Robert Reich: Trump’s Phase 2 Now Begins – OpEd

Robert Reich

 September 16, 2025 

By Robert Reich

We are now witnessing the start of what might be seen as Phase 2 of Trump’s efforts to eradicate political opposition.

Phase 1 has centered on silencing criticism. It has featured retribution toward people Trump deemed personal “enemies” — not just Democrats who had led the criticisms and prosecutions of him in his first term but also Republicans and his own first-term appointees who subsequently criticized him, such as John Bolton. 

Phase 1 also entailed an assault on universities that utilize so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” harbor faculty members and students who speak out critically against Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide in Palestine, or offer classes critical of the United States’s history toward Black people and Native Americans. 

Finally, Phase 1 has gone after media that criticized Trump by withdrawing funding for public radio and television and relying on the billionaire owners of The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, and X to suppress criticism of Trump on their media platforms. 

Phase 2, it appears, will entail a more direct attack on all Trump’s political opponents, including the entire Democratic Party. 

Trump has vowed to order troops into cities run by Democrats — Washington, D.C., Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans. 

He posted a video last week assailing Democratic mayors on crime, although crime rates have fallen sharply in recent years. “For far too long, Americans have been forced to put up with Democrat-run cities that set loose savage, bloodthirsty criminals to prey on innocent people,” he says in the video.

Meanwhile, he’s sending disaster relief to states run by Republicans and that he won in 2024, most recently announcing $32 million in aid for North Carolina, “which I WON BIG all six times, including Primaries,” suggesting that states run by Democrats will not receive such relief. 

He has taken off the gloves with Democratic states and their representatives in Congress, virtually ordering the governors of Texas, Missouri, Indiana, and Ohio to redistrict in order to come up with more Republican seats. 

Another aspect of Phase 2 is his willingness to describe Democrats as “evil.” In a Fox News interview last week in which he complained about so-called “excesses” by the left, he referred to Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist and front-runner for mayor of New York, as a “communist.” 

In calling the entire Democratic Party the “radical left,” Trump seems eager to use the murder of Charlie Kirk to go after Democrats and liberals. Within hours of the murder, he declared that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” and he has hammered Democrats and liberals as “vicious and … horrible.” 

Trump’s Phase 2 thinking can be seen most vividly in the remarks of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who is turning Kirk’s murder into a political cause. As Miller wrote on Saturday:

“In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized,” calling them “the consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Miller continued: 

“There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. 

Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

Miller has vowed to use the power of the government against MAGA’s political enemies, calling his political opponents “domestic terrorists” and warning: 

“[T]he power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

Phase 2 must be understood against the backdrop of Trump’s rapidly declining popularity. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll, from September 9, shows that only 32 percent of Americans support Trump’s deploying armed troops to large cities. 

His economic policies are similarly unpopular. Only 36 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, 30 percent approve of his handling of cost of living, and 16 percent support Trump’s having the power to set interest rates or tell companies where to manufacture products.

Other polls show similar declines in support for Trump. 

Trump’s Phase 2 aims to overcome these declining poll numbers by demonizing the Democratic Party, liberals, and all other political opponents in an effort to divide the nation into those who are with Trump and those who are against him. 

The overall goal is to make loyalty to Trump a litmus test of American patriotism. 

I believe he will fail. Americans won’t fall for it. To the contrary: Trump’s Phase 2 will reveal the depths of his anti-democratic authoritarianism, from which even more Americans will recoil.

• This article was published at Robert Reich’s Substack

Robert Reich

Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and writes at robertreich.substack.com. Reich served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.