The Vicious Cycle Of A Failing Strongman

Texas Dem Chair Kendall Scudder Joins Us Live At Noon Today - Will Be A Good One!

Morning all. Got a few chances to connect with us live over the next few days:

• Noon, Today - Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder joins Hopium live for an update on battleground Texas. Click here a few minutes before noon to join us.

• Tonight, 7pm - Our regular Paid Subscriber get together. Register here.

• Thurs, 915am - I will be joining Jen Rubin and Norm Eisen for a live catch up over at The Contrarian.

You can find registration links to all our events on our Events page. Recordings of all of our discussions can be found on the Hopium site under Podcast and on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify too. You can always find me on Bluesky where I post frequently throughout the day. Hopium is also now posting regularly on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for those who are regulars there.

Hopium In The Guardian - I was given a lot of air time in a new Guardian article by Washington Bureau Chief David Smith on Trump’s descent into authoritarianism:

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist, said: “He’s clearly made a decision to turn America into some form of dictatorship. There’s no way any longer to look away from that. The excuses – ‘Well, it can’t happen here, American civil society is strong enough to resist’ – may be true, but what’s clear now is that his aspiration is to end American democracy for all time and to turn this country into some kind of authoritarian state.”

……

Rosenberg added: “There’s no question that our lack of history with a leader like this, and the perception of American exceptionalism, made many institutional players in our society unprepared for what was to come. The key here is that the way that Trump succeeds is by isolating people and by not allowing people to work together collectively.”

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Indeed, for all his strongman posturing, Trump is deeply unpopular: a University of Massachusetts Amherst opinion poll released this week found his approval rating at just 38%, down six percentage points since April, though only 1% of Trump voters regret their vote. That drop includes men, one of the president’s most reliable groups of supporters.

From his military parade in Washington to his bombing of Iran, from his escalation of immigration enforcement to his so-called “big, beautiful bill”, the American people are rejecting Trump’s leadership and agenda, according to Rosenberg, the Democratic strategist.

“A majority of the country now knows that he’s the old man behind the curtain and not the wizard,” he said. “He still has control over Maga and Republicans in Congress but he doesn’t have the persuasive capacity any longer to keep his hold on the broad majority of the country.

“This is a sign of his weakness and that he’s not as strong as he believes he is. It’s one of the reasons why he’s looking for these avenues to re-establish his strength and power and have there be a perception that people are bending the knee.

“Every time he tries to do this, it fails and he grows more distant to the American people. That has to give us hope we have the tools in the coming months to start winning elections and building a more successful pro-democracy movement that can contain the damage that Trump and Maga are doing to the country in the coming years.”

For more watch my new discussion with Stuart Stevens on Trump’s descent into madness and authoritarianism; and my new takes on Trump’s ridiculous occupation of DC, the bad inflation numbers we got yesterday; and why our pro-democracy movement must build on the momentum coming out of our redistricting battle and find yet another higher gear.

Over the past 24 hours we had a few more confirmations of how unserious, absurd, unhinged and Banana Republicy Trump and his daily “show” has become.

First, White House Press Secretary made clear they are considering idea of suspending the monthly jobs report until they can “fix it” -

Next, the White House has essentially admitted that our ridiculous and desperate leader erred in impulsively agreeing to a meeting with Putin. Read these words:

Friday's Alaska summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin "is a listening exercise for the president," the White House said on Tuesday, tempering expectations for a quick Russia-Ukraine ceasefire deal.

"Only one party that's involved in this war is going to be present, and so this is for the president to go and to get, again, a more firm and better understanding of how we can hopefully bring this war to an end," said White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt.

Like his deployment of troops to DC based on fictions and lies, mistakenly agreeing to allow Putin to come to the US and embarrass us on the world stage would be in any other time grounds for removal from office. Trump is so manifestly unfit now - old, addled, unhealthy, failing, wildly impulsive, unpopular, autocratic - that it has become a charade to pretend otherwise.

“Leningrad” has been called St. Petersburg since 1991

Third, the outrage over the Kennedy-led assault on vaccines, science and our public health is growing, and growing more serious. From The Guardian this morning:

A grassroots organization of health professionals has released a report outlining major health challenges in the US and calling for the removal of Robert F Kennedy Jr from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The report from Defend Public Health, a new organization of about 3,000 health professionals and allies, is an attempt to get ahead of misinformation and lack of information from health officials.

In an effort to keep making progress in public health, Defend Public Health’s report was slated to coincide with that of the anticipated second US report to “make America healthy again” (Maha). The first Maha report was released in May, and a second report was expected this week – but amid turmoil at the health agencies, it has reportedly been delayed for several weeks.

Fourth, the President and his team are now forcing large American global companies to go into business with the Trump Administration itself, just as they do in countries with “state capitalism” like China and Russia. This shit is so wild that it is hard to even type this words, particularly as the Treasury Secretary said this morning that Trump may attempt to extend this arrangement to other American corporations (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!):

US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has raised the prospect of the White House rolling out the unprecedented revenue-sharing agreement it struck with chipmakers Nvidia and AMD to other industries.

President Donald Trump upended corporate norms this week after Nvidia and AMD agreed to give the US government 15 per cent of their Chinese chip sales in exchange for being awarded export licences.

“I think we could see it in other industries over time,” Bessent told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “I think right now this is unique, but now that we have the model and the beta test why not expand it?”

Next, watch Harry Enten on CNN this morning. This is as close to outright mockery of Trump as I think we will ever see in legacy news media.

Finally, let’s level set with my weekly deep dive into the Economist/YouGov poll:

My big point today? You never know in politics. You never know when the dam will break, a bill will pass, a leader goes from invincible to scorned. But somehow these last weeks I feel like the ridiculousness of Trump, his extremism, buffoonery, corruption and just abject abandonment of the American creed has broken through, become harder to ignore; that a growing number of people have come to understand that yes indeed our Orange Emperor has no clothes. As we often discuss here this can be true at the same time Trump becomes more dangerous; and in fact I think these things are related. As his failure and ridiculousness becomes harder to ignore he grows more wild, more impulsive, more desperate for the “spectacular” and more autocratic. Perhaps we will call it, with nods to Anne Applebaum and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the vicious cycle of a failing strongman. That the wild escalation we are seeing this week is due not to his STRENGTH and POWER but to his impossible to ignore failures and weakness.

What do my friends? As Frost told us the “the best way out is always through.” And so…..

Let’s Get To Work For Our Great Country, People!

Support Hopium’s Priority Candidates And Party Committees - A reminder that Election Day, 2025 is a little less than three months away and early voting starts in Virginia in less than six weeks - September 19th!

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Our Recommended Actions - We are prioritizing three actions today. You can get our full list of recommended actions here. Let’s get to it:

1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Four-Part Agenda - While it is recess we need to be loud this week, very, very loud. Make the case for our our emerging four part agenda, and demand they 1) Stand with Ukraine and work to block Trump’s selling out of the West to Putin 2) Roll back Trump’s terrible tariffs 3) Block the expansion of ICE 4) End the war on science, higher education and the public health of the American people.

2 - Bring “Resolutions Of Condemnation” To Your Community - Inspired by the tactics of our Founders learn about how Hopium members are advancing “Resolutions of Condemnation” in their communities across the country and consider bringing this initiative to your state, country or city/town.

Remarkably, members of this community are now advancing 61 (!!!!) resolutions projects in 19 states. Can we get to all 50 states by the fall election?

Our newly updated Resolutions page includes a new chat for folks to report in on their progress or seek counsel from those interested in launching a resolutions project in their community. This is one way to fight back against Trump’s unprecedented abandonment of our Constitutional order.

3 - Grow Hopium And This Wonderful Community Of Proud, Plucky, Patriots - We’ve set a goal of trying to grow the Hopium community from the 152,000 we are now to 175,000 by Election Day, 2025. Do what you can to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to become a summer subscriber to Hopium, free or paid. If each current paid subscriber brings in just one new subscriber this summer and fall we will hit our goal.

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Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Been impressive to see how many of you remain involved in local, in person protests of all kinds in your communities. Keep it up!!!

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you, and a fight it truly is - Simon