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The dog days of the Trump autocracy have been marked by the cowardice and rapid collapse of the leadership class in the US. This abject spinelessness in the leadership of elite universities, law firms, media companies, tech companies, and other private corporations has been chilling, but it has been offset by the courage of ordinary people standing up.
When JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller went to Washington, DC on August 20 to do photo ops with the National Guard troops there, they were roundly booed and lambasted by DC citizens. The Vice President called them “a bunch of crazy protesters,” and Miller called them “elderly white hippies.” If that’s so, there are a lot more old white crazy protesters than anyone thought.
The fact is there were more than 4600 protests and demonstrations against the Trump regime in the US in June 2025, the most in a calendar month since June 2020, following the George Floyd murder. But the mainstream media has not, for the most part, covered these demonstrations against the current regime.
Trump thinks that his “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” will decrease the number of Direct Action demonstrations, but he has mistaken the ready capitulation of the elites for that of the people. The more National Guard troops are sent to American cities and towns, the more demonstrations there will be. As Rachel Maddow pointed out this month, “Americans really don’t like to be threatened with their own military.”
And as colleges and universities begin their Fall terms, expect a lot more crazy protesters to stand up.
Trump’s takeover of Washington DC is a particularly ominous development. As George Conway said on August 22, “If you want to have a coup against the constitutional order, you want to control the capital city. And if he has control of the policing in the city of Washington . . . how do you stop him? Who’s gonna tell him to leave the White House?” And Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth just announced that the 2000 National Guard troops now stationed in Washington will henceforth be armed on the streets, and there are many more troops on the way, as six Republican governors add their contingents to the force.
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If you were wondering what Ghislaine Maxwell gave Trump in exchange for being moved from prison, where she was doing twenty years for sex trafficking of children, to “Camp Bryan,” the tape released on Friday afternoon August 22, of Todd Blanche’s interview with Maxwell on July 24 and 25 is your answer. Blanche, who was until recently Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, is now the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. He is also a friend of Ghislaine Maxwell’s own defense lawyer. Blanche was very careful in his questioning of Maxwell, only asking questions that would allow Maxwell to heap praise on Trump and otherwise go over material that has been made public previously.
In the taped interview, Maxwell downplays the friendship between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, flatters President Trump, and avers he “was always a gentleman in all respects.” And says “as far as I’m concerned, President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I . . . admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him.” Maxwell is a grotesque manipulator and a convicted child predator and perjurer, and above all, she aims to please and obtain a full pardon from Trump.
She spends most of the almost seven-hour interview trying to twist and turn her language to make it sound like she is not guilty of any of the crimes of which she’s been convicted, and is, in fact, the victim here. Her use of language as a smoke screen is actually a lot like Trump’s. She lives in the same post-truth world as Trump. The actual victims of her crimes are hearing this drivel in rage.
Maxwell is the least credible witness one could find on these subjects. The only reason for Blanche to be interviewing her now is to try to provide cover for Trump with his MAGA base and further the cover-up. If he wanted to know what actually happened, he should be interviewing the victims, or at least releasing their testimonies.
Trump has always taken the position that, if you don’t like the outcome, change the rules. If you become inextricably implicated in the Epstein case, say that the whole thing was actually a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats all along and people should just stop thinking about it. If there are too many new cases of Covid recorded, stop testing for Covid. If you don’t like the job numbers put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fire the person in charge of collecting and analyzing that data and replace her with someone who will produce whatever numbers support the agenda of the Dear Leader. If you don’t like the numbers coming out about the effects of tariffs on inflation, fire the person in charge and replace them with someone more malleable.
If you are losing an election in a particular swing state, call the person in charge of counting the votes and ask them to “find” 11,780 votes for you to secure the win. And if you lose the election, say that the whole thing was rigged and encourage your supporters to prevent Congress from certifying the election by force.
If you are convicted of crimes in a court of law, replace the judges. If some judges resist, stack the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court with subservient loyalists.
As Roy Cohn always said, “Don’t tell me what the law is; tell me who the judge is.”
Trump learned much from Cohn: never accept defeat—dodge, deflect, and deny. In a PBS Frontline interview on June 29, 2020, Roy Cohn’s cousin, journalist David Marcus, said, “Roy taught Trump three important lessons, unfortunately for all of us: 1. Never admit you’re wrong. 2. Go on the counteroffensive. And 3. Divide and conquer: find someone to scapegoat, find someone to blame. In Roy’s case, he blamed Communists, he blamed gay people. In Trump’s case, it’s the Other, it’s anybody else.”
Ultimately, authoritarian regimes change the rules for elections, and Trump is busy trying to do that now. He is using gerrymandering and redoing the census to form new Republican districts in red states, blocking Democrats; doing away with mail-in voting, which benefits Democrats; and eroding people’s trust in the voting process, hoping to suppress the vote. Ultimately, he wants to control the counting and tabulating of votes. If Trump can do enough of that, and simultaneously replace enough of the judiciary with partisan hacks, he can make free and fair elections impossible in this country, and make it possible for him to stay in power indefinitely.
It is not a certainty that he will be successful in this, but it will take large numbers of people standing up to stop him.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.