Bogeymen and Trojan Horses

How to identify and call out Trump and Musk’s fascist tactics

U.S. President Donald Trump listens as White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, speaks next to a Tesla Cyber Truck and a Model S on the South Lawn of the White House. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.

It’s tempting to avoid the news these days. The headlines read as a parade of horribles: Trump invokes the Alien Enemies Act! Medicaid funding to be slashed! Green card holders deported! Migrants disappeared to El Salvador! DOGE is inside our federal systems! Social Security in peril! Mass federal layoffs announced!

It’s overwhelming. And it’s doubly frustrating that many Democratic leaders, along with nearly all major media, have capitulated without any fight, leaving us with little faith that they are able or willing to counter any of this. Only the courts, and the people themselves, stand in the breach.

When we’re hit with a barrage of attacks, seemingly from all sides, it’s often very helpful to climb up a level and assess the situation from a higher vantage point. From there, we can see some commonalities in the other side’s strategy and develop our own to counter them.

It takes a bit of discipline, but if we stop thrashing around in panic and rise above the smoke and din, the picture becomes clear. It turns out that neither Donald Trump nor Elon Musk is very original in how he operates. Their M.O.s largely come down to two classic and well-understood ploys: bogeymen and Trojan horses.

Ask “why” when they raise up bogeymen

When Trump first came down his golden escalator in June of 2015 and announced his candidacy, he went off about how Mexicans coming over the border were rapists, murderers, and drug dealers.

Beyond the initial shock from his speech, there were two common reactions. The first was to denounce him as a racist, and the second was to defend the Mexican community from these attacks.

While these responses were understandable and important, it was rare at the time to see anyone asking “why.” Why was Trump demonizing Mexicans? Why was he inviting condemnation and committing what felt at the time like political suicide?

The answer, as experts in fascism would later come to point out more forcefully, is simple: Demagogues need bogeymen and scapegoats to stir up fear and loathing among their followers. These are powerful “gut” emotions that override higher thinking and allow for easy bucketing of people into good and bad sides.

Had we asked the “why” more wisely at the time, we would have identified Trump much sooner, not as some political clown with no hope of being elected, but rather as a dangerous would-be fascist. Here was a man seeking to tap into strong, negative emotions and willing to dehumanize an entire country’s inhabitants so long as it served his purposes.

We’re still falling into the bogeyman trap

Now here’s the depressing part: We haven’t learned our lesson. Trump keeps putting up bogeymen, but we keep responding not with an emphatic why, but rather disputing his wild claims or even arguing that we are tougher on the bogeymen.

Trump’s newest targets are trans people, and in particular transgender athletes in female sports. As the election grew near, he spent a lot of political capital stoking fears and getting voters to despise this very small subsection of an already small minority within an already marginalized community.

But instead of our first question being “Why is Trump coming after trans people?” we found ourselves debating whether Trump was right or wrong about it. And we’re still in that sandtrap of his making.

The problem, of course, is that once you do this, you’ve already lost. You are now on Trump’s turf, spending time arguing the merits of his claims, which only serves to elevate the “problem” in the public eye. Suddenly it feels like trans people are in every locker room and trans women in every public bathroom.

Trump doesn’t really think trans people are a problem, or even that transgender athletes in female sports is a problem. He admitted as much only recently, saying that he only brings the issue up around election time:

[They’re] fighting like crazy about ‘men’ being able to play in women’s sports…. I think it’s a 95 percent issue. But in a way, I wanted to keep doing it because I don’t think they can win a race. I tell the Republicans, I said, “Don’t bring that subject up because there is no election right now. But about a week before the election, bring it up, because you can’t lose.”

Bonus for Trump: He can now look like a strong leader who has taken care of this “problem” which of course was never a real issue to begin with. People are often surprised to learn, for example, that according to the testimony of its president, the number of transgender athletes in the NCAA is ten.

That’s right, ten.

And yet the transgender athletes in sports “debate” catches Democrats flat-footed because the public has already been worked into a slathering hunger over a complete nothing burger, in large part because Democrats keep giving the issue oxygen.

For example, Democratic Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred was so concerned about Ted Cruz’s television ad attacks on this subject that he put out an ad himself insisting he doesn’t support “boys in girls’ sports.” This was bad politics because not only had Allred betrayed his own principles and his friends in the LGBTQ+ community, but he had taken the trans bait, which as a rule you should never, ever take.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who bafflingly launched a podcast where the first two guests he platformed were Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, doesn’t understand this basic rule either. He recently told Kirk that, with respect to transgender athletes on female sports teams, “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair.” He added, “I am not wrestling with the fairness issue. I totally agree with you.”

Congratulations, Gov. Newsom. You are now part of the problem and the weak Democratic response to fascism.

The right way to answer unfair attacks, and the obvious use of edge cases like trans athletes to distort the picture, is not to agree with the attackers. When demagogues put up bogeymen (e.g., trans people, migrants, Muslims) to frighten and divide people, the first thing out of any leader’s mouth should be to call them out.

The response goes something like this:

You know, I see right through you, and so do the American people. You’re targeting a group of people who are already bullied and misunderstood. You want to scare everyone into overreacting, to tap into that fear and fuel your own political ambitions. It’s cynical, it’s bullying, and it’s frankly disgusting.

And when you’re done attacking one group, you’ll move on to the next, because that’s how fearmongers like you operate. But I won’t be a part of that, just so you can make new headlines and edit clips for political ads. You want to demonize others instead of talking about things that actually matter and affect the lives of voters and their families. You do this because you don’t actually have any answers, just more division and fear.

To the extent we do talk about whatever “problem” they want to hype, it’s vital to focus on how it is in fact a non-issue, a bogeyman of their creation. We need to remind people, for example, that red states are scrambling to pass anti-trans laws that cover only a handful of students. The reason they are doing that is to target and marginalize the trans community, and not out of any genuine concern for families or students.

This won’t be easy. The right will respond with images and videos of masculine-presenting trans women who look physically imposing, goading us into accepting their framing of the debate. But we need to be disciplined. Of course, it’s easy to rile people up over edge cases, just as it is easy to get many voters to believe all Muslims are terrorists or all Venezuelan migrants are murderers and that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield. No matter what we say, that is the nonsense they will come back with. And sadly, we will not win if we engage with them on their terms. There will always be bogeymen for them to point to, so our first response must be to expose that tactic for what it is.

In the 1950s during the McCarthy era, the bogeymen were communists and homosexuals. The media got coopted into the red and the pink scares, blaring headlines that made it seem like there was a huge problem with both. Anyone who tried to prove they weren’t a member of either group was already doomed.

Had the media and politicians first demanded an answer to the all-important question of why, the country would have more quickly understood that the red scare was not about rooting out actual communists, but simply a way for McCarthy and his thugs like Roy Cohn (who by no coincidence was a mentor to Donald Trump) to terrorize and silence their enemies.

Trump is a student of this time-worn tactic. He immediately understood, for example, that he could leverage the murder of Laken Riley by a Venezuelan migrant into a terror campaign against all Venezuelan migrants, which then could extend to all migrants, and then to all immigrant communities. Democratic leaders didn’t have the political courage to push back and call out Trump for using Riley’s murderer as a bogeyman to paint all migrants as murderers. That was because they believed doing so would make them look soft on migration and soft on crime.

What they really were was soft on fascism. Indeed, many of them even voted for the Laken Riley Act because they didn’t have the tools of effective counter-messaging or even know how to begin to respond to Trump’s demagoguery.

We must always begin by identifying why Trump is drawing so much attention, say, to one murder. Our leaders must courageously warn Americans what can happen, and what indeed has happened, whenever he stirs up these kinds of fears. We can now draw a clear line from fear and anger over Laken Riley’s murder to the summary deportation of anyone, without so much as a hearing, who is even suspected of being a Venezuelan gang member.

There should be no excuses for weak responses now. When Trump and the GOP fearmonger or scapegoat anyone or any community, no matter who they are, no matter how horribly they paint them, we need to immediately recognize it and call them out: This is exactly what fascists do to gain power.

Ask “why” when they roll up a Trojan horse

If the people of Troy had known beforehand of the cautionary story of a hollowed-out horse hiding soldiers within it, they would have been quite wary when a big, beautiful horse rolled up to the gates as a “gift” to the city.

Here in the U.S., we have the advantage of this parable and presumably know to be wary of Trojan horses. So then why are we so willing to accept the absurd notion that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, wants to give our nation a big free gift? Hearing Trump, the GOP, and Musk tell it, he simply wants to make our government more efficient out of the goodness of his heart.

Specifically, Musk has promised to root out “fraud, waste, and abuse” within our government. And who could possibly be against that, right?

Yet under the guise of this great gift from a benevolent billionaire, who claims to be actively rooting out unwanted things from our bloated bureaucracy, we have let in a viper. Musk is now positioned to gain unparalleled access to private financial data, to destroy the many parts of the government that were responsible for regulating his many businesses, and even to redirect government contracts, such as the FAA’s $2.4 billion communications deal with Verizon, to his own company, Starlink.

Had the media and Congress been asking the why more emphatically when Trump first put Musk in charge of government efficiency, we would have been far more on guard about his true intentions, which have never been altruistic. Musk didn’t become the world’s richest man by giving away his time and money, after all.

We would have understood that few big gifts are ever truly free, and indeed some hide very dangerous and self-serving motives.

We’re still falling for the Trojan horse trap

Musk, along with the White House as guided by Project 2025, is slashing and burning his way through the federal government on a self-described mission to improve efficiency by eliminating “fraud, waste and abuse.”

We already know that this is just a smokescreen for some far bigger plan. Strong evidence for this was on full display when Musk began to make completely unfounded claims that his DOGE team had discovered millions of dead people who were still receiving Social Security benefits. Computer experts debunked these claims as nonsense, but not before they became a rallying cry for the right. Social Security is corrupt and broken, they claimed, and needs to be fixed.

But let’s be clear: Social Security is weakened today because Musk has been able to attack it from within while using the Trojan horse of eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse. His goal is to convince tens of millions of Americans, who have paid into the system and are entitled to its benefits, that it is broken, wasteful, and corrupt, all so that private companies can gain access to its trillions.

As Judd Legum of Popular Info recently reported, an internal SSA memo reveals that the administration is preparing to gut its workforce and close many of its regional offices, on top of eliminating customer service by phone and disallowing walk-in appointments. Far from making things more efficient, this combination will make it much harder for older, less technology-savvy recipients to access services, meaning many will lose out. In the memo, acting SAA deputy commissioner Doris Díaz predicted “service disruption,” “operational strain” and “budget shortfalls” that would create increased “challenges for vulnerable populations.”

Musk uses other Trojan horse strategies, including making his private satellite internet service, Starlink, available for countries all over the world. Again, his goal is not altruistic but to eventually make more profit for himself. It also gives Musk an incredibly powerful weapon to deploy against governments who fall into his disfavor. Musk has threatened Ukraine, for example, with the loss of Starlink for use in repelling invading Russian forces.

The U.S. is vulnerable to this extortion as well. Musk is now eyeing $42.5 billion in rural internet broadband appropriations under the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program. As Gizmodo reported, Musk now wants to swap in Starlink for the planned fiber optic cables that are about to begin being laid from that Biden-era program. He’s promising quicker deployment for rural communities, but there’s a catch: As Evan Feinman, who directed the program for the last three years, wrote in a departing email to staff, Starlink’s satellite internet is “inferior” to alternatives, “delivering slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.”

And if Musk can control the internet service of most of rural America, that would leave him with incredible control, data and leverage over much of the country, on top of raking in hundreds of billions in profit from yet another project redirected to him by the government which he now controls so much of.

The Trojan Horse story reminds us that it doesn’t matter how good the gift looks or what lofty words of greeting and friendship come with it. We shouldn’t trust it; our first move should be to reject it outright; and by the way, why would we ever freely give any one person, let alone a power-hungry oligarch like Musk, that much power?

Lessons applied elsewhere

Once we understand that most everything coming from Trump, Musk and the administration is either a bogeyman scare or a Trojan horse deception, we know how to identify threats and tactics far more readily. Here are some quick examples:

• Tren de Aragua and migrant criminals: Bogeymen to give Trump unlimited powers to deport anyone

• No tax on social security or tips: Trojan horse to open the doors for a big tax break for the wealthy

• Fentanyl traffickers and migrant invasions: Bogeymen to justify high tariffs on our neighbors

• Make America Healthy Again: Trojan horse to eliminate vaccines and mRNA-funded research

• DEI / woke mind virus: Bogeyman to justify firing competent women and minorities and to attack higher education

• Offer to distribute DOGE “savings” to taxpayers: Trojan horse to justify continued slashing of the government

• Attacks on Zelenskyy as real obstacle to peace: Bogeyman to justify realignment to Russia

As you can see, it’s actually not that complicated. It’s important to become disciplined in identifying and calling out these ploys now, because in the not very distant future the stakes will grow even higher.

The ultimate form of a bogeyman, for example, is a major false flag operation, where the government invents a crisis and then blames it on another party in order to justify the seizing of dictatorial powers. That’s also known as a Reichstag moment, named after the arsonist burning of the German parliament just weeks after Hitler took power in 1933, which he then attributed falsely to the communists and used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties in Germany.

Be prepared for Trump’s own Reichstag fire, particularly if the economy continues to sour and he needs to create an emergency in order to justify an iron rule. He’s already invoked a “national emergency” over the border to justify tariffs and the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify summary deportations. Next up is a swing at the Insurrection Act to put military forces to use against his domestic enemies, and for that, he will need a very big justification indeed. If he doesn’t get one from the protests against his presidency, he very well may invent one.

And from there, his “Trojan horse” gift of using U.S. troops to, say, put down the “riots” could become his permanent way of ruling through military force instead of by the consent of the governed.

This next part is important: These are all avoidable outcomes. But to help ensure they do not come to pass, we and our leaders, both civic and cultural, need to collectively become much better, faster, and more responsive to the ruses of the regime. That way, when the big false flags and gifts of “law and order” do arrive, we are trained and prepared to reject them.