Restoring Sanity
We will prevail. We need to talk like it.
Trump and Musk are trying to gaslight us all into believing that they have unlimited power. They do not. Experts say that fascism succeeds by making it so that people can no longer envision the alternative. Our job is to help people see the real reality: that Trump and Musk can - and already are - being stopped. Here is WHAT TO SAY.
Re-Booting Normal
During the Bush years, I depended on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show to keep me sane. Yesterday, this piece from TFN helped me regain my bearings after days of being emotionally overwhelmed.
“In just a couple of weeks, a criminal infiltrator managed to get inside the halls of multiple agencies, disrupting government work and threatening federal employees who have served their country for years. The suspect heads a criminal organization known by its acronym, DOGE, or Dicking Over Government Employees.”
Experts on tyranny point out that people are ill equipped to handle fascism because they make it look inevitable, and we lose our ability to envision the alternative.
Trump and Musk are trying to gaslight us all into believing we live in their FANTASY WORLD in which everyone bows before their power. Comedy of this type works by snapping us out of the brain fog and back into the real world where - oh yeah - Elon Musk is not a God, he’s just an a-hole.
That is what our messaging needs to do for people right now, especially for ourselves.
As you have heard me say many times before: what we talk about is what appears in people’s minds, even if we are making the case against it.
If we talk about Elon Musk’s actions as a “coup d'état,” we make people envision him succeeding. It makes the task of stopping him feel insurmountable, which increases their ability to scare people into obeying in advance.
If we talk about Elon Musk being on a CRIME SPREE, we make people envision what inevitably happens to people on a crime spree: they end up on the run from the U.S. Marshalls.
We need to talk like we live in a world where people like Trump and Musk get stopped, because we DO live in that world! Our successful court challenges, which are happening with remarkable speed, might get overshadowed by the atrocity of the day, but they are still happening.
Our job is to make it possible for people to envision that we can and will defeat these Bozos.
The Performance of Power
“The first step is to understand it.”
Trump’s strategy is to overwhelm us with so many actions and absurdities that we are overloaded and shut down. It is critical that we can visualize an over-arching story that makes all of these seemingly independent bits and pieces make sense.
In my last newsletter, I provided a general framework for organizing these actions around a narrative of corporate bribes and Trump payoffs. Here, Robert Reich crystalizes the chaos into a simple explanation that covers even Trump’s most inexplicable behavior.
Reich says that Trump is putting on a show. He is 1) demonstrating that he is willing to mete out huge punishments and rewards and 2) using unpredictability to terrify people into obeying in advance (like an abusive parent), so he can 3) trade some of that power with people with huge amounts of wealth, both here and abroad.
We don’t have to struggle to find logic in Trump’s individual acts. His motivations for everything are clear:
Trump is using EXTORTION to obtain WEALTH. Like organized crime shaking down business owners for protection money, he’s thinking, “Every now and then you gotta burn something down just to send a message!”
As Ezra Klein points out in “Don’t Believe Him”:
“Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.”
Note that people outside the United States aren’t buying the act. The leaders of Canada and Mexico humored him like a gullible child. Leaders in the Middle East aren’t having any of Trump’s plan for the U.S. to “take an ownership position” in Gaza. At some point this is going to look less like strength and more like reckless stupidity and advancing dementia.
Thank you for reading Reframing America! I need your help to continue this critical mission. The best thing you can do is to forward this email to everyone you know who cares about improving how we communicate with the American people.
Trump is not a dictator. He just plays one on TV.
Do not cause people to visualize a level of success Trump has not yet achieved, and probably won’t.
Trump claims success he does not have, and when he fails, he just changes the subject. Trump is not a “fascist” or a “dictator,” as much as he might like to be. Power is decentralized in the United States. We have leaders in state governments who do not answer to the White House. The presidency has very limited powers, even with a compliant Congress.
TRUMP IS ALREADY BEING STOPPED. Many of Trump’s executive orders have already been overturned by court order. Even Musk has met with roadblocks. A federal judge just limited DOGE’s access to Treasury Dept. financial systems.
Do cause people to visualize us standing up to them and winning.
Stop saying that “nobody is doing anything.” Stop feeding their narrative about “Democrats in disarray.” People did see this coming, and they did prepare, and that is why we’re getting court orders in days instead of months.
Our message should be this: “Patriotic Americans will stand up to Trump and Musk in defense of our laws and our Constitution. Many of us already have, and have won.”
We need to keep the attention focused on Trump’s losses and our wins. Every day, we need to champion every single thing anybody does to fight Trump and Musk, and cheer every single victory, no matter how small!
Burst the Bubble
Instead of building Trump and Musk up to alarm people into action, we need to use our words to diminish them. Don’t just throw around labels, use familiar words that come with clear moral judgment.
Donald Trump
Stop saying "We’re in a constitutional crisis." Nobody knows what that means. Say, “Trump’s orders violate the Constitution.”
Do not say that Trump is a “fascist” or a “dictator.” Is Trump even really in charge? Elon Musk and Project 2025 appear to be in control. Trump doesn’t seem to know what Musk, Miller and Voght are doing.
Trump is a con man and a habitual criminal. His main activity appears to be corruption and conflict of interest: paying off industries that helped him get elected by gutting public safety laws, and soliciting bribes and extorting money from people who have business with or cases before the federal government.
He is putting on a show, trying to convince us all that he’s mean and scary, when he is actually incompetent. He is a weak president with no mandate, and the slimmest possible majorities in congress. He’s doing everything the illegal and unconstitutional way, because he knows he couldn’t get it passed through congress, but that only means that he will fail as everything he does is inevitably overturned.
Trump does not understand how the world works. He is making mistakes left and right. He seems to think that governments own countries, like developers own land. He has already alienated our allies and united the Middle East against us.
He’s demolishing the government that the American people depend on, and putting the American people and our national security at risk, just so that he can give billionaires another massive tax break.
You get the gist. For more, see:
Elon Musk
Musk is not carrying out a coup, he is on a CRIME SPREE, racing from Department to Department stealing things with his little band of hench-boys, like Judge Doom and the Weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
If the CEO of a publicly traded company unlocks the office on a Saturday and lets his buddy come in and download onto a thumb drive the company's intellectual property, including proprietary technology and all of their customers’ credit card information, that would definitely be a CRIME.
Yes, Elon Musk is a criminal. What he is doing is public corruption and industrial espionage: theft of proprietary technology paid for and belonging to the American public, which he intends to use to fulfil his dream of making X everybody’s bank.
He is violating strict privacy laws: stealing the private financial and personal information of every American. He is violating national security laws by accessing top secret documents without a security clearance.
Elon Musk has major conflicts of interest. He has no loyalty to the United States or to the American people. He is using his position for personal financial gain. His businesses depend on government contracts and subsidies. He has substantial business interests in foreign nations, including China. He does not have security clearance due to conflicts of interest and drug use.
We do not want Elon Musk to do to the federal government what he did to X. He has nearly destroyed X which has lost 75% of its value since he took over. Musk has no business being put in charge of anything in the U.S. Government.
What’s Next
What we are seeing here after two weeks is a blitzkrieg that was supposed to roll right over us, but that we have managed to slow considerably and are on our way to grinding to a halt.
Some of us need to stay on this task. Others of us need to turn our attention to the bigger war. Their story is that “extralegal” action is warranted to fix a government that is hopelessly corrupt, woke and weaponized.
We need to make the affirmative case for our core institutions, to show people that not only is our federal government doing good work, but that it actually needs more resources, not less. We need to communicate that we do understand that big change is needed from government, but also that the change we really need is to use our government to take considerably stronger action to fight for economic fairness.
Thank you all for reading, and please take care of yourself at this incredibly difficult time. We will get through this.
In solidarity, always,
Antonia
Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647
Brilliant. You made me feel so much better. Yes crime spree. Yes to all the shifts in language. Masterful! 👏👏👏
So very helpful!!! I will change my language.