Which is worse, the cliff or the off-ramp?
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In March of last year, I published a column here under the headline “Donald Trump and the Dictator’s Doom Loop.” Following an examination of Trump’s machinations to avoid standing trial for fomenting an insurrection and other acts for which he was criminally charged, I turned to what our nation would be in for if he returned to power.
It was, frankly, an exercise in crystal ball gazing, but one based on a clearly established pattern. To my eyes, the writing was on the wall in big red block letters.
I am taking the unusual step of reprinting below the relevant part of that column, both as a reality check on the clarity of the crystal ball and as a renewed warning about the choices that face us now as we stand at the brink of the doom loop.
We’ll conclude with a real-time examination of the dynamics now at play and another look into the ball at where it’s all most likely going.
The following excerpt is from that story, posted on WhoWhatWhy on March 2, 2024:
The Loop
My alarm stems from recognition of a historical pattern I call the Dictator’s Doom Loop. In the case of Trump, I’m talking about something much darker than his use of the D-word, most notably in the infamous whack he took at Sean Hannity’s softball, “You’re promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?”
Trump: “Except for Day 1. … After that I’m not a dictator.”
For many anxious listeners, that teasing interruption came across as a plan to be a dictator from day one, which was not exactly what Trump said. Let the record show that he responded to Hannity, and has repeated since, that he would not be a dictator “except for Day 1.”
But you could comb the history books for many a year and find no example of a one-day dictator. And not a lot of one-week, one-month, or even one-year dictators — dictators who decided on their own hook to stop being dictators.
Which brings me back to our Dictator’s Doom Loop after all. The pattern is, like all doom loops, an inexorable positive-feedback cycle, one in which dictatorial behavior triggers the kind of resistance that in turn necessitates even more dictatorial behavior, harsher repressions, and deadlier measures.
The loop is something of a historical staple, from the quasi-historical Macbeth, through Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, to the contemporary Bashar al-Assad, with many more between. It is likely to be somewhat mitigated or deferred when strongmen take power with the assent and adulation of the bulk of their populace — though even such “beloved” dictators generally wear out their welcome, a la Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and head down the doom loop path.
Donald Trump would not take power in 2025 with the assent and adulation of the bulk of the populace.
In the minds of something like half of America (and, for what it’s worth, most of the world) he will be a serial felon and coup plotter who managed to game the justice system to evade accountability and escape judgment.
As if that were not enough, he will take office with an unbending will to forcefully impose grossly unpopular policies without compromise or accommodation. He will bring with him a small army of thoroughly vetted ultra-MAGA hyper-loyalists to clear-cut his path through the thicket of democracy and facilitate the revenge and retribution he has repeatedly signaled will be high on his list of priorities.
And he will, if history and his own previous efforts are any guide, be itching to invoke the Insurrection Act. But what frightens me most is that, even were he not so inclined, it is unlikely that he will have much choice.
Should he take office having danced through his legal minefield and denied the voters the chance to know whether they were voting for (or against) a felon convicted of the most serious of “political” crimes, I surely won’t be the only one seething with rage.
Trump as president under such circumstances would be hated — and I mean hated — and feared by many millions.
There would be no honeymoon. He would be President Pariah on Day 1.
There would be resistance; there would be protests; there would be a torrent of harsh words and, almost certainly, deeds.
From the very start, Trump would have to, figuratively and quite possibly literally, take arms against this sea of troubles and raging throng of enemies. It isn’t hard to picture, roughly at least, what that would look like. As he imposes his policies — whether drilling or wall-building or defunding Ukraine or withdrawing from NATO or banning abortions or mass incarcerations and deportations — the a priori rage that greeted his ascension will even further intensify. Fierce criticisms will be written and spoken and chanted, implacable resistance encountered on every front.
All the more so if he follows through on his threats of revenge and retribution. I ask myself: If he targets for such treatment even one fellow journalist, or Gen. Mark Milley, or former Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, or any of the courageous among us who have dared to speak against him or cross him in some way or who simply refuse to bend the knee and kiss his ring, would I stand helplessly by? Would their friends and colleagues? Would you?
A Frightful Choice
Please forgive the dark and stormy crystal ball but I hope it’s clear where this is going. When leaders do unconscionable things, the people — in this case “We the People” — under that leader’s sway, or thumb, face a stark choice: resist or acquiesce, rise up or stand by.
If even a small number — sickened by Trump’s evasion of both justice and political consequence, unable to stomach the destruction of both individuals and democracy inherent in his “Project 2025” consolidation and projection of power — choose to resist, history foretells that Trump will forthwith enter the Dictator’s Doom Loop.
Moving against the resistance, with either hard (think Lafayette Square or Tiananmen Square) or soft (think the prosecution of the late Alexei Navalny) power, would re-pose the same question — resist or acquiesce, rise up or stand by? — in a still higher, more urgent pitch.
More resistance engenders ever more brutal dictatorial measures to quell it, which then in turn engender still angrier and more desperate resistance, in an ever-escalating cycle culminating in a final crushing or a full-scale revolt and civil war. The taller a democracy has stood, the further it has to fall — and the harder and more cataclysmic that fall bodes to be.
Some have speculated that Trump would content himself with the White House as his safe house, scuttling the trials and just getting back to his grift. There is little to indicate, however, that such a course — and the relative equilibrium it might bring — would, or could, be his choice.
He has already shown himself to be someone whose needs are unbounded and bottomless, who must have — especially in his years of decline and face to face with his mortality — essentially infinite approval and acclaim. Someone, to put it plainly, who must be worshiped. And who must smite those who refuse to do so.
Whether or not Trump is psychotic or a psychopath I leave to the medical profession; I am simply describing a clear pattern of behavior. Power in the hands of such a person is beyond dangerous — it is apt to be explosive.
Speaking alongside Trump last week at CPAC, far-right, cross-waving acolyte Jack Posobiec delivered this chilling message:
Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.
If Trump makes good on his veiled and not-so-veiled threats to move on democracy — if he, having been elected with the essential aid of a Supreme Court in which his appointees hold sway, commences to tear down the remains of a republic we just a short while ago believed to be vibrant and enduring — what will we, the displaced, do?
Will we shore up the ruins of our birthright? Will we rebuild? Will we abandon hope?
Resist or acquiesce? Rise up or stand by?
History and the present world are full of examples of nations whose people have concluded that resistance is futile or democracy not worth the price, keeping their heads down and going about their daily lives with their eyes averted. America could soon be such a place.
[End of Excerpt]
Nailed It. Now What?
Forgive me for taking a small bow, but that vision of Trump 2.0 has turned out to be, unfortunately, pretty much on the nose.
A bow because so many observers predicted something else — from a continuation of Trump 1.0 to Happy Days Are Here Again.
A small bow because gaming it all out — given our shared, public knowledge of who Trump was and of the system in which he would be operating — wasn’t really very hard.
Reality has departed from the Doom Loop script in only a few particulars. Trump did take office with a modestly positive approval rating, his head slightly above water. But although his starting position was lower, in terms of public esteem, than any modern president with the exception of himself in 2017, he immediately started crowing “mandate” and “landslide” — both figments of his imagination — and behaving accordingly. As a result, he enjoyed the shortest and sourest presidential “honeymoon” in living memory.
The fact that he had anything resembling a honeymoon at all is attributable to the shock, despair, and depression that were virtually ubiquitous among his political enemies, whether in office or in the public at large.
The would-be resistance stared open-mouthed and pinwheel-eyed as Trump fired salvo after salvo at civil society — a civil society far more vulnerable than virtually all of its guardians had assumed.
As Trump began announcing his Cabinet picks, it quickly became clear that any faint hope of moderation or competence was grossly misplaced. But, as long as the Republican Party remained Trump’s toy, there was not much, if anything, to be done about the emerging Overton Window–demolishing clown car that would be the new Trump regime.
So, since you can’t really have the predicted doom loop without both components — a would-be dictator and a fierce resistance — the first couple of months of Trump 2.0 were eerily quiet. Quiet in the streets — there being no massive pussy-hatted marches — and quiet in the halls of justice, courts being by nature deliberative and slow.
Trump, signing a flurry of oppressive and anti-constitutional executive orders, was, as promised, a dictator on Day One. Then he predictably forgot his preelection pledge to revert to president on Day Two, and it went rapidly downhill from there.
The would-be resistance stared open-mouthed and pinwheel-eyed as Trump fired salvo after salvo at civil society — a civil society far more vulnerable than virtually all of its guardians had assumed.
He went after immigrants. He went after dissidents. He went after lawyers and law firms. He went after journalists, media outlets, and nonprofits. He went after universities, researchers, and scientists. He went after judges and members of Congress. He went after the military. He betrayed Ukraine and went after the rest of our global allies. He went after just about everyone in his own executive branch whom his Project 2025–prepped, DOGE-empowered hunters could ferret out as a potentially “disloyal” nuisance. No place for any lead rods or cooling tanks in Trump 2.0’s Chernobyl reactor.
His “hit list” was shockingly wide and deep. Much of it was pure vengeance; the rest was aimed at the girders and joints of functional democracy and civil society.
If you have been a WhoWhatWhy reader, or indeed, a reader of any of the hundreds of scribes who have chronicled the events of the last half year, you won’t need diagrams. You know how much damage has already been done and you can see that the hits just keep right on coming.
Trump — who wasted no time not just “getting back to his grift,” but juicing it up to a level of naked corruption never witnessed or even imagined here in America — as predicted, was not content to soak in his warm bath of ill-gotten, pay-to-play, quid-pro-quo billions.
He has a vision — one that does not rise even to the level of warped Nazi ideology, but one dedicated exclusively to his own apotheosis and engorgement with grotesque levels of wealth and power. Destructive power. The power to threaten, the power to frighten, the power to harm.
Everything else — from tariffs to government “efficiency” to protecting Jews from antisemitism and whites from genocide — is just a kind of window dressing in service to his one true mission.
Referring back to my warning of last March:
[Trump has] shown himself to be someone whose needs are unbounded and bottomless, who must have — especially in his years of decline and face to face with his mortality — essentially infinite approval and acclaim. Someone, to put it plainly, who must be worshiped. And who must smite those who refuse to do so.
This is the brutal, all-encompassing psychodrama we’re now watching play out, causing the soberest commentators, one by one, to acknowledge Trump himself as a new level and new class of danger — an aggressive metastasis on an X-ray, a typhoon on a weather map, a nuclear bomb with a homemade fuse.
This is incredibly dangerous — Trump is infusing his own megalomania with delusional divine sanction. Christians should find this borderline blasphemous. Instead, all too many agree . . . and cheer. pic.twitter.com/tdMIihlfoe
— David French (@DavidAFrench) May 29, 2025
Many have pointed out his manifest weaknesses, his string of legal setbacks, and the bites that often fail to measure up to his barks. Indeed, from a certain perspective — one, crucially, not shared by Trump — the derisively labeled (leave it to the wags of Wall Street!) TACO president seems almost comically pathetic.
But before anyone leaps to the conclusion that Trump, like the Wicked Witch of the West, is melting away — to nothing or even normalcy — we should remind ourselves that two things can be true at the same time: What seems weak, shoddy, irresolute, bumbling, pathetic, and on the verge of defeat can also be supremely dangerous.
Paradoxically perhaps, if Trump’s very weaknesses now on display, and seemingly snowballing, ultimately land him in a corner at bay, might he then not prove — given his consuming abhorrence of and contempt for even a whiff of weakness, and given the terrible powers that remain at his call — still more dangerous than an actual strong man?
Is There a Limit?
We are left with the question I posed at the end of the Doom Loop column: Resist or acquiesce? Rise up or stand by?
What would it take for America to rise up — or enough of America to make a fight of it? What might actually trigger the kind of mass defiance that would in turn trigger the Insurrection Act and deadly force, setting us squarely on the Doom Loop path?
If sheer vileness — of word or deed — could do it, surely it would, by now, have been done.
Trump celebrated Memorial Day weekend by: calling his predecessors “SCUM” and judges who rule against him “MONSTERS WHO WANT OUR COUNTRY TO GO TO HELL”; regaling the graduating West Point cadets with his musings on trophy wives before informing them their job as members of our military “is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America, anywhere, anytime, and any place”; and celebrating none other than himself at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier:
Look what I have. I have everything. Amazing the way things work out. God did that.
All in a weekend’s work. And guess what? It more or less works: cheers from the MAGAs, fury from the Libs, and yawn-shrug from pretty much everyone else. Normalized. Vintage Trump. Take it from The New York Times, whose West Point headline was “Trump Administration Highlights: President Stresses New Era in Speech to West Point Graduates.”
Nor is it clear when — or if — the victims of his slew of reverse–Robin Hood, rob-from-everyone-else-and-give-to-the-rich policies will catch on to the whole scheme, and turn against the bloated plutocrat in populist clothing.
Will there be a tipping point in the price of eggs? Or iPhones? Or mortgage rates? Or jobs lost, assuming federal agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually report honest and accurate numbers? Or suddenly unreimbursed and ruinous medical expenses? Or all of the above?
What about rampant corruption and bribery — palaces in the sky pro quo, billions in pay-to-play memecoin “investments”? Billion-dollar golf courses and hotels built for him at the point of a tariff gun?
Will it be outrage at the fate of Harvard or the rest of the enemies in Trump’s retribution-tour crosshairs? Rounding up of immigrants? Protesters? Dissidents? Those monsters, aka judges, who Trump says want our country to go to hell? Habeas corpus, anyone?
It’s not obvious what, if anything, would make for such a tipping point. Or which way it’s going to tip. Our Theatre of the Absurd being what it is, it might even be that well-aimed acronym — TACO.
As a thought experiment, if Trump decreed that all males whose first name starts with a “J” would be summarily arrested and sent to detention camps, would females whose first names begin with a “K” be out in the streets en masse, or would they go about their business naively believing themselves to be “safe”? Would the Republican Congress say “That’s enough,” impeach, and convict? If not, how many first letters would it take? (Yes, it’s a twist to the old Pastor Niemöller footnote to the fascist playbook, and — being a “J” and given what I’ve seen to date — I might just go ahead and shave my head in advance to save them the trouble.)
It is amazing just how much poisoned food our political GI tract is capable of digesting.
The Richter Scale
But there is a dynamic at play that suggests that, for all the rolling normalization, the Doom Loop still beckons.
The dynamic is this: The whole rise to power of Trump and his MAGA crew is honeycombed with lies and false promises, and subject to collapse like a dying star if they don’t keep pushing out the edges.
They can’t actually govern with anything approaching competence, and their efforts to disguise the cruel intent and rapacious impact of their policies may get them only so far, so they have to keep flooding the zone, creating and propping up an alternative reality, outdoing themselves in outrageousness, and thriving on perpetual conflict.
And the more people they hurt thereby, the more resistance is stoked, the more they have to repress that resistance, etc. — enter the Doom Loop.
Even if there are strong forces of submission and normalization at work, the escalation imperative will keep working to override them.
Because I think we’re launched on that dynamic, I see almost inevitable escalation coming.
And lest you think such a dynamic is my fever dream, there’s this from none other than Curtis Yarvin, the kingpin of the MAGA intelligentsia, the Alfred Rosenberg of our budding Fourth Reich:
Unless the spectacular earthquakes of January and February are dwarfed in March and April by new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale, the Trump regime will start to wither and eventually dissipate. It cannot stay at its current level of power — which is too high to sustain, but too low to succeed. It has to keep doing things that have never been done before. As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.
Think about that: “As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes.”
What this suggests is that even if there are strong forces of submission and normalization at work, the escalation imperative will keep working to override them.
For accelerationists like Yarvin — and you can add fellow travelers like Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel, and the architect of Project 2025, Russell Vought, now Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director — the deadly enemy is equilibrium, where it all comes to rest or moves at a constant velocity in something like a steady state.
In Yarvin’s view, expressed above, the Trump regime must not, indeed dare not, behave like an airplane, achieving cruising altitude and leveling off, but more like a SpaceX rocket, accelerating until it hits escape velocity — that is, escape from the constraints of ordinary democratic politics — or self-destructs.
Follow this hyperbolic trajectory, these visionaries believe, and some idealized panacea awaits — whether a Fourth Reich, where the misfits rise up and rule with vengeful cruelty, or something like the Rapture, where Jesus (or Trump, for some) raises the dead and puts an end to the complexities and grind of the sad, sad world.
Cliff or Off-Ramp?
It turns out that the perceptive Yarvin is not sure Trump and his crew are up to the job. The philosopher-critic tacks on this get-out-your-decoder-ring lament to his warning quoted above:
Unfortunately, it is not quite clear that everyone in the administration gets this last fact about power. Is just the first of many strategic shortages of graduate-level clue [sic].
If Yarvin is right, we might just be saved from the Doom Loop by the failure of at least some on Team Trump to recognize and embrace the task at hand.
They might lose their edge, stop “doing things that have never been done before,” pull the stake out of the economy’s hemorrhaging heart, balk at rounding up every male whose first name begins with “J,” and take a stab at actually governing. Wouldn’t that be something!?
But where would it leave us? Most likely in a fully normalized hybrid of democracy and fascism, some variation on what political scientists Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky have described as “competitive authoritarianism,” models for which can be found in such former democracies as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey.
In which case, it would be foolish to count on either courts or elections to rescue us, as courts and elections are among the main targets of the leaders of such states, and Trump has wasted little time in following suit.
So far, Trump, although combover-deep in his grift, is showing no signs of throttling back on his will-to-power offensive — he seems, unfortunately, quite capable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time. Whether he is listening to Yarvin or to his own implacable urges, each day seems to bring “new and unprecedented abuses of the Richter scale.”
When push comes to shove, when it gets existential, it is not at all clear that TACO Trump will chicken out. And anyone waiting with bated breath for the Lady or the Tiger ending to all this, should bear in mind that, barring cosmic intervention, this circus still has three years, seven months, and twenty days to run.
As of now, America is caught between the forces of acceleration and the deceptive calm of normalization. When it comes to the Dictator’s Doom Loop, it is hard to say which would be worse: the cliff or the off-ramp.
