Eight years ago, I started this political blog on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. I fully expected to soon be writing about President Hilary Clinton’s struggles to govern against a Congress partially or fully dominated by the Republican Party. My model of politics was the Obama years: a grinding struggle between a deeply conservative, anti-government party and an activist one that sought incremental but real gains in the realms of economics and social equality.
In other words, I started my Very Serious Engagement with American politics almost at the exact moment that I learned that I might actually know nothing at all about politics, or that what I thought I knew was wrong, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. In this, I can at least comfort myself in the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. Many with political expertise failed to see Trump’s real shot at victory; and when the dust settled, and his term began, they also couldn’t really explain what the hell had happened or was happening in front of their disbelieving eyes. Instead, much of the media defaulted to treating Donald Trump as a normal president, with examples of what we now call “sanewashing” evident from the start. Likewise, for too long, the Democrats failed to talk about the anti-democratic spirit of Trump — and the way the larger GOP so quickly made itself complicit in what quickly turned out to be a regime of cruelty, lawlessness, and incompetence.
In retrospect, though, my initial sense of disorientation has served me well. Having my assumptions so thoroughly pummeled, at just the moment when I thought I might have something to say about American politics, was something of a humbling experience, to say the least. But in a way, my disorientation buoyed me, and I felt like I had nothing to lose in persevering. Looking back, two things in particular kept me writing.
First, I genuinely wanted to figure out what I’d missed and why a figure as truly terrible as Trump had not only been elected president, but was managing to so quickly mold one of America’s two major political parties in his own image. Like many of us, I had a basic need to understand reality, and why it suddenly seemed so unreal.
Second, I realized that I at least knew enough to say something. You didn’t need a Ph.D. in U.S. history or a journalism degree to see that Trump was deranged, his rhetoric racist and authoritarian, and his role in U.S. politics destructive. It was also quickly apparent that many in the media simply weren’t sufficiently conveying obvious realities in their coverage of Trump, such as his racism and his lies. I also grasped that I could make my efforts to learn part of what I wrote about. I didn’t have to be an authority on everything. I could share my questions, and the answers I was tentatively finding.
Eight years on, we can safely say that Trump’s power and influence over so many people is due not simply to his charisma, his shamelessness, and his ruthlessness, but also to the fact that he’s a figurehead and leader for a vast reactionary movement that wishes to roll back the egalitarian social advances of the 20th century, shift the country’s wealth upward, and impose a white supremacist order on a rapidly diversifying nation. In crucial ways, Trump’s personal odiousness has at times helped obscure this bigger picture, without which you simply can’t begin to grasp the reality of our politics and our society. Trump is a danger to America both because is a violent-minded sociopath for whom reality begins and ends with his own well-being, and also because millions upon millions of Americans have chosen him as their instrument of redemption and dominance over their fellow citizens.
Over the past eight-plus years, Trump and the MAGA coalition have existed in a symbiotic, mutually-radicalizing relationship. Trump has adopted fascistic politics to maintain and gain power, including the incitement and validation of violence as a political tool; the dehumanization of immigrants and the labeling of political opponents as internal enemies; and a de facto war on democracy as a hated limited on his own power. In doing so, he has drawn on the support of his base, who have proved depressingly eager to view their fellow citizens with disdain and hatred, and to turn against democracy if democracy means they can’t impose their preferred vision on American society. His support has been augmented by a cohort of voters who might not agree with him ideologically, but to whom he appeals for other reasons (a belief that he’s a disrupter, that he’s a successful businessman, that he’s on the side of the little people, and so on). Alongside this, the Republican Party, too, has radicalized to embrace Trump’s personal quest for power and the MAGA movement’s reactionary aims — chillingly evidenced in the failure of most GOP congresspeople and senators to vote for his impeachment and conviction following the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, as well as in the Supreme Court’s efforts to immunize Trump against the crimes he committed in office (most glaringly, his efforts to overthrown the 2020 election).
And cementing it all has been a relentless flow of lies and propaganda from Trump, his allies in the Republican Party, and an extensive right-wing media universe, in a concerted effort to re-write reality itself so that up is down and day is night. In this alternate universe, Donald Trump actually won the presidency is 2020, a vast “deep state” conspiracy is out to get the former president, a great replacement is under way in which brown-skinned immigrants are taking away the power and diluting the votes of white Americans, transgender surgery is a daily occurrence in elementary schools, and climate change is a hoax. Conspiracies supplant reality in a narrative of unholy enemies hellbent on destroying America.
To understand where we stand here at the cusp of our third presidential election featuring Donald Trump, our perspective needs to include these various elements. First, Donald Trump’s personal danger to our democracy and freedom, with his threats to imprison and turn the military on political opponents, his insane mass deportation plans that would wreck the U.S. economy and ethnically cleanse the country of millions of citizens and non-citizens alike; and his openly-stated intentions to overthrow the rule of law to keep himself safe from prosecution for his many alleged crimes. Second, the reactionary MAGA movement that wishes to turn to United States into a land where women and minorities are second-class citizens, white Americans are considered the only “true” Americans, and extremist religious views are imposed on the majority (with repercussions from the banning of abortion to the denigration of non-Christian religions like Muslims). Third, the effort to undermine Americans’ ability to separate truth from propaganda, so that some Americans are led to view their fellow citizens as enemies, to view immigrants as soulless invaders, and to view Donald Trump as a savior of the nation who is licensed to enact the most extreme measures to address imaginary threats.
Taken together, the means (fascistic, violent, anti-democratic) and the ends (the replacement of American democracy with an authoritarian regime where Trump and the GOP hold incontestable power, where the government serves the interests only of “real” Americans and treats all others as enemies) add up to what I’ve repeatedly argued should be viewed as a slow-motion insurrection against the United States. This, too, is a framework that helps us understand what’s happening with this election and what the stakes truly are. Even as Trump competes with Vice President Harris to win, he has consistently declared that the election is rigged against him and has refused to say that he will accept any results that don’t put him in the White House. He has suggested retribution against his political opponents. He has promised that there will be “blood” if he doesn’t win. In other words, he is pursuing anti-democratic means to win, with the clearly stated goal of ruling like a dictator should he regain the Oval Office.
If there is hope for this election, it is because a majority of voters have repeatedly shown that they understand that both Donald Trump and the larger MAGA movement are threats to our democracy and to our freedoms. If I’m feeling optimistic about the outcome, it’s because the American majority now has hard, irrefutable evidence of how very real the threat is. In particular, Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt and related illegal efforts to remain in office sent a message through the country that Trump had forever gone beyond the acceptable bound of American politics. Likewise, the Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights — made possible by Trump’s appointment of three justices — was both an undeniable consequence of his presidency and a clear-cut attack on the fundamental rights of half the population to a degree unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. We might say that January 6 provided irrefutable proof that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms, and that the overturning of Roe v. Wade — born of right-wing religious extremism — provided irrefutable proof that the MAGA movement is a threat to our freedoms. No amount of Republican propaganda can convince the American majority that Trump isn’t an authoritarian monster, or that the MAGA movement believes that women are the equals of men.
On top of this, Trump has cast aside any pretense of moderation. Whether through psychological decompensation or a faith that his extremism will motivate current followers and convert new ones, his rhetoric has grown increasingly violent and outlandish. He has said that the removal of migrants will be “bloody.” He has fantasized about Liz Cheney facing a firing squad. He has spoken of journalists getting shot in an imaginary assassination attempt. He has told rally-goers that his second term will be “nasty.”
Should Harris prevail, Trump will still proclaim himself the winner, and attempt to cloak his claim in lies about election fraud and a vast conspiracy against him and his supporters. Journalists and Democrats will talk about him trying to steal the vote, but the more accurate way to describe someone who lies about millions of illegal immigrants voting and who demands to be placed in the White House or else is as an insurrectionist — as someone attempting to overthrow democratic results and install himself in power against the will of people, which is inseparable from overthrowing our democracy itself.
Trump will do so not because he is strong and fearsome, but because he is weak. For as many people have been taken in by his strongman con, or energized by his open racism and misogyny, many more Americans are repulsed and appalled by his unfitness to lead; for all his bluster, he cannot move their opinions of him, which are well-founded and correct. Likewise, the movement he leads, driven by white supremacy and misogyny but also by a preference for unjust order over the uncertainty of freedom, is weak, and immoral. In particular, white supremacism is a howling moral abyss, with no basis in reality, truth, or basic humanity, leading its adherents into a state of mind largely indistinguishable from madness, where they would give up their individual power to a man so manifestly crazed and cruel as Donald Trump, rather than do the hard thing and learn to love their neighbors, or at least get along with them like normal people.
With Trump, the MAGA movement has made a true deal with the devil, a pact that has granted it great powers but at a hideous cost. Trump’s shamelessness has eroded boundaries not only of taste but of basic humanity, creating space for millions of right-wing Americans to become the very worst versions of themselves. In a very real way, he has encouraged his supporters to defile themselves even as he helped channel into full public view the darkest aspects of humanity — hatred, violence, scapegoating, dehumanization, a lust for domination of their fellow Americans. Unfortunately for their electoral prospects, this mutually beneficial but socially destructive pact is now in clear view to those of us outside it, and we find it appalling and un-American. The most retrograde forces in America have yoked themselves to Trump, and have taken an enormous risk in doing so, since his election loss would constitute an enormous blow to the greater MAGA movement. Let this Election Day be a victory for democracy and another step in exorcising the demons of hate from the body politic.