The Return of Trump—V

Astra Taylor • Michael Greenberg • Coco Fusco • Verlyn Klinkenborg • Thomas Powers • Anne Enright

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Astra Taylor

On election night, before Harris’s loss set in, some exit polls showed that “democracy” was a top concern for voters. Many liberals took the result as an auspicious sign. But what is democracy?

That was the title of a documentary I made during the 2016 presidential campaign. As I conducted dozens of interviews across the United States over many months, I learned that there was hardly a consensus over the word’s meaning. Ordinary people struggled to define it; a recent college graduate asked me if democracy was when “they tell you what to do.” Others, usually men, scoffed that we actually live in a republic, not a democracy, as though that settled the matter. Still others—many of them—found the American political system exasperatingly corrupt: rigged by special interests, permeated by racism, and almost or already irredeemable. I also spoke to young conservatives and attended Donald Trump’s rallies, where he railed against the War on Terror, Wall Street greed, killer immigrants, and smug elites, all while assuring the adoring crowd that they would be “ruled by the people” when he won.

Win he did, on the second-to-last day of filming. I spent the final miserable morning with my crew at a cooperatively managed textile factory in Western North Carolina. I had wanted to ask the Guatemalan immigrants who owned and managed the business about extending democracy into the workplace. But there was no way to ignore their fears of retribution and deportation, and how American democracy had failed them.

Eight years later, things have only gotten more muddled and anguished. Part of what doomed the Democrats a second time, I think, was that they took the meaning of democracy to be settled and self-evident. Harris promised voters little more than guaranteed access to the ballot box (albeit on slightly expanded terms, such as same-day registration or wider access to early or mail-in voting), no interference in vote counts, and a future where runners-up gracefully concede defeat. Liberals were understandably up in arms when Trump refused to admit that he lost the 2020 election and over the fracas known as January 6. Harris and her surrogates, however, often seemed to treat those offenses as the primary, or even exclusive, threats facing American democracy—as if vanquishing Trump would on its own secure the republic.

In the process, they idealized the pre-Trump political status quo—the new–Gilded Age, post–Citizens United conditions that produced a surge of populist discontent on both the left and right. Some Democrats, like Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, occasionally speak about structural problems: the Electoral College, the filibuster, the malapportioned Senate, state-level gerrymandering. But none of those subjects surfaced in a meaningful way during Harris’s short run. Nor was there talk of money’s corrupting influence: Harris proudly sought the approval of Wall Street moguls, cozied up to crypto investors, and reportedly leaned on the campaign-sinking counsel of her brother-in-law, Uber executive Tony West.

I witnessed the disjointedness up close at the Democratic National Convention this past August. I went with Nathan Hornes, a member of the Debt Collective, the union for debtors that I helped found. Nathan spoke on the final evening, a few hours before Harris took the stage. He briefly recounted how he had been scammed by the for-profit education corporation Corinthian Colleges, and our eight-year organizing effort to win billions of dollars in student loan relief for over half a million students whose lives were nearly ruined. (That campaign laid the groundwork for Biden’s pledge to cancel student debt more broadly—though he implemented the policy in a way that left it vulnerable to right-wing legal challenges and a hostile Supreme Court.) By investigating Corinthian during her tenure as California’s attorney general, Harris brought the company’s abuses to light and so inadvertently helped our cause. Now she was boasting of this minor accomplishment to burnish her bona fides as a prosecutor who was tough on “predators.” And yet that night not one but two former Corinthian board members spoke on the same stage. That was the Harris campaign: capacious enough to include the defrauded and the fraudster, predator and prey.

If nothing else, election night taught us that a not-insignificant portion of voters who told pollsters they were concerned about “democracy” meant something quite different than shoring up liberal governance, checks and balances, or the rule of law. On a gleeful episode of his podcast released after Harris’s loss, the MAGA hype-man Steve Bannon crowed that Trump has forced the Democrats to become defenders of what he calls “institutional rot” and “oligarchy,” of government and market systems that millions of people see as broken or even corrupt and harmful. Polls have long shown that the majority of the American public would like to see money out of politics. In the absence of such reforms, a large chunk of the electorate has made do with a rich guy who insists that his ample bank balance means he can’t be bought.

Of course, Trump will further corrode democracy as we know it—smash and privatize the parts of the administrative state that provide for health and welfare, strengthen the parts that punish and repress, deregulate industry and chop taxes at the top, further erode voting rights and increase the flow of corporate cash, surround himself with a coterie of aggrieved billionaires and take direction from the Heritage Foundation. The sad irony is that as government becomes increasingly cruel and incompetent, as inequality spirals, and as it becomes harder for liberals and progressives to win elections and govern effectively, ordinary people’s frustrations will only mount—a feedback loop that serves conservative grifters very well.

Short-circuiting this dynamic will take more than pontificating sanctimoniously about “our democracy,” and more even than enacting populist policies that appeal to the pocketbook concerns of working-class voters—though that would be a welcome step. It also requires speaking to people’s mistrust and rage and providing credible remedies to transform the systems they have lost faith in.

Aristotle observed that democracy is the rule of the poor, since people without means will always outnumber the wealthy. What will it take to get money out of politics so that the poor can rule? Some may worry that there won’t be a presidential election in four years, but I think we need to plan for that possibility, and to throw our support behind a genuinely insurgent figure within the Democratic primary. My vote is for Shawn Fain, the current president of the United Auto Workers, whose mantra is solidarity, and who refuses to throw any group—women, immigrants, gay or trans people—under the bus as he advances the interests of the working class.

Fain has insisted that American unions need to work toward a general strike, currently set for May Day 2028, to “reclaim our country’s history of militant trade unions that united workers across race, gender and nationality.” Indeed, labor unions have been aligning their contract negotiations with that date in anticipation of a historic collective action. Candidate Fain could use the Democratic primary as a bully pulpit to advance that goal. Imagine a massive show of economic disobedience to shake up the plutocracy strangling American democracy, and the venal and incompetent Democrats currently enabling it. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I was on the road documenting America in 2016. Crazier things have happened.

Michael Greenberg

What happened in New York City, one of the staunchest Democratic strongholds in America? Harris carried the city but every borough moved toward Trump, and the biggest moves were in the Bronx, Queens, and South Brooklyn. In the Bronx Trump’s vote count jumped thirty-five points from 2020. Overall, in New York City Harris received almost 600,000 fewer votes than Biden did four years ago.

Trump’s biggest gains were among Latino, South Asian, and Chinese voters, many of whom arrived here relatively recently and have young American-born children. Part of the reason is the chasm between the city’s haves and have-nots, which has widened over the past twenty years to a despairing degree for people who have to work almost around the clock to survive. Trump, we know, is a spectacular liar, but Democrats have done some gaslighting of their own, insisting that the economy is great, that the GDP is growing and inflation slowing—all strictly true, but not for New Yorkers who pay half their income on rent, with no hope of owning a place of their own.

New immigrants to the city get no more than a bed for thirty days (families get sixty days), often crammed into damp and substandard church basements, and a little spending money for a short while. But established newcomers, coughing up their taxes and struggling to make ends meet, clearly resent that still more recent arrivals are getting even those meager provisions. Uber drivers, e-bike delivery workers, non-union construction workers, restaurant bussers, housekeepers, janitors, and home nursing aides are not “natural” Democrats. Many of them have no reason to embrace the Great American Experiment, as the rhetoric goes, when their chances of upward socioeconomic mobility—America’s main promise to the world—have dwindled to almost nothing.

“The mood changed,” as John Liu, a Democratic state senator from Queens, summed it up to The New York Times. New York, it seems, can succumb to a populist authoritarian as quickly as, say, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which flipped dramatically in Trump’s favor. New Yorkers who feel partially shielded from the worst ravages of Trump by liberal local officials would do well to take heed.

Coco Fusco

I sensed that Trump would win long before election night. No revelation of wrongdoing, no racist or sexist diatribe, and no display of offensive behavior diminished his popularity. That alone filled me with sadness, but once the election was over I began to ask myself what I should do with that emotion. Join the irate progressives who declare him a fascist and insist that his voters are all bigots? Side with the moderates who argue that the despotic convicted criminal’s supporters are good people simply fed up with ineffectual institutions and identity politics? Democrats may well be paying the price for not offering working people a solution beyond platitudes about joy, but that doesn’t explain why so many Americans believe that Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, his border wall, or his tariffs will reduce inflation, increase wages, or make them safer. Something else made them believe that he would solve their problems.

Trump may be unhinged, but his campaign managers are ruthless and shrewd. His team devised a frighteningly effective media blitz that relied on xenophobic messaging. Between January and September of this year, the Republican and Democratic parties and PACS spent more than $389 million on immigration ads. Democrats accounted for only 17 percent of that sum; 83 percent of it, according to the Immigration Hub, “was spent on anti-immigrant TV ads by the GOP and right-wing groups.” Between September and November, Republican candidates, PACs, and others spent $243 million on 450 anti-immigrant TV ads that aired mostly in battleground states with small immigrant populations. In the last two months alone, right-wing anti-immigrant ads aired over 250,000 times in battleground states and were viewed over 6.5 billion times.

In total, the Republicans produced over seven hundred immigration-related ads while the Democrats made less than fifty. Republican ads claimed that American cities were being flooded with criminals. Migrants were described as illegals, aliens, invaders, traffickers, rapists, and murderers. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, almost a fifth of the ads incorporated stock footage as well as outdated images and videos, some dating back to Trump’s first presidency. The inaccuracies didn’t matter. This large-scale effort to shape public opinion galvanized support for mass deportation.

The ridiculous claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio made for many anti-Trump roasts on late-night TV, but the reality is that for months Americans had been fed a steady diet of fearmongering ads about immigrants. The saddest part of this for me was hearing Latin American immigrants in news interviews say that they felt OK about voting for Trump because he only wanted to deport “the criminals,” i.e., not them.

Forty-five percent of Latinos chose Trump last week, including a sizable number of Puerto Ricans who weren’t moved to reject him after the reference to their country as a floating island of garbage, plus millions of residents of border towns who had supported Democrats in the past. They may not be aware that during the Great Depression, when the US deported over a million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of them were American citizens. “Operation Wetback” in 1954, which involved more than a million deportations, also resulted in US citizens ending up in Mexico. Once he gets the mass deportations up and running, Trump’s next move may be to eliminate birthright citizenship. If he does, people like me—the child of an immigrant who overstayed her visa, used my American birth to obtain residency here, and then sponsored her extended family’s immigration—could end up with nowhere to go.

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What do we believe or know or feel that allows us to care about the other forms of life? Is our concern innate, part of our inheritance as biological beings and fellow organisms? Do we feel the deep genetic kinship we share with all life? Or is our concern mostly a product of culture—of education and experience and scientific insight?

There are no simple answers to these questions. Nor are the answers unchanging. A couple of centuries ago whales were regarded as monsters. Now they’re beloved creatures, singers of slow grace and immeasurable dignity. The change is in us, not them. We’re only now beginning to learn—again—the depth of our connection to nature and the importance of what we feel for it. However these feelings arise in us, they must be cherished. If we know only human life, we know almost nothing about life on Earth.

It’s obvious, I think, that there is nothing resembling respect—never mind affection—for nonhuman life in Donald Trump’s mind (though he thinks with his ego) or in the minds of his MAGA faithful. It doesn’t exist. Nature is there to be plundered. That will be the environmental message of this incoming administration. And that piratical approach is justified—in the appallingly literal understanding of Trump’s evangelical supporters—by the word “dominion,” as it appears in the first chapter of Genesis: dominion over all God’s creatures.

In the Bible, the word “dominion”—God’s gift to Adam—refers early on to man’s domination of nonhuman organisms. But after that, the word nearly always means power over other humans. For a while, Trump will possess dominion of a sort. As we’ve seen so vividly these past few months, one of the ways he sustains his dominion is by dividing humans into groups—the acceptable and the unacceptable. The latter include people of color, immigrants and refugees, childless women, and the LGBTQ+ community, which has done so much to expand our ideas of gender and how we inhabit our bodies. Trump’s dominion over them is far more than dominion. It’s oppression in the belief that their lives have no value. As for the actual genetic “kinship” we share with all living things, Trump would rather point to what he calls, in a eugenic fantasy, the bad genes in this country. He’s just the latest to use this coded phrase.

If you’re determined to loathe anyone who doesn’t resemble you, what are the chances you’ll have any regard for nature? Trump’s approach to nature is extractive, and, to be fair, that’s his approach to everything. Billions of life-forms on this planet didn’t vote for Trump—and they will suffer immensely because of him. You might argue that one source of our feel for nature is the empathy we feel for other humans. Which helps us understand why Trump will do nothing to protect the nonhuman lives we share this planet with.

Thomas Powers

The shock of Trump’s victory ought to be warning enough. It was as close to a landslide as we’ve seen in recent decades. The thoroughness of the win, still emerging, is telling us to go slow. Many of the first efforts to explain it snap off a score of reasons why it was bound to happen. They all make sense, they are crisply argued, and they urge the Democrats still standing to make prompt changes of course.

But a lost election is not a train wreck that can be traced back to a truck on a crossing, stranded there when the driver fell asleep full of drink, at the close of the day he had to put his dog down. A lost election is more like a storm that is worse than expected, the result of a million local weather facts suddenly colliding when the moon is full and the tide is high—predictable, sort of, but only after it has happened.

Rather than listing a score of reasons why Trump won, I would start with one: the Republican strategy beginning fifty years ago to replace the Democratic Party in the eleven states of the old Confederacy. Their success is obvious in the map of the 2024 presidential election, two swathes of red states marking the two great divisions in American history and politics—the North–South separation of slave and free states, and the inland corridor of farmers facing bankers and cultural arbiters on the two coasts.  When the count is complete this year the likely result will be eighteen blue states versus thirty-two red states.

With every national election the right–left, red–blue division in American political argument confirms the success of the Old South in taking over the Republican Party. Positions on all the big issues reflect the Old South agenda of single-party rule, white and male supremacy, social and moral issues as determined by evangelical Protestant churches, a big military plus the Second Amendment. Republican presidential candidates all make their peace with those.

That leaves Trump himself, who was the architect and builder of his own victory. He colors outside the lines, makes violent threats, counts on women forgiving him, encourages men to be like him, never apologizes, rejects all criticism as unfair, tells lies and sticks to them, never reads or pretends to read, thumbs his nose at the law, insists losers are suckers, stands defiant, and manages somehow to get away with all of it. The Founding Fathers lived in fear of demagogues. They had no idea. 

Anne Enright

At about 3:00 AM Irish time last Wednesday (10:00 PM in New York), I picked up the news that Trump had gone out to speak to supporters accompanied by Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and I went to bed. It was over. The anti-vaxxer with the brain worm, who may or may not be put in charge of the American health care system, the giggling misogynist who destroyed Twitter and who is now set, if he can fit it into his schedule, to destroy American public service structures: it was like something out of a Marvel comic, so psychically unloosed and extreme.

More than half of America voted for a man who is not an ordinary liar but someone who asserts the opposite of the truth—is the best word for his cartoon chaos a “tantrum”? The gleefulness of Musk, in particular, made me think how infantile these men are, not just in their exhibitions of power but in their rage for categorization. Musk moved an industry from California to Texas, it is rumored, because one of his children is trans. She is, he told Jordan Peterson, “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” It is very upsetting to such people when reality won’t stay the way they have, perhaps with some difficulty, figured it out to be. These men’s interest in fakeness (usually female fakeness), and in lies and conspiracy seems part of this problem: the world has gone funny, they say, and they cannot trust what they do not control.

I did not sleep well. Donald, Elon, and poor mad Bobby: it was as though the Internet had broken out of the screen, the world’s info-Id; the place where any fact is available, even if it is the wrong fact, where men especially can get what they want, when they want it; a place of complete personal authority and complete childishness, where you can know everything, say anything, be lost and in charge all day long.

I reminded myself that America has had other presidents who were corrupt, lecherous, and hate-mongering, even as their rhetoric was about honor, virtue, and freedom for all. But that rhetoric felt like authority even when it was hypocritical, and I miss it now that it is gone. There is something so dreamlike about Trump’s opposites game, but the money is real, and the sadism in his unfunny jokes is also real and about to be unleashed.

I woke. I remembered the goonshow apocalypse, and I reminded myself that Trump will shaft his fellow goons before too long. I wondered why, if Americans are so angry, the Democrats could not own that anger and redirect it at, for example, the super-rich like Elon Musk. The day after the American election was, for me, like the start of the pandemic. The world is different in a way I could not have foreseen and I am full of dread, but I know this feeling of disaster and the same small rules apply: look after your own head, work, tend to the people you love. Fresh air, grit, and affection. Then do the same tomorrow.