On the morning after Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, in 2016, the White House was a funereal place. For weeks, Barack Obama and his inner circle had worried about Hillary Clinton’s campaign—the failure to visit crucial battleground states with sufficient frequency, the snooty crack about “deplorables,” James Comey’s last-minute letter to Congress about her e-mails. But, for all the troubling signs and missteps, they were optimistic that, in a tighter-than-expected race, America would elect the first woman to the Presidency. A legacy, a continuity, would prevail.
Trump’s shocking victory shattered those assumptions, and that day, as many young, stricken staffers crowded into the Oval Office, Obama tried to raise their morale and convince them that the election of an aspiring autocrat did not spell the end of America’s long, if profoundly imperfect, experiment in liberal democracy. History does not move in straight lines, he told them. Sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it goes backward. It was a solemn, pastoral performance, and, on some level, Obama was also engaged in a form of self-soothing. Two days later, in an interview with The New Yorker, he again tried to keep despair at bay: “I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.”
Privately, Obama, the first Black man elected to the White House, allowed himself to wonder if he had “come along too soon.” A generational political talent, he had deployed the resonant language and narrative of the civil-rights movement (“the fierce urgency of now”) to promote broad-based reforms, particularly the Affordable Care Act. His residence in a house built by enslaved Black men and women seemed to suggest, if hardly an end to American racism, then surely a significant advance for the idea of a multiethnic democracy. But now he was being succeeded by a figure of unmistakable reaction—a poisonous demagogue, a bigot, who proposed a very different American story. The system was “rigged,” Trump told his followers. Foreign leaders were “laughing at us.” The country was a hellscape of ominous “illegal aliens,” “rapists,” gang members, and psychotics from faraway prisons and asylums. “American carnage” was his assessment of the country, and only he could set things right.
Shortly before the end of Obama’s second term, the President was in Lima, Peru, being driven to an event with some of his aides. Along the way, he confided that he’d just read an opinion column implying that, in electing Trump, tens of millions had rejected liberal identity politics. “What if we were wrong?” Obama said. “Maybe we pushed too far,” he went on, according to a memoir by one of his advisers, Benjamin Rhodes. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”
In 2016, Trump’s election could be ascribed to many things, including a failure of the collective imagination. How had a figure who combined the traits of George Wallace, Hulk Hogan, and Father Charles Coughlin managed to win the Presidency? Just as Obama struggled to understand the social and political roots of Trumpism, many Americans failed to grasp fully his character, the dimensions of his malevolence. It was impossible for them to absorb just what a threat he posed to international alliances and domestic institutions, how contemptuous he was of the truth, science, the press, and so many of his fellow-citizens. Surely, his most extreme rhetoric was an act. Surely, he would “grow into the office.”
Trump’s reëlection, his victory over Kamala Harris, can no longer be ascribed to a failure of the collective imagination. He is the least mysterious public figure alive; he has been announcing his every disquieting tendency, relentlessly, publicly, for decades. Who is left, supporter or detractor, who does not acknowledge, at least to some degree, his cynicism and divisiveness, his disrespect for selfless sacrifice? To him, fallen American soldiers are “suckers.” Many of his former closest advisers—Vice-President Mike Pence; his chief of staff John Kelly; Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—have described him as unfit, unstable, and, in the case of Kelly and Milley, a fascist. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Trump went out of his way to dismiss his consultants’ blandishments to moderate his tone. Instead, he pretended to fellate a microphone and threatened to direct the military against the “enemy from within.” He emphasized every rotten thing about himself, as if to say, “Forget the scripted stuff on the teleprompter. Listen to me when I go off-the-cuff. The conspiracy theories. The fury. The vengeance. The race-baiting. The embrace of Putin and Orbán and Xi. The wild stories. This is me, the real me. I’m a genius. I’m weaving!”
In the end, there was nothing Trump would not say, no invective or insult he would not hurl. At Madison Square Garden, he gave the platform over to supporters who spoke grotesquely about Puerto Rico, Jews, trans people—no indecency was impermissible. His most distinctive television ad was pure cruelty: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” His disdain for women, which has been in evidence all his adult life, was only amplified in the last weeks of the campaign, when, in Michigan, he said of Nancy Pelosi, “She’s an evil, sick, crazy bi— It starts with a ‘B,’ but I won’t say it. I want to say it.”
Trump was equally brazen about policy. There is no longer any excuse for failing to see what a second Trump Administration may bring: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. A federal government stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader. A contempt for climate policy, human rights, and gun control. A weakening of NATO. An even more reactionary Supreme Court and federal judiciary. An assault on the press. These are not the imaginings of a paranoiac. These are campaign promises announced from the podium.
The news of Trump’s reëlection did not come with the same shock as his first victory did. Joe Biden, for all his virtues and legislative achievements, was a conspicuously unpopular President. At least fifty-five per cent of voters in the major swing states disapproved of his performance in office. And, by the time Biden came to terms with age and finally stepped aside, Harris, despite all her energy and appealing intelligence, had precious little time to run a campaign that could reasonably outdistance both that dissatisfaction and her opponent. Trapped between her loyalty to Biden and the need to separate herself from him, she played it safe and depended on the electorate’s ability to distinguish between her manifest decency and the dark chaos represented by Trump.
Despite her thrashing of Trump in their one debate, and his campaigning at times as a disturbed man wandering from one rally to the next, the prospects of Harris winning were never more than episodically encouraging. When her aides were asked how they were feeling about the race, they would say, “Nauseously optimistic.” In the end, Trump seems not only to have won the popular vote and all seven battleground states but to have made inroads with Latino and Black men wide enough to shatter the Democratic Party’s long-standing and highly complacent understanding of its demographic advantages.
How you interpret and prioritize the cascade of reasons for Trump’s reëlection is a kind of Rorschach test. It will require a long reckoning before anyone can conclude which of the leading factors—economic anxiety, cultural politics, racism, misogyny, Biden’s decline, Harris’s late start—was determinative. In no way did Trump win a mandate as commanding as, say, Ronald Reagan’s victories over Jimmy Carter, in 1980, and Walter Mondale, in 1984, but, according to an early analysis by the Times, more than ninety per cent of the counties in the country appear to have shifted toward him since the last election. Both major political parties are broken. The Republicans, having given themselves over to a cultish obedience to an authoritarian, are morally broken. The Democrats, having failed to respond convincingly to the economic troubles of working people, are politically broken.
Everyone who realizes with proper alarm that this is a deeply dangerous moment in American life must think hard about where we are. Rueful musings like Obama’s in 2016—What if we were wrong?—hardly did the job then and will not suffice now. With self-critical rigor and modesty, the Democrats need to assess how to regain the inclusive kind of coalition that F.D.R. built in the teeth of the Depression or that Robert Kennedy (the father, not the unfortunate son) sought in 1968.
That is one imperative. There is another. After the tens of millions of Americans who feared Trump’s return rise from the couch of gloom, it will be time to consider what must be done, assuming that Trump follows through on his most draconian pledges. One of the perils of life under authoritarian rule is that the leader seeks to drain people of their strength. A defeatism takes hold. There is an urge to pull back from civic life.
An American retreat from liberal democracy—a precious yet vulnerable inheritance—would be a calamity. Indifference is a form of surrender. Indifference to mass deportations would signal an abnegation of one of the nation’s guiding promises. Vladimir Putin welcomes Trump’s return not only because it makes his life immeasurably easier in his determination to subjugate a free and sovereign Ukraine but because it validates his assertion that American democracy is a sham—that there is no democracy. All that matters is power and self-interest. The rest is sanctimony and hypocrisy. Putin reminds us that liberal democracy is not a permanence; it can turn out to be an episode.
One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here. ♦
