May 2025
It’s easy to dismiss Trump as a poorly scripted conman who wears his narcissism on his sleeve. But if the Trump era proves anything it’s that something can be both absurd and incredibly dangerous. If we want to reverse the slide into authoritarianism we need to understand how Trump has weaponized narrative.
Trump is famous for his endless firehose of blatant lies––from his stolen election metanarrative to blaming Ukraine for getting invaded, to his constant dehumanization of migrants and people of color. But this deceit is so systematic that “lying” is too small a term to capture its grandiose ambition.
The Make America Great Again narrative is more accurately understood as a type of mass PsyOp unleashed on the civilian population. The Trump regime is weaponizing make-believe, manufacturing fake crises to terrorize and manipulate their base and in the process disrupting any shared public understanding of what is actually happening. American politics has been transformed into an information battlefield so immersive it is best described as an effort to disrupt reality.
As Italian anti-fascist Ignazio Silone famously wrote in 1938 “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.” In other words, fascism is first and foremost an attack on reality. Trump is using the same playbook. By weaponizing lies about a stolen election, DEI or immigrants causing America’s systemic inequality he is constructing an alternate reality. In his reality – amplified by the vast right-wing communications infrastructure – he is leading his patriotic supporters on a life or death crusade to save the nation from existential threats. Everything he says and does re-enforces this alternate reality where he is reacting, defending the true America against an imaginary revolution of “radical left socialist Democrats.”
This is extraordinarily dangerous. It is using narrative power to create the permission structures which legitimizes the kind of dehumanization that leads to violence and mass repression. So how do we build mass resistance to Trump’s assault on our political norms?
Nobody Stormed the Bastille Because of a Pie Chart
Well, nobody stormed the Bastille because of a pie chart or a well researched report. Not to say the facts aren’t important but sadly they don’t help that much with fighting fascism. They are waging a reality war on us, exploiting what Steve Bannon has famously called “muzzle velocity” to bombard us with a daily stream of egregious attacks on rule of law and human rights. That pace, and Trump’s skill at monopolizing attention, keep us all off-balance and reactive.
The work of building a mass democracy move to overthrow the regime is deeply enmeshed with the work of building narrative power. If MAGA wants to pretend they are countering a revolution then it’s up to us to give them an actual revolution, one that represents the broadest united front to stop the Trump’s regime’s assault on rule of law.
We need to organize across differences and engage in the process of crafting umbrella narratives that can help scale our movements for resistance and transformation. That means organizing an inviting insurrection, where we articulating a collective refusal that is as compelling as it is unignorable.
Remember you don’t have to wait for Trump to invade your city to get organized. Courage is contagious. Here’s the simple 3 step version of what we need to do.
How We Organize to Stop MAGA #Fascism
1) Don’t legitimize a wanna-be dictator: denounce, obstruct, resist.
2) Build the biggest pro-democracy movement possible: skip purity tests. We need numbers.
3) Don’t let him divide us: whoever Trump attacks, we defend. Solidarity is the antidote to fascism.
UPDATE Dec 2025: Some of the concepts in this post have been expanded upon in my recent article for The Forge Winning the Reality War Against Fascism and Ecological Collapse: Lessons from the Right’s Narrative Strategy.