Almost immediately upon becoming president for a second time, Donald Trump launched his promised “shock and awe” campaign to great effect. The country’s political and social institutions, democracy, the rule of law and the American people’s collective sense of normal and routine have been overwhelmed. So much has happened so quickly that it is difficult to process it all.

The Democratic Party, which should be strongly resisting Trump and the MAGA Republican’s assaults on democracy and the country’s governing institutions and laws, appears to be shellshocked. The Democrats have been in such a state since they lost the presidential election (and complete control of Congress) in November. These first few weeks of Trump’s shock and awe campaign have left the Democrats even more confused and inert.

In a Sunday story about the election of Ken Martin as chair of the Democratic National Committee, the New York Times paints this picture of a Democratic Party very much in disarray:

In private meetings and at public events, elected Democrats appear leaderless, rudderless and divided. They disagree over how often and how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump. They have no shared understanding of why they lost the election, never mind how they can win in the future….

More than 50 interviews with Democratic leaders revealed a party that is struggling to define what it stands for, what issues to prioritize and how to confront a Trump administration that is carrying out a right-wing agenda with head-spinning speed. Governors, members of the Senate and the House, state attorneys general, grass-roots leaders and D.N.C. members offered a wide range of views about the direction of their party.

Their concerns are spilling out into public, as the country’s most powerful and prominent Democratic politicians air sharp disagreements over how aggressively they should oppose Mr. Trump.

Where is the so-called Resistance? It appears that they are somewhere sleeping or practicing “self-care”. Trump has only been president for three weeks and they are already exhausted. Once the Resistance finally wakes up it will likely be too late.

As part of his opening salvo, Donald Trump has now signed approximately 100 executive orders and other decrees that will impact almost every area of American government, society and life. The most ominous and dangerous include voiding the 14th Amendment to end birthright citizenship, declaring a national emergency as part of his mass deportation campaign, freeing the MAGA foot soldiers who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, reversing more than 60 years of civil rights laws and protections with the goal of ending America’s multiracial democracy, targeting the LGBTQ community with laws that attempt to erase them from public (and private) life, further restricting women’s reproductive rights and freedoms, elevating White Christian nationalism as the country’s official state religion, remaking the Department of Justice and FBI into his personal enforcers by firing or otherwise forcing out senior leaders and the thousands of agents who were involved in the Jan. 6 investigations and who more broadly attempting to hold Trump and his followers accountable for their many alleged and proven crimes, firing inspectors generals, pausing foreign aid, withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization and Paris Climate Accords, enacting a thought crime regime of “patriotic education” where schools deemed to be teaching “un-American” ideas will be denied funding and other assistance, trying to force many thousands of career civil servants out of their jobs so that he can replace them with loyalists, and ordering the federal government to stop paying its grants and loans. The latter move will potentially impact trillions of dollars and stop such programs as Medicare, federal student loans, healthcare, food and housing assistance for the poor, Head Start and other supports for vulnerable Americans.

As promised and threatened, Trump imposed high tariffs on goods from China. Trump quickly stopped the threatened tariffs on Mexico and Canada by claiming “victory” when in fact the outcome was very much a return to the status quo ante. These tariffs, if enacted, are estimated to cost the average American family at least $1,000 a year. By Trump’s own admission, tariffs will raise the cost of prescription medicine and other essentials. Trump, a billionaire, flippantly describes such hardship as some "short-term" pain for the American people. He told reporters on Sunday “I’m not concerned. We may have short-term a little pain….And people understand that.”

Trump also announced that Guantanamo Bay will be used as a prison camp for 30,000 “illegal aliens," undocumented people and others detained by ICE and other law enforcement. Guantanamo Bay is infamous as one of the sites where alleged terrorists were tortured by the United States government during the War on Terror. In a much-underreported story, the Trump administration is touting an offer from the government of El Salvador to use that country’s prisons as a type of penal colony for deportees as well as violent US criminals.

And of course, Trump began a revenge campaign against his and the MAGA movement’s “enemies”, as CNN reports:

With actions big and small, Trump has spent his first days in office pushing the levers of government – and his unique powers as commander in chief – to target his perceived political enemies both inside and outside the government.

The president has revoked security clearances from his critics. He’s canceled security details for officials who worked for him in the first administration. He’s personally announced the firings of individuals he loathes. And he’s teased a desire to launch wide-ranging investigation into both his predecessor, Joe Biden, and many others who criticized him after he left office the first time.”

It’s still too early to say how much Trump’s desire for political retribution will color his second term – and whether he will in fact push for far more drastic actions inside the Justice Department once his team is confirmed. The Trump Justice Department this week quickly reassigned at least 20 career officials from senior-level positions where they’ve worked for years.

But it’s clear from Trump’s rhetoric during his first five days in office that he still has a desire to do. The new president this week bemoaned Biden’s preemptive pardons of potential targets of Trump’s retribution – like former Rep. Liz Cheney. And he even suggested in an Oval Office interview with Fox host Sean Hannity on Wednesday that Biden made a mistake by not pardoning himself.

“I went through four years of hell by this scum that we had to deal with,” Trump said. “It’s really hard to say that they shouldn’t have to go through it also. It is very hard to say that.”

This is just a small sample of the unprecedented actions taken by Trump during the first few weeks of his reign. It is critically important for those of us with a public platform to detail and list Trump’s executive orders and other attacks on the country’s democratic norms and society (and their implications for everyday Americans) whenever possible because to summarize them in the interest of “efficiency” or the false assumption that “everyone knows already” is to do the work of enabling such aberrant and abnormal acts.

“Everyone knows this already” will be looked back upon as one of the phrases and type of reasoning that embodied the American mainstream news media’s failures to properly warn the American people about the existential danger of Trumpism and American fascism.   

None of Trump’s executive orders or dictates will do anything to substantively alleviate or end the economic pain of the white “working-class” voters he promised to protect if he were elevated by them back to the White House. Trump’s orders will actually make their economic lives, and that of most Americans, much, much worse.

The sum effect of Trump’s executive orders and shock and awe campaign has been to quickly cement his rule as the country’s first elected autocrat and dictator in waiting.

Trump will continue to behave as though he has a mandate and is above the law, knowing that the courts have no means of enforcing their decisions against him. Trump and his agents also know that even if his executive orders and other edicts are struck down, reversed, or otherwise not effective they have served the intended effect of intimidating the opposition and wasting the comparatively few resources that civil society organizations and individuals have to fight back against the limitless resources of the state, resources that Trump now personally commands with little oversight or limits.

In her newsletter, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is a leading historian and expert on authoritarianism, describes the terror and uncertainty that Trump’s shock and awe campaign is causing pro-democracy Americans and other people of conscience:

I want to address the discouragement and fear that many who care about democracy and peace and human rights are feeling in America and around the world right now.

The purpose of the Blitzkrieg of executive orders and other actions by the Trump administration is to overwhelm you, make it difficult to prioritize, and demoralize and terrify you. It’s no accident that Trump has twinned the surge of domestic measures with outrageous and belligerent proclamations about international affairs, whether it is his talk about United States taking Greenland, annexing Canada, or his plan to “clean out” the Gaza Strip.

Let’s take some of the domestic actions. The removal of oversight and reporting mechanisms in government regarding corruption and other forms of abuse (the firing of Inspector-Generals being one example), the pardons of violent January 6 participants, and the selection of individuals who have been accused of sexual assault for Cabinet appointments have the collective aim of making us feel that the brutes have triumphed and there is nothing we can do about it without endangering our safety.

As I wrote in Strongmen, every authoritarian state seeks to create states of hypervigilance and fear among the public, so that people will self-censor, and comply with whatever the leader asks them to do.

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The “sober” and “realistic” public voices in the news media and elsewhere have been counseling caution and perspective and for the American people to not panic because many of Trump’s executive orders will likely be deemed illegal (as in nullifying the 14th Amendment, stopping federal funds from being spent which is a violation of Congress’ power of the purse, firing inspectors-generals and other officials, etc.) and blocked by the courts. I am less hopeful of such an outcome. Trump is proceeding as though he has a mandate and is above the law, knowing that the courts have no means of enforcing their rulings against him. And even if Trump’s executive orders and other edicts are struck down, reversed, or otherwise not effective they have served the intended effect of intimidating the opposition and wasting the comparatively few resources that civil society organizations and individuals have to fight back against the limitless resources of the state, which Trump now personally commands with little oversight or limits.

Moreover, such “sober” and “realistic” public voices have little credibility as many of them were also condemning those who were sounding the alarm about Trump and MAGA’s growing danger to the country as hysterical and suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” In total, the American mainstream news media, pundits (especially the professional centrists and other “responsible” public voices), Democrats and the other institutionalists are generally aghast at what is happening but mostly because of incompetence, laziness, fear and self-interest are acting like they are powerless to do anything about it.

In so many ways, Trump’s second term has cemented a new political world with new rules, one that the establishment and mainstream voices and leaders are wholly unprepared for it. The narcissistic injury (at least to those members of the news media and other elites who are capable of introspection and critical self-reflection) and overall reaction to the rapid collapse of their episteme has left the establishment and mainstream political and media class like a broken computer powered by vacuum tubes in an old science fiction movie where it is caught in a feedback loop and smoke is coming out of the machinery before it bursts into flames.

This is largely their own fault as Trump and his allies and agents have been publicly announcing and detailing their plans for American autocracy and American authoritarianism since at least 2016.

I often wonder if Ed Wood is running the simulation that is the Age of Trump and the ridiculous and horrible and utterly surreal things that have now become the norm as American society and politics succumb to the spectacle that is authoritarian populism, naked kleptocracy, mass disinhibition, and a public mesmerized and zombified by the human zoo that is social media and digital culture and the screens on their various devices.

As I and other alarm-sounders have repeatedly warned, the elites and other leaders will not save you. The American people must take agency and control over their own destiny and in defense of democracy and freedom. This will mean doing such things as getting involved in politics on the local level. It will also mean getting to know your neighbors and joining groups, both small and large, that are defending democracy and a humane society. If you have the resources, donating to and otherwise supporting independent news media is also critical for resisting American autocracy and going around a mainstream news media that has consistently failed in its responsibilities to protect democracy and to speak truth to power. Seemingly apolitical activities such as the arts, planting community gardens, teaching literacy courses, volunteering at food banks, cleaning up litter, and helping people and animals in need are also a way to create the types of personal relationships, social capital, and networks that will be required for mutual aid, organizing, and other forms of pro-democracy work and collective action in this time of great crisis.

Two recent essays by Kim Lane Scheppele and Timothy Snyder provide much-needed guidance for understanding Donald Trump and MAGA’s blitzkrieg attack on American democracy and society and what to do in response to it. At the Contrarian, Scheppele, who is a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University, advises that "Democracy dies when no one defends its promise of a life free from fear and without the requirement to grovel":

Buried in everything that happened in this exhausting first week of the new Trump administration, then, is this important big idea: Trump seeks to govern through cruelty and loyalty. Defending our constitutional democracy requires that we don’t look away when cruelty is visited on members of our community and that we refuse to allow our democracy to crumble into personalistic attachment to the leader. To stand up to this will require a unity of purpose so that we cannot be divided by fear and it will require that we defend the principle that no man is above the law—nor can he change the law to put himself above it. Those of us concerned about the future of our democracy need to regroup and prepare for a long hard fight. We cannot let ourselves be divided and conquered—or distracted by everything that is flooding the zone right now.

And in a new essay, historian Timothy Snyder, author of the bestselling book On Tyranny, offers this counsel:

As for the rest of us: Make sure you are talking to people and doing something. The logic of “move fast and break things,” like the logic of all coups, is to gain quick dramatic successes that deter and demoralize and create the impression of inevitability. Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

"What is a country?" he asks. "The way its people govern themselves. Sometimes self-government just means elections. And sometimes it means recognizing the deeper dignity and meaning of what it means to be a people. That means speaking up, standing out, and protesting. We can only be free together.”