What is alarming about Donald Trump’s return to the White House is not just that he won the presidency, but how he won it. In the closing months of the campaign, the conventional political wisdom—pronounced by the regulars on cable TV news panels and whispered to reporters by Republican “insiders”—was that Trump should temper his role as insult comic, ease up a bit on his authoritarian bluster and talk about his plans to govern.
After a comedian who was invited to warm up the crowd at Trump’s Madison Square Garden finale described Puerto Rico as an island of garbage, perhaps it would have been better not to stage a photo op with Trump behind the wheel of a garbage truck? With polls showing that his menacing misogyny antagonises female voters, did he really want to promise that he would be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not”? When in the final days of the campaign former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and several top veterans of the first Trump administration bravely declared the candidate a “fascist”, was the prudent, presidential response a reciprocal volley of name-calling?
Yet the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted candidate emerged with something he had failed to get in his two previous runs—a popular majority. Clearly Trump understood the voters’ tolerance for blowhard antics better than many of the experts did. An ABC/Ipsos poll found that almost half of those surveyed agreed Trump was a fascist; 8 per cent said they would vote for Trump anyway. We should have realised by now that Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” is not just the song he danced to at his first inauguration.
What will he do with this shameful mandate from the voters? Having bent the Republican party to his will, he is now doing the same to the country.
We should expect a campaign to fire or intimidate conscientious civil servants—what the Trumpists call “the deep state”—and a co-option of the military as a political instrument of the White House. Armed forces and law enforcement would be deployed to uproot hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants from their communities and confine them in prison camps pending deportation. We can expect the Justice Department to serve the personal agenda of the president, meaning pardons for himself and his lackeys and criminal investigations for those who have offended him. We can expect massive increases in oil and gas drilling and a rollback of climate measures. We can expect a patchwork of state laws governing abortion. We can expect the new health czar, likely Robert F Kennedy Jr, to attempt a war on vaccines. Kennedy has been told he’ll be able to do “what he wants” with women’s healthcare. We can expect tax cuts for the rich and crippling tariffs for US consumers. Abroad, we can expect Trump to abandon Ukraine to the ambitions of Vladimir Putin, and to support Israel’s annexation of parts of Gaza and the West Bank, in defiance of international law.
The second Trump administration will apparently govern with a Republican majority in the Senate (and possibly House). We can expect few profiles in courage. The seasoned grownups who subverted the more outrageous ideas of his first term are already replaced by enablers and enthusiasts, the likes of Elon Musk and Kennedy, and the xenophobe Stephen Miller, who the Southern Poverty Law centre credits with “shaping the racist and draconian immigration policies” of the first Trump term.
The courts will remain an active line of defence, but the federal bench has been reshaped since 2016. In his first four-year term, Trump appointed 54 federal appellate judges, one short of the 55 Obama appointed in two terms. In doing so, “Trump ‘flipped’ the balance of several appeals courts from a majority of Democratic appointees to a majority of Republican appointees,” according to Pew Research. And that does not include a Supreme Court that has been Trump-friendly on issues from voting rights to women’s health to emasculating federal regulators.
More than ever, Americans will depend on a free and aggressive press to serve as a watchdog over Trump Redux. The news media, like just about every other institution these days, suffers from an erosion of public trust, compounded by a troubled business model and an epidemic of online disinformation. The recent scandals at the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—where billionaire owners who do business with the federal government stopped their editors from publishing endorsements of Kamala Harris over Trump—did not noticeably affect the papers’ editorial contents. Like most American newspapers, the LA Times and Post insulate their newsrooms from the business operations of their companies, and both have continued fearless coverage of Trump. But the controversy delighted Trump and reminded us that courageous journalism may come at a price.
If all of this strikes you as nightmarish, there is one factor that might slow the American rush to autocracy. At 78, Trump will be the oldest person ever to become president. Seventeen months in, he will turn 80.
