MAGA in Motion

What we can learn simply by describing what we see from the second Trump administration

U.S. President Donald Trump takes a question during a swearing in ceremony for interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Jeanine Pirro (R) in the Oval Office of the White House on May 28, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

It’s probably a perennial fact of life—and certainly a fact of political life at the present moment—that people who value verbal and conceptual fluency tend to overstate the power of words and concepts in the world.

The examples are almost too numerous to mention.

To take just a few: The highly educated activists, academics, and journalists who believe in advancing the cause of the left in the culture war also believe passionately in the power of labeling their opponents “racists,” “misogynists,” “homophobes,” and “TERFs,” with the assumption being that affixing these terms does them serious reputational damage, weakening their potency in the world. In response, those on the opposite side of the culture war use (and overuse) “woke,” “cultural Marxist,” and other epithets as all-purpose weapons.

We also see it in the rancorous fights surround Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, where defenders of the Palestinian cause have repeatedly sought to describe Israel’s actions as tantamount to “genocide,” while pro-Israel writers, activists, and scholars reach early and often for the “anti-Semitism” label to tar those on the other side as expressing hateful bigotry toward Jews.

Then there are those like myself, who use terms like “fascism” or “competitive authoritarianism” to describe where the second Trump administration is headed.

My point isn’t that these labels are necessarily inaccurate. It’s that we fool ourselves into exaggerating the power of deploying them, as if we think of ourselves as ideological physicians conducting an etiological investigation, collecting facts, statements, and other kinds of evidence (or “symptoms”) to confirm a diagnosis that justifies a quarantine.

We too easily forget that we lack the power to impose and enforce the quarantine.

That’s one reason why I’m going to try something a little different in this post. Instead of collecting bits of proof to justify a diagnosis, I’m just going to describe some what I’m seeing in and around the second Trump administration in the hope that doing so will enable us to see something we may otherwise be missing about its character.

Random, Harsh, Cruel, and Capricious