This will be a short note as I’m readying a three-day trip to Los Angeles in the next hours and your eyes are probably tired of reading so much everywhere about Saturday’s successful upsurge of national protest. I will be merciful!

I want to take a few minutes to put the last consequential week into some sort of perspective. I am also writing this on Sunday so I don’t know if the market will take another slam on Monday but it is clear that it’s not gonna be pretty in the short or middle term.

To the crux: The past week has seen major developments that are shifting the state of play.

• It has been a terrible 10 days for the Trump administration. I will mention only the top-lines because most of you already know the details. Signalgate has spread into an epidemic of fuckery and incompetence. A barrage of federal court restraining orders have ensnared the administration in prolonged litigation on several main planks of his agenda. The ICE Barbie video from El Salvador provoked mass nausea and repudiation. The rendering of a legal Salvadoran resident in the U.S. to that same megaprison was a “mistake” admitted by a lawyer from the DOJ but the administration clams it is powerless to being him back. Terrible PR. More reports and videos of DHS thugs accosting people and foreign students in the streets like Argentine death squads continue to surface and raise fears. They can comfort nobody except determined racists and fascists.

• Donald Trump unleashed a completely unhinged tariff order on the entire world, tanked the stock market and provoked the likely onset of a national recession and global economic earthquake. Our closest allies in Europe have issued travel warnings for tourists coming to the U.S. Trump’s tariffs were roundly denounced by British, French and German leaders. China has already retaliated with a 34% tariff on American imports. Canada has ginned up a fierce Don’t Buy American campaign and is removing American goods from it shelves. And the administration that was going to make America greater and richer on Day One is now warning people we are coming into a rough patch and to be prepared for “temporary” price hikes.

• Vice-President Vance and his wife were snubbed on their “diplomatic” visit to Greenland and Vance was forced to make only one brief appearance at a barren U.S. radar station 1000 miles from the populated part of the island.

• As Trump officials began to publicly grumble about the need to cut social services and Social Security, the House passed its version of the Trump budget including trillions in cuts to those services and dooming Medicaid (that serves 73 million Americans.) But a split in MAGA ranks led the Senate to pass its own version eliminating about 80% or more of the House cuts and that difference remains to be resolved. And to confirm popular opinion that Trump is indifferent to empathy and is, indeed, a narcissist psychopath, just hours after setting the world economy on fire he retreated to a weekend of golfing in a tournament on his own property sponsored by his best buddies from the brutal Saudi dictatorship. Let them eat MAGA hats.

Only the blind could not see our own Nero swinging the nine iron on the 18th hole as the world around him was ablaze.

On the other hand, there was a counterforce. Last Monday, Senator Corey Booker broke the upper house record with a 25-hour marathon speech shredding in no uncertain terms the entire Trump agenda in a passionate, cogent, and empathetic tirade. Think what you will of this performance but it clearly uplifted millions who had grown desperate and cynical about the limp Democratic response to Trump in the previous two months. Bernie Sanders and AOC shook things up with rallies that drew tens of thousands who have also been seeking some voice of salvation. We don’t have the hard numbers yet, but tens of thousands of new voters were registered. And Sanders this coming week is organizing five more massive rallies in the western U.S., including in some very red bastions like Bakersfield, California.

No question in my mind that the Booker-AOC-Sanders shows motivated thousands of those who participated in the 1000 or more anti-Trump rallies that exceeded all expectations of just about everybody in their size and scope on Saturday. Not just fifty or a hundred thousand in DC, but thousands more across the country including in Tennessee, North Carolina, Idaho and other Republican fortresses. Overall, this was a terribly positive and inspiring series of events that will hopefully lead to more and better actions and organizing in the weeks to come.

The leadership organizing these events are very mainstream and so were the attendees. In some rallies, it was union and community leaders who spoke to a sea of American flags and not the usual tiresome ideologues of the ultra-left sects. I’m a socialist but could not be happier that the constituencies that other so-called socialists claim to represent but don’t, were the ones actually doing the talking and applauding.

This was mainstream America coming into the streets and that has a truly revolutionary aspect to it. And only in a few instances did Democratic Party electeds dominate the scene and that’s also very good. This incipient movement must not become a Democratic satellite and must remain and grow as independent as possible. See my friend Micah Sifry’s NYTimes gift op-ed on this crucial topic of movement leadership. It’s right on the money.

Does this mean that Trump is doomed? Far from it. First, we need to turn these demonstrations into institutional organizations of opposition. The crowds were big, but youth and blacks were missing. They need an organic, independent leadership with clearly stated goals. Any thought of lateral decentralized “leaderlessness“ in the model of Occupy in 2011 must be firmly rejected.

Further, some people have to learn to hold hands with some they have differences with. This movement must be multi-racial, multi-generational, and must be one broad united front that stretches from moderate disenchanted Republicans to Sanders supporters and beyond. One goal only: Defeat Trump and MAGA. No check lists, please, for admission. We need to include not exclude.

What I call Litmus-Test Leftists should be disregarded as regressive and counter-productive. Some of the usual suspects like Greg Gandin blasted Corey Booker because he did not denounce Israel and the Gaza genocide and takes money from banks and AIPAC. True enough. But in this struggle, he is an ally. Maybe when Gandin gives up his support for Cuban dictatorship, Booker will relent on Gaza. Same bullshit from performance artist and “peace activist” Medea Benjamin who chided Saturday’s rallies for not denouncing U.S. support for Israel.

Maybe when she stops pandering to the same Cuban authoritarians and to the Chinese dictatorship as well, rally speakers will shift their rhetoric to the left. As a 60-year veteran of these sort of demos and protests what a relief it is to finally see some not led by these “leftists” trapped forever in a 1968 mindset. On this topic I refer you to Max Sawicky, a veteran boomer leftist economist who sternly warns those expecting a sudden magical burst of socialism to be wasting their time. As he did and so did I for too many years. It is NOT inevitable.

So...to begin summing up. The opposition is growing and Trump, mostly by his own hand, is now on his back feet. But make no mistake, he is today more dangerous than ever. He will not do a third term, legally, and he is set to lose the House…IF…the 2026 elections proceed as free and fair or if it all.

The tariff torrent last week brought forth a very clear lesson. Donald Trump alone, immersed in paranoia, cognitive impairment, and psychosis, is making these horrific policy decisions. His cabinet of misfits and fuck-ups are just following his erratic orders. Not one serious economist including those on the conservative right think his tariff moves are anything less than crazy and nonsensical.

The regime has become a personalized presidential dictatorship where damaging and heartless policies emerge from the whims, moods, and anger of one bitter old man filled with ignorance, rage and vengeance. He has no real advisors, except maybe the equally deranged misanthropic Stephen Miller. Rasputin to the Czar. In this case it’s Mad King Trump—and that’s not sarcasm. It’s a fact.

Trump is a cornered beast and will lash out rather than concede anything. He is already defying court orders and as he continues, the rule of law is crumbling at an alarming rate.

Just be aware that this week was bad for Trump and good for the rest of us. But we’ve got three-and a-half years to go—or more. We must escalate and sharpen our opposition as the storm has only just begun and the forecast remains foreboding. Take today to celebrate Saturday’s upsurge. Then, heads down and back to redouble our work and build opposition for the coming confrontations. Trump came up with nothing this last week. And when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. So, for us, full steam ahead with eyes wide open!

Marc Cooper has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, The Nation, and many others. At the University of Southern California he was the founding director of Annenberg Digital News. Read him on Substack at ​The Coop Scoop​.

Sane Americans might not be winning the political war quite yet, but we definitely get points for cleverness. A selection of signage from our Facebook friends around the country and the world. And, yes, this is Neil Young and Daryl Hannah in L.A.