'Fatal miscalculation': Here’s what Trump gets wrong about his opponents

26 March

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during an event to sign an executive order to shut down the Department of Education, in the East Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 20, 2025.

Former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan isn't shy about debunking Donald Trump and his allies' claims about the size of his victory in the United States' 2024 presidential election. Trump and other MAGA Republicans often describe his victory as an "historic landslide" and a "mandate," but according to Cook Political Report, Trump defeated Democratic rival Kamala Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote — which, as Hasan points out, is far from a landslide.

In his March 26 column, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie argues that President Trump and close allies like Tesla/SpaceX/X.com leader Elon Musk are badly underestimating the amount of opposition to his policies.

"Trump is behaving as if he has no opponents that matter," Bouie observes. "But he does — and their anger and energy is on the rise. For every institution in American civil society that capitulates to Trump rather than honor its stated ideals, there are many ordinary Americans who are ready to fight. If there's anything left to take down the Trump Administration and consign Trump to the ash heap of history, it will be this fatal miscalculation — this belief that the only thing that sustains American liberalism is outside funding and 'deep state' shenanigans."

Bouie adds, "The public, however, is not a mirage. And even authoritarian regimes need a measure of public support — the consent of at least some of the governed."

The Times columnist notes that MAGA Republicans are obsessed with George Soros, often pushing conspiracy theories involving the billionaire Democratic donor. That obsession, according to Bouie, underscores their belief that opposition to Trump cannot be "organic" and that "nefarious outside forces" are conspiring "to take Trump down."

"In the present, if you explore the depths of the right-wing world, you will continue to find a belief in the immateriality of popular political opposition to Trump — a sense that it is less the response of ordinary people with agency than it is a plot by outside agitators," Bouie explains. "To this point, there is a popular meme, recently shared by Musk, that portrays the attitudes and beliefs of liberal Americans as nothing more than the programming of nefarious elites."

Bouie adds, "The meme is a visual representation of the idea that most people in the world are non-player characters, or NPCs — a term taken from role-playing games to refer to those characters who behave according to a script."

Jamelle Bouie's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).

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