The past decade or more in American politics witnessed a breakdown of the party system. It began invisibly, with the tepid optimism of Obama’s second term and the assurance that we had weathered the effects of the 2007-09 financial collapse, except for some “economic headwinds” after the flood. But the little word “we” never properly denoted all Americans. The truth is that, for many people, the suction of the receding waters never abated.
Meanwhile, as far back as 1964, the Republican Party had splintered from its traditional matrix in East Coast banking, white-shoe law firms, and Texas oil, and had come to rely on the passion of talk-radio listeners and evangelical Christians. This new constituency widened between the Carter and Obama presidencies, with voters from the decommissioned working class of the Rust Belt; and after a departing sigh of the old guard in the person of Mitt Romney, the call in 2016 went to a real-estate millionaire who doubled as host of a TV quiz-and-survival show.
The very existence of Donald Trump was an offense to traditional Republicans, but among his other talents was a vulgar wit. When, in an early debate, Jeb Bush said that his mother Barbara would detest everything Trump had just said, the answer was maybe your mother should be running for president.
The Democrats appeared to learn nothing from Trump’s success in 2016, or from the 74 million votes (47 percent of the total cast) which he scored even in 2020, when guilt by association with Covid would have defeated almost any incumbent. Instead, the party—based in the polite culture of the universities, the professional caste, and the mainstream media—has been wondering for a decade how any decent person could vote for Trump.
Democrats still think of themselves as the party of the people. But “black and brown folks” and “marginalized folks” have displaced the working class, whose representatives seldom now appear on the ballot. The practical wisdom of the Democrats rested on a highly theoretical hope that the sum of the identity groups would add up to a majority at election time. This was supported by a broad belief in simple majoritarian logic. Hillary Clinton’s respectable margin in the popular vote in 2016 and Joe Biden’s wider margin in 2020 made it possible to forget the local-state-federal amalgam that comprises our government. Also shelved somewhere but waiting for revenge was the discovery that President Obama’s neglect of all but the quadrennial national contests between 2008 and 2016 had given up 900 seats to Republicans in the state assemblies. This sort of unwelcome detail has consequences for anything a party with a temporary national majority may wish to do. The same goes for the brute fact of the electoral college, an anti-majoritarian feature of the US Constitution increasingly deplored by Democrats in the wake of Trump’s 2016 win.
The achievement of a firm popular margin by Trump in November 2024 (exceeding Harris by 2.3 million votes) put paid to the idea that the Democrats are still the party of the people. Over the past decade, populism came to be a pejorative epithet on the left, since it was the most impartial-sounding ism ascribed to Trump. Populism—the word and the thing—now seems inviting again to Democrats; but it will take a good deal of redefinition. Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, one of the few perceptive observers of Trump, remarked that his campaign rallies didn’t look like what you would normally call a political gathering; they were more like a sporting event. Lots of people would arrive in a relaxed state of mind, just to listen to the drifting words of his lounge-lizard standup delivery. What Trump calls his “weave” is a mingling of the usual invective with nostalgic uplift and music (to which he dances a little between random speech-acts); a portion of his followers hold tailgate picnics at a distance from center stage and enjoy the reassuring ambience. Such scenes, in the fall of 2024, formed a bewildering contrast with the elegant and posh stage presence of Kamala Harris.
Many people were brought to Trump’s side from sheer wonder at his survival of the assassination attempt on July 13, in Butler, Pa. That he seemed by a chance turn of the head to have dodged the bullet by an inch—this was enough to transform wonder into superstitious devotion. There is a wish for luck in all religious passion; and wishful sympathy with Trump’s luck designated him a hero despite everything known about him. The Democratic Party could pardonably have felt it had a lock on Wall Street and the West Coast money culture ever since they backed Obama in 2008; but Elon Musk went over to Trump after his purchase of Twitter, and other people in those places began to shift their allegiance. Even the most hardened investor at moments like these may be seduced by the odor of magic. Sometime before November, half the money culture seems to have decided there was no percentage in resisting Trump any longer.
“The Democrats decided to run a third ad-hominem campaign.”
In the months preceding the election, the Democrats decided to run a third ad-hominem campaign. Any intelligent person, they declared again, could see that Trump was an outrageous person. It hadn’t worked in 2016, but you could always say Putin stole that election. Both the fallacy and the Russophobic excuse were buoyed by a secondary theory, namely that the Democrats won in 2020 by running against Trump as a bad person, rather than, say, the fact that he was the president when Covid hit. In 2024, the Biden campaign and then the Harris campaign were given an apparently solid footing by five separate prosecutions of Trump: in Florida, for purloining and concealing classified documents; in Georgia, for his phone call asking for an election recount in grammar construable as extortionate; in Washington, DC, for his interference with the normal post-election transfer of power; and in New York, twice over, first for inflating the value of his properties, and second for hush-money payoffs to a sexual partner which aimed to suppress embarrassing facts in an election. The New York indictments were the least plausible of the five, but they were the prosecutions that ended in conviction.
What the Democrats failed to understand was that the lawfare pile-on inevitably landed Trump the role of underdog—the hapless citizen ground down by the government machine. Twenty-four percent of black men and 50 percent of Hispanic men voted for Trump in 2024. Why? Lawfare could seem to them an extension of heavy-handed policing, and perhaps the worse of the two evils. But the party and the polite culture also made a larger miscalculation. Trump’s mandatory appearance at the hush-money trial led almost daily to fresh opportunities of free media coverage outside the courtroom. “Our legal strategy is our media strategy; our media strategy is our legal strategy”: According to Michael Wolff in All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, this was the central axiom of the campaign. For Trump, there is no higher distinction than to say about a given event or encounter that it will make “great television.” (This was his verdict, too, on the unseemly blowup in his recent White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky.)
The Democrats were politically wrong again, and morally lazy in a new manner, when, having given up the slander that Trump was a Russian agent, they decided to go with the livelier usage of their campaign crowds and call him a fascist. A Roman word like fascist has no more grip on the average voter than a Greek word like oligarchy or a top-drawer academic word like narcissism. It has been said, and with some justice, that most Americans recognize only two figures in human history: Lincoln good, Hitler bad. Trump, in the years 2015-2024, was not a putschist commanding a private army and expounding a race-based nationalism with a dream of imperial conquest. He was exactly what his reality shows and products told you he was, an unscrupulous real-estate businessman preoccupied with making deals, making money, and seeing his name in lights. His model came not from anything European but the precepts of the Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn, the adviser to Senator Joe McCarthy and, for Trump, an admired youthful mentor— Cohn, whose mother had taught him the concept of the “favor bank,” which Cohn in turn imparted to the young Trump. Do your half-friend a gratuitous favor and it’s money in the bank; later, you can call on him, he’ll pay you back, and maybe then it’s a three-quarters friendship. In short, Trump was, and is, a high society mobster: a character fundamentally distinct from the political gangster.
How far has this picture altered since Trump’s inauguration for a second term on January 20? The most conspicuously base of his personal qualities is a wide streak of cruelty, overlapping with personal vengefulness. Magnanimity is a rare human capacity, rarer still in presidents, but Trump is the reverse of magnanimous: He can’t refrain from gloating over the spoils of any victory. This temper is a concomitant of his almost unmixed and unlimited self-regard. And these tendencies have been sharpened by the cabinet choices of his second term—some of them purely a matter of whim, others dictated by right-wing formations like Project 2025, which saw that his second term would be as incoherent as his first unless the president were carefully surrounded by a well-instructed team to rope him in. The sadistic edge in Trump’s character has been augmented by his border czar Tom Homan, an advocate of mass deportations, and by the punitive rigor of his attorney general Pam Bondi. Presumably it was Bondi who advised the executive order withdrawing security clearances from big-name law firms, along with the demand for surveillance and inspection of the minutest details in the budgets of elite universities, on pain of a withdrawal of federal funding. The threat to defund universities and the threat to deport immigrants converged in the arrest of pro-Palestinian students at Columbia and Brown: Their opinions were said to warrant an expanded use of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which allowed the deportation of immigrants whose politics advanced the cause of world communism.
All these early actions have been questioned or temporarily halted by rulings in the lower courts; but Trump has always lived by the lawsuit—3,500 is the common estimate of the number of suits in which he has been involved as plaintiff or defendant. With a programmatic disregard for custom and legal precedent, Trump is seeking a spectacle of defiance that will work as great television until the decisions come down case-by-case from the Supreme Court. To advertise the uniqueness of the excitement, he has responded to questions about the limits of executive power with deliberately ambiguous statements concerning his disposition to obey the verdict of any court. But the next target in the conflict over deportations has already been set: “Wait till you see what’s coming,” Homan said at the end of April. Coming, he meant, to illegal immigrants but also to the officials who have harbored them in sanctuary cities.
Chaos is the word most readily associated with Trump’s style of governing, and it doesn’t come only from his enemies. Any move he makes is apt to be inconsequential, soon reined in or reversed, but it may work as great television; the likelihood that the first move will be followed by a second compatible with the first is surprisingly close to zero. Even by Trump standards, however, his naming of Musk as leader of a new Department of Government Efficiency, and placing DOGE beyond the reach of inspection by folding it into the White House, was a drastic decision that facilitated many things done quickly and wrongly, some of them already retracted, some with reverberations that won’t be measured for years. The stated goal for Musk and his team of high-tech virtuosi was to work hard for 130 days and cut US government spending by a trillion dollars. A hundred days in, the cuts were approaching one-fifth of that arbitrary number, with serious losses to public health stateside and abroad, and to the upkeep of national parks, along with an exorbitant encroachment on civic privacy in searches of the Internal Revenue Service.
Yet, since they were ordered by the president, some of these moves may well be judged neither illegal nor unconstitutional. Such is the legacy of the “energy” and “dispatch” envisaged for the chief magistrate by Alexander Hamilton. It is possible to imagine someone using this kinglike prerogative even more recklessly than Trump; the only adequate cure is the abolition of the presidency; but it must be added that the capacity of the new administration to sow confusion and excitement was more than doubled by Trump and Musk acting as a team, often on camera together. What we were seeing was a government revolution against government itself.
Another series of galvanic shocks came from Trump’s announcement of a new regime of “reciprocal” tariffs. The aim was to jump-start the movement of re-industrialization that he promised in campaigning for his first term; but the immediate reaction to the country-by-country tariff chart was so unpleasant (as the following days in the stock market would testify) that Trump issued one of his no-worry retractions: a 90-day postponement, accompanied by a cordial invitation to various countries to come to him separately and negotiate. The numbers on the chart were, he suggested, only the opening bid for whatever the deal might become. It is now expected that the first repercussions of the tariffs for American consumers will be felt in June.
Besides calling a salutary close to uncontrolled immigration, the main area in which Trump had seemed to promise a welcome relief from his predecessors was foreign policy. Liberal internationalists like Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan were lineal descendants of the liberal imperialists in British foreign policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Trump is a believer in America First, a slogan that can mean many things, but he is anyway a defector from the bipartisan globalist consensus: He made this clear when he spoke with contempt about the Iraq war in the 2016 primaries. Again, as president, he announced in December 2018 the termination of US military actions in Syria, only to have his command subverted by his generals and the CIA. More recently, he has opposed Biden’s climb up the escalation ladder in Ukraine. It therefore seemed possible that the start of Trump’s second term would draw the world a little further from the onset of a third world war.
But the evidence is uncertain. In dealing with Ukraine and Russia, as well as with Israel and Palestine, Trump has trusted Steve Witkoff to be his personal negotiator. Such freelance assignments are not unknown in the history of American presidencies. As the veteran diplomat Charles Freeman has pointed out, Harry Hopkins played a similar part for Franklin Roosevelt, and Colonel House for Woodrow Wilson; and Witkoff seems to possess a canny intelligence and a moderate temperament. Yet his background is in real estate. He is learning the politics of both regions as a novice at shuttle diplomacy, reading as he runs.
Even so, Witkoff obtained the temporary ceasefire in Gaza that eluded Biden for a year; and statements by Secretary of State Marco Rubio have indicated that the most inflammatory cause of the other war, the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine, is now off the table. Washington may settle for an end to the killing and a frozen conflict in the manner of Korea. Trump would seem to share a definite stance with his Vice President JD Vance, his Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and his Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Elbridge Colby, all of whom have shown a determined hostility to the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Biden pattern of regime-change wars. But the evidence of cogent assessment is undercut by the inclusion in Trump’s government of people like General Keith Kellogg and (the lately sidelined) Mike Waltz, both of whom are close to the neoconservative orthodoxy that favors “force projection.”
“At some point, and under whatever auspices, this is a game that will have to end.”
The world outside recognizes the United States as a global empire, but we are the most unconscious empire in history, and none of our recent presidents, not Biden, not Obama, not even the younger Bush, was ever called an imperialist by the mainstream media. The New York Times, however, in a special April 28 section on Trump’s first 100 days, ran a separate article by David Sanger under the section-heading “Imperialism” and the article-headline: “Greenland? Canada? The Canal? The Mystery Behind Manifest Destiny.” Unlike all the others, Trump could safely be called an imperialist. What the always cautious Sanger meant was: Trump is a 19th-century imperialist (so we can use the word). Trump’s talk of Greenland and Panama belong to the world of the Monroe Doctrine, of North and South America as the US sphere of influence: the very doctrine that our 21st century imperialists have abridged and expanded.
Trump, in this way, can be tagged with the racist stigma of the 19th century warrior-presidents who pass in a clear line from Andrew Jackson to Theodore Roosevelt; at the same time, he can be demoted for his quaint lack of interest in subsidizing NATO and joining more wars in the Greater Middle East. The old empires of Europe were at once the debauching tutors and the beneficiaries of America’s 20th and 21st century world empire, but we called it, instead, “the rules-based international order.” Euphemism was the compliment that decorous mastery paid to a grateful servitude. At some point, and under whatever auspices, this is a game that will have to end.
Yet Trump, in his first 100 days, has been impossible to credit as a leader of the United States on an innovative prudent path. His only constant appetite is for headlines and a sprawling disorder. So the question returns: How can he have become president? Backwash from from the financial collapse was still a drag on many people’s lives; the BLM riots of 2020 (their participants hidden under Covid masks) didn’t strike everyone as the call of conscience that Kamala Harris pronounced them to be; and finally, people got tired of pretending.
Pretend that the damage to your small business is not so dire and that it will be, eventually, recoverable. Pretend that the border crossings weren’t out of control in 2021-2023, even if you later learn (a fact noticed by David Leonhardt in The New York Times, December 11, 2024) that it was “the largest immigration surge in US history” and 60 percent of the immigrants were illegal. Pretend that Joe Biden wasn’t as mentally out-of-it as he seemed, and that it wasn’t a relief to hear anyone say (as Trump did in their debate): “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, and I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”
The 49.8 percent plurality that gave Trump his second term did so from a mood of rational resentment. People in this state don’t say of someone like Trump, “I agree with him” (even if it were clear what that could mean). They say about the opposing party: Not that. And the Democrats had come to seem a party in which elder statesmen like Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin took instructions from staffers in a language they scarcely understood; a party that began every ceremony, however brief, with a solemn land acknowledgment; in which a left-liberal columnist, Jonathan Capehart, at the meeting to elect the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, could ask the candidates and audience to raise their hands if they agreed that misogyny and racism were significant factors in defeating Kamala Harris, and, when almost everyone raised their hands, could award them with teacherly praise: “That’s good—you all pass.” We’re going to center the marginalized part of this issue so we can navigate any questions in a productive conversation and proactively support the resilience of intersectional folks. Democrats have been talking like that for a decade now, with inflation at home and the forever wars in the background.
The loss of services from government cuts at the level Trump has enforced; the degradation of due process in the immigration arrests; the global reaction to the tariffs and their predicable effects on the fulfillment of everyday needs—all these consequences of actions he authorized in his first 100 days will be brought home to voters soon enough. Trump can occasionally approach a semblance of coherent policy, but it never lasts for long. This fact alone might be a source of long-term hope for the survival of constitutional government; but it will have to be accompanied by a break from subservience by Republicans (it only takes a few) and, among Democrats, a turn from the indiscriminate allure of “resistance” to the daily work of political opposition: a work in which filthy words can deliver no more help than Greek or Roman words.
The polite culture has got to be put away and replaced by a disposition to think again and to listen—a different thing from acting friendly. An opposition worthy of the name can profit from heterodox models like former Senators William Fulbright of Arkansas and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin: lawmakers who went to work free of self-pity, condescension, or a well-bred distaste for the people they might still hope to persuade.