For anyone trying to win or hold onto power, the only thing more debilitating than not knowing your enemy is persuading yourself that you have no enemy. Or, as is the case for President Donald Trump and his allies, persuading yourselves that your opponents, somehow, do not really exist.

Now, it is obvious that Trump sees a world of elites aligned against him. That is part of why he has launched a war on the capacity of those people to oppose him and his agenda. (The other reason is pure retribution and spite.)

“Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come,” my newsroom colleagues Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher report. Trump promised to “expose” his political enemies using the resources of the Justice Department. His chief deputy, Elon Musk, has encouraged his fellow travelers in the administration to investigate ActBlue, a donation platform that serves as critical infrastructure for the Democratic Party. The Trump administration is also going after Democratic-aligned lawyers and law firms that the president believes are hostile to his interests.

But there is also a context to these attacks that you cannot immediately glean from the president’s language, even when he is ranting and raving against his perceived enemies. For that context, you have to look to how the larger right wing talks about left-wing and liberal political opposition, especially opposition to Trump.

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The Myth of Outside Agitators

During the 2020 protests over the killing of George Floyd, a major refrain from the political right was that this was the work of outside agitators and saboteurs. “80% of the RIOTERS in Minneapolis last night were from OUT OF STATE. They are harming businesses (especially African American small businesses), homes, and the community of good, hardworking Minneapolis residents who want peace, equality, and to provide for their families,” Trump said at the time, adding: “It’s ANTIFA and the Radical Left. Don’t lay the blame on others!”

Some individuals and groups on the right claimed that George Soros, the Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor and billionaire philanthropist, was directly funding the protesters. Rudy Giuliani even went as far as to suggest that there was “coordination” and a “guiding hand,” turning his attention to Soros and, like Trump, “antifa,” in a conversation with Sebastian Gorka, a fellow Trump adviser and conspiracist, then out of the government. And some conservative groups purchased online ads that called on law enforcement authorities to “investigate George Soros for funding domestic terrorism and his decades-long corruption.”

For conservatives possessed of the conspiracy theory that the protests were the orchestrated work of a secretive billionaire, there was no way that a nationwide uprising against police brutality could be an organic response to a horrendous event. It had to be the work of nefarious outside forces, leveraging everything they had to take Trump down.

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The NPC Theory of Political Opposition

In the present, if you explore the depths of the right-wing world, you will continue to find a belief in the immateriality of popular political opposition to Trump — a sense that it is less the response of ordinary people with agency than it is a plot by outside agitators. To this point, there is a popular meme, recently shared by Musk, that portrays the attitudes and beliefs of liberal Americans as nothing more than the programming of nefarious elites. The meme is a visual representation of the idea that most people in the world are nonplayer characters, or NPCs, a term taken from role-playing games to refer to those characters who behave according to a script. They run on a loop, of sorts, capable only of what they’re written to do.

(Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the playable character is also shaped by written direction and exists within the confines of the game’s code or the game master’s script.)

One upshot of the idea that there is no such thing as genuine popular political opposition to Trump and the MAGA right — and that most, if not all of it, is the product of secret machinations by elusive billionaires and shadowy government agencies — is that the people are inherently on your side and your opponents are illegitimate. The other is that to defeat your opposition, all you have to do is strike at the individuals and institutions that fuel it. Remove them, and you’ll have no one in your way.

We see both conclusions at work in the way the president and his supporters are operating.

The Delusion of a Landslide Victory

Trump has never recognized the legitimacy of opposition against him and, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, he and his allies have spoken as if there were none.

His close win in the race for the White House — Trump did not clear a majority of the national popular vote, beating Kamala Harris by a scant 1.5 percentage points, one of the narrowest margins in American political history — has become, in the lore of the Make America Great Again cinematic universe, a historic landslide in Trump’s favor.

“The presidential election of Nov. 5 was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades,” Trump said in his address to a joint session of Congress on March 4.

In a recent interview on Fox News — where she decried the legal obstacles to Trump’s agenda, Attorney General Pam Bondi took time to remind viewers that Trump “won the popular vote by an overwhelming majority.” And Musk, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency is busy dismantling the federal bureaucracy while potentially costing the government hundreds of billions in lost revenue, is also fond of citing the president’s “landslide.”

Musk, in fact, has all but accused agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development of seeding the country with paid protesters, denouncing it as a “radical-left political psy-op” and accusing it of “interfering in governments throughout the world and pushing radical left politics.” Here in the United States, he said, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a “stooge of USAID.” And following a massive rally in Denver last week — where Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders drew tens of thousands of people in protest of oligarchy — Musk asserted that the participants were just “paid protesters” who had been moved around from previous events.

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The Dangers of Underestimating Opposition

It is quite fitting for someone with autocratic aspirations — and here I’m speaking of both Musk and Trump — to think that there are no wills in the world other than those of the wealthy and powerful. But one problem for the people living under this delusion is that it robs them of the ability to contend with the reality of bottom-up popular opposition. And this leaves them vulnerable.

To succeed in any conflict, political or otherwise, a skilled leader needs the ability to take a read of the land — to see the larger picture, anticipate difficulties, account for his weaknesses and know when to move or when to hold back, when to retreat or when to go on the offensive.

To do any of this effectively, however, that leader needs to have an accurate measure of the people he’s up against — a real sense of who they are, what they want and what they can do. You cannot win if you think yourself invincible against an opposition that may as well not exist. That mentality leads, almost inevitably, to the profound errors and catastrophic mistakes that can destroy armies or take down entire regimes.

Trump did not win in a landslide. He is not a figure of overwhelming popularity. Just the opposite. He won narrowly and has now lost the approval of a majority of the public. Despite this, he’s moved aggressively to try to consolidate an authoritarian turn, exercising unilateral executive power against large numbers of Americans, including key groups within his own government: the veterans who make up a large part of the federal workforce, law enforcement and the military.

Trump is behaving as if he has no opponents that matter. But he does — and their anger and energy are on the rise. For every institution in American civil society that capitulates to Trump rather than honor its stated ideals, there are many ordinary Americans who are ready to fight.

If there’s anything left to take down the Trump administration and consign Trump to the ash heap of history, it will be this fatal miscalculation — this belief that the only thing that sustains American liberalism is outside funding and “deep state” shenanigans. The public, however, is not a mirage. And even authoritarian regimes need a measure of public support — the consent of at least some of the governed.

Trump and MAGA’s gamble is that they’re built differently. Maybe they are. But as the Greek playwrights teach us, hubris has a way of angering the gods.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jamelle Bouie/Mark Peterson
c. 2025 The New York Times Company