Modern Polarization in Two Polls
Collapse is never the end. It's the pretext.
I. Collapse as Pretext
The signs are everywhere: record-breaking disapproval, MAGA consolidation, tariff backlash, judicial friction, political infighting, visible cruelty, and momentary institutional pushback. If you only skim headlines or follow the rhythm of social posts, you might believe the tide is turning. You might feel tempted to step back and breathe.
Don't.
This regime is not collapsing. It is consolidating—through friction, through noise, through spectacle. And we must understand the difference.
II. The Myth of Approval
There is a myth that regimes die when their approval ratings drop. That unpopularity disarms power. That ridicule erodes control. That when people are unhappy enough, the system will correct itself.
That myth is not just wrong—it's lethal.
Two recent polls illustrate why. According to a CNN poll, Trump's approval rating at the 100-day mark is just 41% — the lowest for any newly elected president in modern U.S. history. He's underwater on nearly every policy issue, with steep drops among independents, women, and Hispanic Americans.
But in a competing NBC poll, 36% of voters now identify as MAGA. Among Republicans, that number jumps to 71%, with college-educated men seeing a 16-point rise in MAGA affiliation since last year. Trump has never been more unpopular. He has also never been more entrenched.
This is not a paradox. It is the regime's operating model.
From tariffs to deportations, the Trump regime has racked up high-profile losses: court defeats, economic pain, international backlash, and institutional resistance. But these losses are not causing retreat. They are causing realignment. The drop in approval among independents is accepted as the cost of purification. Economic discontent can be reframed as evidence of sabotage. Legal defeats can be recycled as pretexts for prosecution of the judiciary, defunding, and outright defiance.
The regime is not failing in spite of backlash. It is failing toward consolidation.
█ Low approval ratings don’t constrain autocracy—they license escalation.
III. MAGA Crystallization
The Republican Party is no longer a coalition. It is a vessel. MAGA has swallowed it.
That 36% of voters (>80% of Republican voters) now identify with the movement is not evidence of ideological unity. It is authoritarian crystallization. As broad support erodes, the core becomes more militant, more media-sheltered, and more bound to Trump's personal dominion. The party's base is no longer merely conservative; it is post-constitutional, reality-resistant, and animated by a siege ethic. The spike among college-educated men is not a shift in policy consensus. It is a declaration of identity in a reality-warped war.
█ MAGA is no longer a faction—it is a crystallized minority rule project, forged not in consensus but in siege, spectacle, and submission.
IV. Legitimacy, Not Popularity
The real battlefield is no longer popularity. It is legitimacy.
CNN's numbers may suggest fading trust, but Trump's regime does not require broad approval. It is building a durable minority with structural control—over media, commerce, law enforcement, and digital surveillance. Disapproval means little if dissent has no institutional refuge. Economic backlash means little if pain is pre-spun as patriotic sacrifice. Court defeats mean little if federal agencies refuse to comply.
█ A regime built on executive orders, loyalty tests, and black sites does not need to be popular. It needs only to be unchecked.
V. Are We Winning?
It is tempting to look at the numbers and think the tide is turning. That institutional rejection is building. That the public will correct what the courts or ballots cannot. But here is what the data truly says:
There is no longer a middle. You are either building something that resists authoritarianism—or you are its terrain. The regime is not collapsing. It is converting backlash into fuel, disapproval into leverage, friction into loyalty.
█ Trump’s disapproval is not a forecast—it’s a warning. The storm is here. You don’t wait for authoritarianism to fall. You organize to make it irrelevant.
VI. Friction vs Fracture
We have seen real victories. Harvard’s resistance disrupted federal coordination and bought time, even as it deepened the regime’s committment to attacks across higher ed. Both the ongoing tariff debacle and the Abrego Garcia firestorm have united unions, clergy, students, and senators in visible defiance—while giving the White House the excuse it needed to escalate its war on the courts. Protests and rallies have filled the streets with a mass display of noncompliance. But the federal register is already trial-ballooning new definitions of "anarchic jurisdiction."
The regime would have it that every success be followed by reprisal.
Every reprisal has been a test. Every test has been a lesson.
This is not a regime in retreat. It is a regime in rehearsal.
█ Do not confuse regime disarray with regime decline. The failures you see are selective, useful, and more often rehearsals than real defeats.
VII. The Myth of Incompetence
The last month has bought us friction—but not fracture. Courts have begun ruling against Trump’s actions, especially in immigration and public health. But those same courts are now targets for structural erosion. Some law firms, universities, and governors are resisting—but this is different from saying “the law firms, universities, and governors are resisting”. The regime has lost control of its narrative. Its economic claims are mocked. Its deportations are condemned. But narrative dissonance is not narrative defeat.
What we have bought is time. What we have not bought is reversal.
And it would be a fatal error to assume collapse will do our work for us.
Authoritarianism does not collapse when it weakens. It deepens.
Trump has designed a government that uses chaos as leverage. He breaks systems to demand loyalty as the fix. He fires loyalists to remind everyone that he alone decides who is safe. He issues illegal orders to test which courts still expect compliance. He engineers visible instability to make the regime’s brutality seem inevitable.
What looks like incompetence is often a message. What looks like failure is often bait.
█ Do not expect self-correction. This regime is building power out of the rubble. Our only path forward is coordinated, layered resistance.
VIII. The Coming Sequence
And here is what comes next.
First comes normalization of the tariff collapse: inflation will be repackaged as sacrifice, while price controls and rationing frameworks appear under the guise of “patriotic stabilization.” Then immigration theater will resume its escalatation into routine black site deportations—legally ambiguous, jurisdictionally obscure, but procedurally rehearsed. Next will come renewed pressure on the judiciary: firings, investigations, budget attrition, selective injunction defiance. Surveillance will expand through DOGE and allied AI systems targeting protest organizers, civil society actors, and "non-cooperative" municipalities. And finally, emergency powers will widen.
In fact, all of that is barely an inch past what has already occurred.
And none of these moves are random. They are rehearsal. They are sequence.
So what must we do?
We must continue to build state legal defense networks—not just lawsuits, but alternative systems with real teeth. We must strengthen jurisdictional defiance. Governors and attorneys general must be ready to not just sue, but to refuse. We must continue to expand protest as we continue into the warm months of 2025. And we must expose tactical failure without mistaking it for structural collapse.
We are not losing. But we are not yet resilient. Not enough.
█ This moment demands clarity: the regime's weakness is not our strength unless we organize to make it so. Our victories will not come from collapse. They will come from construction—of structures, doctrines, networks, and refusal.
IX. From Polls to Power: Building in the Vacuum
The modern authoritarian does not govern by consent. He governs by calibration—of feedback loops, narrative friction, and system failure.
Approval ratings? Instruments of pacing.
Court losses? Fuel for restructuring.
Public outrage? A resource to be mined, reframed, and weaponized.
The illusion that this regime is governed by popularity metrics is not just wrong—it’s disarming. Trump’s machinery does not need to win over the middle. It needs only to manufacture inevitability.
Radical Federalism rejects the premise.
It begins with the understanding that collapse is not an event—it is a process. It is a shift from visible order to fragmented function, from centralized trust to distributed necessity. And in that vacuum, two futures contend:
One is autocratic cohesion: minority rule hardened by structural capture, surveillance, and administrative monopoly.
The other is federated survival: a layered sovereignty of governors, tribes, cities, courts, collectives, and mesh—capable not only of resisting the center but outliving it.
We do not fight this regime with popularity. We fight it with architecture:
Legal redundancy, so that no federal court can singlehandedly extinguish rights.
Jurisdictional shelter, so that ICE raids and federal surveillance hit procedural walls.
Mesh-based networks, so that when federal narratives collapse, civic meaning remains legible.
Prefigurative governance, so that food, power, and medical care survive the executive order that tries to kill them.
This is not theory. It is not aspiration. It is already beginning.
Every protest that becomes a hub.
Every town that chooses to be a sanctuary against unjust orders.
Every governor that lays groundwork for legal failover.
Every student, lawyer, medic, or mayor who decides this regime will not define the limits of what is lawful or real—
Each is participating in the only kind of majority that matters now:
a federated majority of refusal and reconstruction.
█ We do not need better approval. We need parallel legitimacy—earned, distributed, defended, and ready.