Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was an extreme failure for the United States as both a nation and a country. He has open contempt for democracy and the Constitution. He is publicly promising and threatening (and putting in place the means) to rule as the country’s first elected dictator on “day one.” Trump, like other such autocrats and authoritarians, means what he says both literally and figuratively.
A country consists of a defined territory and borders, founding documents, laws and institutions. The United States failed to protect its democracy by putting an autocrat and his larger authoritarian populist movement and cadre of kleptocratic allies in control of its governing institutions — including Congress.
One of the tenets of America as a nation is a belief in American Exceptionalism. Be it a “shining city on a hill” or “the world’s greatest democracy,” Trump's return to power further undermines America's self-image of greatness. The United States has now been brought down to the level of being common, and just another of many examples across the centuries, of how a failing and sick democracy succumbs to demagogues, strongmen and authoritarians and their false promises of renewed greatness and easy solutions to complex problems.
In total, the 2024 election and the extended Trumpocene embody a moral crisis and civic collapse for the United States. Donald Trump is a damning indictment of the country’s political culture.
"I think on the Republican side, there is no morality right now," former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger explained to Salon in a recent interview:
Is there room for it? Yes. I think there is still morality in the Democratic Party. One of the things that I've appreciated over the last four years is my new alliance with liberals, and what I call this is an alliance to defend democracy….. That's where we're at now. I think there is still morality left in the Democratic Party, and I think there has to be morality. Otherwise politics just becomes an exercise of power. . .
For many Americans — especially those White Americans who believed in the many lies of America’s inherent greatness and goodness, and that authoritarianism and fascism are something “over there” and not something with centuries of history in the United States in the form of such regimes as American Apartheid and Jim Crow, White on Black chattel slavery and other great crimes against nonwhite people — Trump’s return to power is shocking, unbelievable and a type of epistemic crisis.
James Baldwin spoke to these feelings in his 1965 essay “White Man’s Guilt”:
People who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves, or the world. This is the place in which it seems to me, most white Americans find themselves. Impaled. They are dimly, or vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, but they do not know how to release themselves from it and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.
In an attempt to make better sense of our collective emotions (and tumult and upset) in these days before Trump’s return to power, reflect on the previous year and the election and what may come next, I recently spoke to a range of experts.
Once Merrick Garland allowed and facilitated Trump to skate on the worst acts imaginable not only against individuals but against our democracy and national security we were in deep trouble. The minute Trump was able to announce he was running for president it was clear it was to avoid prison. And Merrick Garland knew it. And enabled it.
Regrettably, few of us treated it as such or recognized the impact of the moment. We held onto the illusion (delusion?) that our democracy was intact, even though our Department of Justice and Merrick Garland had already by that time, ensured it was not. It was already slipping through our fingers like we were trying to hold onto a handful of water. "Disappearing" Trump's many crimes effectively took them off the table as impactful campaign issues for persuadable voters.
Since Election Day, we've seen our institutions that we already knew were floundering, now openly selling out to the coming fascism and the authoritarian Trump regime, with MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brezinski groveling their way down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring and beg for mercy and with ABC News and George Stephanopoulos settling a defamation case brought by Trump.
Trump and his administration and agents and other enablers will crash the Biden economy — one of the best in decades — to "rebuild" it again — except they will only keep the first half of the promise. There will be no rebuilding. There will only be mass looting of our tax dollars, greasing of palms, favors to help the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the destruction of the middle class, further ensuring we cannot fight back.
Trump owns the domain of feelings politics: anger, resentment, outrage and even joy from revenge and winning.
I’m concerned that Republicans will implement Project 2025 and that it is going to trigger a recession similar to that of the early 1980s. I’m also bracing myself for having the news cycle revolve around Trump again. It’s mentally exhausting to follow and track the administration with the non-stop drama.
As for these being the “good times”? I agree. The Biden administration did some good things with the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. There are some good long-term investments in those acts. I don’t think we will see good policy for a while. Even if it’s just hyperbole, Trump’s obsession with immigration and the border is not a productive economic policy and doesn’t do anything for working people.
As the folk wisdom suggests, you can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. What was missing was the word “enough” – you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to get elected. And I don’t think it was just fooling people; Trump ran against a Black woman — meaning Harris already had two strikes against her when she came up to bat, but still almost won. I usually am much more mindful of America’s deep-seated racism and misogyny, but I lost sight of it along the way in the summer of 2024 and into the election.
[T]his time I feel resigned to bad news on a regular basis and don’t have the energy to respond to each Trump transgression. I will try to focus on those individuals and groups who are trying to do good work in defense of American democracy and human decency.
If we devolve into the nightmare that Trump’s return to power will mean for the country, we must try to keep a larger perspective. This means maintaining our relationships with friends and family and the larger community. We should strive to find those happy times amidst what will be so much darkness and pain.
I clung to the belief that the majority of Americans would understand the stakes — that electing Trump again would mean dismantling the architecture of democracy and reassembling it into something menacing and unrecognizable. Surely, I thought, voters could see the obvious: Trump was a fascist. But then, like a lightning bolt, it struck me —most Americans simply didn’t care.
I've believed in the resilience of the American electorate and its capacity to discern the dangers of demagoguery. By 2024, that belief was shattered. Surely, by now, they should have seen through Trump. But they hadn’t — or worse, they had, and it didn’t matter.
With Trump’s personalist rule and its cronies and incompetent nominees to run the administration and the looming betrayal of Ukraine by Trump in its war for survival and freedom against the Russian invaders, it feels as though the country stands on the brink of an uncharted precipice, every concession, every acquiescence, nudging us closer to the abyss. In the face of this chaos, I find myself desperately searching for any fragile foothold, any sense of stability, though none seem to exist. I haven’t felt this unmoored since the dark days of 2016.
When Trump spoke of a publicly televised trial for Liz Cheney over the January 6 report, my mind raced to darker places, conjuring the ghost of Roland Freisler, the venomous voice of the People's Court in Nazi Germany.
I won’t watch the Inauguration. I’m sure Trump will bask in his glory, proclaiming the crowd size is the largest in presidential history. And later I’ll follow stories about how world leaders sucked up to Trump. And there will be emails from friends and colleagues worldwide offering their condolences to me for having to live through more Trump years and offering their solidarity which I will appreciate.
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