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Donald Trump and wife Melania arrive for the 80th session of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, September 2025
Opinion: He descended the golden escalator and dragged us down with him, and his most recent ride says that his dictatorship will stall, writes John Casey.
Donald Trump has spent his entire life trying awkwardly — and illegally — to sleaze his way to the top. Yet every time he climbs, he slides right back down. Failed businesses, casino bankruptcies, disastrous investments, and political chaos all form the same pattern: for Trump, things always go down, and never up.
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Which is why I couldn’t help but laugh when he and Melania (she did not look pleased, probably thinking another dead end with this stinky guy) tried to ride an up escalator at the United Nations on Monday, only for it to grind to a sudden stop. It was a perfect metaphor. Trump is forever stalled in his quest to rise higher.
He blames others, threatens lawsuits, and lashes out, but he never truly ascends. He is his own worst enemy. He’s never wrong.
Related: How, under Donald Trump, we are increasingly becoming unapologetically unapologetic
We’ve seen this escalator imagery before. In 2015, Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president. That moment wasn’t just the start of his political career. It was also the start of America’s descent into a downward spiral.
From that ride down, the country was dragged into division, cruelty, and incompetence. He turned people against each other, botched the pandemic response, and unleashed a racist and dictatorial backlash to George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
He even held a Bible upside down, indicative of a truly rock-bottom moment in American history.
Related: It’s Easter, and Trump spent Holy Week hawking a Bible
He brought crooks, convicts, and racists into the White House (and some stuck around, like Stephen Miller). And worst of all, he tried to overturn a democratic election, inspiring the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6t, 202. That was a descent of historic proportions, perhaps the lowest moment for American democracy.
HIs first presidential down ride was almost catastrophic.
Now comes the escalator freeze heard round the world. It stopped Trump dead in his tracks, and I can’t stop thinking about how fitting it was. Because in the end, I believe our democracy will stop him in the same way — that is abruptly, firmly, and in full view of the world.
As an aside, and no irony here, was that Trump, who was likely embarrassed to be stopped, tried to find someone to blame. His press secretary screamed a conspiracy. But turns out, it was the bumbling team Trump behind the stall.
Back to the halt. The metaphor is not to say Trump hasn’t done damage. He has. His second term has been just as destructive as his first, perhaps more so, and the breadth of that damage is astounding.
But the question is whether he can succeed in remaking America into the dictatorship he clearly craves. I don’t think so.
Why? Because Trump is not a dictator in the mold of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Those men are calculating, cunning, and disciplined, words you would never use to describe Trump. Kim Jong Un may not be a genius, but he inherited his dynasty; the machinery of tyranny was already built for him.
Trump, by contrast, is trying to build authoritarianism in a country whose democratic foundations are too strong, too durable, and too deeply ingrained. He is too small for a democracy this big.
Related: Life every decision he’s made in his life, Trump deciding to bomb Iran didn’t work
What gives me hope is not my cheery optimism, which has been in short supply lately. It is the unmitigated and unraveling evidence that democracy just might hold.. The courts, aside of course from a Supreme Court that is a rubber stamp for Trump’s illegality, are responding almost in lockstep to his attempts to upend the law.
Lower courts and presiding judges are starting to push back more aggressively.
Most recently, when a federal judge in Florida threw out Trump’s ridiculous $15 billion complaint against The New York Times, he said something that struck at the heart of Trump’s continued scheme to extort money from litigants. “A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally,” he wrote
Voters are stirring, too. Just look at the results of recent special elections, where Democrats are winning districts by larger margins than even Kamala Harris did at the top of the ticket in 2024. In Arizona's special election on Tuesday, now-Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva beat her Republican opponent by 40 points in a district Harris won by 22 points.
That’s not apathy on the part of voters. To me, that’s resistance growing into a movement.
And this resistance is not only political but cultural as well. When Trump tried to punish dissenting voices like Jimmy Kimmel’s, for instance, the message of pushback was made by consumers who canceled trips to Disney theme parks and scrubbed their Disney+ and Hulu streaming accounts, all of which had a negative impact on Disney’s stock.
The company and the network had no choice but to bring him back, because at the end of the day, it is all about the money. Always. And that’s the way it’s always been for Trump, except he’s always lost money, so he gets confused when the word profit is dropped into a sentence.
Yes, we are right to be on edge with the horror Trump is instilling. Trump’s furious attempts to consolidate power are real and dangerous. He is still trying to bring this country down with him, and at the moment he’s doing his damnedest to succeed.
But when you pan out, the pattern of his life and his politics comes into focus, Trump always goes down, never up.
Trump’s escalator rides tell the story better than most could. He came down the golden escalator and dragged the country down with him. And now, caught on an escalator that froze before it could lift him higher, he was exposed once again
Trump is a man desperate to climb, but always and forever, he will be stopped short.
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