This piece was initially published on Tuesday 5th November and was updated on Wednesday 6th November.
With Donald Trump’s devastating electoral triumph one of the most urgent questions for Democrats is—who will lead the opposition to a regime that looks like it will have the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and Supreme Court in its control? Who will champion the half of America that did not vote for Trump and whose liberal and democratic values are likely to be attacked from day one of his presidency? What happens when Trump’s grip tightens and if the TV networks are shut down, as he has already threatened, and America’s right-wing oligarchs use unbridled power to loot the land?
The guardrails are gone. The idea that checks and balances of the constitution would always be able to restrain a man like Trump now seem ludicrous. Only the relative autonomy of state governments will offer any resistance to a dictatorial regime. Democrat governors such as Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gavin Newsom in California and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania have a degree of power in this unprecedented situation, but their power is restricted to their states. Who will rally Americans nationally against Trump’s onslaught on democracy, his mass deportations, the persecution of his enemies and the destruction of institutions?
It certainly won’t be the outgoing vice president, Kamala Harris, because a defeated candidate doesn’t become the leader of the opposition in the United States. Although I admired the way she made the best of her short campaign, her never failing grace and tireless campaigning, she will have no standing or office after January and, anyway, she is totally spent as a political force.
It is difficult to underestimate what this decisive Trump victory means for America, let alone the world. Trump is, after all, a man who felt able to fantasise in an interview with his buddy Tucker Carlson, about former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney having nine rifles trained on her face. Cheney endorsed Harris, and Trump was talking about taking revenge with a firing squad, something that he would be emboldened to order because of the Supreme Court’s gift of immunity to serving presidents. Trump seemed to enjoy the idea; Tucker offered not the slightest murmur of disapproval.
I kept hoping Trump and his allies would commit a terminal offence against American decency, but not even in the last week of his campaign, which included the openly fascist rally at Madison Square Gardens, did his behaviour cause the universal outrage it would in the past. Things have certainly changed, or rather he has changed them by screwing with everyone’s mind and making them lose their bearings.
So, who will raise the standard and save American democracy now that a convicted felon has won a second term? Among others, it could be Liz Cheney; she has shown great courage since the 6th January insurrection, and there’s a good argument that a principled conservative who believes in the Constitution and is on the right of the party (in the old sense) is the person who might eventually break the spell of Trump, bring America to its senses and calm the anger.
Or might it be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Like Bernie Sanders, the independent senator for Vermont, she has talked for years about the systemic problems of American democracy and the influence of big money in the country’s politics. Despite his formidable intellect and energy, Sanders at 83 is too old to lead the resistance. AOC is nearly half a century younger and is one of the most articulate, charismatic people on the US political stage. Still, though a lot has changed during this speed-of-light election, her national standing has not increased to the point where she can challenge a tyrant.
Those on the left in American politics must regroup, think about their country, and rid themselves of an awful lot of assumptions, many of which I happen to share. One initial conclusion is that reasonable, evidenced arguments about self-interest and freedoms may not be enough to save democracy in the west. And that is a profoundly worrying thought.
It is often said that Las Vegas exposes all of a person’s hidden failings and vices, because the city is so geared towards vice. The same is true of US presidential elections. For a brief moment, we see society floodlit like a huge stadium, its deep flaws apparent, along with the bad faith, dishonesty and malevolence of so many politicians and political actors.
The scene is profoundly more depressing now than in November 2008, when I watched Barack Obama make his acceptance speech in Chicago. Not a year later, just as we were getting used to the surge of optimism, the essayist and novelist Gore Vidal suggested that America was ripe for dictatorship and that one might even follow the Obama presidency. Trump’s first administration was chaotic rather than despotic. History will record it as the preparatory term for what follows now. We don’t know how bad the Trump second term will be, but Vidal was right and he saw a transformation in America that many others did not.
Vidal, an occasional politician, leaned towards a kind of populism—he was chair of the People’s Party for two years in the 1970s—and he would no doubt have agreed with Sanders on the immorality of American inequality: its three richest men are now worth more than half the population.
To understand the anger, or at least the part of it that hasn’t been driven by Trump’s racism, sexism, and compulsion to tell women what to do with their bodies, you need only grasp this inequality that Vidal felt so keenly and warned was dangerous. Millions are working two or three jobs to buy food and keep a roof over their head. Forget paying for health insurance and prescription drugs and saving for old age or to send children to college—these are distant dreams for many Americans.
I have been visiting the United States regularly for about 30 years and lived here for a spell at the beginning of the Clinton presidency. It is interesting to reflect that in those three decades the working class, usually referred to as the middle class in America, has endured deindustrialisation, the Great Recession and Covid. Their share of the country’s wealth fell from 37 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2022, while the richest 20 per cent of Americans increased their share from 61 per cent to 71 per cent.
This is a direct transfer of wealth from the bottom of society to the top. One of the biggest failures of the Harris campaign was that she didn’t say to the American working class, “There’s a reason you feel angry about your life: the rich are taking all your money.”
This shortcoming wouldn’t have surprised Vidal, who was critical of both parties for their failure to deal with perpetual inequalities of American life and who ended his days saying the Republicans and Democrats were in a conspiracy against working Americans. His analysis explains the rise of Maga populism, even if it can’t make sense of why such a large number of hard-up working people supported a man who promises tax cuts for billionaires, suicidal tariffs and the deportation of 20m people, the combination of which will almost certainly collapse the American economy and bring ruin to them.
So, back to my question. Who is going defend American democracy in these extremely dark days? Who has the moral authority to stand up to Trump and the sickness he spreads? (Last weekend, he appeared to fellate a microphone on stage.) New leaders will emerge from AOC’s generation, but I believe the answer, for the time being, is the Obamas: Barack, who has returned to the campaign trail, and Michelle, who grows in stature every time she speaks. They have an aura, and Trump will find it more difficult to touch them—though he will surely try. “She opened up a little bit of something,” Trump said, in response to Michelle Obama’s criticism of him. “Oh, she was nasty. Shouldn’t be that way. That was a big mistake that she made.”
In these last five weeks, Barack Obama has provided the rational case for Harris, mocked Trump’s hucksterism and dishonesty and made the Republican look stupid—all with great aplomb. But it was when he left the prepared script to address particular Trump outrages, you saw the Obama of 2008: tearing into Trump’s allegations that Democrats were sending emergency funds to migrants after the hurricanes that ripped across the southeast, appealing to Republicans to stand up to the lies and misinformation that were destroying lives. After the warm-up act at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage”, Obama stormed, “These are Americans. They are people. That is the reason why this election should not be close. Here’s a good rule: If somebody does not respect you, if somebody does not see you as fellow citizens with equal claim to opportunity, the pursuit of happiness, to the American dream, you should not vote for them.”
There are going to be many more lies, many more outrages against humanity, reason, and science. America will need voices like Barack Obama’s, particularly now that the Washington Post and LA Times have, by refusing to endorse Harris, established that they have been cowed by Trump. This is one of the most worrying developments of the last few weeks, and it is critical that a free media is not crippled by blandishments and threats from the Republican hegemony, which will last at least until the mid-term elections in 2026. Money is buying elections, and those same interests have begun to stifle free expression in the media.
Perhaps the finest speech of the campaign was given by Michelle Obama, in Michigan on 26th October. It contains a takedown of Trump, intelligent praise for Harris and a moving and candid passage on the importance of protecting women’s reproductive health. I feel sure this issue has never been articulated so well on the American stage. “See fellows, most of us women, we suck up our pain and we deal with it alone. We don’t share our experiences with anyone. Not with our partners, our friends, or even our doctors,” she said.
Millions of women across America must have nodded and yet millions also voted for a crude sexist and adjudicated rapist. We are in new territory, and while I feel sure that the Obamas and figures such as Cheney, Sanders AOC and the Democrat governors have their part to play in the initial defence of democracy, Democrats must go away, re-tool and grasp that the arguments that they believe to be self-evidently correct aren’t always landing. Only that way will new voices emerge to address the Trump menace and the deep structural problems that have brought him to power again.
