They Are a Minority

Get your mind right.

Unpopular people. (Photo: Getty)

For many politically minded people who are not fascists, the weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration have felt like an unstoppable whirlwind of doom. By plowing ahead with plans to shutter entire federal agencies, cut tens of thousands of federal workers, and generally govern by decree in bold defiance of written laws, Trump and his allies are inculcating in their opposition the feeling of being overwhelmed. I have already heard entirely too much despair creeping into the tone of those who should form the backbone of the political opposition to what is happening right now.

Without minimizing the potential for the utter destruction of the rule of law in this country—a genuine possibility!—I want to make two basic points that may be helpful in restoring a little fire to everyone who does not care to live in a fascist state. First: the political faction carrying out the Trump-Musk agenda right now does not have the support of the majority of the public. Far from it. And second: the fraction of the public that is happy with the agenda currently being enacted is going to get smaller for the foreseeable future.

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When you brush away the chaotic bombardment of daily outrages and look at the actual base of support for these policies, you will see that that base is a significant minority of the public, and that it is going to shrink as the impact of the policies begins to be felt in the real world. In other words: We, the opposition, are the majority. Take heart.

Let me hasten to add here that the fact that we are the majority does not mean that we are automatically going to prevail. No. That is going to take a lot of work. It is going to take a lot of organizing, and it is going to take a lot of mass communications, and it is going to take the creation of political coalitions between groups that do not care for one another, and it is going to take level of bravery and resoluteness from the Democratic Party that they have not yet displayed. But it is important to recognize all of these tasks as things that exist within the realm of possibility, and not as some sort of far-fetched dream. How do regimes manage to impose minority rule on enormous populations? By getting the majority to give up. Don’t do that.

Rather than allowing yourself to be drowned in frantic headlines, consider what Donald Trump’s base actually looks like. He got about half of the 150 million votes cast in 2024. (Close to 90 million eligible people did not vote.) Out of the half of the population willing to vote for him, a significant portion are more or less traditional Republicans, who view the party’s MAGA turn with some level of distaste, who would be happier with Mitt Romney or George Bush or Ronald Reagan, but who prefer Trump to a Democrat. Of the portion of Trump’s base that are MAGA faithful—the red hat variety of Republicans—a majority or close to a majority are going to bear significant negative material impacts from the actions that Trump is allowing Elon Musk to take. Every Republican voter who receives any form of Medicaid is now at risk, and Social Security and Medicare cuts may well come as well. Everyone who has relied on the federal government for consumer protections or environmental protections is going to be disappointed. Everyone who likes to take their family to national parks is going to find that they are understaffed. People will find that their health care system does not work as well. Multiply this by everyone who is touched by the myriad functions of the federal government which are now being dismantled. The farmers going on Tik Tok to complain about how they voted for Trump and are now being screwed over by USDA budget cuts have become a source of schadenfreude, but they represent one small part of a much bigger constituency: Trump voters who are finding out in very tangible ways that Trump’s presidency is going to be materially bad for them.

This constituency is only going to grow as more and more functions of the federal government are destroyed. There is no way for it not to. And every new person that falls into this category represents a shrinkage of the enthusiastic base of support for Trump’s presidency. This trend will happen not for any ideological reason, but because Trump’s best buddy is systematically breaking things that performed key functions in millions of Americans’ lives, up until now. That will not go unnoticed.

This is us.

Now think about Trump’s institutional base. He has the billionaires, and I will give him the business community for now as well—both of these groups are fundamentally agnostic and/ or cowards when it comes to things like “right and wrong,” and they lend their political support to whoever they think has the power to help them, and that will be Trump for the foreseeable future. Money is behind him. (They may regret this support if he, you know, destroys the economy by undermining the dollar and launching idiotic trade wars and smashing the stability of the financial system, but that is a separate matter.) Notably, though, Trump has, in less than a month, pissed off some significant sources of institutional support—groups that may in fact have preferred him in the election, but who are now finding that they themselves are targets of his agenda, rather than beneficiaries. These groups include, but are not limited to:

• Millions of government workers and their families, who may have voted Republican but now find their own livelihoods threatened;

• Veterans who will see the VA decimated;

• Members of the military, who will see austerity imposed upon them;

• Clean cut law and order types at the FBI and the Justice Department who are finding that Trump is actually lawless, and is attacking them;

• Law enforcement types disillusioned by Trump’s pardoning of January 6 protesters who attacked cops;

• Parents of schoolchildren who will find their public schools getting worse and worse;

• Latinos who voted for Trump who will find themselves and their families targeted by his anti-immigration agenda;

• Black people who voted for Trump who will be unhappy with the wave of officially condoned racism he has unleashed;

• Women who voted for Trump who will at some point find themselves or their family personally harmed by the restrictions on reproductive rights;

• Sober small business types who will find that they are, to their surprise, on the losing side of the oligarchy;

It is easy to say “these people deserve what they get!” and it is easy to say “nah, these people are blind dead-ender racists who will ride the Trump Train to hell no matter what!” but both of those sentiments miss what is consequential here. Sure, within all of these groups, it may be the case that most of the people who suffer material harm will grit their teeth and ignore it and continue to back Trump because of unshakeable party affiliation or racism or cultural mores or failure to pay attention or whatever. But I guarantee you that some portion of all of those groups is going to be so pissed or disappointed or disillusioned with what Trump and Musk are doing that they will lose their enthusiasm for Trump. They will lose their will to affirmatively support him. And all of these defections, remember, are coming from a base of less than half of the public to begin with. MAGA is a minority, and the more it carries out its political program, the more it will shrink.

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The many people who have already become and the many more who will soon become pissed or disappointed or disillusioned with what is happening will not automatically rush off to register as Democrats. Rather, these people compose and substantial and growing pool of support that is up for grabs. They are the persuadables. Many of them will experience the cognitive dissonance of having their own image of what Trump stands for contradicted by things happening to them or their families or friends personally—things that they cannot deny, because they are living them. When this happens, they will search for explanations. Trump, of course, is always ready with lies about why things are bad: it’s immigrants, it’s Biden, blah blah, you know the things he says. When people are confronted with hard realities, though, the power of lies is weakened. The political opposition—already at least half of the country, and likely more, at least on a policy level—will have this expanding pool of people who have been burned to work with, to talk to, to bring in, to ally with.

The opposition is the majority.

None of this means that the work of deprogramming former Republicans is not a difficult task. The right has smashed public trust in media, they are backed by a near-infinite pool of money, and they are led by one of the world’s richest men, who bought his own social media network and bought the Republican Party and seems prepared to deploy all of his resources on his apocalyptic idiot quest to destroy public services once and for all. There is hard work to be done. I’m not trying to give a kindergarten “We Are the World” speech that implies that any of this is easy, or that we are not right on the edge of some very bad things. I do, however, get the sense that the mood among many non-Republicans has swung a little too far towards resignation to be healthy—that the conventional wisdom is trending towards “we’re fucked,” which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Recognize that these fuckers are the minority, and that it is impossible for them to carry out their program without isolating more of their base and become more of a minority.

So stop moping around. We have the people! We have to bring them together. The numbers are on our side. Trump and Elon Musk are like two guys with six-shooters trying to hold a thousand people hostage. They only win if everyone thinks they are too strong to rush.

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• Related reading: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Things You Can Lie About; Who Is Your Enemy, My Brother?

• Go to a protest. Call your representative. Picket a Tesla dealership. Join the labor movement, and embrace your power to strike. What can you do to help the labor movement? Here are some suggestions. I also wrote a book about it, called “The Hammer,” which you can order wherever books are sold. If you want me to come speak to your union or school or secret revolutionary sect about this, email me.

• One other small action you can take to strengthen civil society and democracy is to support independent media. (I am biased here, but it’s true.) You are reading How Things Work, a publication that has no advertising and no paywall, so that everyone can read it regardless of income. About eight percent of the people who subscribe to this site choose to pay for it. They alone are the financial support that keeps this place going. If you enjoy reading How Things Work and want to help it continue to exist, you can take a moment right now to become a paid subscriber, for an affordable price. We’re all in this together, my people. Thanks for reading.