The Return of Trump—III

Christine Henneberg • John Washington • Suzanne Schneider • Aryeh Neier • E. Tammy Kim • Andrew O’Hagan

Christine Henneberg

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, friends asked me whether I was worried for my four-year-old daughter’s future, specifically her access to legal abortion. My answer: not in California, and not with an abortion provider for a mom. In the worst-case scenario, I joked, I could perform her abortion in my garage.

The joke is even less funny now as I consider the implications of a second Trump presidency for the future of my work, and for girls’ and women’s reproductive freedoms. If a Trump Justice Department moves to enforce the Comstock Act (an 1873 anti-obscenity law that could be used to prohibit the mailing of abortion-related medications and equipment), or if Trump should go so far as to enshrine fetal personhood in the Constitution (as anti-abortion lobbyists will pressure him to do), doctors in states like California who provide care for women traveling from restricted states will ourselves be severely restricted. This means that I, like physicians in Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, will be forced to turn patients away—not for medical reasons, not because I am not trained to help them, but because of moral decrees handed down by politicians. The worst part is that I will turn them away knowing that if my own daughter ever needs an abortion, she will get one—either in my garage, or in the same way those politicians’ daughters will get theirs: by flying to a place where it can be done safely and discreetly, at a price unaffordable for most of my patients.

For doctors who believe, as I do, that every woman should be able to terminate her pregnancy for any reason at any time, it has always required some compromise of integrity to practice in a country that restricts abortion according to someone else’s idea of right and wrong. But the dilemma suddenly feels more desperate. Every time I yank my kids back from a curb or bear-hug them through a flu shot, I whisper fiercely, “My most important job is to keep you healthy and safe.” I have the same duty to my patients—a duty I’ll have to fulfill while, in all likelihood, a vaccine conspiracy theorist with no public health training runs one or more of the nation’s public health agencies, and while a violence-inciting president rules a country where men shoot women and children so regularly that it often doesn’t even make the news.

My daughter, now six, recently shared with us her first-grade teacher’s definition of integrity: “doing the right thing even when no one is watching.” It’s an excellent definition for a six-year-old. But it leaves at least one adult wondering how to define “right” in a country in which the opportunities for fulfilling my most sacred duties—as a doctor, a parent, a citizen—are rapidly disappearing.

John Washington

Myles Traphagen, a researcher at the Wildlands Network, has described the seven-hundred-mile border wall between the United States and Mexico as an “uncontrolled ecological experiment on a continental scale.” The piecemeal structure disrupts animal migrations and has cleaved in two some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. One remote valley of the Arizona borderlands, for example, is home to over 470 species of bees—more than any other place on earth. Wildlife biologists have told me that blocking off the few remaining gaps in the wall, especially in Arizona and New Mexico, will kill any hope of the jaguar’s recovery in the United States. The apex predator is one of the keystones of the Southwest ecosystem; they need room to roam. 

The wall, along with immigration enforcement writ large, is an experiment that still more immediately threatens humans. Just hours after Trump’s victory was declared, Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, confirmed to Fox News that his administration would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” on his first day in office. He plans to use both state governments and local law enforcement. “They know their names, they know their middle names, they know everything about them,” Trump recently said, describing the relationship between local police and immigrants. “They’re going to get them and they’re going to get them out.” 

Republican state lawmakers have passed bills in Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma in the past year to facilitate exactly that: allow local jurisdictions to round up, lock up, and in some cases, deport immigrants. Arizona voters this week approved a ballot proposition along the same lines. These laws haven’t yet gone into effect (except in Texas, but only for a few hours) and are being contested in the courts because, since the late nineteenth century, the federal government has wielded sole authority over immigration. States are now challenging that monopoly.

These “states’ rights” tiffs over immigration control have been increasing in both frequency and intensity. But rather than represent opposing approaches, the two sides are jockeying for authority. Earlier this year, when Texas attempted to enforce its own state immigration policy, the Biden administration filed a lawsuit to stop it in which they cited an 1875 Supreme Court case, Chy v. Freeman, that defended the federal government’s ability to uphold Chinese Exclusion. At the same time, the administration was limiting asylum protections, deporting people in greater numbers, and building more detention centers.

With Trump heading back to the White House, the charade of opposition will end. The president and his legal team have four years to appoint new federal judges to change not only the operational landscape—more prosecution, detention, and deportation—but also the legal landscape of immigration enforcement, which could soon look vastly different. In 2020 Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s deputy secretary of homeland security, published a policy brief that proposed combining the US Customs and Border Protection with ICE, shifting its core missions from processing visas and regulating cross-border traffic to keeping people out. (On Friday, Cuccinelli appeared on CNN to explain the “practicalities” of mass deportation.) Humanitarian visas could disappear. Asylum protections will likely be further gutted, and more families intentionally separated. States may even be able to run their own immigration enforcement or deputize their own border forces. As for the physical landscape, all signs point to more miles of border wall, leaving little hope for the jaguar and even less for migrants.

Suzanne Schneider

“They’re going to win.” This was my frank assessment to an editor after attending the National Conservatism conference in London in May 2023. At NatCon, I saw conservatives—including several British MPs and vice-president elect J.D. Vance—outflanking liberals economically and tying this mode of populism to an appreciable public distaste for identity politics and language policing. As I recently warned in these pages, if Democrats “fail to reinforce social progressivism with policies for economic justice—from health care and housing to education, child, and elder care—then they will struggle to overcome an ascendent New Right that acknowledges the abundant failures of the free market even as it advances a regressive social agenda. Americans can’t live on joy alone.”

I do not for a moment believe that Donald Trump will embrace the populist economic agenda favored by the NatCon arm of his coalition, who will likely be marginalized having served their electoral purpose. As Curtis Yarvin, the court philosopher of Silicon Valley’s right flank, has argued, “The leader must use the mass movement to win the democracy game, then demand and take absolute power.” The GOP is the party of Elon Musk and it will never throw down against capital—as their eagerness to fire FTC chairwoman Lina Khan attests. Instead an intensified patronage system is likely to emerge, as entrepreneurs cozy up to Trump and position their companies as national champions. But major Democratic donors will also cheer Khan’s dismissal, pointing toward the structural impediments that prevent liberals from taking class seriously.

The postmortems will be penned for some time. Perhaps the least convincing explanations currently on offer are those that explain Kamala Harris’s disappointing performance by fixating on the inherent racism of American voters. As the public historian and community organizer Asad Dandia noted on November 6, “the party becoming whiter is the Democratic Party and the Party becoming more multiracial is the Republican Party. This doesn’t align with the theories that academics, nonprofit activists, and race scholars trotted out in the 2010s.”

Donald Trump has continued making inroads with immigrants, young voters, and a multiracial working class. We must grapple with this fact and forever retire the notion that voters of color are naturally progressive. So too we must recognize that an overwhelming portion of the electorate neither thinks nor speaks like online theorists of privilege and marginalization. They go to work and try to afford groceries, housing, and childcare. The rapidity with which many liberal commentators dismiss such concerns as selfish only underscores the distance between a politics of recognition and one of material security. We won’t make progress on the former without tackling the latter.

Aryeh Neier

Since about the beginning of the present century, authoritarianism has been on the rise the world over. In China, Xi Jinping has positioned himself as the country’s ruler for life, ending what had been a halting, fitful movement toward the rule of law; in Russia, Vladimir Putin has consolidated absolute power and tried to destroy or control an independent Ukraine that had been developing democratically; in India, Narendra Modi has had wide latitude to enact his Hindu nationalist agenda; and a host of autocratic rulers have come to power, some by more or less democratic means.

The triumph of Trump and Trumpism in the United States will do much more than add this country to the authoritarian roster. It will also add legitimacy to the rule of autocrats such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Kais Saied in Tunisia, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, the Shinawatras in Thailand, Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Abiy Ahmed in Ethiopia, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, as well as to the path that Prabowo Subianto will likely follow in the world’s third-largest democracy, Indonesia. After all, if the leader of the world’s preeminent democracy openly admires autocrats—from Orbán, Putin, and Xi to Kim Jong Un—and threatens his political opponents with prosecution and imprisonment, who is to object to Erdoğan sentencing the philanthropist Osman Kavala to life in prison without parole for his charitable support for minority rights and for peaceful protests? Why raise a fuss over the sudden death in prison of Putin’s political nemesis, forty-seven-year-old Alexei Navalny, without an independent autopsy to ascertain the cause?

Unfortunately, other prominent western democracies currently lack the leadership necessary to counter the rise of authoritarianism. Angela Merkel was able to exercise salutary global influence during her tenure as Germany’s chancellor, but no European leader has filled her shoes since she stepped down three years ago. Nor is there a leader who is up to the task in the United Nations or any other intergovernmental body, such as the European Union. As is now widely recognized, some members of Trump’s administration—especially former military men—managed to restrain him during his first term. He has made it clear that he will not tolerate such limits again. It is not only democracy in the United States that will be under severe threat in the next Trump era, however, but the future of democratic governance around the world.

E. Tammy Kim

A great number of poor and working-class Americans voted for Donald Trump this week, as they did in 2016. Though his policies as president were almost uniformly to their disadvantage, he spoke to their anxieties over the four subsequent years he spent running for reelection: inflation and deindustrialization, opioid deaths and a loss of status on the world stage. That he offered no real fix was no matter. The Democrats didn’t even bother to hold up a mirror. 

Bernie Sanders’s postmortem—that the Democratic Party “abandoned working class people” long ago, and has now been abandoned by them in turn—feels right as a general critique of messaging and coalition-building. Yet as Sanders himself has acknowledged, the Biden administration did some very good things for workers, or those who should identify as such. For one thing, it transformed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces workers’ right to organize and oversees collective bargaining between unions and employers in the private sector. The NLRB isn’t especially large or powerful, but under Biden it responded to a swell of pandemic-era activism—in coffee shops, warehouses, college gyms, newsrooms, Hollywood studios, and car factories—with a newly assertive, creative approach to labor law. It tried, inasmuch as a bureaucracy can, to push workers toward collective action and away from Trumpian grievance. 

As soon as Trump is re-inaugurated, he will—in keeping with his habit of prioritizing revenge—surely fire Jennifer Abruzzo, the career civil servant who currently heads the NLRB. Biden, after all, had swiftly terminated Trump’s appointee to that position. But in his second term Trump will do more than install a pro-business leader. He will use his influence over the judiciary to ensure that his friends Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos get everything they want. Earlier this year, both SpaceX and Amazon, rather than consider the (quite reasonable) demands of their employees, filed lawsuits claiming that the NLRB, by its very nature, is unconstitutional. They have had success in the Republican-dominated Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and were further boosted by a trio of Supreme Court rulings, from over the summer, that serve to weaken all federal agencies. There will now be more attempts to “disembowel the state’s power to regulate the wealthy and powerful,” Hanan Kolko, a union-side lawyer in New York, told me. Workers will continue to organize; they just won’t have any help.

Andrew O’Hagan

It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. To millions of decent people who might judge better when it comes to their children, Trump’s menace is not a bar to his attraction but is rather a part of it, and so, for reasons too deep for tears, his manifold hatreds have proved more inviting than repugnant to a proportion of the electorate. It is an aspect of Trump’s cruel magic that he so readily invites the communion of people who find they can express in company what they might otherwise resist. As George Orwell showed, groupthink may be developed in a darkroom of propaganda. For us, it now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.

This has been his achievement, to bring such loathing to the open spaces of America, where certain voters can feel remote, can feel worthless, looking for someone to blame and someone to save them. That is how a sociopath gets to be President. He rises like a Leviathan out of people’s worst feelings. And that is how true oppression works, by harnessing the unconscious disgust and prejudice of the vulnerable, marrying it to the ambitions of the mighty, who are ready to say, “come and be part of our solution.”

The anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko once said that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” That is how a sexual predator gets to be president. He gets there by being a wizard of paranoia and brutality, while the voters, so many of them shunted away from their brains, their hearts, and their courage, follow the road that leads to his phoney eminence, begging for inclusion. He has the fame. He has the money. He has the answers, right?

What the election shows is that more than enough Americans feel sufficiently disappointed with their circumstances to join their voices to a fascist band. It will end horribly. A man who should be in jail is positioned again as the most powerful person on earth, accompanied by a vice-president who once compared his boss to Hitler. When I witnessed Trump mount the convention platform in July, reeking of malice and manifestly disturbed, I hoped that a population of free voters couldn’t possibly reelect him. But that’s the point. A very great number of them are not in the best sense free. They are imprisoned in his mirage. That is how a racist gets to be president. Not by being liked by those he hates, but by being the source of a power they feel desperate to share in. They want ownership. And Donald Trump is president because he temporarily owns their minds.