We Are Going Back, After All

So here we are. Once again, as a member of the millennial generation, I find myself not looking at the end of history, but instead sailing on a tiny, fragile, and leaking boat being tossed between its waves.

As I write this, what I had been jokingly describing as the “Hellection” for months ended in the worst way possible, with Donald Trump being reelected, not because of a fluke of our archaic Electoral College (the only one left in the world), but because of a popular vote. The data coming out now does suggest that this outcome was less because people had a taste for Trump’s brand of cultish, conspiracy theory-fueled reaction but out of the greatest ally of all awful United States politicians, voter apathy, helped along by the petty and cynical voter restriction policies Republicans have relentlessly pursued. Even those policies, though, can’t share any of the blame for the depressing fact that women across the country voted to lift state abortion bans at the same time they voted to give power back to the man responsible for the endangerment of abortion rights and ultimately for the deaths of women whose lives depended on medical abortions. In my mind, it helps prove people are less brainwashed by far-right demagogues and more just plain stupid and unable to see their own interests in the timeless American way.

Whatever the reasons, the United States has collectively decided the Trump era is not yet over. The seemingly historic enthusiasm that greeted Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket proved to be a mirage. Many people have just seemingly forgotten the sight of dying people in overcrowded hospitals, dump trucks full of body bags, and corpses preserved in freezers that were the fruits of Trump’s COVID policy and drove him out of the White House the first time. Nor did they really appreciate that Trump is a convicted rapist with ties to the most notorious sex trafficker in recent history, that he prioritized Vladimir Putin getting the first COVID tests over any American (America First!), that Trump’s proposed economic policy is built on failed nineteenth-century ideas that he clearly doesn’t even understand, and that Trump’s new buddy Elon Musk explicitly said on multiple occasions that deliberately crashing the U.S. economy would be for the greater good (the “greater good” being an even more Darwinistic, oligarch-friendly, and explicitly racist society than what we already have, of course).

It is an understatement to say I was unhappy when Joe Biden became the presidential nominee. While my feelings toward him did soften, I still believe that he squandered a once-in-a-decade opportunity to push for real police and racial justice reform, that he is complicit in a genocide in Gaza, and the post-COVID economic recovery he presided over was real but more uneven than his fans like to admit. But while a Harris-Waltz presidency would have been, at worst, business-as-usual, Trump 2.0 has the potential to be a disaster for all but billionaires and people with the most bizarre, impractical, and/or reactionary of belief systems.

If it is possible for anyone to be objectively the worst president in the history of the United States, that person is Donald Trump. In fact, I would make the case that he belongs in a small, exclusive club of leaders whose hallowed ranks include the Emperor Commodus, King Charles I of England and Scotland, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Nicolae Ceaușescu. If anything, Trump has gotten even worse since 2020. Anyone who has with an open mind watched even a brief clip of his recent rallies or have seen his debate with Harris knows he is falling apart physically and mentally, so much so there is a non-miniscule chance he won’t be able to participate in his own inauguration. Behind his deteriorating flesh is a gang of ghouls chomping at the bit to eviscerate our already meager system of social services, hand even more of the digital space over to grifters and monopolists, staff the federal administration with ideological cronies, enrich the already obscenely wealthy, dismantle workers' unions and freedom of speech in higher education, promote ignorance about modern medicine, and unleash people who might as well be real-life Captain Planet villains on the environment. Then there is what is undoubtedly the greatest challenge facing all of human civilization today, climate change. While it is true that greenhouse emissions did decline under Trump, this clearly happened in spite of and not because of a man who continues to believe (or pretends to believe, which is even worse) that climate change is a hoax.

What makes the prospect of a second Trump administration so frightening is that it’s mostly unknown what will happen. In 2016, Trump at least still bothered to pretend to some of his audiences that he would govern like a moderate Republican. Now, though, all bets are off, with Trump vowing to set up the most openly and actively xenophobic and nativist presidential administration since at least World War I. Yet this is also a man who is a proven liar and a perpetual stage performer, surrounded by sycophants with incompatible agendas and a tendency to backstab. Even Trump’s vaunted Mexican border wall turned out to be something that could be braved by an eleven-year-old child.

It could very well be that the second Trump administration will be much like the first, doing real lasting harm and wrecking people’s lives especially the lives of immigrants, the poor, the disabled, and other minorities as well as outright directly causing deaths, but also for worse and for worse a standard Republican administration, albeit one on steroids in some respects. The aftermath will be mitigated or cleaned up (although never to the extent it should be) by the inevitable Democratic administration, brought into power like several times before by the public’s disgust at Republican scandals and excess. Even Trump’s most radical threats, like the vow to start a vast and brutal deportation regime and to repeal the Affordable Care Act and destroy the Department of Education, might simply fail at least in part, if he bothers to really try to push these things through the likely resistance at all. Or the second Trump administration could be a genuinely authoritarian, oligarchical government that will break all laws and norms to steamroll over any resistance by Democrats, the courts, state governments, and public opinion, turning the United States into, at best, a “soft authoritarian” regime much in the style of Hungary or India. Or it could be anything in-between. I already shudder to think about the implications even a less extreme Trump administration will have for the Palestinians and Ukraine and the struggle against the encroaching global far-right. The only comfort here is that, with a couple of exceptions, the people around Trump are very inept, but even incompetents can cause a lot of harm.

Even in the best case scenarios, the predictions are grim on their own. No matter what happens with Trump's actual policy plans, migrants, asylum seekers, and immigrants will be targeted by a president and vice president who during their campaign did not hesitate to try to incite violence against the minority of Haitian-Americans in a specific city on the basis of rumors spread by literal Neo-Nazis, even to the disgust of Republican politicians. I know for sure I will personally be screwed when it comes to student loans, and I can only hope that at least I can opt into a payment plan that will be less than my rent. I’m also depressingly certain that our Supreme Court, already an implausible hybrid between Opus Dei and the most obnoxious capital-‘L’ Libertarian in your sophomore philosophy seminar, will strip away my right to marry or at least my right to have a potential marriage recognized nationally as well as possibly the basic right for women to access birth control. And I fear for trans people, who in many places will probably have to fight for their right to medical treatment, if not the right to exist at all in the public sphere. On my part, living as a gay man in a progressive large city in a bluish-purple state feels like a privilege, if a thin one. Yet months away from his return to the White House, there is already harm. One need only look at the empowered gloating of the ontologically evil podcast-and-YouTube far-right punditocracy and the rabid screams for retaliatory violence from MAGA, along with how suicide hotlines have become overloaded since the election.

Still, let me conclude by trying to find some silver linings in a very dark cloud. As I mentioned, the people Trump choose tend to be the dumbest and most treacherous people this side of an '80s Saturday morning cartoon, any of whom Trump himself will betray or shove under the bus the instant they displease him or spark genuine outrage from the public. That Trump has already alienated or angered most of the adults in the room and is having to ally with outright lunatics like Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Elon Musk might actually be beneficial. Then there’s the bare reality that the entire MAGA movement and the hopes of truly sinister organizations like the Heritage Foundation rest almost entirely on an elderly man in awful health and with a rapidly declining mind. Of course, they could and almost certainly will swap in J.D. Vance, who may be an even worse threat because he is a true believer instead of an empty vessel like Trump, but he was chosen at least partially because he completely lacks anything resembling Trump’s perverse charisma, thus posing no threat to upstage Trump. There simply is no heir apparent to MAGA, no AOC to Trump's Bernie Sanders, not even a George Bush to his Reagan. It’s probably too much to hope for that MAGA will not survive or become fangless after Trump, but even then Trump is the failing lynchpin holding together a movement that is already infamous for its incoherent politics, obvious con-artists, endless infighting, loathed proposals when delivered by anyone other than Trump, and acolytes turned detractors. Finally, Republicans historically tend to overreach, as much as Democrats usually underreach in their political imaginations, which never fails to provoke a deep and lasting backlash, at least until the next major election.

However, I honestly do think the real silver linings lie within us. True, Trump’s return to power is as much a failure of the U.S. voting population as it is of the institutions and people in power that should have borne down on Trump like the Old Testament God the day after the January 6 coup attempt. I have no doubts about that. But even then, and as much as I’ve railed against my own country for most of my adult life, I have faith at least in the American distaste for busybodies and anyone telling them what to do and how to live. It’s so far kept would-be Inquisitors like Moms for Liberty out of many school boards even in the reddest of rural counties. Moralistic tyrants like Jerry Falwell can and do hold sway for many years, but eventually the genuine, lower-case ‘l’ libertarianism of Americans comes to the fore, sometimes in surprising ways. Reagan conservatives used to understand this and be able to exploit it or get around it. The new breed of Trumpian, tech bro reactionary does not and, for the most part, cannot. They only understand what their own bad attempts at philosophy, their hideous AI-generated memes, and their online echo chambers in the ruins of what was once Twitter allow them to understand along with whatever they think will “own the libs.”

Maybe the most pessimistic of leftists have a point when they post about how at least the West, if not all humanity, is caught in a downward spiral accelerated and sealed by climate change. I don’t believe that, but I also don’t know if I agree with Martin Luther King that the arc of history bends toward justice, and I definitely don’t agree with the neoliberal crowd that a stable and lasting liberal democracy is the inevitable end point of everything. But, here and now, I know fevers do break, storms end, monsters eventually die like the rest of us (even if comfortably in their beds), and sometimes something lasting and good grows out of the most barren or muddy of fields. At the risk of giving away my age, I can say I’ve outlived the Moral Majority, the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, the political ascendency of Sarah Palin, and the vicious, politically stoked, and bipartisan homophobia of the ’80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s while also seeing the legalization of same-sex marriage and the inauguration of the first African-American president.  More to the point, the millions of Americans who voted against all this and look at Trump and his supporters and what they represent with contempt aren’t going away. I see it in my own life. Every day in my day-to-day life and online, I interact with even not typically political people who are just as afraid and angry and tired as I am, but also still motivated and willing to fight for themselves and their communities.

We have to keep living our lives, going to work, and trying to make the best for ourselves and our loved ones. That’s the part that usually gets left out of the history books. It’s going to be hard, and after putting this essay up I intend to avoid the news, if possible for the next four years. But if nothing else, we can hold on to the fact that none of us are alone. It is a cliché, but like many clichés it is also a truth: we still have each other. That is the one thing they cannot take away.