-populist grifter with a demagogic genius and an insatiable appetite for both power and revenge was a nightmare too unimaginably dark for just about anyone except those few of us obsessed with the recrudescent patterns of history and steeped in such precursor nightmares as the rise of the Third Reich.

Not Just a King

And yet here we are, our democracy on life support, a tyrant and his movement threatening this ghastly autocratic transformation, plunging a seemingly rock-solid republic back into the era of monarchy. 

And not just kingship per se but the reign of a bad king, an evil king, possibly a mad king. The kind of king or emperor whose reign the history books blanch at recording. The suffering inflicted, the damage done, the misery endured. And, in our case, the carefully designed and painstakingly built constitutional edifice destroyed.

We see that virtually none of what Trump is doing is popular, in the sense of being supported by a majority, or even a plurality, of Americans. It is likely — government and right-wing media lies and propaganda notwithstanding — to become yet more unpopular. 

What happens if and when extreme unpopularity and extreme power collide?

So, as a thought experiment, imagine Trump, a year from now — with an American Dream-crushing economy, with masked ICE goons running amok, with some number of dissidents likely disappeared or dead — having lost half his current support such that his approval rating is in the teens. 

And imagine, too, that the power line on the power/popularity graph has continued to push higher into uncharted territory: more executive and personal power bestowed by an all-in Supreme Court; more adverse and limiting lower court decisions (those that are not overruled) ignored or defied; more “enemies” targeted; more cities occupied; more “emergencies” declared and exploited; more control over elections taken, de facto if not de jure; the barest pretense of democracy cloaking an increasingly open dictatorship…

What then? What happens if and when extreme unpopularity and extreme power collide? 

Counting on a Free and Fair Election? Don’t.

Elections were dreamed up, somewhere in the past, to provide a peaceful resolution not just to disagreements over policy, but to threats to thwart by force the collective will of a majority of the people, and to provide continuity and stability. But what happens when an election gets caught in the middle of a power struggle in which one side is no longer remotely committed to process but only to outcome — to winning, to staying in power at all costs? 

It should be clear right now that Donald Trump is playing for power. Popularity would be nice but even if he himself is in denial, too self-deluding to know the score, his minions — Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, Pete Hegseth, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and certainly JD Vance — are not. They can read the polls and know they can’t all be “fake”; and they can follow the trends. They know unpopularity — increasing unpopularity — when they see it. 

Barring some kind of miracle, they already are preparing for it all to come down to power.

What that means in immediate practical terms is that if it’s not looking good for winning the 2026 midterm election legitimately, you set about winning it illegitimately. And if all your thumbs on the electoral scales aren’t enough to do the trick, you find whatever pretext is necessary to cancel the election or, if it is held, to refuse to accept the results — claiming that they are illegitimate even if, in fact, it was your thumbs that made them so.

If all that seems just too fantastic, know that the historical record tells us that it has happened, repeatedly. Not here — although claims of rigging and illegitimacy are becoming something of the norm, fueled both by “existential” hyperpartisanship and the nontransparency of much of our electoral process — but in failing democracies around the globe.

What matters is force, who wields it and who doesn’t, how loyal those who wield it are, and how willing they are to do the once unthinkable. A reign of terror requires a surprisingly small legion to inflict.

Of course, such a putsch won’t go over well in America: Millions will take to the streets; various institutions will weigh in, citing precedent, law, the Constitution, morality, and decency, expressing shock and outrage. 

But — and this is where most observers still blink at the next step — once you’ve committed your fate to power, you just make up whatever you have to make up and do whatever you think you need to do, and none of that pushback to it all really matters much. 

What matters is force, who wields it and who doesn’t, how loyal those who wield it are, and how willing they are to do the once unthinkable. A reign of terror requires a surprisingly small legion to inflict.

This is why the purges of the military, the staggering $75 billion budget for ICE, and the deployment of federal troops to police American citizens are so alarming. Not to mention the far-right “militias” and the fact that MAGAworld is bristling with a couple hundred million privately owned guns.

Skating to the Puck

As in the opening dozen or so moves of a chess match, the forces are being built up and put into place; systemic responses, or “guardrails,” are constantly being tested; and a kind of rolling normalization is making the once outrageous acceptable, preparing the ground and the collective psyche for still worse.

You might say that, so far, no pieces — knights, bishops, rooks, queens — have been captured, only a few pawns; blood isn’t yet flowing in the streets; we’re a long way from checkmate. But as any chess player knows, that relative calm and apparent balance can be very deceptive. 

Now is the time to look ten more moves ahead — to imagine, with the help of history, how the playbook will unfold, what the middle game and endgame will look like. To switch metaphors, we’ll need to lift up our heads and skate to where the puck will be.

That means, I’m afraid, assuming the worst. Begin with grasping that Trump has already left the realm of politics and popularity and descended into ultimate reliance on power: a power of threat and intimidation, but one backed, when push comes to shove, by deadly force. A lot of it. Enough to terrorize and subjugate a great nation and its once proud people.

Notice that Trump always floats a “reason” for each new aggression: Crime is out of control; the blown-up boat was smuggling drugs; India’s been screwing America for decades; immigrants are “invading” and “poisoning [America’s] blood”; someone or some agency is “woke”; DEI is a mortal threat; Powell is a moron; Democrats “cheat”; and on and on. 

Virtually all of the reasons fail miserably as genuine justifications. Most often outright false, they are, at best, flimsy pretexts.

But for Trump, their validity is hardly the point. They just make his authoritarian takeover look like some kind of legitimate politics, while piece by piece all the guardrails are torn down. At the end, shorn of such institutional protections, all we will be left with is force — a great imbalance of force.

The Great Unlulling: Finding and Using Our Weapons

I have alluded to this dynamic previously as the “dictator’s doom loop.” Yet even the predicted has a way of taking your breath away as you watch it unfold in real time. 

It can be, and has been, paralyzing for so many of us — especially those of us with little or no power or influence beyond our individual voices. What can a speck of dust on the chessboard do?

I think the key here is twofold. We must continue doing all that we can — fighting, in one way or another, everything that Trump and this administration does to further augment their power. I doubt there is any silver bullet, but if we have a secret weapon, it lies in our numbers — which are reciprocal to Trump’s popularity and will continue growing as his numbers shrink — and in our relentless communication, both among ourselves and to our leaders and anyone else still blind to what is really going down in America, which should even include, where possible, those who one day may occupy our streets and be called upon to use deadly force against us.

Our rejection of Trump’s fascism can be made more visible through periodic protests and demonstrations. It can grow some teeth through coordinated mass economic actions such as consumer boycotts, tax revolts, and general strikes. 

We have plenty of weapons if we care to dust them off and use them.

We’ve seen so much normalization and capitulation, even from the powerful, that it’s only natural to conclude that such is a sensible course, that concession and appeasement will bring a tolerable equilibrium and peace. It won’t.

And that is the second key: preparation. Right now, we are woefully unprepared for the war that is likely to come and that is, in many respects, already upon us. We’ve seen so much normalization and capitulation, even from the powerful, that it’s only natural to conclude that such is a sensible course, that concession and appeasement will bring a tolerable equilibrium and peace.

It won’t. No more than it did in Europe in 1939. 

Fortunately, some with power are fighting. Harvard just won in court. Every inch of ground must be contested; no victory in any battle or skirmish should ever be grounds for complacency. We should take our inspiration from Winston Churchill’s iconic 1940 speech in defense of England under attack: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”

Churchill hinted, toward the end of his great speech, at America (“the New World”) coming to the rescue of the old. Such a rescue, alas, is not something we can hope for. It is all on us: the war and our preparation for it.

Preparation means understanding that we face a threat and an enemy no less formidable than that faced by Europe, England, and, eventually, Pearl-Harbored America 85 years ago. The will to power, embodied now in a psychologically weak and pathetic but nonetheless monstrous individual and his power-drunk adherents, has spoken all languages — German, Russian, Swahili, and, yes, English — and has reemerged, like a retrovirus, in all eras. 

We might protest that America was built to resist such depredation — and we’d be right. But no divine dispensation has granted us immunity in perpetuity, assured us victory without struggle or sacrifice. We’ve been lulled by our long, good fortune into expecting that. 

It is time to unlull ourselves, and prepare ourselves, both psychologically and materially, for the conflict to come.