Fourteen months into Donald Trump’s second presidential administration, the political situation in the United States of America looks both more horrifying and more hopeful than it did, say, last summer. Since returning to the White House, Trump has pursued a drive toward dictatorship with a speed, scope, and effectiveness arguably beyond anything in U.S. history. His regime has sharply intensified repression—kidnapping hundreds of thousands of people in the name of immigration enforcement and using a host of measures to stifle political dissent—and has seized unprecedented powers for the federal government and particularly for the president. Since gaining its footing, the regime has also launched an escalating series of military attacks against other countries, culminating in the 2026 U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which has already killed thousands of people and is still unfolding.
But Trump’s actions and broken promises have cost him popular support. Significant fractions of the MAGA movement have publicly clashed with Trump over his military adventures and over his regime’s complicity in protecting rich and powerful sexual predators implicated in the Epstein files. At the same time, popular resistance to the regime’s anti-immigrant repression has mounted. In January 2026, the Battle of Minneapolis showed the whole country what militant, mass-based community defense looks like. It drove further cracks into Trump’s support base and forced the regime to retreat. And it was a reminder that trying to rule through naked repression, violence, and fear isn’t a sign of strength; it’s an expression of weakness.
In this context, many leftists are grappling with the question, how do we combat the Trump regime in ways that promote systemic radical change? Two months ago, as one contribution to this discussion, Three Way Fight published Dandy Andy’s “What the F**k is to Be Done?” Following on that, I’d like to discuss two other pieces that I believe offer useful perspectives on revolutionary analysis and strategy in this time: “At the Turning of the Tide: How to Fight Our Way out of the Trump Era” (published by CrimethInc. in December 2025) and “Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility” (attributed to the Mr. Burns Collective and published by Ill Will in November 2025).
To help frame the discussion, I offer a few starting premises:
- The Trump regime’s authoritarian power drive represents a dramatic worsening of the U.S. political order, not just more of the same.
- Elections and court battles are wholly inadequate for stopping the Trump regime. Its defeat will require direct, organized, broad-based resistance.
- Although Trump’s political project reflects his personal idiosyncrasies, it grows out of long-term political trends and dynamics of U.S. society, and should also be seen in the context of related developments in a number of other countries.
- Liberal efforts to restore the status quo ante are fundamentally inadequate, because (a) many of the changes the regime has wrought are structural and can’t simply be undone by electing new officials, and (b) support for Trump has been fueled by broad popular anger at the failures of the U.S. political and economic system to address human needs, so just turning back the clock would likely result in another, possibly worse far right resurgence.
- The Democratic Party’s claims to be an opposition force are fundamentally compromised, because the party has been actively complicit in helping to lay the groundwork for much of what Trump has done, and because its structural role is to mobilize popular support for U.S. capitalism.
- The far right’s rise and Trump’s project largely reflects the left’s failure to offer a credible radical vision and strategy that speak to more than a few people. Leftists need to approach this struggle with a willingness to rethink old ideas, principled engagement with popular struggles, and a recognition that nobody has all the answers.
“At the Turning of the Tide”
“A year into the second Trump era,” CrimethInc.’s “At the Turning of the Tide” declares, “authoritarians are in control of the federal government, but they have yet to gain control of society at large. They have done tremendous harm, but their assault has hit a plateau, if not yet an impasse.” The situation was still profoundly dangerous, but it presented new opportunities for hope. “It is finally possible to imagine how we might not only defeat them but take advantage of the situation to make more profound changes than were thinkable before.”
“At the Turning of the Tide” (which I’ll call ATT for short) frames Trump’s rise as the result of structural processes in US capitalism, notably the massive growth in wealth inequality and the militarization of policing brought by neoliberalism. This background section is short and abbreviated but makes some good points, for example arguing that pillaging the state, which has become one of the Trump regime’s defining features, isn’t just about greed—it’s a necessary capitalist response to declining rates of profit.
The bulk of the essay details the Trump regime’s first year, including its drive toward dictatorship, the incipient rifts in the Republican Party, and the growing popular resistance. By late 2025, the essay argues, the regime had mostly achieved its initial objectives, from packing the federal bureaucracy and military with Trump loyalists to cracking down on dissent in universities and the media, and from realigning foreign policy with white supremacism and the far right to normalizing corruption. “Above all, the goal is to accustom the general population to suffering—both to others’ suffering and to their own…. This explains why they commit their worst atrocities not in secret, but as media stunts.”
Yet as ATT points out, authoritarianism poses serious risks for the rulers. “They are gambling that hard power is worth more than soft power,” or, as the authors put it elsewhere, instead of bribing his subjects with bread and circuses, Trump is “buying off his support base with entertainment alone” while destroying the social safety net and impoverishing what remains of the middle class. Here again, ATT argues, the choice isn’t arbitrary or determined by Trump’s ego; it reflects structural constraints on today’s rulers.
In this context, ATT saw the last few months of 2025 as a “turning of the tide,” a time when the regime lost momentum through a confluence of shifts: growing protests and anti-ICE resistance, setbacks in the courts and in the November elections (especially Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City), widening fissures in the Republican Party, and rising fears that Trump’s policies could be leading to an economic crisis. All this made it harder in some ways for the regime to intensify repression, but, the authors warned, a weakened Trump was still dangerous and could become desperate. “Like Benjamin Netanyahu, he may instigate wars—or worse—as a means of evading his day of reckoning.” A few months on, the double-edged reality of that moment has only sharpened. Anti-ICE resistance, dissension within MAGA, and other setbacks to the regime have increased, but Trump has launched increasingly devastating military attacks on other countries, with increasingly risky and unpredictable consequences.
While recognizing that electoral politics is part of the mix in the struggle against Trump, ATT emphasizes that “the elections will only matter if the balance of power shifts against Trump both in the streets and inside the state”—especially given that “Trump has made it crystal clear that he will not leave power voluntarily.” And whether elections go forward or not, Trump has made the state structurally more authoritarian, a legacy that future office holders whether Republican or Democrat will leave in place. So now more than ever, we need “a strategy that outflanks and delegitimizes party politics along with capitalism and the violence that sustains it.” The essay also squarely rejects warnings by some liberals that it’s dangerous to resist in ways that are too militant, on the specious grounds that doing so gives the regime an excuse to intensify repression. “[T]here is no route to a better future that does not begin with building the capacity to resist the violence of the state.”
ATT advocates a divide-and-conquer strategy to defeat Trump, focusing not on his die-hard followers but rather on “segments of his support base that are not permanently committed to his reign, but whose backing is essential to keep him in power.” We should analyze these groups’ interests and priorities, and find ways to pressure them into withdrawing their support. As an example, ATT argues that in the summer of 2020, protesters in Portland, Oregon staved off a Trump coup attempt by defeating the federal agents Trump sent there to impose order, thereby “convinc[ing] elements of the ruling class that Trump’s efforts to remain in power would only endanger them.” As a further example, ATT cites the spring 2025 protests at Tesla dealerships, which successfully hurt the company’s reputation and stock price and arguably helped pressure Elon Musk’s to leave the Trump administration.
“Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility”
A related but different take on radical analysis and strategy comes from the “Mr. Burns Collective,” which in November 2025 published “Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility” on the insurrectionist web journal Ill Will. Although this document follows a more compressed format than “At the Turning of the Tide,” its scope is wider, addressing revolutionary possibility not just in the United States, but globally. Developments in the United States implicitly loom large here, but the wider framing allows the authors to focus on issues that transcend the Trump regime’s peculiarities. In addition, most of their analysis extrapolates from the present into the near future. This makes “Ten Theses” to some extent a speculative document, but it’s speculation that we need to take seriously.
The context for any revolutionary motion today, “Ten Theses” argues, is that neoliberalism, colonialism, and the fossil fuel economy—three pillars of the global order all of us have known—are on their way out. “The highly complex world of global supply chains and just-in-time delivery, of ever-increasing per capita resource consumption, of continual economic growth, and of commercial and communicative hyper-connectivity is coming to an end.” This transformation will vary from place to place but will be destructive and disruptive for most of the world’s population, as the rulers retreat behind walls and intensify state repression and warfare in order to hold onto power, and as ecological and economic breakdowns bring “significant food, energy, housing, and social shocks.” Automation and AI will decrease reliance on human labor in the construction of wealth, and capitalism will shift from a focus on economic growth toward “new modes of enclosure that include significant long-term destruction of value (i.e., not just periodic market crises).” We will also see a decline of US dominance and “a move away from globalized systems of trade to more regional networks of autarky, and the end of liberal norms of human rights, as we have already seen with the genocide in Gaza.”
The authors expect that the global order’s systemic transformation and multi-faceted collapse will disrupt current hierarchies and fuel “widespread rebelliousness and rejection of state legitimacy,” thus opening new revolutionary possibilities—but will also require new approaches to political analysis and strategy. In particular, they argue, the fragmentation of global systems and the uneven nature of the collapse mean that revolutionary organizing will need to focus on local conditions and should seek to gain power at the local and regional levels rather than the nation-state level. They envision translocal revolutionary organizations will “offer coordinating analyses…and a unifying collection of principles for pluralistic flourishing” while relying on local actors to determine their own courses of action.
Comments
There’s a lot I find useful in both “At the Turning of the Tide” and “Ten Theses on Revolutionary Possibility,” but both of them have significant limitations. For example, ATT can inform the vital project of building militant grassroots forces independent of the Democratic Party, but strategically it focuses narrowly on the goal of “toppling an autocrat,” not radical systemic change. And while its divide-and-conquer strategic recommendations are good as far as they go, they need to be combined with other pieces of a strategic picture, such as Dandy Andy’s discussion in “What the F**k Is to Be Done?” of the relationship between class analysis and intersectionality, guidelines for working in coalition with liberal forces, and the need to balance public organizing and movement security.
“Ten Theses,” in contrast, is concerned with systemic, liberatory change rather than “just” overthrowing a would-be dictator, but it is written in such broad terms that it offers a framework for developing revolutionary strategy rather than a strategy itself. In addition, the situation “Ten Theses” describes is not the present reality but rather a short- or medium-term future, and it’s not the only plausible future we can envision. We can see foreshadowings of the collapse the Mr. Burns Collective describes, but it hasn’t happened yet on anything approaching a global scale. That doesn’t mean we should ignore the scenario they outline—far from it—but as with ATT we should consider their argument in combination with other analyses and perspectives.
Image credit:
French Revolution, 1789 painting, artist unknown, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.