Targeting and testing: How attackers tip their hands

And what that says about how vulnerable they actually are

If you’ve ever taken a self-defense class, you’ve learned a little about the psychology of attackers. They look for easy victims, not hard ones. That’s why they test your boundaries before actually attacking you—to see if you resist the small incursions, as a test of whether you’ll fight back particularly hard against something that is a bigger deal. They also try to read your body language: Do you look easy to intimidate?

But targeting and testing doesn’t have to be so direct. Wanna-be dictators also engage in testing. But people who want political power test the government and the public. Trump didn’t send ICE out in large numbers immediately. At first he had them kidnap a person here and a person there, to gauge public response. Likewise, even in his first term he tested Congress. His first impeachment in the House was for violating Congress’ power of the purse: That impeachment wasn’t just about the quid pro quo that Trump tried to establish with Zelenskyy, but about the fact that, at the time, Trump was withholding funds that Congress had set aside to send to Ukraine. (Yes, this was before Putin invaded.) But there wasn’t a large public outcry back then of people saying, “hey, the President can’t fuck around with money Congress gave him for a specific purpose—he has to actually use that money for that purpose.” Instead people focused on the quid pro quo in what Trump described as a “perfect phone call.” I wonder if it bothered Trump that most people didn’t even really notice that he was violating the separation of powers too.

He tested harder when he incited a crowd to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Got away with it, too. What message do you think he took from that experience?

When Trump was elected the second time, he seems to have decided not to waste time testing the public or Congress in little ways. He started a full-on assault on Congressional authority from day one.

The two actions I have on my mind now are his withholding of SNAP funds that two federal judges told him Friday he must spend on SNAP, and his insistence that the 60-day limit in the 1973 War Powers Resolution does not apply to his bombing of Venezuelan boats (his 60 days will be up on Tuesday). Both these matters have to do with separation of powers, specifically separation of powers between Congress and the president. (There is also a different separation of powers conflict going on—the separation between the federal government and the states and localities.)

The Constitution is very clear that Congress, not the president, decides how federal money is spent. At best the president can make small adjustments in budgets provided to federal agencies—his budgetary powers are as an administrator. Trump expects to lose the battle of the purse, I think. That’s why he’s testing another boundary by asking his friends to donate money to pay for his ballroom and to fund the military during the government shut-down. Maybe he’ll also get a good buddy to pay for SNAP for November, as a compromise and to look like a hero, but if he does, be sure you notice that this isn’t heroic behavior, it’s corruption, and it’s a crisis he manufactured by refusing to do what Congress told him to do with the money it provided in the first place. He’s lining up his friends to provide money in case Congress tells him no, not because he wants the money (though he probably wants that too), but because he wants to make sure that he will still have done something illegal and violated a democratic norm related to money even if Congress finds a way to let him off the hook otherwise.

I think Trump expects Congress to cave on war powers for the Venezuela action, though. But there are two ways Congress could cave. It could do nothing and just let the president run right over its boundaries. Or it could vote to authorize his actions. The latter would at least be a way for Congress to exert minimal authority by saying, “Of course, he’s only doing this because we allowed it.” Neither option is great, though.

You might think that the party whose boundaries Trump’s actions toward Venezuela tests is Venezuela. But this is a two for one deal. Sure, he’s testing Venezuela and really, by extension, various other Latin American countries, and even, by further extension, the global balance of power.

But his real target here is the United States Congress. There isn’t much left that Congress hasn’t let Trump do. It refused (as a collective body) to take any real action against him for the January 6 matter. When Trump returned to office, he began to systematically dismantle the government, largely through DOGE’s actions. He began firing federal workers whose jobs were protected and who it was illegal for him to fire. He tipped his hand massively by firing the heads of watchdog agencies FIRST. He began his assault on federally allocated funds right from the beginning with USAID. All summer he’s been violating at least the norms around immigration law, and in many cases the laws themselves. He has continued his assault on the Congress’ power of the purse throughout this funding standoff. But attacking Congress’ war powers by violating the War Powers Resolution, should he do so, gives him a second front in his war on American democracy.

Because that’s what this is. American democracy is founded on the separation of powers in the Constitution. And again, though Congress has various powers, the two most important are deciding what to do with federal money and deciding whether and when to declare war. These are the exact two powers that Trump continually targets and tests.

Those of you who think that the president has dementia or that he’s an overgrown child are missing the point. Maybe he’s losing some mental acuity. Maybe he has given some of his authority to advisors. But even if that’s true (and I don’t think we know that), will you all please keep your eye on the ball? Trump’s health is not the ball.

The ball is power, and for months now Congress has acted like it doesn’t have any.

I don’t want to leave you in despair so: Here is what I see as reason for hope in this ridiculous situation.

The president, his friends and supporters, his allies, the Heritage Foundation, all of them, are afraid they will lose. Against all the evidence that Congress can’t or won’t resist authoritarianism, they still fear that they will lose. How do I know?

There is a reason why people with power and privilege love grace and courtesy, charm and fancy things. The more effortless they make having power look, the more it looks like they didn’t do anything violent to get to be in the positions they are in. Then if people object, oh, those people are the angry, rude, and nasty people. Over here, we in power have such lovely manners. That’s what they’re doing.

If people with power use force, violent force, to accomplish their objectives, it pulls the Band-aid right off all their lies. And then you can see their vulnerability.

When people use force, it’s because they are afraid. It’s because they think their backs are against the wall and they can’t win any other way. That’s an awful lot of fear for people who supposedly, by all accounts, are already rich and powerful.

Trump and his allies are even afraid to let immigrants enter the country. Think about that. Immigrants, despite the lies we have been told, don’t need to come to the United States to break laws and commit acts of violence. You can commit acts of violence anywhere in the world; you don’t need democracy for that. Plus, statistics show that American citizens are far more violent than immigrants. Immigrants for the most part come to the United States to find work. And, remember, work is central to conservative ideology. Republicans’ favorite thing is to call people lazy. People come knocking at America’s door looking for work, and these people say no? WTF? They say they want people to work, and they say they want to reverse population decline because they say they’re afraid in the future America won’t have enough workers (even though on another day they’ll tell you they don’t need as many workers because of AI), and then they attack a group of people who could help them with both these things. You’d think they would welcome them with open arms. Especially because America’s lawmakers have not made entering the country illegally a felony, which is a thing Congress could probably do if it had support for such a law. (And do you think politicians don’t realize that if they just gave blanket citizenship to all immigrants that they would immediately have a new group of supporters who might even vote for them?) None of this makes sense.

Unless this administration’s stated ideals are not reflective of their true intentions.

Unless their words have never been meant to inform, but are instead meant to test.

Unless they chose the most vulnerable because that’s who attackers always look at first!

If attackers were strong, they wouldn’t, by the way, look for the vulnerable. If they were super strong and wanted to test their own superiority, they would look for someone of equal strength to spar with. If, on the other hand, attackers are secretly scared, and secretly feel very weak and hesitant, then they would look, as they are doing now, for those who are weaker than they, making a huge deal out of the optics of the situation, so they can make it look like they are big and scary.

This president knows that he could even be removed from power. He has not forgotten how close he came to prison time in the months before he was elected.

One of the things that scares him is that he almost went to jail through peaceful, lawful means.

That’s the good news.

If the American people rise in violent revolution, he will try to suppress us with military force. I think that might actually be his ideal scenario, because then he would be able to make a stronger case to the military that he should be allowed to impose martial law. I don’t know if that’s his view, I can’t read his mind, but I am just speculating.

But Americans don’t want violent revolution. Americans want peace and safety. In fact, Americans want peace and safety so much that we have put up with an inordinate amount of testing just to avoid jeopardizing what remaining peace and safety many of us still have. So this president has teased and taunted with his AI videos and his bulldozers knocking down the White House. And now in absolute desperation, he has turned to taking food out of the hands of children, because historically, taking food from people has been a tool that you could rely on to get people to revolt. But one flaw in that plan is that there isn’t a famine in the U.S. Food exists. Americans know how to feed each other. And we don’t need Congressional approval to do so, either.

I’m not the first person to say this, many people have said it, but this is a game of chess. It is not a game of “let Donald Trump boss everyone around.” And, Dems in Congress: This is also not a game of “let’s count the votes.” This is a game of chess, and in chess, the queen is the most powerful piece, while the “king” has the least power. Even the pawns are more powerful than the king, especially at the beginning of the game.

At the beginning, the “king” isn’t even on the field.

This time, this is the people’s game.

You all remember how this “king” tried to rename Denali, even though he can’t even land anywhere in Alaska except for Elmendorf Air Force Base. He can’t set foot on Denali. He might as well try to rename the stars.