Is Trump Winning? Is He Losing?
Kimmel uncanceled, Comey indicted, a terrifying “domestic terrorism” directive, and troops to Portland: Where does America stand in the struggle against encroaching authoritarianism?
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Let’s start with a timeline. Here are just a few of the events that unfolded over the past 18 days since the murder of Charlie Kirk – a snapshot to illustrate how precarious this moment is, and how uncertain the outcome:
September 15 - On Monday, September 15, the Trumpists used all channels to declare their intention to crack down on liberal America and anyone they consider to be a leftist enemy. Hosting Charlie Kirk’s talk radio show, for instance, Vice President JD Vance (Opens in a new window) vowed to “go after the NGO networks,” and Stephen Miller promised to use the power of the state to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks” (Opens in a new window) and bring down the “vast domestic terror movement” (Opens in a new window) that was the American Left.
That same evening, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel used his opening monologue to mock the MAGA attempts to portray the killer of Charlie Kirk as an agent of the Left in order to justify political repression.
September 17 - This sparked a reaction from the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) that demonstrated what this political repression might look like: On Wednesday, September 17, FCC chairman Brendan Carr, himself a devoted Trumpist, openly threatened to come after broadcaster ABC unless it canceled Jimmy Kimmel Live. In an interview on a rightwing podcast, Carr said (Opens in a new window): “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct to take actions, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Two of ABC’s affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, reacted immediately and announced they were preempting Kimmel’s show. Both are currently seeking FCC approval in crucial matters, and they were evidently in no mood to defend first amendment rights at the risk of angering the regime. Not long thereafter, ABC also released a short statement (Opens in a new window) declaring it was taking Kimmel off the air.
September 18-20 - But the public backlash was swift. Already the next day, September 18, polling (Opens in a new window) suggested that most people vehemently disagreed with the decision to cancel Kimmel and sharply rejected the threats ushered by the FCC chairman. By the weekend, it had become clear that Disney, which owns ABC, was paying a steep price for not standing with Kimmel, as a record-number of people decided to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions (Opens in a new window). And even some Republican politicians in Congress deviated from their general “I will defend whatever the regime does” default: Texas senator Ted Cruz (Opens in a new window), for instance, called Carr a “mafioso” for issuing threats to the television network.
September 22-23 - As the new week started, the higher-ups at Disney and/or ABC had evidently decided it was time to backtrack: On Monday, September 22, they announced Kimmel would be back the next night. In his opening monologue (Opens in a new window) on Tuesday, September 23, Kimmel certainly showed no signs of being overly intimidated by the regime: He was grateful for the public support he had received, called on Americans to come together – and went right back to mocking Donald Trump.
September 25 - The way the Kimmel saga had played out was widely perceived as a massive defeat for Trump. The American people, it seemed, had drawn a line and forced the MAGA regime to retreat. Was this not a clear sign that the Trumpists were failing at consolidating their authoritarian rule?
But then, just two days later, the Trumpists reacted with a flurry of authoritarian escalations. On Thursday, September 25, former FBI director James Comey was indicted in Virginia. Trump had been publicly clamoring for this for years: He considers Comey an enemy because the FBI, under Comey’s leadership, looked into illegal connections between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016. What happened here was so transparent that even mainstream media coverage reflected how brazenly the regime was using the justice system to exact retribution.
The same day, Trump also released a presidential memo – an instrument quite similar to a presidential executive order – on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence (Opens in a new window).” It was entirely geared towards laying the groundwork for the type of comprehensive crackdown on the “Left” the Trumpists had been demanding since the murder of Charlie Kirk: The memo instructed the entire machinery of the federal government to employ an incredibly expansive definition of “domestic terrorism” to go after any organization or individual associated with leftist “anti-fascism.”
September 27 - And that wasn’t even the end of the week yet. On Saturday, September 27, news broke that the ideological purge of the FBI was also accelerating: In what is clearly an illegal act, the FBI fired a bunch of agents who had been photographed taking a knee (Opens in a new window) during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020.
Finally, the same day, Trump announced he was sending troops (Opens in a new window) into “war ravaged Portland” to protect the city “and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Trump said he was “authorizing full force, if necessary.” The militarization of the political conflict has reached another urban center; the Trumpists are determined to widen and escalate their war on blue communities.
This is how authoritarianism works in the 21st century – but sometimes it doesn’t!
What does this all amount to? After all this, where do we stand in the struggle over the fate of American democracy? Was the Jimmy Kimmel story just a blip? Or still a significant defeat for the regime?
It was fashionable in some corners of the political discourse to scoff at the Kimmel affair even before the Trumpists answered Kimmel’s reinstatement with another round of escalation: Who cares about some celebrity feuding with Trump, the argument seemed to be; this was basically all just a bit of pointless theater – catnip for the “resistance libs,” but meaningless overall.
Actually, the Kimmel story mattered quite a lot – both diagnostically (meaning: as a window into the state of American politics) and politically (in terms of how it is impacting the ongoing struggle). Regardless of its outcome, it pointed to what is one of the key differences between the first Trump administration and his second presidency. While the Trumpists were never defenders of free speech, there was no systematic attempt during Trump I to nullify the First Amendment or use the levers of state power to suppress protest and public dissent. They simply didn’t know how to use the government in that way, and they didn’t have the people in place who could have systematically used the state machinery as an instrument of repression. This led to a pervasive frustration within MAGA, and it is precisely what animated the big planning operations the Right launched during the Biden era – most infamously Project 2025. In fact, Brendan Carr literally wrote the chapter on the FCC in Project 2025’s policy agenda – in which he envisioned using the agency exactly the way he has since taking over as chairman in January: As an instrument to put pressure on business and media, threatening regulatory action or lawsuits against anyone not sufficiently deferential to Trump’s will.
The FCC’s attempt to coerce ABC into canceling Jimmy Kimmel was a reminder that the Trumpists intend to use the federal government as a machine that serves only two purposes: To impose Trump’s will and desire for retribution – and to impose a reactionary societal order against the will of the majority. It was also a demonstration of how an authoritarian transformation of a democratic society tends to work in the twenty-first century. Kimmel’s cancellation sits right at that intersection of open state repression – and pre-emptive self-censorship and complicity by businesses and civil society actors. No need to send the thugs in boots and brown uniforms to rough the place up, or to send the secret police to arrest everyone, if you can also “nudge” these institutions to comply by… less untidy means.
What to make of the reaction from the companies that first rushed to censor Kimmel – and then quickly brought him back, seemingly without any conditions? Let’s not kid ourselves: The people in charge at Disney or ABC did not rally in defense of democracy and free speech. Their immediate instinct, lest we forget, was to accommodate the regime. They reacted to consumer pressure and realized that their brand was taking a significant hit that would affect the bottom line. They made a business decision that just happened to align, in this instance, with the democratic defense. That may not be the case the next time. And yet, at the very least, their decision to backtrack does demonstrate that these companies have not yet fully bought into personalist rule. In a fully personalist regime, your position is entirely dependent on your relationship with the regime, on your standing with the regime leader. We have seen some very concerning signs in the past few weeks of how far we have already moved into this direction: Remember the tech leaders all schmoozing (Opens in a new window) Trump in a ridiculous White House dinner propaganda enactment? In that sense, at least, this was a welcome sign that public pressure can still cause the type of market effect that keeps companies from fully rolling over.
What caused the public backlash?
One obvious reason Kimmel’s cancellation caused a significant public reaction is that he is famous. He is extremely well connected in Hollywood, causing a lot of celebrities and entertainment industry people to chime in. And since he is someone from outside the realm of politics, they also felt more comfortable taking a position, as it was less easily discarded as a purely partisan act. All of a sudden, sports podcasters who generally try to stay away as far as possible from being “political” were talking about “the Kimmel situation,” (Opens in a new window) reaching a broad audience with lots of people who might otherwise be completely oblivious of whatever was going on in the struggle to stave off authoritarianism.
Another reason why the American public reacted so strongly to the Kimmel cancellation is that the Trumpists went about this in the most ham-fisted way. Since the very first day of the first Trump presidency, we have been wondering how much MAGA incompetence would hamper their malevolent attack on the democratic order? Here is a concrete example of how a more sophisticated, insidious approach might have gotten them a very different result. The FCC could have threatened ABC / Disney executives behind the scenes – yet Brendan Carr just had to play big, bad man on a rightwing podcast, likely because he thought it would endear him to the MAGA base. Trump could have used backdoor channels to make it known to Kimmel’s bosses what he wanted; yet he is Donald Trump, and so he went straight to talking into a microphone how the networks should have their licenses revoked (Opens in a new window) if they were mean to him, and how he wanted to see two more late-night hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers (Opens in a new window), fired too. It all added up to a spectacle that was so obvious, so easily recognizable as state repression; an assault that looked so much like “dictator stuff” to even casual observers that it sparked a rather basic response in people: That’s not ok.
Will it last?
Could the Kimmel affair have a lasting impact on how the struggle between the authoritarian aspirations of the Trump regime and the realities of American society plays out? One scenario is that the Trumpists just go back to a slightly less open approach to exerting pressure on media and business elites; that those elites understand that if they want to comply with the regime and seek to accommodate (and so many of them so desperate do!), they’ll also have to be a little less brazen about it. Don’t cancel Kimmel right away, maybe just announce a week or two later that his contract won’t be renewed… (that is basically what happened with fellow late-night host Stephen Colbert at CBS).
But there is also another takeaway that might potentially impact future behavior: The broadly hostile reaction from the American public certainly served as a crucial reminder that the Trumpists do not represent a broad societal consensus. No matter how many times they claim a “mandate” and angrily insist they represent “the people,” it remains true that Trump’s assault on free speech is extremely unpopular. The Trumpists are most dangerous when they combine their “will of the people” rhetoric with actions that are predicated on an understanding that what they need to do is to erect authoritarian minority rule. They got ahead of themselves with Kimmel, acting out in the open as if it was actually true that “the people” were on their side.
Could this reminder of Trump’s unpopularity strengthen whatever reluctance to go along with the regime might still exist somewhere within the Republican Party? Don’t hold your breath. However, I will say there is still a fault line within the GOP between those like Ted Cruz who apparently are still concerned that a public backlash like this will harm him and the party, that the rules of “normal” politics aren’t yet fully suspended, that you still have to be somewhat careful or risk losing the next election – and those like Stephen Miller who are so determined to establish a fully authoritarian order, and soon, that they cannot be bothered to care about public opinion.
Most importantly, perhaps: Let us hope that the Kimmel affair can convince at least a few more of mainstream America’s leading voices and most influential elites that there really is no reason to affirm and propagate the MAGA assertion that Trump represents “the people.” This has been Trump’s superpower for years, and especially since the election in November: So many, including in the country’s nominal opposition party, insist on treating him like he really is the tribune of the people, like the voice of “real America,” like a leader with a broad mandate to implement his agenda. It was never true.
Beware the swinging pendulum
I believe the developments of the past ten days or so offer some important lessons for all of us – they should inspire a reflection on the general dynamics of the political conflict and the way we are analyzing and interpreting it. In terms of the public perception of where things stand, the pendulum swung wildly over such a short span of time. The rightwing reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk were so unhinged, the calls for violent escalation against “the Left” so furious, that it certainly felt like America had potentially reached a tipping point: Not from democracy to no longer democratic (we crossed that line a while ago), but from a hybrid regime to potentially something closer to the no-longer-competitive-authoritarianism end of the scale. The cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel, with its combination of brazenly open state repression and full-on surrender from media businesses, seemed to point in the same direction. Authoritarian rule consolidated, or at least getting there fast. Trump was winning!
But then Kimmel was reinstated. This immediately sparked a host of pieces arguing the tide was turning (Opens in a new window), that America was not just another Hungary (Opens in a new window) after all. The regime had overplayed its hand and suffered a devastating defeat. Trump was losing!
But that was before the wave of authoritarian escalations to end the week. Comey indicted; troops to Portland; and a presidential declaration opening the door for virtually anyone in the United States – certainly anyone who is critical of Trump – to be harassed by the state as a domestic terrorist. If you believe that sounds hyperbolic, please read the memo (Opens in a new window) yourself. I will have to write more about it soon, but my first reaction is that it is a breathtakingly authoritarian document. The only purpose it serves is to create a flexible instrument that could be used against anyone the regime deems an enemy. It employs a definition of “domestic terrorism” that is entirely directed against the bizarre phantasma of “the Left” as it exists in the feverish mind of someone like Stephen Miller – even going so far as to explicitly declare all “activities under the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism’” as likely to be terroristic. Meanwhile, the memo widens the definition so much – including “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” – that it becomes difficult to identify what act of resistance or disobedience the state couldn’t persecute as “domestic terrorism.”
I think that’s terrifying. And it came just two days after Jimmy Kimmel returned with a defiant monologue that seemed to prove the regime had failed in its attempt to suppress public dissent. Now what: Is Trump winning? Is he losing?
The only productive way forward is to reject the question. Binary categories of “Winning/losing” – or “weak/strong” – are just not very helpful right now. They tend to reproduce mood swings more than they help generate plausible analysis. Every Trumpian embarrassment (remember the “Liberation Day” tariff debacle?) is destined to cause a new round of “Trump is weak, he is losing” pieces; every authoritarian escalation is accompanied by a chorus of “Democracy is dead, Trump won” post-mortems. My point is not merely to say that the truth lies “in the middle” (it might be far closer to one end of the spectrum than to the other) – but to remind us all that we must consider the bigger picture and how the many different actions and reactions are connected.
We long for certainty. That’s why we look for clear lines of demarcation and identifiable points of (no) return. But the lines will inevitably get pushed further and further out, and the next turning point is always right around the corner. Let’s think in directionality rather than fixed lines. And let’s not isolate specific actions or moments, but insist on a holistic understanding of what is happening around us. Things might move differently, at different speeds, in different sectors: The regime might have to make concessions to business leaders today, while aggressively moving forward on their plans to purge the nation tomorrow. A phase of escalation might be followed by a period of relative easement – and it would be as foolish to declare victory during the latter as it is defeatist to announce democracy’s inevitable downfall during the former.
Nothing is determined. But some things are certain. There should never have been any doubt about the Trumpists’ intentions. They are entirely sincere about their assertions of absolute power, unburdened by legal restraints and puny norms. They desire to transform America into some form of plebiscitary autocracy, constantly invoking the true “will of the people” and their “mandate” to restore former national glory while drastically narrowing the boundaries of who gets to belong, centralizing power to neutralize the opposition, curtailing the rights of those who dare to deviate, entrenching a tiered system of participation defined by hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, and restoring white male dominance in elite institutions as well as across all spheres of American life.
But that doesn’t mean they will ultimately succeed. Only that they are trying. And if it were all happening elsewhere, and our observations weren’t still distorted somehow by an exceptionalist mythology that wants us to believe “It cannot happen here” in this self-declared land of the free, we would have no trouble recognizing how disastrously far they have already come in just a few short months.
If you have been reading Democracy Americana for any length of time, you know this is not the place you come to for optimistic encouragement. We must recognize how dangerous, how precarious this moment is. But we must not perpetuate the Trumpists’ assertions of strength and dominance. It’s a constant balancing act, with enormously high stakes and a completely uncertain outcome. For now, the gap between their authoritarian aspirations and the reality of American society remains vast. That’s where politics still continues, that’s where the counter can yet happen.
