Last weekend, 7 million Americans participated in "No Kings" protests around the country. Which means that 333 million Americans didn't participate in those protests. Trump's approval rating is holding pretty steady around 40% approval, 55% disapproval. That is slightly lower than other presidents, but not by much. So it struck me how some of the rhetoric from the left on the internet, calling Trump a fascist, is contradicted by an absence of effective opposition to Trump's rule. If Trump is a fascist, then what does that make hundreds of millions of Americans? Mitläufer? The "No Kings" protests had less than half the number of participants than the 1968 "Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam" demonstrations with 15 million participants, and America only had 200 million citizens back then.

The reality of history is that civil obedience is extremely common, and large scale civil disobedience extremely rare. Most of the Americans who disapprove of Trump have concluded that the solution to the problem will be the 2028 US presidential elections. I generally approve of the idea that sometimes the best solution to break the political power of a bad populist movement is to let them govern the country for 4 years, which shows everybody that the simplistic populist answers don't actually solve problems. If you compare Trumpism to other political movements named after their leaders, like Stalinism or Maoism, it is obvious that Trumpism doesn't have much of an underlying ideology, and is more about the peculiarities and vanities of Donald Trump himself. Don't tell JD Vance, but that sort of movement is unlikely to survive the departure or death of its leader. The probability of economic hardship, possibly a financial crisis, possibly a recession, between now and 2028 is rather high, and while not all of the problems are due to Donald Trump, Americans tend to blame their president even for the price of gas. Ronald Reagan's "Are You Better Off Than You Were 4 Years Ago?" is still the ruling principle of how America elects its presidents, and there is very little hope that the average American will be better off in 2028 than he was in 2024.

The question then basically becomes how much damage Donald Trump can do to the United States in 4 years. Fortunately, he isn't a very effective leader. There is a lot of bullying, extreme rhetoric, smoke and mirrors, but much less actual change. ICE raids maybe flashy and make headlines, but even if you consider their effect of discouraging illegal immigration, it is yet unclear whether the US will manage to deport enough people in 2025 to even just bring net illegal immigration to zero. Trump's idea to rule the country by executive orders has the obvious flaw of being easily reversed by the next president, or even being overturned by courts before that. When you consider that Republicans are still working on partially dismantling Obamacare 15 years later, and are unlikely to be able to completely abolish it, it becomes obvious how much more likely a president is to leave a lasting legacy when he works via the creation of laws rather than ruling by decree. The most significant lasting legacy of Donald Trump is likely to be a White House ballroom. That isn't much, from a historical perspective. In the end, Donald Trump will be less "L'État, c'est moi" and more "This too shall pass".