With a Whimper

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, October 16, 2025

 

There isn’t enough despair lately in right-leaning commentary to suit my tastes (admittedly, there never is), so I was pleased to see this new piece in The Atlantic by David Brooks. Why are Americans letting a fascist movement dismantle the liberal order that made ours the wealthiest, most powerful nation in history, he wondered?

 

Where’s the outrage?

 

“On April 17, I published a column in the New York Times arguing that all sectors of America needed to band together to create an interconnected resistance coalition,” Brooks wrote. “That column got an enormous amount of attention and support. For a moment, I thought the mass civic uprising I was hoping for was at hand. So where is it?”

 

“Are we just going to stand in passive witness to the degradation of our democracy?” he asked at another point. I mean … yes? Pretty obviously?

 

That’s a strange point to make with mass anti-Trump demonstrations set for Saturday, I realize. Brooks himself acknowledges the virtue of the “No Kings” rallies that were held in June and will be held again this weekend. Republicans in Washington sound nervous about them too, ratcheting the usual demagoguery about riots and domestic terrorism and Antifa waaaay up to try to frame the protests in advance as some sort of menacing insurrectionist threat.

 

It’s not just the usual suspects, either. Rep. Tom Emmer lost his shot at becoming speaker of the House in 2023 after Donald Trump pronounced him a “RINO.” Emmer has now atoned: Last week, at a press conference on the government shutdown, he characterized the No Kings demonstrations as a “hate America” rally organized by “the terrorist wing” of the Democratic base.

 

Ditto for Sen. Ted “Constitutional Conservative” Cruz, who went to bat for Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel was threatened by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr. Cruz told a Fox News audience this week that he’s introduced legislation to let the Justice Department pursue racketeering charges against left-wing donor networks that are funding Saturday’s rallies, on the theory that they’re bankrolling “riots.”

 

Remember that the next time you’re tempted to take him seriously on the subject of free speech.

 

Republicans fear the No Kings protests, you might conclude from all that. I disagree. I think Republicans are being opportunistic about the No Kings protests. If the rallies aren’t peaceful—if even one among the hundreds scheduled across the country turns ugly—the GOP has laid a predicate to smear law-abiding left-wing organizations as accomplices to a vast criminal conspiracy.

 

And if they are peaceful, and come off without a hitch? Nothing will change. No one will remember in a week.

 

If anything, with a population as civically narcotized as ours, one could argue that sporadic displays of defiance toward the president and his project are useful to the White House. Americans who are dimly uneasy about creeping autocracy will feel false reassurance from public demonstrations against Trump and the persistence of figures like Kimmel on television cracking jokes about him. Stuff like that doesn’t happen in real autocracies, right?

 

America is still America—unless you have Trump Derangement Syndrome.

 

Insofar as America really is still America, though, it won’t be for much longer. Most of the public has plainly given up on resisting the authoritarian project, and the president and his cronies know it. And they’re taking advantage.

 

A war of choice.

 

The pace of the administration’s activities in Trump’s term is “rapidly accelerating,” Politico noted this morning. True, but I think the scale of what they’re up to lately is more significant than the tempo.

 

For instance, it appears we’re about to attack Venezuela for reasons no one can explain.

 

The president spent his first six months back in office taking bribes, fiddling with tariffs, purging federal bureaucrats, and shaking down ivory tower left-wing enclaves like universities and white-shoe law firms. For the average joe, I suspect, most of that qualified as irrelevant to their lives or (in the case of tariffs) sufficiently esoteric legally that it was hard to form a strong opinion about the propriety of Trump’s actions.

 

As for the bribes, *shrug*. Voters knew what they were getting when they reelected him. He’s a convicted criminal, for cripes’ sake.

 

But a war of presidential choice with a rationale no more concrete or compelling than “something something drugs”? That’s a truly major escalation in Trump’s claim to autocratic prerogatives. He’s already begun bombing Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean, having declared unilaterally a few weeks ago that the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” with drug smugglers. Special Operations helicopters were recently spotted flying within 90 miles of Venezuela and some 10,000 U.S. troops have been deployed to bases in the region as part of a military build-up. Yesterday the president confirmed that he’s also approved covert CIA action inside the country.

 

Not only has Congress not authorized any of this, it appears only vaguely aware of what’s going on. If you believe the latest reporting, military officers at the highest levels are uncomfortable with the mission. Even the CIA aspect of it, which should be firm ground legally for the White House, might be unlawful under such unusual circumstances. And the casus belli is a farce: Venezuela isn’t a major cog in drug trafficking to America and members of the Tren de Aragua gang who live in the United States aren’t being directed by Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

 

The best I can do to explain why an “America First” president is suddenly hot for regime change in South America is that it’s in the nature of his movement to evolve that way. Just as all crustaceans will eventually become crabs, all fascist regimes that glorify “strength” and military power will eventually turn their guns on their neighbors. If you intend to be the bully in the regional schoolyard, at some point you need to start roughing people up.

 

A year ago you and I (well, you) might have thought that Trump starting a pointless war without legal or popular approval would at last rouse the great and good American people against him. Now here we are. If you’ve seen any meaningful evidence of public alarm, do share.

 

Enemies list.

 

Another significant autocratic escalation by the president is using the Justice Department to settle his scores.

 

John Bolton, James Comey, Letitia James: Unsatisfied with purging “disloyal” bureaucrats at federal agencies, Trump has begun overtly directing law enforcement to carry out his grudges against old bêtes noires. “The Department of Justice is no longer the premier prosecuting office in America,” former ally Chris Christie said this past weekend. “What it is now is a capo regime who goes out and executes hits when directed by the Don to do so.”

 

Right, except it’s not just the DOJ. “The Trump administration is preparing sweeping changes at the Internal Revenue Service that would allow the agency to pursue criminal inquiries of left-leaning groups more easily,” the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. IRS official Gary Shapley, the capo in charge of the scheme, has apparently been “putting together a list of donors and groups he believes IRS investigators should look at. Among those on the list are the billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and his affiliated groups.”

 

Weaponizing the IRS to harass political opponents is a Watergate-tier scandal. Republicans raged, justifiably, when the agency was caught during Barack Obama’s presidency applying extra scrutiny to right-wing groups seeking nonprofit status. What Trump is poised to do is an order of magnitude more corrupt than that, tasking the IRS with fishing expeditions into the workings of left-wing groups and replacing agency personnel who might obstruct that mission on ethical grounds with more compliant toadies. And doing it, mind you, in plain sight.

 

I would bet both of my kidneys and one of yours that Americans won’t care. They certainly don’t seem to care about the indictments of Comey and James, which the president has gone out of his way to present as driven by his personal vendettas. Since Comey was charged on September 25, Trump’s job approval has actually risen by six-tenths of a point. Why shouldn’t he get the IRS involved in the Great Retribution Tour of 2025?

 

Why shouldn’t he continue to deploy U.S. troops to U.S. cities, for that matter? The policy may be unpopular in isolation but it’s not weakening his overall political support. And why shouldn’t he let Immigration and Customs Enforcement continue to act with impunity? Clips of agents abusing their power float by regularly on social media nowadays, briskly enough to convince Americans that their tactics are unsavory—yet not quite briskly enough to make a dent in Trump’s numbers.

 

What the president is learning, day by day, is that the American people have a much higher tolerance for authoritarianism than anyone thought. And so every transgression that fails to meet popular resistance invites another. The envelope will be pushed until that resistance emerges or Trump does something so unthinkable, like suspending an election or ordering troops to attack protesters, that resistance becomes too frightening to contemplate.

 

Either way, temporarily or indefinitely, the perversion of American government will get worse.

 

Call that prediction “Trump Derangement Syndrome” if it makes you feel better, but if you think I’m exaggerating the extent of Americans’ apathy, let me remind you that Congress is absent figuratively and literally in Washington right now. That wouldn’t happen in a country where voters were inflamed about autocratic power grabs: As much as Republican cowards in the House and Senate fear the president, they fear their constituents more. In a system like ours, the legislature can’t and won’t condone Caesarism unless it’s electorally riskier to oppose it.

 

Which, in America 2025, it is. Congress has been gelded so completely by the right’s appetite for autocracy and the wider public’s indifference to it that the president’s allies have taken to mocking the chamber’s impotence in print. “Inside the White House, top advisers joke that they are ruling Congress with an ‘iron fist,’” the Journal reported last weekend. “Steve Bannon, the influential Trump ally, likened Congress to the Duma, the Russian assembly that is largely ceremonial.”

 

That analogy is painful but apt. America is Putin-izing, more rapidly than even an Eeyore like me expected, yet the GOP’s chances of retaining control of the Duma next fall are rising thanks partly to Trump’s redistricting scheme and partly to the Supreme Court’s likely decision on the Voting Rights Act. No amount of redistricting would prevent a Democratic takeover of the House if a broad-based popular backlash to Trump’s program were in motion—but it simply isn’t.

 

The constitutional order is going out not with a bang but a whimper.

 

Culture usually wins.

 

A few days ago Barack Obama wondered how the right, particularly Fox News pundits, would have reacted if he had ordered the National Guard into Dallas over the objections of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. He recalled correctly that a conspiracy theory along those lines actually did circulate among populist Republicans in 2015. In the end, it wasn’t Obama who used the military to try to intimidate American citizens in unfriendly jurisdictions. It was their hero, Trump.

 

Obama seemed more amused than angry at the hypocrisy, though, and I understand why. It seems silly in 2025 to feign surprise or disappointment that Americans don’t actually object to fascism in principle. Complaining about that at this stage of national decline feels a bit like complaining about presidential “mean tweets.” It’s awfully late to still be remarking about it.

 

In fact, while the news of Trump’s IRS gambit brought out predictable mentions of Lois Lerner on social media last night, my (very unscientific) sense is that the right is getting less whatabout-ist in its defenses of the president. The harder it becomes to deny that his ambitions are genuinely autocratic, truly unprecedented in American history, the more hollow the usual excuses ring that he’s only behaving the way Democrats typically do. As his term wears on, they’ll be forced to admit the truth—that they support the postliberal project on the merits, not as some nihilistic demonstration of “turnabout is fair play,” and dare not relinquish this opportunity to seize power indefinitely.

 

If that makes them hypocrites for having screeched about tyranny during the Obama era, and it does, they can live with that.

 

As for why the rest of America got comfortable with authoritarianism, you can speculate as well as I can. “Sheer exhaustion,” one might say, reasoning that it’s hard to get angry about Watergate when a new Watergate happens every day. Or “media silo-ing,” you might theorize, as Trump-friendly outlets suppress information that might cause viewers to turn against the president’s program. Case in point: It came as a revelation last week to a Fox News-loving relative when I showed her the viral clip of ICE officers shooting a priest in the head with a pepper ball as he appeared to be praying. That video wasn’t in heavy rotation on her favorite news network—go figure.

 

Or maybe you’re a true cynic who believes that the character of a critical mass of Americans has corroded irreparably, undone by our post-literate culture, the ruthless narcissism of social media, and the contempt for empathy valorized by Trumpist anti-morality. Kakistocracy is a choice, and George Washington’s political descendants are now rotten enough to have chosen it.

 

Last night I thought about the not-so-young Young Republicans on the infamous group chat exposed by Politico and found myself wondering, “How did their parents raise them?” Then I thought, “Probably pretty well, actually.” One can and should prepare one’s child to resist the worst impulses of the culture they inhabit, but in the end culture usually wins. A national culture that made a creature like Donald Trump first rich, then a celebrity, then president seems to be approaching its final destination.

 

I’m not a parent myself, and the older I get and the more disillusioned with Americans I become, the happier I am about that fact. Because here’s what parents are facing if David Brooks’ dream of repudiating Trump doesn’t come true. On the one hand, you might try to raise your child to despise fascism—and fail, because culture usually wins. At best, that child will grow up believing fascist cruelty to be “normal,” politics as usual the same way we grew up thinking “Democrats versus Republicans” was normal. At worst, like the Young Republicans texting about Hitler, they’ll become a fascist themselves.

 

Or, on the other hand, you might succeed in raising your child to despise fascism despite the culture’s best efforts to the contrary. In that case, their reward will be to feel chronically miserable and embarrassed by their country, de facto exiles within their own nation, day-drinking while they slog through the latest Boiling Frogs newsletter.

 

Either way, America isn’t coming all the way back from this. Call that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” too if you like, while you still half-believe it, before events make it impossible to deny.