Donald Trump won the vibes. Now America's anti-democratic coalition seeks vengeance
Donald Trump has once more won the presidency. It's as shocking as it was the first time and even more terrifying. We should have seen this coming from all the polling which showed that the race was tied nationally and in the swing states. Of course it was possible. But I think a lot of us, myself included, once again fell for the illusion that America is too fundamentally decent to elect someone like Trump. We were wrong.
In 2016 that starry-eyed naivete led to the deep despair that we all felt when Trump eked out a win over Hillary Clinton. And in 2020 we believed that dream was vindicated when Joe Biden turned the tables and eked out a win over Trump. And here we are again, caught in a swirling vortex from which we can't seem to escape.
The funny thing is that until recently I had assumed that the contest was going to be political trench warfare again and the result would be very close. It has seemed to me for a while that we're in an ongoing war between two coalitions that can be defined as pro-democracy and anti-democracy and they have roughly equal political strength. The razor-thin margins in Congress and these incredibly tight presidential races bear that out.
Yes, Donald Trump is the leading figure in this fight as the man who best articulates the anti-democratic coalition's impulses but he also hinders them with his crudeness and lack of discipline. Meanwhile, the pro-democracy coalition is diffuse and leaderless but is helped by the fact that it's less crazy. Joe Biden managed to pull it out in 2020 in the middle of a global pandemic when there were just enough people in the right states to recognize that Trump wasn't up to dealing with it. He was also a white man, which clearly makes that choice easier for some people. (It cannot be a coincidence that the rank misogynist brute, Donald Trump, beat the two highly qualified Democratic women he ran against.)
I knew all this. And I assumed 2024 would be a tough race for Biden to win although I thought he would probably be able to do it because he managed to "deliver" on so many of his promises, particularly on the economy, which many smart people assured me was the key to winning over voters. Surely, the people would start to see that inflation had abated, the job market was great and that interest rates were coming down, right? All that new manufacturing in the swing states had to count for something. But when it became clear that he could not campaign effectively and he turned it over to his vice president, who seemed to electrify the pro-democracy coalition, I began to believe that this time it would win decisively. I was fooling myself.
Donald Trump bungled the worst health crisis in a century, was found guilty of fraud and civilly liable for defamation and sexual assault. He is currently under indictment for stealing classified documents and attempting a coup in 2020. He acted deranged and demented on the campaign trail and it changed nothing. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes, he was right. There is literally nothing he can do to make his faithful followers move away. And that's because it's really not about him — it's about them.
Trump has solidified his grip on nearly half the voters in this country because, as journalist Lindsay Beyerstein tweeted last night, "he created a conspiracist permission structure to ignore or deny all the facts and focus on hate." Our modern information ecosystem, the social media and cable news silos have allowed him to construct an alternate reality for the Republican Party and they eagerly accept it because it feeds their sense of fear and loathing of the other. And it isn't just the kooky QAnon conspiracy types — Trump managed through sheer repetition to convince otherwise normal people that his first term was a golden age of peace and prosperity and that the country today is a dystopian hellscape because the price of eggs is higher than it was five years ago.
On some level, these people know that's all nonsense and Trump knows it too. This anti-democratic coalition has a deep, entrenched grievance with the modern world and they use politics to express it. "This is happening all over the world," The Atlantic's Tom Nichols wrote of the anti-incumbent wave elections, "among people who think that others are *unjustly* living better than they are - even while they themselves are living well."
Nichols added, "resentment and false nostalgia (and affluence and boredom) are deadly threats to democracy, as we're about to learn."
It's not about policy no matter how much people insist that it is. We know this because in places like Missouri voters just passed initiatives for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, all Democratic policies, while overwhelmingly voting for a Republican senator and president who both strongly oppose these things. This is about aesthetics and attitudes. A majority of Americans want an autocratic strongman show and Trump and the Republicans are happy to give it to them.
The anti-democracy coalition under Trump is on the verge of fascism. He and many in his party are already there. We know this because we know their plans. We've all been discussing Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and Schedule F for months now. Trump's mass deportation policy may never come to full fruition but they will certainly make an example of some people if only to entertain the base. Recall how much they loved those migrant flights to Martha's Vineyard and the like a year or so ago. Some televised knocking down of doors and throwing crying women and children onto buses ought to give them a thrill (a double thrill when the Democrats get hysterical about it.)
Here's Trump promising RFK Jr. "a good time" messing around with the public health system:
We know about Trump's plans for the economy and since his tariff obsession is his only economic and foreign policy idea, it's unlikely that even his business buddies will be able to talk him out of it. Foreign allies are no doubt meeting with their national security people as we speak, implementing plans to distance themselves from the United States, knowing Trump's affinity for autocrats like Russia's Putin and Hungary's Orbán. America's adversaries are licking their chops. They know Trump is a pushover.
But the vengeance policy is what's going to animate Trump the most. His enemies list is long and he will make sure they pay. It's what he lives for:
Here's a message from one of the people mentioned as a possible attorney general or White House counsel in a second Trump term:
We survived Trump's first term, (although his erratic rhetoric and policies during COVID did result in many unnecessary deaths.) But everyone knows by now that this second term is not going to be the same. The Republican establishment has been purged of dissenters and Trump will have only MAGA loyalists in his inner circle. Trump's new "government gfficiency" czar Elon Musk is already promising that there will be "hardship" (not for him, of course) as they slash the government safety net that so many Americans depend upon. Everything from environmental regulations to abortion rights to free speech is on the chopping block. And who will stop them?
Can we survive it again? Probably. But it's going to be much harder. The question is whether the Resistance has the energy to do it all again or will it pull back and just watch it all burn out of sheer exhaustion? After all, they tried their best. They ground out many wins between 2016 and today. But in the end they lost it all again. What's next?