Harnessing Collective Power to Overcome Trump’s Fear Tactics

This is a guest post from FrameLab contributor Jason Sattler. Jason is LOLGOP on BlueSky and pretty much any other social media platform. His writing has appeared in USA TODAY, Wired.com, the New York Daily News and Alternet.

You can dissect his braying clownishness, his doting love of dictators, or his slavish devotion to selling his corporate sponsor's cars. However, when it comes down to it, Donald Trump has just one move.

Fear.

"It's the emotion at the heart of Trump and the GOP," Dr. George Lakoff has explained. "Fear of immigrants. Fear of people of color. Fear of equality for women and LGBT people. Fear of religions other than Christianity. Fear of non-existent conspiracies. Fear of the media. Fear of social progress. Ever wonder why?"

The answer, of course, resides in the brain. But it's also in the brain that we find the superpower that can help us neutralize Trump's fear mongering and save what's left of our democracy.

The simple way to make someone more conservative

Wannabe tyrants like Trump have always used a wildly exaggerated fear of the "other" to fool populations into trading their freedom for totalitarianism. And when they stoke wild moral panics—like the ones we're currently living through about trans people, immigrants, and student protesters—they literally change brains.

​​"Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals," wrote John Bargh, a professor of social psychology at Yale University and a hero of Dr. Lakoff. "And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course)."

Fear makes people more conservative and willing to toss out the fantastic things Americans have accomplished through institutions like USAID, the National Institutes of Health, or even Social Security. The suspicion that some "other" is taking something from you or threatening you or your family motivates people to action faster than any other stimulus.

But understanding this mechanism gives us power. When we recognize how fear operates, we can counter it effectively.

Triggering fight or flight isn't difficult, especially in a population bombarded with propaganda about the threats they face from anyone who isn't a white man or his wife who fiercely greets you with "Merry Christmas!"

And this experiment has played out right before our eyes over the last eight years.

Trump got 62,984,828 votes in 2016, 74,223,975 in 2020, and 77,302,580 in 2024.

How is that possible, you may wonder, when he has proven himself more unfit for the presidency or any job every step of the way?

As president, he led the U.S. into the worst response to the pandemic in the rich world and the highest layoffs ever. He inspired an insurrection at our Capitol. He kept our stolen national secrets in Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom.

But those facts are far less persuasive than fear.

His fear mongering, the media's compulsive need to share it, and even the urge to reshare the horrible things he says to stoke our amygdalas thinking we're turning people off to Trump are actually creating conservatives.

Of course, Elon Musk dumping in close to $300 million – plus the $44 billion he harnessed to buy Twitter and turn it into a MAGA campaign site – helped a lot. But that wouldn't have worked unless enough brains were primed and misguided by fear.

And as Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

This is where our collective strength begins. By recognizing fear as the tool being used against us, we can deliberately activate its antidote.

So how do we empower people to oppose Trump? If fear is Trump's superpower, how do we overcome it?

John Bargh can tell us because he created liberals in a lab. Bargh described an experiment in which participants engaged "in an intense imagination exercise":

They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to be able to fly, under one's own power. For the other half, it was to be completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general.

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans' attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

Is this a roadmap forward? Science demonstrates that feeling safe makes people more tolerant, progressive, and liberal. This is why the situation we face right now is so perilous.

Trump is a Reverse FDR. He's only got fear, but he's got a lot of it.

So first, we have to fight fear itself – and we do this by creating safety together.

People Power Rising

There are green shoots of people power everywhere, especially in the #TeslaTakedown, the 50501 movement, and the town halls where Republicans are facing the rage at the destruction of our government they're enabling. Yet those with the most power keep buckling.

Senate Democrats caved. University administrations refuse to stand up to the president. Big media companies are getting in line to pay him off.

"It seems that everyone is afraid — afraid that Donald Trump will target them next, afraid that Elon Musk may single them out on his social media platform," wrote Democratic super lawyer Marc Elias. "No one wants to speak up. Everyone wants to hide or lay low."

We could assume that America has always been a nation of cowards, and we're finally getting a chance to show it. Or we can consult brain science and recognize that we're in this situation because fear is everywhere. The problem will worsen until we decide to use the superpower that is the antidote to this evil brain game.

The power and safety in numbers

I'm going to do your brain a favor. Look at this:

1/6th of Serbia's population shows up to oppose a corrupt regime:

That's 1/6th of Serbia's population of almost 8 million people showing up in the country's capital to protest the corruption of the current regime, 100 days after a disaster at a train station in the town of Novi Sad.

Does it feel better to see that, or this:

Hungary: Tens of thousands protest against Viktor Orban's government:

That's tens of thousands in the streets to protest the regime of Viktor Orban, one of Trump's favorite despots and the GOP's favorite model for rolling back democracy by quashing the academic freedom of universities.

Do you feel better now? Suddenly, more liberal?

This is our superpower in action. There's a reason that tyrants hate protests. We know why Vladimir Putin has essentially eliminated any ability to gather in large crowds that don't support him; they make people feel strong. They make it feel that it's safe to oppose authoritarianism.

We can't put tens of millions of Americans in a lab and make them imagine a superpower to turn them liberal. But with each protest that grows, that superpower is activated in real life.

It's up to us

FrameLab's Gil Durán recently wrote about the 3.5% rule. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth studied over 300 uprisings across history and found something remarkable: When just 3.5% of the population actively joins a movement, her research showed, change often becomes inevitable.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we're nowhere near that number in America yet.

That's why Senate Democrats fear Trump and Musk more than they fear the voters. That's why the media is catering to the regime's bluster. That's why grad students are afraid to have their classes recorded for fear they'll say something anti-Trump that could kill their career before it even starts.

The truth is that America's most essential institutions for preserving liberal governance—the media, universities, and lab—are all failing in key ways when we need them most, explains Andrea Pitzer, who studied authoritarians around the world for her global history of concentration camps:

All this is to say that many of the traditional ways that people have pushed back against government overreach and rights violations are under attack, and some have already been sold out by those who were given a chance to lead and protect them. Absent institutional help, regular people will need to step up in bigger ways.

You could say that no one is coming to save us. But that might provoke fear, which we know only enables Trump.

So here's the empowering truth: We get to save America. We have the power. We have the strength. We have the numbers.

Trump has never had the majority of this country behind him. He has no genuine overwhelming support for his ideas because all his backing comes from fear, not inspiration or agreement. Americans overwhelmingly reject what he and Musk are doing to our government.

We know a mass movement can and will save this country. The only question is when. The answer seems clear. We will begin to win when Americans feel safe enough to reject Trump's only move.

Together, we create that safety.

Find a way you can stand up today:

• 50501 continues to organize actions against executive overreach in defense of our constitution.
• Join a TeslaTakedown near you.
• The National Day of Action on April 5th aims to bring out Americans nationwide to tell Elon Musk that he may have bought Donald Trump, but he can’t have our country. This is an excellent chance to feel the strength of our numbers. 

Gil Durán Speaks at #TeslaTakedown

FrameLab co-founder Gil Durán spoke during a mass mobilization call for the #TeslaTakedown movement yesterday. He provided a brief overview of the tech authoritarian ideology behind Elon Musk's dismantling of the United States government. Click here to watch.