U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with reporters, as he departs for travel to Pennsylvania from the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.C. U.S., July 15, 2025. REUTERS Jonathan Ernst
I can’t tell you exactly how I know but after sixty years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.
This past week did it.
On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.”
On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them.
On Wednesday, after Brendan Carr, his lapdog chair of the FCC, pressured ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, he claimed that Kimmel being “CANCELLED” was “Great News for America,” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers next.
On Thursday, he said broadcast networks have been mean to him and that Brendan Carr might have to start taking their licenses away. “When you have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” he said, “they’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”
On Friday, he suggested that negative coverage about him is “really illegal.” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office he said: “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal,” adding “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”
On Saturday, he demanded that Bondi prosecute several of his political rivals even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He demanded that she do it “NOW!!!”
On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar “what the hell is going on here?”
Immediately after Kimmel’s suspension, Disney viewers and customers began to cancel their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.
According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.
Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.
Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship.
By then the giant was roaring and stomping.
By Monday, Disney decided to put Kimmel back on the air.
Trump’s poll numbers were dipping even before last week’s explosion of authoritarianism. Now they’re in free fall.
I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before.
Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt destroyed countless careers before the giant roared: “have you no sense of decency?”
McCarthy melted almost as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West. His national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censored by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of forty-eight.
The giant roared again a decade later, after television showed civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.
It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.
It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the coverup of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.
It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.
And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.