From Personal Power to Autocracy in Donald Trump’s America

Power is felt, attributed, invisible, all-important, descriptive, without shape, and so much more. There is personal power, governmental power, and the collective power of the people. Power can be bought, sold, traded, bestowed, even rescinded. It can be good or bad, positive or corrupt. However you might wish to describe power, one thing is clear: how it’s used depends on the society in which we live.

At present, of course, our society is one in which President Donald J. Trump is the quintessential seeker of power, a man who needs power the way most of us need food. And as it happens, he has at his beck and call not just the entire military establishment, but ICE (and so much more). With him in the White House, power is distinctly in fashion.

Personal Power

Married and with children, my brother, who was a veteran, kept guns in his basement. “To hunt,” he told me when I objected. But he didn’t hunt, not in Nassau County where he lived, not by taking part in a sport that cost money he didn’t have to travel somewhere, get licenses, and who knows what else. Did he keep guns because he felt afraid? Absolutely not, he insisted. Was his neighborhood one with many break-ins? No, he assured me. So, why did he need weapons in his basement? He couldn’t say, except that it was important to him to own them.

Why? I kept asking him. As a soldier, he reminded me, he had been taught that without his gun he was in danger of being killed.

Had he been a man of means, that inculcation wouldn’t, I suspect, have been as powerful, but he wasn’t and never did feel empowered. He’s gone now, but his world isn’t. Guns remain as much a staple in the United States as potatoes.

Well-off families keep guns, too, hopefully in locked places and have the money to buy hunting rifles, licenses, and whatever other paraphernalia they need. But in the United States today, all too many guns — sometimes even untraceable “ghost guns” — aren’t locked in boxes, but carried by young people on the streets and even sometimes into schools. The guns on the streets of inner cities, in rural areas, and even in some suburbs are all too often unlicensed stolen ones. And a desire/need to be seen/known/heard all too often leads to someone shooting others with one of those weapons in a mall, movie theater, or school. Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in this country in 2023. Such shootings occur more often in the United States than in any other nation. Why?

Under the Trump administration, when more is taken away from so many people than given to them, guns offer those who carry them a reprieve from a sense of powerlessness over their daily lives and futures. Many of them are young people alienated by a society that cares little about their well-being. With gun in hand, they experience steadiness, security, and yes, hope (however false it may prove to be).

With a weak social safety net, a gun offers a false sense of personal power and security. Should anyone come too close and aggravate the anger that may be boiling inside, however, that gun could go off.  And who wouldn’t be angry? Too many young people in working-class families today are unsure where they might be headed and fear the dead-end jobs that they know lie in their future. The Trump administration, of course, offers such young people little or nothing — and if they weren’t born in the United States, they face the everyday menace of fear, degradation, and deportation. In America today, immigrants have become the scapegoats for such unvarnished racism that it takes one’s breath away. And don’t imagine that this is about so-called borders. Not a chance! Rather, it’s part of Donald Trump’s and his advisor Stephen Miller’s plan to rid the country of as many people of color as they can, with the end result, they hope, being white supremacy.

Though guns should be difficult (if not impossible) to obtain, like drugs, they are, in fact, available around more or less any corner in the most impoverished areas of any state. To stop the acquisition of guns, we would need more than enacted laws. We would also need to strengthen hope and offer a deeper belief in the daily safety of those who don’t for a moment feel taken care of in the most powerful country in the world.

And there’s no hiding from those in need how power is used to procure more and more money for the already wealthy, the Trumpian billionaires of our world.

Why should some, but not most of us, have an equal chance to do more than survive? For too many, their present and future safety becomes their personal problem, while Trump and crew are busily engaged in pursuing military and imperial power to gain yet more wealth for themselves and other billionaires, none of which enhances the power of the American people. And don’t forget that Donald Trump’s blatant racism is a vile infection that spreads daily from the Oval Office.

From Toy Guns to Machine Guns to Tanks

From toy guns to actual machine guns, the United States offers a constant example of how to express power through weaponry. There are the guns of war, the guns of intimidation, and the guns used against countries whose governments we choose to assault. Take Venezuela, where a recent U.S. military sneak attack killed untold numbers of civilians and snatched its president to imprison him in the United States. That, I say, is one hell of a lot of nerve. The Trump administration certainly didn’t do that to make life better for the Venezuelan people, but to steal that country’s oil riches, which Trump plans to use for the benefit of U.S. oil companies.

And with that in mind, let me head into the past for a moment. In 1968, when riots erupted in many communities to protest the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tanks first appeared on the streets of American inner cities — big, bulging, heavy vehicles, much like the ones being used in the Vietnam War that was then still raging.

That moment could, in fact, be seen as the public start of the militarization of this country’s police — the start but far from the end of it, which we see today, 77 years later, in many states like Minnesota. There, masked, gun-carrying (as in the old West) Border Patrol and federalized ICE agents have invaded, terrorizing and killing innocent civilians and pulling people out of their cars to deposit them in deportation camps.  Such scenes not only increase the frustration and fear of so many Americans, but also the desire to carry licensed (or unlicensed) guns to protect themselves.

ICE is the most recent incarnation of weaponization in this country, in which the agents themselves have become the weapons.

Such macho terrorizing actions as in Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so many other places in this country, involving the rounding up of immigrants, are all too much like the 1930s Gestapo in Nazi Germany rounding up Jews. The use of such terror is not only sanctioned by the Trump government but also encouraged by racists like Stephen Miller. He is the quintessential representation of where this country is headed, if not stopped and stopped quickly.

In addition to guns, ICE Agents carry other weapons of war: fire suppressers, lasers, accessory mounts, dump pouches, magazine wells — and they use drones. Pepper spray and other debilitating substances are also being used against those who protest the terror.

War is now being waged against Americans on the streets of our country, which is not only antithetical to all our laws but distinctly unconstitutional and, of course, immoral to the nth degree. Such weapons are perfected for one reason: to kill.

Unsurprisingly, ever more money is once again being spent on the Defense Department (now the Department of War), instead of on health, education, science, and so much else. And Donald Trump wants to spend far more. Guns over butter is an old meme, which we simply must not accept.

People Power

In Minnesota, ordinary people organized against the fascistic actions of ICE. Their resistance was not only brave, but an important example of the ways in which the people have chosen the good over the actions and behaviors of a bad government, president, and the Stephen Millers of this world. As demonstrated in Minnesota, we Americans have refused to go quietly into ICE’s nightmare. We wouldn’t stand for such injustice and intuitively began organizing to meet the needs of our neighbors and those who are being treated horribly. Watch groups, food groups, school groups, even singing groups were organized by ordinary citizens, inspired by an innate sense of justice and an innate hatred of injustice.

The struggle of Americans during the siege of Minnesota has indeed had results. The Department of Homeland Security, President Trump, Stephen Miller, and their cohorts have lost some credibility and perhaps some of their ability to frighten people into obedience. It’s more than unfortunate, however, that, in the process, children had to (and will continue to have to) experience the unjust power exhibited by ICE and Trump.

The use of guns will undoubtedly continue to be a staple of Donald Trump’s war of intimidation, clearly focused on developing a society where white supremacy rules. (See Project 2025.) His followers are laying the groundwork for the few to rule the many at the cost of our freedom.

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote that, if you introduce a gun in Act One, make sure to use it by the end of the play. In other words, unless stopped, what the Trump administration has been doing will only grow more brutal. Its attempt to militarize this country goes beyond the Department of War to other government departments like the Department of Homeland Security. Its plebeian belief that might is the only right (and only its right) is also its way of opening a road leading to an authoritarian government, where voting itself will undoubtedly become endangered.

We’re living through an exceptionally dark time where tyranny, lies, and encroaching fascism at home, and the rapidly accelerating destruction of our planet (again, with a distinct helping hand from President Trump) are happening in tandem. Our elected representatives have shown themselves to be spectacularly ill-prepared in the face of such threats.

But neither the president nor his government owns the people. We the people have power, too.  There is power in knowledge, power in organizing, and power in resistance, all of which can be used to halt the brutality and lies of this administration. Moreover, the people have the numbers. If we wish not to be overtaken by an authoritarian government in whose hands so many more will suffer, then it’s important to resist now.

We the people know how to do that. We have done so throughout history. We have rallied and demonstrated. We have called on our neighbors, friends, and families. We have called on our local media. We have called on members of Congress. We have written letters and posted signs and billboards. We have sat in protest, walked in protest, and even gone to jail in protest. And we weren’t to be stopped. We made our voices heard across society. We appeared in thousands of towns and cities across America.

The history of this country has shown not once but many times that people together resisting and fighting for justice (without guns) can win. It was how Social Security was won, how child labor was ended, how the Vietnam War was made ever more difficult to pursue, and that’s just to start down a long list of examples. Recently, on MS Now, TV host and political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell said:

“The protesters always win,
And people die,
But protesters always win.”

History proves O’Donnell right.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

The post From Personal Power to Autocracy in Donald Trump’s America appeared first on CounterPunch.org.