Trump's first weeks back in power have aimed to disorient and demoralize—and so, to begin the work of dismantling liberal democracy.
We’re in the fourth week of the second Trump administration, and as many commentators have noted there is simply so much going on in U.S. politics—and therefore global politics: What happens on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in large measure shapes the world.
The Trump team’s frenzied first few weeks have clearly tried to induce a sense of overwhelm and overload in the population. His “blitzkrieg” start to his second term—a term used metaphorically for this short interval of intense activity that aims to overwhelm opponents and quickly achieve a predefined set of objectives—are a (not-so-subtle) attempt to disorient and demoralize the opposition.
In just a few weeks, Trump has promised to annex Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and the Gaza Strip; threatened (and partly ordered) tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, and others, including 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminium; tried to dismantle USAID and the Department of Education via Musk’s DOGE and his team of young engineers barely out of college; attacked transgender rights and the freedom of scientists to use particular words; and imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court for its role in prosecuting Israel for war crimes committed in Gaza (Trump groundlessly claims the ICC has “abused its power” by issuing arrest warrants “targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant.”)
This dizzying array of actions is very nearly, to quote the title of a 2022 movie, “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” And that’s the point.
By all of these actions, Trump and his band of late-modern fascists would like nothing better than to induce a vertiginous sense of political fatigue, forcing a retreat back into purely interpersonal relations: They seem to be counting on people to withdraw into more comforting spaces, away from the churn and anxiety of an endlessly hectic news cycle manufactured by Team Trump.
The German philosopher Hegel envisions social life as being divided into three “moments” or stages: the family, civil society, and the state. There’s also an implicit reverse-hierarchical ordering at work here: all three are necessary, but the family involves “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) in its merely “natural or immediate phase,” civil society sees ethical life in its conflictual “division and appearance,” while only the state is capable of rendering “freedom universal and objective,” gathering up all the competing claims on the social order and arriving at some form of judgment.
Trump aims to dominate the state to redefine the meaning of terms like freedom, and other central goods, in line with his own twisted sociopolitical vision. But he also seeks to pollute civil society to such a degree that only “the family,” or domestic sphere, becomes in any sense inhabitable to ordinary citizens. Trump and his cronies are trying to engender a retreat from a toxic political society to the realm of merely domestic comforts (such as they are when enveloped by late-modern capitalism and an incipient fascist authoritarianism), so that these groups will cease to struggle over control of the state. In other words: to disorient, demoralize, and demobilize—and so, to lay the groundwork for the demolition of liberal democracy.
What is to be done? Retreatism certainly won’t help. Of course, self-care and reconnecting with friends and family are always worthwhile, so long as one doesn’t have any illusions about their longer-term political value.
Instead, any opposition will also have to match and mirror the Trump administration’s frenetic pace. The only way for the opposition to counteract the Trumpist blitzkrieg is with a blitzkrieg of their own, using all available, peaceful means, from legislative action to street-level organizing and social-media activism, to mass protests and general strikes (such as “Days without Immigrants,” demonstrating the economic contributions of groups denigrated by the far right). A better future still remains within our potential reach.