A false messiah always underestimates the backlash

MAGA is using the heavy hand of the government as if Trump is some kind of god.

America is not at war with any foreign power, yet the Trump administration is using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people without due process. The Supreme Court ruled that’s a no-no, that whether by the immigration law judges at the Department of Justice (via the Immigration and Nationality Act), or the federal court system, via the AEA, people subject to deportation get their habeas corpus—their day in court, physically present. “Too bad, so sad,” was the administration’s reaction: these Venezuelans were already gone and cannot be brought back.

Photo: El Salvadoran government, CECOT prisoner being admitted, March 16, 2025

Then Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, accused of being associated with the MS-13 gang, was deported to El Salvador and imprisoned in that nation’s notorious CECOT facility, which holds 30,000 gang members. El Savadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose authoritarian fist has cleaned up his country in just two years, sat in the Oval Office and defied our Supreme Court, cheered on by President Donald Trump.

Sure, MAGA has foreign allies: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netyanyahu, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, and Bukele. What do these people have in common? Their disdain for niceties and laws, in favor of immediate results. But America is not El Salvador, or Israel, or Hungary, or (God forbid) Russia. Getting everything you want by the heavy fist of government might work in other places, but in America, there is a backlash coming.

The Trump administration, still high off Donald Trump’s electoral and numeric victory in 2024, is underestimating the backlash and the resolve of those who will soon organize in not just resistance, but in an offensive against these tactics. Underestimating the opposition is a mistake that loses wars. The losers of WWII all underestimated the resolve of their enemies. Confederate president Jefferson Davis underestimated the resolve of President Abraham Lincoln to defend the Union, and the ability of the northern industrial states to wage war. The actions of the Trump administration closely align with acts of war: against immigrants with unpalatable worldviews, against China, against allies that Trump considers disrespectful of our position in the world.

China has moved closer to open hostilities in banning the sale to America of rare earth minerals, which are necessary for so many military and commercial applications. This act could harm our military preparedness once existing stocks of these minerals run out. And that’s just the beginning of what could clearly escalate. The U.S. has sources of rare earth minerals, but China controls 90 percent of the world market, with far more potential than America. That’s the main reason Trump has his eye on Greenland, which is reported to be rich in these natural resources.

I have spent time working up a viable timeline and scenario for the U.S. executing a takeover of Greenland. We could easily move enough troops and resources to our existing base in Thule to control the population, which numbers less than most Atlanta suburbs. But in order to hold Greenland, we’d have to fight and suppress the population there, and then concoct a legal resolution to our de facto conquest. This is not 1898, when President William McKinley got Congress to pass the Newlands Resolution, annexing Hawaii. In 2025, the world gets to watch in real-time.

I have concluded that it cannot be done, because the backlash would be too terrible, and Trump, sensitive to his supporters getting “yippy,” would crumble. But perhaps he might try anyway.

But dealing with immigrants, or law firms, or Harvard University, these will also have a backlash. Trump’s main supporters, even his refined Ivy League compadres, have little compassion for white shoe law firms who have long cozied up to Democrats and their fellow travelers, and even less for the rarified club of college administrators and professors who soak up federal grant dollars like giant sponges.

It’s not the ends—rolling back some of the entitled attitudes and hand-wringing over research programs, or deporting actual gang members, or clearing out the Hamas-loving students who threaten Jews—it’s the means that will undo Trump’s plans.

Trump does not trust courts, or judges, or lawyers for that matter. He does not listen to experts, even when they are undeniably right. His views are hardened like cured concrete: that if only there were more mining, drilling, and assembly line jobs at good pay, Americans would line up for the Black Lung, oily, dangerous work, or stand for 12 hours a day bolting doors to chassis. No, we won’t.

An insightful exchange quoted by Kevin D. Williamson (from Bob Woodward’s book Fear) between Trump and his first term economic advisor, former Goldman Sachs chief Gary Cohn, illuminates this. Cohn tried to explain to Trump that data shows Americans flee dirty, dangerous, industrial jobs when other jobs, at clean desks, or doing service work, are available. Trump wouldn’t budge. Cohn, exasperated, asked why Trump has these views.

“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”

Being right has little to do with how the president thinks. He thinks that those who tried to lock him up cannot succeed because they didn’t succeed in the four years between 2021 and 2025. He thinks that the “resistance” is toothless because of how quickly Big Law caved, and how Big Tech gravitated to his side. He thinks that he can simply fire those who oppose, especially if they work for the government.

He can, actually. For now, that is working.

But the resentment is building, because Trump is ignoring the means, and focusing on the ends. The heavy hand of government, ruling by the end of the gun barrel, can only succeed in one environment: actual shooting war. And even then, wars like Vietnam end badly, because they were invented and concocted. The reason President G.W. Bush’s Afghanistan and Iraq wars went on so long is because of 9/11 and our national injury. But eventually those wars had their own backlash (which include Trump himself and his MAGA supporters).

The only reason Trump and MAGA are succeeding now is because the backlash is coming from radicalized liberals. But this won’t be the case forever.

People who value due process, who see what happens when those radicalized liberals have power and ignore the means to get their ends, know where the policy of ejecting immigrants (who have legal status in the U.S.) to foreign prison camps under the fist of foreign authoritarian leaders, without due process, leads. We know where the policy of freezing $2.2 billion in Harvard’s grant money, which is small compared to its own enormous endowment, but not without pain to the university, in an arm-twisting move, leads.

Harvard is resisting, and that is impressing even those who generally agree with Trump’s goals. The New York Times quotes one:

Michael S. Roth, who is the president of Wesleyan University and a rare critic of the White House among university administrators, welcomed Harvard’s decision. “What happens when institutions overreach is that they change course when they meet resistance,” he said. “It’s like when a bully is stopped in his tracks.”

It is bullying. And the federal government, when it acts like a bully, regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are doing the bullying, brings resistance in the form of backlash.

Trump has done so much, so fast, that the backlash will build and it will be huge. He thinks he can do it all before the midterms in 2026 could sweep Republicans from power in Congress. But that means using ever more draconian methods to get it done. It means more arrests, more deportations without due process, more blackmail of institutions, more defiance of federal judges, more trusting in foreign authoritarians, and more acts of war with both allies and adversaries.

Doing these things ignores that America is a pluralistic and democratic political entity. It leads to the suspension of First Amendment rights, and Americans won’t put up with it. And when Americans get mad enough, Trump will back off, because he can read the “yippy” room. But then he’ll double down when he thinks he can win.

Even Trump, who has expertly navigated public opinion and manipulated events in a way that allows him to thrive with so many opposing him, has his limits of persuasion. And the backlash is building. My biggest fear is that Trump, who truly believes he was empowered by God because the bullet meant for his head missed his brain by millimeters in July, will underestimate the backlash, and the resolve of those who agree with many of his ends, but reject the means.

Immigrants deserve their habeas corpus rights and due process. Big Law and Harvard deserve respect and negotiation, not blackmail. Even Palestinian activists who support terrorists and threaten Jews don’t deserve to be treated worse than POWs in war. They don’t deserve these things because I agree with them, or think that their views are correct. They deserve these things because America is one place in the world where everyone should be treated with the same rights, regardless of who they are. I challenge you to find someone I should take seriously, who thinks America should be a place ruled by the gun barrel and the iron fist of government.

When the fever dream of America’s “Golden Age” ends, I fear we will either find ourselves in a shooting war (Iran, Taiwan, Greenland), or we will find ourselves ruled by the iron fist, but it won’t be Trump’s, it will be those who rule over the backlash when it comes. It is building. Ask Gov. Josh Shapiro, whose mansion was firebombed in Harrisburg.

I can only hope our president is better at reading public mood than his supporters, or Elon Musk. I can only hope he’ll know when to take his foot off the accelerator. But I fear he won’t because his “conversion”—his encounter with mortality and who he thinks is God—last July, has colored his thinking and instead of resulting in introspection and examination of his concrete-cured views, it has only further cured them into hardened stone.

The result: a messiah, albeit a false one. False messiahs always overestimate the backlash.

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