Reader Contribution: America on the cusp: Phones vs Fascism

We are watching a US inflexion point, where citizen action is confronting state violence and hardening authoritarianism. Where will it lead?

America is creeping towards an inflexion point. It’s a tense moment, captured through conflicting viewpoints. On one view, the US administration is in a death spiral with the Maga base floundering over a trio of issues:

ICE, foreign wars and the economy.

On the other hand, Tanehill’s compelling 8-point analysis of how the US 2028 election could be rigged, rates the chances of a Democrat win as “virtually zero”. Tactics such as cancelling postal ballots and using ICE to deter Democrat voters could also jeopardise the midterms. Trump has already ordered the removal of Fulton County ballot boxes.

It is foolhardy to try predicting at this moment whether the US will escape the Trump administration, but we can trace the battle lines.

Phone eyes

In freezing Minnesota, US citizens are now eyeball-to-eyeball with Trump’ regime and showing their might. Outrage against the tyranny is getting loud. The key citizen weapons are phones. Without the 15 different video angles taken of Alex Pretti’s murder, the Trump administration would not have relieved Commander Bovino from duty.

Photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash

The power of phone footage goes beyond Pretti’s murder, first, because it forces public acknowledgement of the Trump administration’sgaslighting to an extent that even MAGA struggles to deny.

Second, it highlights the brute arrogance of theirOrwellian command that citizens ignore the evidence of their own eyes.

Third, these blatant deceits ripple across whole belief networks. That the egregious murder of an innocent man was so readily gaslit as ‘self-defence against a terrorist’ shows the subterranean depths to which the administration will stoop. And this shakes the credibility of other claims, from ‘our economy is strong’ and ‘we only deport illegal aliens”, to “States are crooked … so we should take over the voting”as per Trump on 3 Feb, 2026.

Climb downs and chaos

Alongside the growing voice of condemnation, commentators invest hope in Trump’s climb downs, on Minnesota and, more broadly, on Greenland, tariff punishments, etc. These ‘TACO moments’ they suggest, illustrate ‘Trump’s deal-making craft’:

Proposals are pushed to the extreme, then softened.

It’s a hard-line negotiating tactic designed to extract maximum benefit to the dealmaker.

But Trump’s threats and withdrawals are not strategic. They are reactive outbursts that flow in dizzying rotation from his deeply vindictive but chaotic personality. Arguably, he backed down at the World Economic Forum because he scared himself. His quiescence looked like an ear-flattening, rollover response to being surrounded by a recognisably dominant pack of growling, much smarter dogs. Had Trump been on home turf with his posse of idiots and lunatics then, as per his earlier White House abuse of Zelensky, he may have persevered with his Greenland grab.

Because Trump is chaotic, he also backs down on backing down. TACO has an inbuilt bounce-backwhich renders him completely unpredictable. One thing his behaviour is not is measured, hence, neither citizens nor international leaders can use his ‘climbdowns’ to keep him in line, temper his cruelty, or slow his acquisitive, corrupt impulses.

Trump’s dangerously chaotic volatility means we have to take his threats seriously, even as they become more extreme. Aside from voting ballots being removed and dubbing innocent people as terrorists, Trump has openly called for the execution of lawmakers, and recently had two journalists arrested. Meanwhile, ICE is evidently being used as a Gestapo style centralised police force.

Much of this aggressive pushback against the growing roar of disapproval is probably orchestrated by key Trump puppet master, Stephen Miller. Is this aggression a wild last-ditch attempt to salvage a failing administration or neo-fascism tightening its grip in preparation for the midterms?

If the latter, the power of citizen push-back may be short lived. History reminds us that uprisings can be crushed (Tiananmen Square, 1989, Belarus 2020). The ICE programme hasn’t been scaled back. (Withdrawing Bovino from Minnesota was placatory.) Citizens are braving the streets but Alexandra Hall Hall traces a growing climate of fear with people scared to leave their homes, talk or write. From our UK vantage point, we have to support their campaigns but also respect the moment, if it comes, when they feel they can’t anymore.

The ongoing process of citizen pushback and retaliation from Trump’s administration means it’s impossible to determine at this point which way the US will go. Let’s consider two scenarios.

Possible futures

In one, Trump is deposed or resigns. Epstein could finish him in the same way Partygate effectively finished Johnson. A free and fair election is held with a thumping Democrat win. The rules-based order cheers as it wakes from the nightmare, and commentators settle into the task of documenting thatanomalous moment democracy’s fabric was torn. It will feel like recalling the surreality of the pandemic or a ‘serious weather event’.

Alternatively, because Trump’s plummeting poll ratings make him a liability, he’s ‘retired’ and thebaton handed to the Vance / Miller duo. This pair will eventually clash but, until Trump’s deposition, remain mutually useful. Trump’s commitment is ultimately only to self. Whereas the ‘terrible duo’ shares a coherent, Christo-fascist ideology and potentially the ruthless organisational ability to roll it out.

Taking advantage

It is in the nature of authoritarian regimes to tighten control in direct proportion to levels of social unrest,and the terrible duo, or one of them, would be taking over at just such a volatile point. Authoritarians win using charisma, gaslighting, and lies, but they stay by installing fear.

The US’s conduits for truth (universities, the judiciary, news media and the arts) have already been severely compromised. Meanwhile the political opposition, with anticipatory obedience, has fallen into sclerotic silence. Citizen pushback is pretty much the only game in town. It’s potent and may spread, re-igniting courage in other sectors, but Trump’s successor would have the advantage of taking power over a nation already weakened along classic authoritarian lines.

He would also continue enjoying support from the tech broligarchy. Modern authoritarianism is strengthened by extreme concentrations of wealth and served by tech interests. Palantir-style surveillance tech is both a perfect authoritarian instrument and highly lucrative. It’s reasonable to suppose that, as calls for economic equality and wealth taxes grow, so the fascist noose will tighten - in the US and wherever, across Europe, its poisonous ideology reaches.

Inheritance: the well of victimhood

Trump’s successor will also inherit his America First ethos. This mandate wasn’t unprecedented but the culmination of America’s long-standing perception of its global interconnections as a drain on itsbenevolence, harmfully prioritising ‘elsewhere’ over its own citizens. In this respect, Trump is a symptom of his time.

But the grievance will continue to find expression through the fascist leanings of the White House. Indignation about the US’s disproportionatecontribution to NATO, for example, is no longer just about fairness; it’s now hitched to contempt, hatred even, for woke Europe, so vehemently expressed by Vance in Munich.

Trump drew on his own deep-rooted well of victimhood to carve out a whole tariff programme as punishment and economic payback. He handled his expression of US paranoia particularly badly (hysterically) but his successors will continue to exploit it. They’ll want maximum dominance, at least over the Western hemisphere and possibly Europe as well, but with minimal inter-dependence (economic, military, cultural).

Yet Trump’s legacy is also marginalising the US. His tyrannical tariff slaps and petulant bouts of foreign expansionism have triggered the assiduous re-wiring of global trade towards other destinations.

Canada and the UK, amongst others, are striking new deals and accelerating the completion of old ones with India, China and elsewhere. Shed of US dependence, Western democracies are re-building the shape of their alliance to re-secure its vast trade and security benefits. Hoping that, without US beneficence, the liberal, rules-based order will implode is a wet dream from the fascist manosphere, but it doesn’t stop the US’s own descent into further hell.

David and Goliath

If the midterms go ahead, the US faces the slightly less formidable challenge of competitive authoritarianism for which there is a protest toolkit, parts of which US citizens are already deploying. They could also threaten a general strike if the elections look rigged and try getting the military onside. We should take heart from the ‘Velvet’ and ‘Bulldozer’ revolutions of Armenia and Yugoslavia.

However, set against these brave ‘Gulliver’ acts is the ‘Goliath’ of Trump’s dogged insistence that the 2020 election was stolen. He’s way madder now than he was then and, as president, has the power to use this excuse again, witch hunt polling data, and twist future election fails into ‘wins’, this potent narrative will be pursued by his successor regime.

Copycats and wizards

The US outcome matters in the UK precisely because we face the bald prospect of a Reform general election win. The Trump fanboy leading Reform is unashamed about the neo-fascist policies he plans to import here (UKICE, leaving the ECHR). If the US is unable to escape the clutches of their far-right administration, this can only embolden the UK’s copycat movement.

The US itself is on a ‘high stakes’ cusp. Right now, we can’t know if Trump will be removed, or if this would result in the restoration of US democracy or, instead, succession by another, possibly more fascistic regime, braced to take advantage of a pre-degraded US infrastructure and vulnerable morale.

Nor can we know whether Trump’s successorregime, if that’s next, will gain ideological control or be rumbled as wizards of Oz, incompetent charlatans without even the charisma to keep MAGA onside, having to run scared as their citadel is (metaphorically) stormed.

We watch, we wait and we hold our breath.

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This was a reader contribution from the Bearly Politics community. If you would like to submit a piece for consideration, please feel free to email ideas to iratusursusmajor@gmail.com.

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