The Return of Trump—II

Rozina Ali •  Christopher Benfey •  Quinn Slobodian •  Walter M. Shaub Jr. •  Bridget Read •  Jon Allsop

Rozina Ali

“Why would you place your faith in somebody who instituted a so-called Muslim Ban?” President Barack Obama asked at a campaign rally in Wisconsin earlier this month. In the weeks running up to the elections, that question was repeatedly posed to Muslim and Arab American leaders who had publicly stated they would not endorse Kamala Harris for president. It was meant to highlight the seeming contradiction at the heart of their protest: even by voting for Jill Stein, as several said they would, they were paving the road to the White House for a president whose interests were explicitly opposed to theirs. 

Yet it was the Democratic Party’s electoral campaign that was rife with contradictions. In attempts to draw a contrast with Donald Trump, Harris reminded voters that “democracy is on the line”—an argument that fell flat to significant numbers of Muslims and Arabs. As Democratic leaders claimed that only their party could preserve the international rules-based order, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bulldozed over every red line that President Joe Biden put before him. As Democratic leaders touted decency, Biden questioned the number of dead Gazans and sent more weapons to Israel. 

More recently, as the official death toll in Gaza neared 43,000 (the actual number is estimated to be a lot higher), President Bill Clinton admonished voters in Michigan for criticizing Israel and blamed civilian casualties on Hamas fighters: “Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself.” As Democratic leaders warned Americans that a vote for Trump was a vote for fascism, antiwar protesters were arrested or suspended from colleges and threatened with being blacklisted from jobs. As Harris promoted joy and inclusion as a way forward, her campaign refused to allow Ruwa Romman—a representative from the Uncommitted Campaign and a state legislator who went on to win her own race in Georgia—to speak on stage for a few minutes at the Democratic National Convention, even after the campaign said the speech could be vetted beforehand. 

The Muslim Ban—one of the first executive orders that Trump signed when he took office—affected tens of thousands of families. The State Department calculated that nearly 42,000 visas were denied between December 2017 and January 2021, separating parents from children, husbands from wives. Some remained apart for years. Amid the chaos and vagueness of the rushed policy, US citizens too were detained and interrogated at airports. But the war in Gaza has led to the death of scores of relatives of American voters, a fact that the White House has been reticent to acknowledge. (In his statement marking a hundred days since the October 7 attacks, Biden did not mention Palestinians once.) As early as November 2023, it seemed that every Palestinian American with family in Gaza knew someone who had been killed. By this September the war had expanded to Lebanon. How, then, did the Democratic Party expect voters to rationalize the Republicans as a “worse option”? It did not help that, when asked if she would have done anything differently than Biden, Harris answered, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” 

Preliminary results in Dearborn, Michigan, show a mass shift from the Democrats to the Republicans: 42 percent of votes went to Trump, who had in recent weeks promised to end the war. In 2020, 70 percent voted for Biden. Only 36 percent did so for Harris this year. Even if Harris had won all 18 percent of the voters who chose Jill Stein, she would have had less support than Biden did against Trump in 2020. It is difficult not to interpret this swing as a protest against the war. 

A similar voting dynamic was replicated around the country, as former Biden voters abandoned the Democrats. Exit polls show that foreign policy was near the bottom and the economy at the top of voter concerns. But even if the war was not foremost on their minds, it was not unrelated to their material circumstances. The Biden administration had rolled back aspects of its progressive domestic agenda—temporary cash relief ended, as did the expanded child tax credit, while millions lost access to Medicaid—but it continued funding wars abroad. Since October 7, 2023, the US has spent over $22 billion on military aid to Israel. The Pentagon budget for 2024 is an astonishing $953 billion—higher than its annual average spending during World War II, adjusted for inflation. At the same time, the US is breaking other historical records: we have the largest-ever homeless population, the most household debt, the widest gap in spending between the poorest and richest consumers (in part because food costs have risen). Even as it condemned Trump as “isolationist,” the Democratic Party seemed to have forgotten its own view of the world: America is not isolated. Foreign policy and domestic policy are interlinked.

Over the last few months, polls in swing states consistently found that a majority of voters favored conditioning military aid to Israel or stopping it altogether. Harris ignored the findings, but Trump did not. According to The New York Times, researchers in the Trump campaign “found that up-for-grabs voters were about six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” 

The Arab and Muslim voting bloc was not significant enough to break Harris’s chances, nor was the Gaza war a driving issue for most voters. But the Democratic leadership’s approach to both signaled what kind of party it has become. In 2004, as Democrats ran a heated campaign to stop President Bush from securing a second term, John Kerry made the Iraq War a referendum on the Republicans. Having voted in favor of it two years before, he now criticized Bush’s aggression and called for a diplomatic solution. In this, he joined millions of antiwar protesters. Twenty years later, Harris decided that the best way to win an election was to cozy up to some of the very Republicans responsible for the Iraq War. Perhaps it is not the American voters who shifted. 

Christopher Benfey

It will take time to sink in, we tell ourselves, but this time the sinking feels physical, as though gravity had increased twofold. We had imagined the old excitement of sitting around the television to watch the returns trickle in state by state. But by nine o’clock we knew from a surreptitious glance at our phones that our plan was a bad one. There would be no TV, not this time, not for our friends and not for us. We numbly ate our dessert and said our goodbyes amid the inevitable jokes. See you in Ireland. Or Iceland. We hugged each other as though, absurdly, it might be a long time before we saw one another again.

The morning after, we awoke to the serene autumn morning and the usual walk through the fallen leaves with the oblivious dog. A woman was sobbing uncontrollably at the trail head. Impossible under the circumstances not to recall other elections, other mornings after. My German-Jewish father, who died this past January at ninety-eight, liked to quote his own father, a Berlin judge, after the new chancellor was appointed on January 30, 1933. “‘Wait till the next election,’ Vati said, but there never was a next election.”

In the preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman celebrated the power of the common people to elect their leaders. He wrote of “the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry.” By “terrible” Whitman meant something like awe-inspiring, sublime, worthy of poetry, like the “terrible beauty” that W. B. Yeats invoked in “Easter, 1916.” The word carries a different meaning today. The two presidential elections that preceded the publication of Leaves of Grass were also terrible, despite Whitman’s comparison. Both candidates supported slavery and the expansionist Mexican War in 1848. Four years later, the Southern sympathizer Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne’s good friend, was installed in the White House, with the Civil War on the horizon. In protest against government support of slavery, Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay the poll tax in 1846.

At certain points in our history mere political campaigns and get-out-the-vote efforts can seem inadequate to the task at hand. “Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the 1838 policy of Indian Removal, that mass deportation known as the Trail of Tears. But sometimes, and this is surely one of those times, imagination is as necessary as resistance. A different way forward will have to be at least as energizing, as intoxicating, as full of unrhymed poetry as the lurid Halloween campaign that just won the day. And more than voting will be needed. “Cast your whole vote,” Thoreau urged his readers in On Civil Disobedience. “Not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”

Our kids attended a school where time out was exacted on the Thinking Chair, the progressive alternative to the Dunce Cap. Our younger son thought it was the Sinking Chair. It will take time to sink in, and we’re still sinking.

Quinn Slobodian

Can you demolish the world economic order twice? The first time Trump was elected, there were dire prophecies about how his policies would affect global trade. His tariffs would destroy the world economy, we were warned—even by people who had for years warned us about the excesses of globalization. Joseph Stiglitz called the US withdrawal from NAFTA a “nightmare scenario.” The rollout was indeed pretty chaotic. China was the main target, but Canada and the EU ended up in the crosshairs for apparently infringing on America’s capacity to produce enough steel and aluminum to protect its own national security. It got arcane quickly. The EU imposed retaliatory tariffs on Harley Davidson motorcycles and bourbon. It was like a first-year macroeconomics class in reverse: as if England wanted to make its own wine and Portugal wanted to make its own cloth. Wasn’t this irrational? Even worse, wasn’t it inefficient?

Yet the political sense of the trade turn soon became clear—and not just to team Trump. Trade policy would be the most obvious continuity between his administration and Biden’s. Progressive pundits praised Trump’s trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, as his “one good appointee,” and there were whispers that he might make it into the new administration. By 2021 tariffs had been rebranded as the royal road to a just energy transition. In rhetoric, the break with the free trade consensus—however incomplete the bond had been in the first place—seemed total.

What should we expect, now that Trump’s logic of hyperbole has forced him to escalate by talking about tariffs of up to a thousand percent on products from China? We should probably listen to his allies when they say that these are the negotiation tactics of a madman rather than concrete policy proposals. Indeed, trade might be one of the policies on which one administration and the next differ least. Abandoning the pretense of green capitalism will allow Trump to pivot back to the carbon- and extraction-driven development that has always underpinned modern American growth. It will hasten the euthanasia of ESG and accelerate the return to the high times of asset price inflation and share buybacks that characterized both Democratic and Republican administrations since the financial crisis.

Industrial policy will be conducted once again by tax breaks rather than subsidies. Lighthizer will return, perhaps as treasury secretary. The World Trade Organization, born in 1995 and useful only insofar as it delivered on American goals, will continue its senescence and likely early interment before it reaches middle age. Badly needed debt relief for the global south will lose any chance of US support. Trade will be nakedly transactional, with the thin silver lining that a space could be opened for at least rhetorical attention to globalization’s effects on deindustrializing heartlands.

Will any of this lead to greater social justice or reduced inequality? There’s no reason to think so. With the rise of J.D. Vance, National Conservatism’s claim that the GOP is the new party of the working class has been realized at the ballot box—but there’s no sign that it will flatten the country’s ever-steeper hierarchies of wealth. Think tanks of the libertarian and post-neoliberal right will jockey for proximity to the president while the man himself remains focused on the one thing he has always excelled at: going bankrupt and still coming out on top.

Walter M. Shaub Jr.

In the 1940s a generation of Americans defeated fascist powers. This week a simple majority of American voters submitted to a fascist leader who has expressed admiration for Hitler’s generals and aspires to destroy representative government. Rejecting the very reason for the Revolutionary War, his supporters traded a president for a ruler. Some of them didn’t believe the warnings. Others—those whose souls are stained with bigotry, greed, and fear—relished the chance to kneel before a cruel and immoral despot.

Donald Trump, too, is submissive. He is the blushing coward whose unrequited adoration for Vladimir Putin was apparent in Helsinki, the dupe who “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un, and the hype man for Viktor Orbán. He may well, in his weakness, cede influence over the budget to Elon Musk, a government contractor who is a conflict of interest incarnate. Trump’s own conflicts of interest are worse than last time, and his appointees won’t worry about ethics rules being enforced against them.

His supporters will suffer from his incompetence with the rest of us. His management skills haven’t improved since he bungled the pandemic response with deadly results. His plot to round up millions of immigrants will certainly also be deadly, like his smaller prior effort. If Trump musters the nerve to wage his promised trade wars, consumer costs will soar and exports will lag. Anyone who thinks the mix of autocracy, corruption, ineptitude, and chaos will be good for the economy is in for a surprise—anyone who isn’t a billionaire, that is.

Trump’s scheme to politicize the federal workforce, meanwhile, is a potent formula for institutionalizing corruption and incompetence. The justice system will become a weapon of political oppression. Thanks to the fringe-right Supreme Court justices who recently invented presidential immunity, no one knows how many crimes he will commit. Trump’s signature innovation may be unleashing the military on civilians inside our borders.

For all that, now is a time for courage, not submission. The great civil rights leaders had little reason to believe they could change this country, but for several decades their struggle gave hope that all might taste democracy. We must be like them.

Bridget Read

In 1937 Napoleon Hill published what is perhaps the best-selling business book of all time, Think and Grow Rich. Handsome if slightly weaselly, eyebrows etched up in false supplication, perpetually slick and suited, Hill told Americans still scraping their way out of the Depression that wealth was, in fact, everywhere. The universe was infinitely abundant. Anybody in a bread line or working for a pittance simply wasn’t tapping into the right energies. It was a shrewd pitch that made tired and desperate people feel suddenly in control of their destinies, rather than buffeted by forces much larger than themselves.

Hill claimed to have learned the secrets to money manifestation by observing tycoons and visionaries like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Thomas Edison. But he was merely a violent huckster. He ran an automotive “school” that preyed on students, charging them to build cars he later sold, and a “success” school for which he was eventually prosecuted for securities fraud. As the journalist Matt Novak has written, he beat his wife and delivered at least one lecture to Klansmen. Nevertheless, the book sold millions of copies. It still goes viral every so often on TikTok and Instagram, rediscovered by would-be entrepreneurs.

I found myself thinking of Napoleon Hill as I saw images of a yam-colored Trump celebrating his victory—and not just because Trump is a devotée of Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who repurposed many of Hill’s ideas in his own self-help bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). Trump was steeped in Peale’s sermons every Sunday as a child, when his family traveled to hear Peale preach at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. Trump said in 2016 that Peale called him his “greatest student of all time.”

In times of institutional chaos—or failure—the swaggering business maverick, rather than the staid Wall Street manager, has long appealed to a country that values muscle, spectacle, and showmanship. Trump, like Hill, never excelled at “business” in the traditional sense of making a profit. His real estate career was marked by failures, fraud, and bailouts, chiefly from his father. But he understood that in America you can make a living telling others that you know a secret route to prosperity—otherwise known as the get-rich-quick scheme. When Trump was just a celebrity, the secret was health supplements, which he hawked via a multilevel marketing company for a few years after the Great Recession. As president during the pandemic, the secret was hydroxychloroquine. For some of his allies, the secret is cryptocurrency, another “business” heavily promoted to the everyman. On the campaign trail this time around, the secret was Trump himself.

To Americans who’ve tried and failed at bootstrapping, the secret must come as a relief. It’s easier to cast your lot with a rogue genius than to confront the material reality asserting itself with each boom and bust. Rather than infinite abundance, the system of private capital to which we’ve yoked ourselves seems to be producing more harm than good, and many of its profiteers are scoundrels, liars, thieves, and brutes. Better to believe the hype, stay for the sideshow, step right up.

Jon Allsop

In 2016 you really didn’t want me at your election party. That June I watched, stunned, as Britain voted to leave the European Union; I had worked as an organizer on the anti-Brexit campaign in Plymouth, my hometown in the southwest of England and, based on what I was hearing locally, I felt confident that we’d win. In November, now a journalism student in New York, I was at Hillary Clinton’s election night event at the Javits Center. The vibes were peppy at first. Less so by the time I left.

A narrative soon developed in the media (and in my group chats) that Brexit and Donald Trump’s victory were closely linked. That analogy was useful, up to a point. Both, of course, were received as shock victories for xenophobic populist nationalism, and for “left behind” or “disaffected” voters in post-industrial heartlands over bleeding-heart elites. Trump himself supported Britain leaving the EU; at a rally, he predicted that his own win would be “called Brexit plus plus plus.”

In other respects, the two events struck me as very different. Eight years later, the politics of the US and the UK remain more divergent than might be suggested by facile one-to-one comparisons between, say, Trump and Boris Johnson (dishonesty; tousled hair) or Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer (honesty; former prosecutors). And yet I’ve come around more strongly to the idea that Trump winning is America’s Brexit moment. It’s just that the comparison applies to Trump’s victory in 2024 more so than in 2016.

The Brexit referendum succeeded by 52 to 48 percent—close, but actually, by the standards of contemporary polarization, a fairly decisive margin. Trump, by contrast, lost the popular vote that year, 46 to 48 percent. It seemed possible that his victory was, if not a fluke, then at least an aberration—the product of a deeply distorted electoral system, likely to be washed away next time. And so he was. This year, with the caveat that votes are still being counted, it seems very likely that Trump will win the popular vote. (At time of writing he was up 51 to 48 percent.) This is hardly a Reagan-style landslide, and yet Trump is seen by many commentators as having a decisive mandate.

There are other parallels. Brexit was, at least in part, the result of Brits having marinated in decades of rampantly Euroskeptic media discourse; the same could be said of Trump and generalized far-right sentiment in 2016, but the normalization of his brand of personality-driven authoritarianism has only sunk in more recently. The pro-Brexit campaign won, in no small part, by fusing the economy to immigration in voters’ minds; the same was a defining feature of the 2024 Trump campaign (as no less an authority than the right-wing Sun noted). If Trump executes his trade pledges, in particular, the consequences could be comparable, too: a root-and-branch reset of economic relations with close partners—not least, ironically, post-Brexit Britain, which currently exports tens of billions of pounds worth of goods to the US annually. 

And while it is important not to give into amnesia about the damage of Trump’s first term, the fact that he has been elected to a second, on a more radical platform, seems likely to presage more durable structural shifts in the way the US government works, not to mention the tenor of American politics. There is, in a sense, no coming back from this. (“I think that four years is okay,” President Barack Obama told reporters, of Trump, shortly before leaving office. “Eight years would be a problem.”) This isn’t to say that the Trump era won’t end; as Starmer has shown, right-wing populist projects don’t last forever. But the impact of Brexit is indelible. If that wasn’t true of Trump before, it will be now.