Taking Stock After Three Disorienting Weeks
Things are mostly stable, but in a way that reinforces and exacerbates a losing dynamic.
Donald Trump should never have been president. He became president through a combination of luck, deceit, and civic failure. It was basically an accident.
Since that time, an intellectually diverse array of analysts has tried to contort his accidental presidency into a framework where national extremism must follow some grave injury: depression, famine, military defeat. Among other insults to the working class, they’ve reached for the Great Recession and NAFTA, which millions of Americans surely experienced as big economic disruptions. Perhaps these were marginally contributing factors.
But the truth remains:
Trump committed and abetted felony crimes to advance his candidacy;
Liberal individuals and liberal organizations (including the Clinton campaign, DOJ, Obama White House, and mainstream media) indulged complacency because Trump trailed in the polls.
With Trump running as a lawless insurgent, Democrats behaving arrogantly, and millions of anti-Trump Americans treating the election as a freebie, Trump still only sneaked into office as the loser of the popular vote.
A mistake of history and of antiquated U.S. political institutions.
The Trump years went on to be shot through with toxicity, scandal, and political violence, topped off by a governing failure that cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives and left the economy in ruins. It was a nightmare. But the sheer unlikeliness of it all was a source of hope: So long as we keep our guard up—that we do not repeat the mistakes of 2016—this movement is conquerable.
Americans heeded that lesson in 2018, 2020, and 2022. The forgetting—or maybe it’s just exhaustion—set in very recently. The recency provides a lonely glimmer of hope that people—citizens and elites—can be shaken out of it within the next four months. But they’re unlikely to come around on their own, and reaching them will require political sacrifices key actors don’t seem to want to make. Yet.