Donald Trump’s Revenge | The New Yorker

Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequence, to be sure, but a mistake nonetheless. But America has now twice elected him as its president. It is a cataclysmic revelation of what America really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario — that of 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 at the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a trash to the world”, and whoever threatens retaliation against his political enemies could win – and yet it happened in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was no upset, nor was it as unthinkable 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 his closing argument to the nation ahead 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 chose him anyway. In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho stance against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflationary American economy resonated more than all the lectures about his many shortcomings as a person and a future President.

Eight years ago, at the dawn of what historians will call the age of Trump in American politics, 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 reporters days before Trump’s inauguration, was like a leaky boat taking on water but hopefully still sturdy enough to stay afloat. Two terms for Trump, he warned, would be a completely different matter.

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 foolishness 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 a disgraced loser nonetheless with no prospect of a return to power.

They were wrong. Rule #1 in politics is never underestimate your enemy. Trump’s enemies were hungry for a reckoning, for Trump to pay a price, legally and politically, for the damage he had done to American democracy. Instead, Trump has now achieved an unimaginable resurrection. Even his four criminal charges have only served to reinvigorate and reinvigorate his grip on the Republican Party, which is now more than ever centered on one man’s personality and grievances. Nearly sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than 74 million cast their vote for him in 2020. In 2024, it’s even possible, as votes are counted overnight, that Trump could 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 he lost, has promised a second term of retribution and revenge. Are we finally going to take him seriously this time?

President Biden will receive a large share of the blame for this disastrous outcome — by refusing to step alongside, when he should, the 81-year-old president who rationalized his entire candidacy four years ago on the existential need to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, will have greatly contributed to Trump’s return. Biden’s reckless insistence on running again despite the visible signs of his aging may well have been the most consequential decision of the 2024 campaign. When he finally bowed out, in late July, after a disastrous debate performance with Trump, was it already too late? This will be a hypothetical for the ages. Politicians from both parties make unfulfilled promises to the American electorate all the time. But the implicit premise of Biden’s candidacy might have been one of the most woefully impossible campaign promises ever — as it turned out, there was to be no restoration of normalcy, no return to a pre-Trump America.

Harris moved quickly and largely successfully to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. She ran a polished, if late-starting campaign over the ensuing hundred and seven days – a short run to election day more usual for a British general election than for the years-long tussle of endless politics that Americans demand of their candidates . But Harris, despite four years as vice president, had little national identity or constituency to fall back on. She was embraced by her party, held an imperious, celebrity-studded convention in Chicago, and cheered after her disruption of Trump in their only debate in September, but the net effect of her rise was to return the race to where it was before Biden’s implosion: stalemate .

In the weeks leading up to the election, poll after poll in the seven battleground states found a contest within the margin of error. Pennsylvania and Nevada were a dead heat in the final Five Thirty Eight poll average; Michigan and Wisconsin finished with a single-point advantage for Harris; and Arizona and Georgia showed a small advantage for Trump. Even that, in retrospect, proved overly optimistic for Harris, who lost, narrowly but decisively, in all the battleground states at the time the election was called. Her defeat in Pennsylvania — long considered her must-win stronghold — will likely lead to years of reflection on her decision to bypass the state’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, as her vice presidential running mate in favor of Tim Walz, the governor of reliably Democratic Minnesota. . But given her overall defeat, it might not have mattered.

Harris now becomes one of a long line of sitting vice presidents who tried and failed to secure a promotion; her difficulty separating herself from the liabilities of Biden’s record has proven why only one meeting No. 2, George HW Bush, has been elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren did in 1836. Too many voters seemed to have seen Harris as effectively the incumbent in the race – at a time when a large majority of Americans report dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. This, according to Doug Sosnik, White House political director for President Bill Clinton, is why ten of the twelve elections leading up to this have resulted in a change of control of the House, Senate and/or White House.

In that sense, Trump’s victory was a predictable result for a Republican candidate, perhaps even the expected one. And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-indicted, four-times-indicted, once-convicted fraudster from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular GOP candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, it might have been conceivable for voters fed up with the status quo to see Trump, a famous businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake up Washington. But this is Trump after 2020 — an older, angrier, more profane Trump who demanded his supporters embrace his big lie about the last election, and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist and xenophobic in modern times. history. His slogan is now clearly strongmen — only Trump can fix it — and he will return to office unfettered by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from within his own cabinet. Many of these individuals refused to endorse Trump, including his own Vice President, Mike Pence. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired four-star Marine General John Kelly, told Times during the campaign that Trump met the literal definition of a “fascist,” and yet even that was not enough to deter the enablers and enablers in the Republican Party who voted for Trump.

The new gang around Trump will have few of Kelly’s scruples. He will make sure of that. One of the most important lessons that Trump took from his presidency was about the power of the staff around him; his son-in-law Jared Kushner left the White House concluding that poor personnel decisions represented the biggest problem for his administration. Shortly after Trump left office, I interviewed a senior national security official who spent a lot of time with him in the Oval Office. The official warned me that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first, especially because he had learned how to better get his way — he was, the official said, like the velociraptors in the first “Jurassic Park” — movies, which proved capable of learning while chasing their prey. One of Trump’s transition chairmen, billionaire Howard Lutnick, has already said publicly that jobs in a new administration will only go to those who pledge loyalty to Trump himself. Having defeated impeachment twice, this second-term Trump will have little to fear from Congress reining him in, especially now that Republicans have managed to regain control of the Senate. And the Supreme Court, with its far-right majority fortified thanks to three Trump-appointed justices, recently granted the presidency near-total immunity in a case brought by Trump seeking to quash the cases against him after Jan. 6.

Throughout this campaign, Trump has been deliberately sober about his extreme and radical agenda for a second term. He rejected Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page governing plan spearheaded by a number of his former advisers, avoiding the details that might have turned off voters in swing states. Trump, for example, said he no longer favored a national abortion ban, despite promising to sign a twenty-week ban when he was first in office. Project 2025, should Trump adopt its proposals as his own, includes an extensive menu of ways to further limit women’s access to abortion, contraception and reproductive health services.

But the agenda that Trump has publicly committed to is reason enough for serious alarm. He has said he will begin “mass deportations” of undocumented migrants as soon as his new term begins; that he will be dictator for a day when he is sworn in on January 20; that he will pardon the thousands of January 6 “hostages” who stormed the US capitol in 2021 on his behalf; and that he will go after his opponents, the political “enemy from within”, deploy the US military to quell domestic unrest and even suggest that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who dared to challenge him while he was wearing America’s uniform, was guilty of treason and deserved execution. It is not inconceivable that Trump will move quickly to follow through on earlier threats to fire independent officials, including two of his own appointees, whom he later fired — FBI Director Christopher Wray and Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Even before his inauguration, Trump’s victory will shake alliances and embolden autocrats around the world. Which power will NATO‘s Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense is holding up with a US president who has publicly said Russia can do whatever it wants to him. NATO members who, in Trump’s view, are not paying their fair share? And what about crisis-ridden Ukraine, whose ability to fight on against Russia has been bolstered by billions of dollars in US military aid that Trump opposed? Trump has promised he can end the war in 24 hours – how will he do that, other than pressuring Ukraine to cede its stolen territory to Russia in exchange for peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms?