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James Herbert2
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You’re welcome :) 

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by Denis
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-23

Personal Blog

I cannot help believing that the single most impactful thing that anyone could do right now to help the world would be to stop President Trump. 

Yes, the man who would take over is equally awful in terms of policies, but I don't think he holds the same fear-factor which is currently preventing decent Republicans from stopping Trump. Until Trump is gone, I see very little hope. And I don't think we can allow humanity's hopes to rest on the Democrats suddenly fixing the myriad political and psychological problems that render them so unelectable. 

Too many people are trying to normalise the situation. The situation is not normal. People say any comparison with Hitler is false, because there is (thankfully) no evidence that Trump is an antisemite. But WWII was a global tragedy which killed at least 50 million people and destroyed many countries. Trump is moving in a similar direction. He's too afraid to take on the big powers, so he's appeasing Russia and instead using the threat of US power against Greenland and Gaza and Panama. So far. 

He's also utterly transactional in a way that goes against everything Altrusim stands for. He wants to force Ukraine to sign away their raw materials, much the way colonialists did in the past. He sees no personal benefit in helping people in other countries, so he's stopping US Aid. He also has the kind of delusions of competence which would lead him to take on China or Russia if they didn't respect him. He is actively preventing effective AI Governance just because his cronies who gave him money don't want it. He is in every sense both an existential threat and a step backwards for everything EA stands for. 

Reading history, how many of us wonder why Hitler wasn't stopped. 

Reading history in the future, let's hope future generations don't wonder why nobody had the courage to stop Trump. 

It's becoming ridiculous to work on our initiatives to help climate and to fight poverty and disease and so on while we have Mr. Trump in the White House actively and vindictively making them worse far faster than we can fix them. He and his clever lawyers and judicial picks will find arguments and interpretations that make his horrendous acts legal. They are ready to be challenged by legal means, because they have tilted the field and bribed the referees. 

We need a solution. If someone has one, I would love to hear it. But I'm pretty sure it's not just writing posts like this one on forums :(  Or angry newspaper columns. We are fighting an evil machine that views the law and the Constitution as, at most, an inconvenient obstacle that needs to be overcome. We need to take off our straitjackets and be ready to fight more aggressively. People need to stop enabling him. World leaders need to refuse to engage with him. Army generals need to reject his orders, because their ultimately loyalty is to the Constitution, not to the President. But also simple bureaucrats need to stop carrying out his illegal orders. 

Remember Nuremburg and how the "just carrying out orders" defence was judged at the time. 

Millions of lives are at stake. 

Those of us outside the US are feeling totally impotent. But I know that many Americans share the feeling of utter disgust and horror at what Trump is doing.  

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NickLaing7
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I am suggesting that in this case there is "there is no ethical justification for causing the death of one 73-year-old man..." 

1) I still believe in the legitimacy of American democracy - I don't it has failed yet on a large scale. Encouraging assasinating a leader democratically elected undermines the whole democracy and gives legitimacy to Trump's supporters in possible future anti-democratic actions. The future harm caused to democracy could greatly overshadow any possible short term gain.

2) This would set a terrible precedent for the future and make justifying violence vs. leaders easier across the world. Non-violent norms towards leaders are super important to keep intact - Not just for America but the rest of the world as well.

3) There are so many other non-violent options which have not been taken to resist here, even though they seem have sadly faded into obscurity these days. Martin Luther King and co. stood against tyranny arguably worse than Trump's through massive non-violent protests, harnessing the rightness of his position and the will of the masses to create change.

I respect approaches on this front like that of Bonhoeffer. I think political situations need to be disastrous and non-reversible through other means before these kind of extreme actions are even considered. It was many years into Hitler's regime before Bonhoeffer even considered this kind of drastic action - we are barely a month into Trump's.

I also disagree with this "But it's becoming ridiculous to work on our initiatives to help climate and to fight poverty and disease and so on while we have Mr. Trump in the White House actively and vindictively making them worse far faster than we can fix them." How is saving lives ridiculous, regardless of what others are doing? I'll keep trying to save them on my end, and I doubt the white house can make the situation worse faster than we can fix it. USAID is a big factor, but still a small percentage global aid and development at the moment - and an even smaller percentage of cost-effective aid. Its not ideal but we can manage without it.

I'm sure there's much more too, that's just my top-of-head thoughts.


 

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Denis 6
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Hi Nick, 

I fully agree with you. In fact, after I re-read the post, I realised I urgently needed to edit it. I had intended the idea of actual assassination to be provocative, but instead it read as if I was actively proposing it. 

What I'm hoping for is, indeed, non-violent options, protests, etc. 

What I'm objecting to, though, is him feeling he can break laws and accepted conventions at will, but everyone else blindly following them to enable him. For example, this is the moment when the EU could take a strong, moral stance. We could propose, in the short term, to literally replace the US - fund US Aid, pay the workers, etc., which could be both helpful for those who need help and a really powerful rebuke of Trump. But we could also just refuse to treat him seriously. 

For example, I'm Irish. On March 17th, St Patrick's Day, traditionally Irish leaders visit the US president and give him some shamrock. Many Irish people want us to skip the visit this year, and to instead make a very public point about wanting nothing to do with Mr. Trump - while still having massive respect for all the great things the US stands for. But it looks like it will go ahead as normal, he'll get a nice photo-op, and everything will seem normal. 

It's not normal. We shouldn't normalise it. 

But I totally agree with you, assassination is not the literal answer. Hopefully you are one of the few people who read it before I edited it :D 

Cheers

Denis

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Denis 1
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It would be amazing if some of the people who downvoted this and or disagreed with it could provide some perspective on why. 

Specifically: do you genuinely believe that stopping Trump's destruction of so much that is good and altruistic and necessary in the world is not an important and worthy objective? Or do you not believe that EA's should get involved in the dirty world of politics? 

[NickLaing's comment is great, but was based on a previous version that I'd had updated even before I saw his comment.] 

 

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Denis *1
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I wrote this post one month ago, it received minus 29 votes and 6 x's. 

Do people still feel the same way? Or are you now realising that this man is trying to turn the US into his own personal Russia? That there is a model for this that he is following - look at Turkey or Poland or Hungary or Slovakia or Brazil or Argentina or Venezuela. All slighly different, but similar in the way that an apparently stable, mature democracy was hijacked by a populist movement and eventually became an authoritarian state where the constitution and the rule of law were gradually replaced by the whims of one individual. 

I spent some time in Venezuela when Chavez was in power, and it is scarily similar to the US right now. At the time, it was early in Chavez's rule, the economy was still working, the country was rich although with a lot of terrible poverty and many people, even educated people, supported Chavez's vision of a more equal society. But now the country has been destroyed. 

I have read a wonderful novel, Europe Central, by William Vollmann, which describes what it was like to live under Stalin. So much parallels what's happening in the US today, from punishing people for expressing the "wrong" opinions, to, for example the way Stalin was the person who decided if Shostakovich's latest works were acceptable or not - just like the way Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center. 

And this is happening to the most powerful country in the world, the country that used to be the good guys in a world where Russia and China support so much that is bad. 

To me this is utterly terrifying. And I'm not sure why EA's don't see this as a problem. 

  • Is it that EA's are secretly libertarians who actually think that some of what Trump is doing is good?
  • Or is it that we rather focus on narrow problems that seem more tractable, and leave the global political problems to others?
  • Are those of us in Europe missing something? 

Could anyone enlighten me? 

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James Herbert7
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I suspect it's mostly the way you've written it. As a rule of thumb, always aim for high reasoning transparency. I asked ChatGPT o3 to rewrite it in a style that's more likely to appeal to EAs and that frames it in terms of reducing the risk of stable totalitarianism. I've pasted its output below.

"Claim. A second Trump presidency would raise the probability that the United States drifts toward a technologically-entrenched autocracy, thereby increasing the global risk of stable totalitarianism — a scenario where an oppressive regime locks in power for centuries or more.¹

Why that matters. Even a <1 % chance of permanent totalitarian lock-in constitutes an existential risk: it would foreclose almost all future value while inflicting vast suffering.² Emerging tech — especially frontier AI, ubiquitous surveillance, and autonomous weapons — could remove the usual checks (elite defection, popular uprising, leadership succession) that historically topple dictatorships.³

Mechanisms by which Trump plausibly raises the risk:
• Erosion of democratic guard-rails. Intent to purge the civil service and use federal agencies for partisan aims weakens the institutions that normally resist autocratic consolidation.
• Politicised AI and surveillance. Allies have floated centralising control of federal datasets and AI models; misused, these tools could neutralise opposition and entrench rule.
• Norms against power transfer. Open refusal to accept electoral defeat in 2020 signals willingness to test the limits of constitutional constraint.

Scale & neglectedness. The U.S. controls ~25 % of world GDP and a decisive share of AI R&D; trajectory changes here propagate globally. Yet only ~$70 m/yr flows to non-partisan democracy-protection charities, versus >$10 bn in partisan spend.

Tractability. Cost-effective levers include:

  1. State-level democracy infrastructure (voter-registration, local media fact-checks) — historical cost ≈ $300–400 per net vote.
  2. Legal defence funds for civil-service whistle-blowers.
  3. AI-governance policy work that limits executive control over surveillance and autonomous-weapon deployment.

Next steps for funders / organisers: commission a quick Rethink Priorities dive to refine the risk delta; pilot $1–5 m to the most effective democracy-protection orgs; reassess post-election.

¹ See 80,000 Hours problem profile on risks of stable totalitarianism. 80,000 Hours
² 80k’s BOTEC puts the century-level risk at ~0.3 %, with other experts’ estimates up to 5 %. 80,000 Hours
³ Advanced AI could give a ruler decisive military, surveillance and succession advantages, removing historic failure modes for dictatorships."

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Denis 1
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That is awesome feedback, James. Thank you! 

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James Herbert2
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You’re welcome :) 

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