Trump's Playbook
04/29/25
This is Trump's playbook
According to John Shattuck, president of Central European University in Budapest, Trump’s playbook has 10 parts:
- One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.
- Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.
- Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.
- Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.
- Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.
- Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”
- Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.
- Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.
- Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.
- Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.
American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values. That means getting rid of Trump — the sooner the better. Legislators on both sides of the aisle in Congress need to wake up and impeach Trump once again, and then follow it up by permanently removing him from office immediately. Our Constitution guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government. We need to do it now.
Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls — and it's falling. National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value. Resistance to Trump's assault on democracy is not only possible, it’s essential.
Martin Luther King's words apply today: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.” We'd like to add: Keep resisting Trump! On 4/28/25, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, in his speech in New Hampshire, said that we need to stop listening to “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when Americans are demanding urgent action, and to “fight — EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” Pritzker continued: "Making America fail is the point of the Trump administration's actions. We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools. We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens — a family of refugees — on a crusade to expel our country of both. We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency — an immigrant granted the privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him — who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself. And we have a president who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers. And we have a Grand Old Party, founded by one of our nation’s bravest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put in the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our country than lift a hand to save it. Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption. But I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box.”
Copy and paste Trump's playbook and give it to everyone you know. The citizens of America need to start a mass nationwide civil resistance to Trump and his evil, dictatorial regime.