Four Ways to Fight Fascism: Checking In
Throughout this year, I have argued there are four ways to fight fascism — and doing so through the guise of the Democratic Party (especially DC Democrats) is not yet the best way to do so.
I argued these were the four ways to peacefully fight Donald Trump’s authoritarianism:
- The Erica Chenoweth rule, which says that if you can get 3.5% of a population in the streets, it often leads to regime change.
- Beginning to peel off four people in the Senate or eight or nine people in the House.
- Rescuing Republicans from a predictable catastrophe like Democrats did in 2008 and 2020.
- Waiting until 2026, winning at least one house of Congress, and beginning to rein in Trump that way.
Since for many of you, today will be the last normal day of the year, and unless Trump sets off a predictable catastrophe, today will also be the last Nicole Sandler show we do, I wanted to check in on how we’re doing on these four issues.
The 3.5% rule
Start with people in the streets.
If 6.5 million people attended October’s No Kings rallies (some estimates go as high as 7 million), it would amount to about 1.8% of the US population. That would make them the biggest protests in American history, but still just halfway to that 3.5% mark, and not directly in response to a particular outrage. The organizing and openness of those protests was a huge accomplishment and, at the very least, taught a lot of people who had never protested before how to do so.
But it wasn’t enough to oust Trump.
A more interesting measure of people in the streets, however, is Chicago (and other anti-ICE/CBP protests). I have no idea what population of Chicago took part in mobilizing to oppose Stephen Miller’s goons. But there are aspects of that mobilization — perhaps most importantly the way media coverage arose from citizen witness to local media to independent media to mainstream outlets — that provided real lessons in how to thrive in a disastrous media environment.
One point I keep making about this kind of opposition: it does not have to be, and arguably is far more successful if it is not, coincident with the Democratic party. Some of the most powerful moments in Chicago’s opposition came when right wingers in conservative suburbs joined in — holy hell those people were assholes!!
Whatever else Stephen Miller’s terrible dragnets have done, they have renewed civil society in most places the invasions happened.
Peeling off defectors
Both Axios and Politico took a break from Dems in Disarray or ragebait stories this week to instead focus on Hakeem Jeffries, both focusing on Jeffries’ success at getting four “moderate” Republicans to vote for his discharge position extending ObamaCare subsidies for three years.
Time and again this year, Democrats under Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have maneuvered to successfully undercut the GOP agenda and put its leaders on the back foot. From a daily drumbeat on health care to the long-running saga over the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to a new focus on the rising cost of living, they believe they’re succeeding by making the party in power talk about Democratic priorities, not its own.
Their success was underscored this week when four House Republicans joined a Jeffries-led effort to force a vote on expiring Obamacare insurance subsidies — a major embarrassment for the GOP speaker.
“Our message to Mike Johnson is clear — you can run, but you cannot hide,” Jeffries said as he took a victory lap on the House steps Thursday.
And as Politico notes, it started (actually, two months earlier than they credit) with the Jeffrey Epstein effort.
Indeed, since Tom Massie and Ro Khanna, with Jeffries’ cooperation, chased Mike Johnson away a week earlier in July for fear of Epstein votes, Johnson has largely vacated his majority.
There have been limited instances where Republicans have defected on other issues. Just before the SCOTUS hearing on Trump’s illegal tariffs, for example, a handful of Republicans defected to pass resolutions against Trump tariffs.
Where things may get more interesting in the new year — on top of what is sure to be a frantic effort to fix the healthcare crisis Republicans are causing — is on Russia. The NDAA Trump signed yesterday included a number of restrictions on European and Ukrainian funding and troop alignment, measures that directly conflict with Trump’s National Security Strategy.
In a break with Trump, whose fellow Republicans hold majorities in both the House and Senate, this year’s NDAA includes several provisions to boost security in Europe, despite Trump early this month releasing a national security strategy seen as friendly to Russia and a reassessment of the US relationship with Europe.
The fiscal 2026 NDAA provides $800m for Ukraine – $400m in each of the next two years – as part of the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which pays US companies for weapons for Ukraine’s military.
It also authorizes the Baltic Security Initiative and provides $175m to support Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia’s defense. And it limits the Department of Defense’s ability to drop the number of US forces in Europe to fewer than 76,000 and bars the US European commander from giving up the title of Nato supreme commander.
To be sure, thus far, Congress has done nothing to police Trump when he spends money in ways they tell him not to. But these restrictions (along with a few things to make Whiskey Pete Hegseth behave) might set up a conflict early in the year.
Remember: recruiting defectors actually takes efforts to reach out to them, often the opposite of what people think they want.
And while all that is not enough defectors to stop Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene may set off a stampede for the exit. And that could make it easier for Jeffries, at least, to continue to pants Mike Johnson.
Predictable catastrophe
Democrats have done a good job of seeding the ground to get credit for rescuing the country from Trump-caused catastrophes in healthcare and the economy — and both will exacerbate the other in days ahead.
I’m less sanguine that Democrats have prepared to rescue the country (and claim credit) for other likely Trump catastrophes, like a collapsing AI bubble or epidemic. Laying the ground for both is really critical, in the former case bc AI bros plan to spend big in 2026 in the same way crypto bros did in 2024, and in the former case, because bigots are trying to blame rising measles (and, now, whooping cough) on migrants rather than assholes like RFK Jr.
2026
Democrats are doing surprisingly well to position themselves for 2026, both because they’re overperforming by numbers that suggest they will do well (including in elections, like TN-07, with midyear-levels of turnout), and because they’re matching Republican redistricting efforts (and Stephen Miller’s goon squads mean the redistricting in Texas may not turn out like Trump wants).
But it will be harder to achieve a true Blue Wave than in 2018.
Even as this year’s election results have left many in the party encouraged they can mount a massive blue wave, next year’s battleground is a far cry from 2018 — with fewer Republican-held seats for Democrats to easily target.
Democrats don’t need to win as many seats this time around, netting just three seats rather than two dozen to claim a majority. But the hill to reach a comfortable majority like the 235 seats they held after the last blue wave has grown much steeper, driven by multiple rounds of gerrymandering — including ongoing redistricting in several states that threatens to erode the battlefield even further.
The result is that Democrats could post a bigger national swing than in 2018 and still end up with a slimmer majority than they had after that year.
Where Democrats are doing better is in promising consequences if and when they do get a majority.
I’m more interested in Democrats promising those capitulating to Trump — whether it be law firms or Paramount — that there’ll be consequences in 2027 than I am in discussions about impeachment (except for people like RFK Jr, such discussions will work against other Democratic efforts, IMO).
Such efforts, in my opinion, are one way to do more to lay out Trump’s accountability for predictable disasters.
All in all, opponents of fascism have more momentum than they had when caught flat-footed in January. But there’s still a lot of work to do.
Rent-Seeking: Trump Sells Patriotic Fraud to Boost His Tariff Lies
I was going to write about how Trump’s promise, last night, to send a bunch of service members a $1,776 checks, was actually a confession that there will be no tariff rebates for civilians.
Two paragraphs after Trump introduced his false claims about tariffs — “my favorite word” — he said that because of tariffs, along with the Big Ugly, Trump was sending some number (he bolloxed the number repeatedly) service members would get a check.
This historic trend will continue. Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings and far greater national security. Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs, my favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore. Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that’s why they’re coming home to the U.S.A. in record numbers. They’re building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen. A.I., automobiles, we’re doing what nobody thought was even possible, not even remotely possible. There has never, frankly, been anything like it.
[snip]
Because of tariffs, along with the just passed One Big, Beautiful Bill, tonight I am also proud to announce that more than 1,000, 450,000, think of this, 1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call warrior dividend before Christmas, a warrior dividend. In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way. Nobody understood that one until about 30 minutes ago. We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs, and the bill helped us along. Nobody deserves it more than our military. And I say congratulations to everybody. And by the way, we now have record enlistment in our military, and last year we had among the worst recruitment numbers in our military’s history. What a difference a year makes.
He once was offering bigger refunds — $2,000 — for everyone but high income people. That was, as Dean Baker did the math at the time, totally unaffordable, even ignoring that Trump is likely to have to pay some portion of the tariffs back, only to importers, not the consumers who have paid increased prices for consumer goods.
Doing the simple arithmetic, the country has 340 million people. If 10 percent of these people fit Trump’s definition of high-income, and therefore don’t get the rebate, roughly 300 million people would get the checks.
At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes. Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt? Also, he seems not to know that our deficit this year is projected to be $1.8 trillion, so he is actually adding considerably to the debt and would be adding even more with his $600 billion tariff “rebate.”
So, I figured, promising a smaller number (but hiding the smaller amount in patriotic shlock) to a far smaller number of people would serve the purpose of the rebates — to generate public support for keeping the tariff revenue rather than paying them back — in a way that would be hard to oppose.
Who would begrudge service members a check, after all.
But once you give that $2.5 billion away (assuming the larger number is the correct one), you’ve started eating into the $100 billion you might be able to use to give money away.
The service members were going to get the check instead of everyone.
But according to Defense One, even that is not what is going on. Trump is taking money Congress allocated to expand housing allowances and paying it as a direct check instead.
President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops, announced Wednesday, come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.
During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.” He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”
The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.
“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”
It has nothing to do with tariffs (though was provided, without enough guidance to prevent such a gimmick, in the Big Ugly bill). Trump just told that lie along with his $18 trillion lie in order to claim his tariffs have been less disastrous than they have been.
Who knows? Maybe Trump will bankrupt the country to send rebates to cover over how much consumers have paid for these tariffs.
For now, though, Trump is simply piling lie on top of lie about it all.
Donald Trump Is Getting a Pass for His Catastrophic Trade War
WSJ had a heavily-produced story on Sunday, “Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong,” purporting to assess the claims that Trump and economists had made … at some point about his tariffs.
This table includes the six allegedly competing claims WSJ assesses; I’ve added a check marking whichever side WSJ claimed was really right.
For most of six paired predictions, WSJ makes a show of adjudicating who was right, giving Trump credit on two predictions and less ostentatiously confirming economists’ predictions on three.
For example, WSJ provides this table purporting to show that both Trump and the economists were wrong about inflation (with steeper tables showing the spike in coffee and appliances); for some reason, WSJ indexes this to January 1, 2024 prices, not 2025 (and some of the tables at WSJ’s source show steeper spikes).
WSJ judges that economists were wrong this way:
Tariffs swiftly hit Americans’ wallets as major retailers from Macy’s to Best Buy raised prices in response to the duties.
“The magnitude and speed at which these prices are coming to us is somewhat unprecedented in history,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey told The Wall Street Journal in May.
But the worst inflation fears haven’t come to pass. Inflation has for months hovered around 3%—higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, though still lower than many economists’ expectations.
But starting in the very next paragraph, WSJ explains why inflation wasn’t as bad as predicted: first, because Trump reversed the worst tariffs. Then, because companies are still trying to figure out what the fuck his tariff policy will be, especially after the Supreme Court gets done with it, and so haven’t passed on all of the tariffs, which they will eventually do.
Another factor at play: Trump’s repeated policy shifts on tariffs.
Many companies have said they want to see where tariffs will ultimately settle before introducing more price changes. The still-undecided Supreme Court case on Trump’s authority to impose tariffs gives them another reason to wait a bit longer.
Economists predict higher prices as companies draw down on their pre-tariffed inventory and renegotiate contracts with retailers and distributors.
If no new tariffs are announced, the Fed estimates the current ones will take nine months to work their way through the economy. That could push inflation from goods down in the back half of 2026. But “we haven’t been able to predict this with any precision,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. “No one is.”
The rest of the article has similar equivocations. WSJ returns to Trump’s decision to reverse many of the tariffs when discussing the GDP growth (and notes that AI has kept the GDP afloat, without also noting that it’s likely in a bubble that is beginning to crash).
Trump has also walked back and delayed many of his threatened duties.
WSJ’s discussion of Trump’s failure to bring manufacturing back returns to changing policy.
Big projects will likely take years to materialize, if they happen at all, as government policies could shift again in that time.
And the flux makes this assessment impossible. Two days ago, for example, WSJ hailed September’s good job’s report.
The U.S. added 119,000 jobs in September, far more than economists had expected. But the figure was an outlier from previous months, in which job growth had lagged. As of September, the unemployment rate reached 4.4%, the highest in four years.
But that got revised downward today and — Justin Wolfers describes in reading today’s report — in reality there may be zero or negative job growth since Trump tried to impose his big tariffs, which if that proves true, would vindicate the economists.
WSJ gives Trump credit for predicting some revenue growth even while noting he wildly exaggerated how much growth there might be, but then admits that not only will much of the revenue go away if SCOTUS throws out the tariffs, but Trump would have to pay some portion — potentially as much as half — of the tariffs back.
Future collections hang on the Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s authority to impose the tariffs, expected in coming days.
If the court strikes down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, monthly revenue collected would fall by more than half. More than $100 billion already collected might also need to be refunded.
And WSJ also notes that a lot of the data it would need to measure all this is delayed (it doesn’t address Trump’s efforts to tamper with the data).
Perhaps the most salient assessment in the story is the last line: “As long as Trump continues to surprise the market with tariffs, trade will remain volatile,” which is both a platitude and an observation that you can’t assess many of these claims using regular measures, because the tariffs are not (or not just) about creating a precondition to shift trade flows.
Trump’s tariffs aren’t just tariffs. They are week-to-week business uncertainty.
They are also, just as importantly, about giving Trump a tool to attempt to leverage power, something captured in a different WSJ story, this interview with Meredith McGraw, in which Trump offers word salad to explain why tariffs are so cool.
When asked if he has alternative ways to use tariffs, the president said there are other laws but they are not as “nimble, not as quick.” He added, “I can do other things, but it’s not as fast. It’s not as good for national security.”
Trump also argued that tariffs gave him leverage in negotiations with other countries.
“I just used tariffs 10 minutes ago, just before you came, to settle the new inflammation that took place with Thailand and Cambodia,” Trump said. “And I told them, ‘If you have the war, not only am I going to break the trade deal we have, but I’m going to put tariffs on your country.’” He added, “Nobody can do that but me.”
“Nobody can do that but me,” Trump said of an authority that SCOTUS is likely to say he cannot lawfully do.
Worse, Trump equates being able to coerce other countries nimbly with national security. But it is anything but.
Consider how inconsistent Trump’s logic is. In the same week that Trump approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China (which chips China promptly said they would limit use), chips that remained, that very day, illegal to ship to China, the White House halted negotiations on similar kinds of technology with the UK because the Brits would not bow to Trump’s demands on food and tech standards. Trump wants to send chips to China instead of (just) shitty chicken, but he won’t send chips to the UK unless they accept US shitty chicken and Nazi Xitter posts.
None of it makes sense.
And this misrepresentation of how Trump is using tariffs — treating as sincere his false claims about how he claims he is using them — is just part of the reason why the reporting on Trump’s catastrophic tariffs has been so shitty.
To be sure, there has been persistent reporting on how badly his tariffs have devastated farm markets, especially soybeans but now shifting to wheat. There have been stories on how China has gotten pretty much what it has wanted. But there has been less coverage of how Trump’s stupid ass trade war — and China’s preparation for it since Trump’s last Administration — has created the opportunity for China to leverage its rare earth dominance and soybean consumption to bring Trump to heel.
Trump thought America was the irreplaceable market, and attempted to leverage access to it accordingly. But as he has discovered how little of all that he understands, it has backfired, giving China leverage it otherwise didn’t have.
And, if we can believe Vanity Fair’s profile of Susie Wiles, half of Trump’s advisors knew it wouldn’t work in real time.
“So much thinking out loud is what I would call it,” said Wiles of Trump’s chaotic tariff rollout. “There was a huge disagreement over whether [tariffs were] a good idea.” Trump’s advisers were sharply divided, some believing tariffs were a panacea and others predicting disaster. Wiles told them to get with Trump’s program. “I said, ‘This is where we’re going to end up. So figure out how you can work into what he’s already thinking.’ Well, they couldn’t get there.”
Wiles recruited Vance to help tap the brakes. “We told Donald Trump, ‘Hey, let’s not talk about tariffs today. Let’s wait until we have the team in complete unity and then we’ll do it,’ ” she said. But Trump barreled ahead, announcing sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, from 10 to 100 percent—which triggered panic in the bond market and a sell-off of stocks. Trump paused his policy for 90 days, but by that time the president’s helter-skelter levies had given rise to the TACO chant: “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Wiles believed a middle ground on tariffs would ultimately succeed, she said, “but it’s been more painful than I expected.”
All this is so painful not just because tariffs are a stupid policy and the way in which Trump implemented them is even stupid. It is painful because Trump has no fucking ability to discern what is good for America, and he doesn’t much care if he fucks up and destroys entire markets as a result.
And coverage of Trump’s destruction of the soybean market has not yet called out the systematic lies Republicans tell claiming Trump’s grant of $12 billion to struggling farmers is only an attempt (again) to reverse the damage he did, which will not come close to making farmers whole. Right wingers are, across the board, hailing Trump’s payoff and blaming the damage Trump did on Joe Biden … and almost no one is calling out the projection and lies.
Trump’s tariffs are a failure not just as tariffs, in fulfilling their purported purpose. But because Trump knows so little about the markets he’s trying to alter, he’s simply making the US vulnerable.
Update: Paul Krugman has more on what we learned from yesterday’s job numbers.
[T]he data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.
We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market.
[snip]
Normally, when a president experiences a troubled economy during his first year he dispatches his
flying monkeysminions to declare that it’s all his predecessor’s fault. And some Trump officials, like Scott Bessent, are indeed trying to play the blame game. But this standard political tactic is unlikely to work for this president.First, the economy that Trump inherited when he took office was in much better shape than today’s economy, with lower unemployment combined with faster job growth, and inflation trending down.
Second, Trump’s radical policy changes – huge (illegal) tariffs, mass deportations, big tax cuts (for the rich), benefit cuts (for the poor and middle class), mass layoffs of federal workers, disinvesting in huge green energy projects and aid to farmers — have been clearly damaging to everything besides crypto and AI. It strains credulity – even for the Trump faithful – to claim that we are still in Joe Biden’s economy.