The Second Coming

Karl Marx famously wrote that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Kamala Harris makes him undoubtedly a world-historic personage whose impact will be felt around the world for a very long time. But his second coming is no farce. It is a brutal show of strength.

It has turned out that the drama that best encapsulates this momentous period is, after all, the shadow play of death and resurrection that unfolded in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. As Trump was grazed by a fragment of a bullet fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks, he dropped to the ground, then rose again, fist in the air, triumphant and defiantly alive. Distilled into this moment and lit by a glow of heroism was the whole story of what had happened since Trump’s apparent political death on January 6, 2021, and of what was to come in the 2024 election: that which does not kill him makes him stronger.

There has been, in recent times, something of a pattern here: the strongman gets elected, is thrown out of office, and then makes a triumphant return. This is what happened with one of Trump’s political models, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. It happened with Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. And what this pattern suggests is not just that the strongman comes back—he returns as a more radically authoritarian ruler. The second time he is infused with the swagger of impunity. The man they couldn’t kill is also the man they cannot inhibit.

“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably, at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.

And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses. Up to now it has been possible to take some comfort in Trump’s failure to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020, and in the fact that not once during his time in the Oval Office did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing. (This was true of no previous president in the era of polling.) It could be said with some justice that he did not really embody America.

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