Will Trump’s Fear Factory be his Greatest Weapon or His Ultimate Undoing?

He’s learning what every would-be king learns: fear works only until people remember who they are…

Trump and his people, with all their strut and swagger, want you to think he’s the most powerful man in America and will continue in power indefinitely. Don’t believe it.

The reason he’s rushing so hard and fast to spread his secret, masked police across American cities while mobilizing the military against civilians is precisely because he’s so extraordinarily weak.

— It’s why he’s breaking laws left and right, from laws against bribery to the Hatch Act to Posse Comitatus.

— It’s why he’s trying to provoke a military confrontation with Venezuela, the same as Reagan did with Grenada two days after the Beirut Marine barracks bombing.

— It’s why he’s trying to distract us from the Epstein Files and the reality that a third of America’s states are in or nearly in recession.

— It’s why every time a report comes out about inflation continuing to spike, unaffordable housing, or job growth stalling out, he comes up with some new outrageous shiny object to dangle in front of the media.

Trump, in fact, is pretty much unique among both modern and historic figures who rode elective office to power and then turned their nations into dictatorships. None were as weak as Trump is today when they succeeded in consolidating enough power to eliminate their challengers and lock down the populace. All had a massively larger base. Consider:

Putin: Came to power just a few years after the Soviet Union had collapsed and in the rubble of the nearly incoherent presidency of the severely alcoholic President Boris Yeltsin. When he became acting president in 1999 amid war in Chechnya and economic recovery, his approval rating vaulted from 31% to 80% in three months. He sustained 80–88% support between 2003–2008, with popular acclaim for restoring order and boosting wages and pensions. Even during controversial wars, his approval reflected genuine public trust, peaking at 86–88% following the 2008 war with Georgia and 89% after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Orbán: His early political career was marked by charisma and reformist credentials. In 1998, at 35, he became Hungary’s youngest prime minister after leading Fidesz — a progressive student movement — to victory. His personal popularity was rooted in perceptions of competence, patriotism, and authenticity amid widespread post-Soviet disillusionment. Even critics acknowledged his ability to project “a modern conservative vision” that appealed to broad swaths of Hungarian society. I’ve written about how I was in Budapest the summer of 1989 when, as a 26-year-old former “student leader,” he gave his first major speech, cementing his then-liberal reformist credentials, eventually catapulting him into power.

Hitler: Germany was in shambles from World War I and the punishing demands of the Treaty of Versailles when Hitler was appointed Chancellor in January of 1933. A bit over a year later, an Aug 19, 1934 referendum on merging the positions of president and chancellor into a single office with him holding it produced an 89.9% “Yes” vote. He built the Autobahn, started Volkswagen, and rebuilt the country from the ashes of the war. Under his massive public works and social welfare programs, unemployment fell sharply after 1933 via public works/rearmament from ~34% in January 1933 to ~14% by January 1936.

Mussolini: In Italy, Mussolini consolidated mass support through national restoration and charisma, rather than coercion. His Fascist Party drew broad appeal by promising to end postwar chaos and “restore Italian greatness.” Mussolini’s personal image — “manly,” “decisive,” and virile — was widely hailed in the Italian media. The Lateran Treaty of 1929, which reconciled Italy with the Catholic Church, skyrocketed his legitimacy among Catholics and conservatives, cementing a decade of popularity across classes. Even the American public, as contemporaneous accounts noted, admired Mussolini’s “efficiency” (“making the trains run on time”) and national modernization during the 1920s.

Looking at our own hemisphere, Fujimori succeeded in destroying democracy in Peru and Bukele did the same in El Salvador, but both solved major crises that gave them over 80% approval ratings across their nations when they seized that kind of power.

In Peru, as political scientist Jonathan Schlefer writes for Politico, inflation was so bad that a tube of toothpaste cost as much as a house had five years earlier, while El Salvador was both poor and overwhelmed by gangs that had seized control of most of the country.

By contrast, Trump’s approval rating is consistently low, even though he keeps lying about it as he claims a broad mandate. He didn’t even break 50% of the popular vote in 2024, and lost the popular vote in 2016.

As of October 20, 2025, 44.2% approved and 52.1% disapproved of his presidency, according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin. The RealClearPolitics average gives him around 45%, while Gallup finds 40%, making him one of the least popular U.S. presidents at this stage in all of our history.

His economic approval has sunk to 34%, with 62% disapproving of his behavior amid inflation and federal shutdown unrest. Unlike his predecessors or authoritarians in other countries that lost their democracies, his base remains intense but small; there’s no evidence of majoritarian enthusiasm existing outside of his core partisan bloc.

The few Republicans willing to defy him and speak up about Trump’s unpopularity (and that of his policies) are often blunt and even see their own popularity increase because of their resistance.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, told Semafor yesterday that Trump‘s economic policies are ruining America and his popularity:

“I can’t see into the future, but I see Republicans losing the House [of Representatives] if Americans are continuing to go paycheck-to-paycheck They’ll definitely be going into the midterms looking through the lens of their bank account.”

So, how does Trump hold onto power and the loyalty of Republican politicians?

Fear, it turns out, is the cement that’s holding the GOP together under Trump.

His indictment of lifelong Republican James Comey and his pardon of criminal grifter George Santos were unambiguous messages to every Republican politician in the nation. He was saying, in effect

“Stay with me and keep licking my boots and I’ll keep you safe even if you commit horrible crimes; cross me and I’ll destroy you.”

So far, it’s working. But as Schlefer points out in Politico, wannabe strong men like Trump only succeed in destroying democracy in wealthy nations about one in four times. Most often, as we recently saw in South Korea and Brazil, they fail and then suffer the consequences; both former presidents are now in prison.

For Trump and the people who are either excusing or actively participating in his corruption and naked crimes, holding onto power almost exclusively by fear is a dangerous game.

As John Adams noted in 1776:

“Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion… that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.”

But politicians like Trump (and his lickspittles) eventually find themselves trapped by the very fear they’ve used to paralyze their party members into compliance or silence. As Winston Churchill famously said:

“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.”

This is why Trump, as noted above, is building such a massive police and military presence, along with constructing hundreds of new concentration camps across America.

It’s why he had to fire the commission that oversees the White House before taking a wrecking ball to the East Wing. It’s why he’s desperately trying to pack courts and government agencies with toadies who worship or fear him; he knows he only has a short window before the country truly fights back against his strongman attempts to turn America into a third world tinpot dictatorship with a “royal” family that’s corruptly made billions off their brief moment in power.

Fearful men always lean on violence and the threat of violence because eventually the spell of the fear they’re trying to cast across the nation is broken.

We saw it in the American Revolution, when 57 men defied the terror King George III had imposed here when they signed their names — producing an instant death sentence from the British crown — to the Declaration that ended, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

When enough people stand up against state terrorism to hit a critical mass (3.5% of the population, according to political scientist Erica Chenoweth), others quickly join them. The turnout for the No Kings marches suggest we’re close to that.

Evangelist Billy Graham (who, were he still alive, would certainly be horrified by his corrupt son’s behavior) reminded us:

“Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.”

So, take heart. The No Kings marches proved both Trump’s widespread unpopularity and the fearlessness of an American public echoing over two centuries of our nation standing up to tinpot despots and wannabe dictators.

We Americans have never tolerated a king or a dictator, and we’re not about to start now.

Louise’s Daily Song: “Trump’s Fear Factory”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now availble in bookstores nationwide.
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