According to Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The law relates to physics but has relevance for politics. President Trump and his minions would do well to heed it.
As the first few weeks of the Trump administration’s actions have clearly shown, the president’s agenda is revolutionary, hoping to bring about rapid, comprehensive and fundamental change to American life. If past revolutions from above are any guide to the future of Trump’s endeavor, his revolution will not only fail to achieve its goals, but also generate its opponents and gravediggers.
Trump’s revolution will fail because rapid, comprehensive and fundamental change is too complex, with too many imponderables and unknowns to succeed. Unintended consequences will appear, problems will arise and sooner or later the whole project will come to a standstill. Except of course that it will have ruined the lives of millions of people — usually those with the least to lose.
The affected elites and masses, which will comprise everyone besides Trump’s fanatical supporters, will likely take to the streets and demonstrate that “people power” can be an effective tool of resistance to revolutionary elites with inhuman agendas. The administration would respond with threats and violence, but, unless it’s willing to engage in mass terror in the style of the French Revolution, the coercion would only harden the resolve of the protestors. The mass marches would continue.
But a certain segment of the opponents would draw a different lesson from the government crackdown. Like the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers and Young Lords in the U.S., and like the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy, they may conclude that violence must be countered with violence.
Expect bank robberies and assassinations, campuses in turmoil. The National Guard would be mobilized. But the key line of defense, the FBI, would likely be too disorganized and too demoralized to track down the terrorists.
Then things could get worse. With the FBI and CIA in disarray, and with a Putin sympathizer whom no European service will trust in charge of national intelligence, the U.S. will be an easy target for foreign terrorists delighted by FBI Director Kash Patel’s and Elon Musk’s pell-mell destruction of American security institutions. A repetition of 9/11 is no longer unthinkable.
Both responses to Trump’s revolution — national protests and domestic and foreign terrorism — would delegitimize the president and his regime for a simple reason: Having assumed charge of all of America, Trump will be held responsible for everything that goes right and everything that goes wrong. And far more will go wrong than right.
At that point, with chaos and disorder spreading throughout America, Trump could either up the ante and employ mass violence, or have to step down, probably as a result of a palace coup led by an opportunist such as Vice President JD Vance. Mass violence would not save the regime, as it would only generate an equal and opposite reaction. A palace coup could rid the country of an illegitimate leader and usher in a transition to moderation and democracy — call it a Thermidor — that Vance would be unlikely to survive politically.
There will be chaos, but America will have the opportunity to save itself from the revolutionaries and terrorists.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
