Trump's Essential Weakness

We must hold onto our ability to recognize that Trump's despotism is built on a throne of lies—and it will not endure

The American Eagle knows the truth. (A video screenshot)

He called his social media platform Truth Social. He said Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs. He said his mass deportation operation would target only dangerous criminals. He rejected the weak job data and fired the labor statistics chief responsible for reporting it. He signed an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity in American History” with a plan to take over the Smithsonian Institution and rewrite history. He deployed the military in Washington, D.C., claiming it was an emergency driven by bloodshed and bedlam, while the city’s actual crime rates are declining. He plans a meeting on American soil with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, claiming he wants to bring peace, yet doesn’t invite Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. He says his tariffs are raising not billions but trillions of dollars. He boasts that he doesn’t take a presidential salary, yet exploits his public office to rake in billions to stuff his own pockets. He asks why shouldn’t he accept Qatar’s “gift” of a 747 jet, but doesn’t mention that it will cost upwards of a billion dollars to make it usable as Air Force One. He said he wanted to cut government costs, yet pushed the passage of a bill that adds over three trillion dollars to the national debt and hands his rich buddies over two trillion in tax cuts. He whines that the voting system is rigged, then pushes Texas to rig its system. He demands a “new and highly accurate CENSUS based on modern day facts and figures” because he doesn’t like the numbers, even though the last one happened in 2020 and the Constitution decrees census-taking every ten years. He says he won in 2024 by a landslide and earned a mandate, even though he only won by one-and-a-half percentage points. He still says he won in 2020, even though he lost by three-and-a-half percentage points. He still says Russian interference in the 2016 election was a hoax and climate change is a hoax. He wants to destroy NASA satellites that track climate change data. Any time a reporter asks a question that he doesn’t like, he calls them fake news. He calls his regime “a perfect administration.” He says America is the world’s “hottest country,” even though layoffs are rising, costs are soaring and global opinion toward America is cratering. He called the Jeffrey Epstein story a hoax and “total bullshit,” while the FBI deployed a thousand agents to dig through all the files to identify references to Trump. He calls himself the President of the United States, even though he says he vehemently hates Democrats, who comprise nearly half of the country. He calls himself the President of the United States, yet he despises the Constitution and is turning the country into a gangster state led by a mafia boss.

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I’ve surely skipped plenty of other examples. But this is not about providing a comprehensive list of all the ways in which Donald J. Trump ignores or openly rejects the truth and pushes lies to elevate himself and his ill-informed opinions. This is about looking squarely at his effort to advance a dictatorship in which facts, data and knowable reality are replaced by his desperate need to look strong and be a winner.

Our beloved country is being held hostage by this malignant narcissist who stokes fear, hate and division and who relies on his sycophantic operatives to repeat his lies and degrade the public’s capacity to know what is true or false. Note the comments in recent days made by his bloodless Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, after Trump pushed lies about crime in D.C. and reporters questioned them. “Crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” Miller declared. “The real rates of crime, chaos and dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher.”

It’s no wonder that the guy Trump wants to insert as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antoni, is a hack economist who kowtows to Trump, despises the bureau, rejects its work and has already said he would drop the monthly jobs report and go quarterly. Of course, Trump is all for a guy who is not committed to informing the citizenry but instead to doing his bidding: “Our Economy is booming, and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE,” Trump said in announcing this selection. This follows his previous comments rejecting the jobs data earlier this month: “In my opinion, today's Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

I share these points not to discourage you. Quite the contrary. The more untethered Trump is from reality and the more obvious are his lies, the more his weakness is revealed, his decline will be hastened and his end assured. Do you doubt that the allies of America—and I don’t mean Trump’s America—can see through the obvious bullshit? Do you doubt that most of our fellow Americans can grasp that he’s trying to rule on his throne of lies? It’s up to us to hold onto our capacity to know what’s true and to maintain our capacity for independent thought.

Yes, we are undermined by cowards who have chosen to capitulate to this bloviating con artist—and it’s demoralizing that many of them represent once-respected schools, law firms, businesses and legacy media organizations. But every day the lies mount, I take strength from the knowledge that they can’t sustain this house of cards. The regime may succeed in adding to their list of surrender monkeys. But as our economy continues to decline, our body politic becomes more fractured and their hostility toward our democratic system and basic humanity becomes more vivid and unavoidable, I expect public outrage and public protest to grow. That means all of us recognizing our collective power and remembering that we are participants—not just spectators—in this 249-year-old democratic experiment and its survival.

One last note: California Gov. Gavin Newsom made a powerful case today for putting redistricting on California’s ballot in November to fight back against Trump’s push through Texas to grab five additional Republican House seats. His forceful speech represented his vivid commitment to fight “fire with fire,” recognizing that California is the world’s fourth largest economy and can provide outsized influence.

“California will not sit idle as Trump and his Republican lapdogs shred our country’s democracy before our very eyes,” Newsom said. “In just six months, Trump’s unchecked power has cost Americans billions and taken an ax to the greatest democracy we’ve ever known. This moment calls for urgency and action: That is what we are putting before voters this November, a chance to fight back against his anti-American ways.”

And more: Trump “doesn’t play by a different set of rules—he doesn’t believe in the rules. And as a consequence, we need to disabuse ourselves of the way things have been done. It’s not good enough to just hold hands, have a candlelight vigil and talk about the way the world should be. We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt, and we have got to meet fire with fire.”

This is the kind of urgency that I have missed from too many of our Democratic leaders who have seemed stuck in the old ways of doing things. Newsom’s push is a promising sign that—out in America, at the state level, among the laboratories of democracy—we just might find the necessary firepower to overcome Trump and his hostile takeover.

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