Do not avert your gaze. Do not seek bogus comfort in the countless rationalisations that are already on offer. Accept Donald Trump’s election to a second presidential term for what it is: a world-historic moment that probably challenges just about every political, social and moral assumption you hold dear.
According to the botanist Joseph Banks, who travelled with Captain Cook to Botany Bay in 1770, the Aboriginals on the shore were simply unable to see the HMS Endeavour, so huge and incomprehensible was it to them. “I was almost inclind,” Banks wrote in his diary, “to think that attentive to their business and deafnd by the noise of the surf they neither saw nor heard her go past them.”
There is something of this cognitive failure in the initial response to Trump’s extraordinary victory, which has inspired a carnival of rationalisation. So: it was the economy and inflation that did it. Or it was Kamala Harris’s inability to define herself. Or it was Joe Biden’s stubborn refusal to drop out until late in the electoral cycle; or, conversely, his failure to stand his ground, thus robbing the Democrats of the only candidate who has ever beaten Trump. It was punishment for incumbency. It was the unfavourable astrological position of the moon relative to Venus (all right – I made that one up).
Doubtless all of these and many other factors will feature in the lengthy autopsy and audit to come. But they do not capture the sheer scale of the moment, its thunderous force and tectonic origins. The rationalisers will be doing themselves and the progressive cause they espouse no favours if they do not fully confront the immensity of what has just happened.
As Biden might say, here’s the deal: the American people were presented with a convicted felon, twice-impeached, found liable by jury for sexual assault, awaiting trial for electoral subversion, and chose him, by some margin, over a serving vice-president, former senator and state attorney general who spoke sensibly, rationally and with poise about the future of their country.
This, let us not forget, is a man described by his former chief of staff, General John Kelly, as fitting “the general definition of a fascist”; a verdict shared by General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who called him “the most dangerous person to this country… a fascist to the core”.
Only last Thursday, Trump said of Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, who put country before party and supported Harris in the campaign: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face”.
At a rally on November 3, he pointed at media representatives and said “to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much”. His language throughout the campaign was crude and often violent. He routinely spoke abusively of Harris, urging one crowd to send a message to her: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president”. He fantasised about putting her “in the ring” with Mike Tyson.
He lied about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. He threatened to lock up his political opponents. He promised to destroy “the enemy from within”, “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics”, who could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military”. The list goes on – and on, and on.
And still, more than 71 million Americans cast their ballots for him, enabling him to win both the electoral college and the popular vote. The citizens of the world’s most powerful nation chose authoritarianism over conventional democracy; lies over truth; patriarchy over women’s reproductive rights; nativism over pluralism; closed borders over internationalism. Plenty of US voters, of course, do not think this way, and tried to prevent the return of the Big Orange. But not in sufficient numbers to win it for Harris.
The search for precedents is a dead end. True, Grover Cleveland also won two non-consecutive presidential terms, in 1884 and 1892. De Gaulle? Churchill? Neither of them had incited an insurrection before their respective returns to office. We must acknowledge that Trump’s comeback is singular in character: defeated by Biden in 2020, disgraced by January 6, embarrassed by the performance of his favoured candidates in the 2022 midterms, he appeared to be facing oblivion – until the indictments began in March 2023.
According to the traditional rules of politics, he ought to have been finished off by the 91 felony charges brought against him by federal and state prosecutors. Instead, by a diabolical form of alchemy, he reframed his legal tribulations as evidence of his supposed role as tribune of the ordinary working American. “I am your justice,” he said. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution”. Quite what form of retribution he meant, we shall discover very soon.
As the indictments mounted up so the donations poured in. A quagmire of felony counts that ought to have made him a political pariah had precisely the opposite effect. They burnished his allure. They consolidated his reputation as the tribal leader standing between neglected Americans and their allocated enemies: migrants, the media, judges, the Deep State, the impious saboteurs of decency and order. Surviving two assassination attempts – one of which was a very close call indeed – he postured as the anointed servant of God, saved for a great national purpose.
At minimum, his victory shows finally and definitively that the old manual of politics has been torn up. As the Atlantic journalist Adam Serwer has argued in his book of the same name, the cruelty is the point. The divisiveness is the point, too, as is the threatening language, the indifference to the norms of political discourse, the brutality of his rhetoric and methods.
It is time to accept the unpalatable truth that a great many voters like Trump’s approach to public life and his absolute disdain for all of its traditional guidelines and guardrails. We delude ourselves if we imagine that, nine years after he descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his first presidential candidacy, they held their noses as they backed him against Harris.
They have grown used to his way of doing things. They granted him a second term not in spite of his character but because of it. A liar, a convicted criminal, and a sexual predator he may be. But, for an alarmingly large number of Americans, the dark side of his personality is intrinsic to the brutish strength that they manifestly seek from their next president. They wanted him back.
It is very hard indeed for progressives to come to terms with this. If you believe (as I do) in the legacy of the Enlightenment, the pre-eminent value of truth, the centrality of science, the primacy of reason, and the quest for pluralist decency, then the electoral success – the return from the political abyss – of a figure like Trump is, to say the least, difficult to digest. But digest it we must.
Given his impulsive, reckless and vindictive nature, the precise consequences of his victory cannot be predicted with any certainty. But they will be colossal. Abandon now the old trope about taking him “seriously but literally” (or vice versa), and the delusion that, somehow, he will be surrounded in the Oval Office by grownups and experts who will curb his worst instincts.
Trump had more than enough of that during his first term, which is why his eldest son Donald Jr has had a team vetting 20,000 resumés to ensure that members of the new administration – and not just at the top – swear uncompromising allegiance to the president and do not deviate even slightly from his autocratic, populist plan.
We know already that Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr will play a significant role in Trump’s second term, as officials or as powerful advisers. The tech billionaire’s ambition to slash trillions from the federal budget should strike fear in the elderly, the needy and public sector workers of any kind. As for Kennedy: his plan to “Make America Healthy Again” involves a rolling back of well-established vaccination programmes, the removal of fluoride from the US water supply and federal support for all manner of dangerously pseudoscientific claims.
Stephen Miller – a senior White House adviser in Trump’s first term who is likely to be even more powerful in his second – will now have the authority and power to enact his monstrous plan to deport at least 11 million undocumented migrants. Most of these people, it must be emphasised, live with their families in communities all over the US.
Extracting them from their homes and forcing them to leave the country will involve unimaginably harsh measures. It will not happen overnight. But Miller, like his boss, is determined to enact this racist revolution, and to ensure, as he put it at the now infamous Madison Square Garden rally on October 27 that “America is for Americans, and Americans only”.
Harris had hoped – a long shot, admittedly – to restore the rights enshrined in Roe v Wade by means of federal legislation. Well, so much for that. Now, whatever individual states choose to do about abortion law, you can be sure that more women will die in hospital car parks, and more physicians will shy away from life-saving medical interventions that might be interpreted in court as illegal abortion.
And imagine, too, what the mood in Kyiv is like as you read this; how the Ukrainians feel about what lies ahead of them, once the Putin-loving president-elect is inaugurated on January 20. Beyond that, ask yourself how safe Nato is with Trump in the hot seat, how much (if anything) he will do to address climate change, what impact his love of tariffs will have upon trade and jobs the world over.
Why has this happened? Because the world has changed fundamentally and progressives have yet to come up with a coherent, dynamic, energising response. Trust in traditional institutions is in the gutter. The inequalities within and between countries yielded by globalisation have not been addressed.
The very notion of truth has been undermined by social media, conspiracy theories and the corrupt ethos of “alternative facts”. A significant proportion of voters in the free world do not think foreign entanglements are worth any blood and treasure. They do not like immigration. They recoil from what they perceive as the condescension of liberal elites.
Trump’s triumph entrenches the MAGA movement once and for all and will turbocharge its future as a global franchise. It is a terrible blow to the cause of liberal democracy, the precious principles of pluralism, the rule of law.
There is no direction to history and sometimes things really are as bad as they look. I am reminded of General Corman’s words in Apocalypse Now: “There’s a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’”.
On Tuesday, in America, the darkness did prevail, in ways that will reverberate all over the planet for decades to come.
So: let us lean into the new reality, accept the scale of the task ahead and begin the long and painful work of renewal.
