Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich argues that the “great sleeping giant” of American politics is awakening, with multiple polls showing President Donald Trump's approval rating at record lows — but he contends that what is happening runs deeper than poll numbers.

In an essay published by Alternet, Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley who served as secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997, wrote that something “very dramatic” is occurring: people who consider themselves non-political or independent, moderate Republicans, and even those who voted for Trump in November 2024 “can't avoid seeing what's come so clearly into the open” — and are finding it “disgusting and terrifying.”

According to the essay, Americans have watched Trump order the National Guard into cities over the objections of mayors and governors, and have watched U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents drag people out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tie them and their children, and haul them away.

Reich pointed to the Justice Department's argument that if the Democrat wins Alaska's Senate race, she should not be certified, as well as Trump's threat to revoke the citizenship of Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, herself a naturalized citizen. He also cited Trump directing the IRS, FBI, and Justice Department against liberal groups that oppose him; pressuring broadcasters to take comedians who criticize him — Stephen Colbert of CBS and Jimmy Kimmel of ABC — off the air; and what Reich described as Trump's establishing immunity from IRS investigations of himself and his family.

Reich noted that Trump has said that Canada — Canada — is an enemy of the United States, and that Putin was not the aggressor in the war in Ukraine. He also faulted Trump for defending Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, over an ad featuring the estranged mother of Ramaswamy's Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar. Acton has not spoken to her mother since she was 12, when she was removed from her mother's custody after her stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her.

Reich further criticized Trump for deciding “on his own” to take America into another endless war in the Middle East — a conflict he said has driven prices at the pump so high that many Americans cannot make ends meet.

In Reich's telling, millions of people across the country who have long avoided politics are shaken by what they have seen and heard. “It's no longer Democrat versus Republican or left versus right,” he wrote. “It's now democracy versus dictatorship. Right versus wrong.” He added: “It's no longer a war on undocumented immigrants. It's now a war on Americans. It's no longer just matter of repudiating Trump. It's now a matter of stopping him — containing him.”

Average Americans, Reich argued, are realizing that they too could be dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night by ICE agents, tear-gassed and arrested by the National Guard, targeted by prosecutors, or shot by the military. They too could be impoverished by what he called Trump's “brainless, arbitrary tariffs and wars.” They too could be made unsafe, their children vulnerable to measles or other diseases, their health insurance unaffordable, and their neighborhoods taken over by data centers — “because the person in charge doesn't give a fig about them. He's in it for himself.”

“Trump has shown that all of us are endangered by him,” Reich wrote. It is “impossible not to see,” he argued, because Trump and his Republican sycophants are doing all of this in the open. “Most Americans abhor what they see, because what they see is abhorrent.”

“This is how the great sleeping giant of America awakens, roars, and puts an end to it,” Reich concluded. “This is how America throws the bums out. Nine days from now.” The countdown frames the essay as a pre-election argument — in Reich's telling, the reckoning he describes rests with voters rather than with Washington institutions.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at

Source: Alternet