We’ve Just Seen How Trump Can Be Stopped

Two Saturdays ago, I found myself on the streets of a small, down-at-heel Republican town in northwestern Connecticut where dozens of protesters had gathered to join the millions who took to the streets across the nation to oppose Donald Trump’s increasingly autocratic presidency. Wielding handmade signs filled with corny puns, they braved the spitting rain to declare that the United States would not be ruled by a self-proclaimed king. It was, by some estimates, the biggest single-day protest in American history, driven by genuine anger at, among other outrages, Trump’s aggressive and unlawful deployment of the American military on the streets of Los Angeles.

A week later, Trump unlawfully deployed the American military once again, dispatching B-2 bombers to drop so-called bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump ordered this unprovoked attack, apparently at the behest of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, without consulting Congress, much less seeking its approval, another breach of the norms and laws of the United States. It was also a clear betrayal of a core promise of Trump’s campaign to return to the presidency — an America First foreign policy that would avoid bloody entanglements in the kind of faraway wars that tore the country apart over more than two decades.

I waited in vain for some kind of galvanized response — protests, petitions, anything — to the threat of America starting another war. I wasn’t really surprised that it did not come. Unlike most people around the globe, Americans, by dint of geography, history and temperament, enjoy an illusory wall between the domestic and the foreign.

But the dark genius of the first months of Trump 2.0 has been collapsing that distinction, turning domestic enemies — pro-Palestine students, unauthorized migrants, elite universities — into threats from abroad. That is the sort of thing autocrats everywhere do, but the nature of the American system of government, and Trump’s canny manipulation of it, has given him outsized power. By couching fights with purported internal enemies as matters of national security and foreign policy, areas where by law and custom presidents have broad authority, Trump has unshackled himself.

With his strike on Iran, Trump moved on to the corollary, recasting distant trouble as an immediate threat on the home front. For all his America First posturing, Trump’s adventurism abroad and his aggression at home are closely twinned. In both, he claims extraordinary powers, under the banner of protecting America and unfettered by any kind of norms or congressional checks, to do whatever he wants.

This is a grave threat. It’s also a tantalizing opportunity. Because for all the mind-mangling speed of events and the strange place Iran occupies in the American psyche, it is clear that a majority of Americans, stretching from progressives to MAGA populists, oppose and fear American warmaking. It’s equally clear that a broad swath of society opposes Trump’s autocratic arrogations of domestic power; just look at the spread and scale of the No Kings protests and his slumping polling numbers on issues he used to dominate, including the economy. Finding a way to combine these two objections — to fuse, as Trump does, the domestic with the foreign — is a means to a properly majoritarian politics in the United States.