Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.
Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was no upset, nor was it as unimaginable as when he beat Hillary Clinton, in 2016. But it was no less shocking. For much of the country, Trump’s past offenses were simply disqualifying. Just a week ago, Harris gave her closing argument to the nation in advance of the vote. Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other—that’s who he is,” she said. “But, America, I’m here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.” Millions of voters in the states that mattered most, however, chose him anyway. In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.
Eight years ago, at the dawn of what historians will call the Age of Trump in American politics, the outgoing President, Barack Obama, famously insisted that “this is not the apocalypse.” Privately, he summed up what would become the conventional view in Washington. Four years of Trump would be bad but survivable—the nation, he told a group of journalists just a few days before Trump’s Inauguration, was like a leaky boat, taking on water but hopefully still sturdy enough to stay afloat. Two terms of Trump, he warned, would be another matter entirely.
Four years later, after Joe Biden defeated Trump, Democrats and the dwindling ranks of anti-Trump Republicans made the fatal miscalculation of thinking that it was Trump who had sunk. Too many of them were sure that the hubris and folly of his reluctant exit from the Presidency had destroyed him politically. They saw him as nothing more than a sideshow—a malevolent figure in his Mar-a-Lago exile, but nonetheless a disgraced loser with no prospect of returning to power.
They were wrong. Rule No. 1 in politics is never underestimate your enemy. Trump’s enemies hungered for a reckoning, for Trump to pay a price, legally and politically, for the damage that he had wreaked on American democracy. Instead, Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020. In 2024, it’s even possible, as votes are being counted overnight, that Trump might win the popular vote outright for the first time in his three races. With such backing, Trump, the first President since Grover Cleveland to be restored to the office that he lost, has vowed a second term of retribution and revenge. This time, shall we finally take him seriously?
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