Ten Years of Trump

O tempora, O mores!

Ten years ago today, Donald Trump descended a golden escalator and began to plague all of our lives.

I do not mean to make any readers feel old by saying this, but I was in high school when this happened. The majority of the time that I have been aware of politics, it has been dominated by Donald Trump, and it is only a majority because my childhood was very political - my parents believed in a constant diet of talk radio, Fox News, and ideological indoctrination from a young age.¹ Around 40% of my entire life has been in the Age of Trump, and at this point we have to call it the Age of Trump, just as we had the Age of Jackson two centuries ago. Politics and American life have been polarized around him and remade in his image. The most essential question of someone’s political, social and cultural beliefs is if you are for him or against him, and it is rare to find someone who does not have an opinion on him. It is worth taking stock of this miserable decade to understand just how we went from the comparative placidity of the late Obama years to two terms filled with a cavalcade of horrors.

It really is remarkable to reflect just how far we have fallen. Please understand that when I invoke the “comparative placidity” of the Obama years, I do not mean that things were perfect or even good. It is obvious that the mere appearance of someone like Donald Trump is not a symptom of a healthy country, let alone him winning. As I mention in the footnote, my own upbringing was rigorously and ideologically conservative, and I heard friends and relatives say things about Obama and the Democratic Party that I cannot repeat in polite company. But I think we can all agree that things are different than they were, and they have not really changed for the better. We now face a government that is fascist in its ideology and conduct, and things have happened which even the biggest Trump haters could not have predicted in 2015.

The Age of Trump began with his reformation of the Republican Party. If you want a good laugh, go back and remember the Republican opposition to his run. Remember the National Review’s “Against Trump” issue, or Rubio or Cruz’s pathetic attempts to mimic Trump’s insults and turn them back on him? The Republican Party’s leadership class went from mostly neoconservatives to merely being personal loyalists of Trump, and the old neoconservatives who have clung to their principles, however odious, have gone into exile at The Bulwark. Republican policy cadres and staffers are even worse, each one a representative of some member of the “family” of right-wing ideologies, to use Michael Mann’s term. These various metastases include both Protestant and Catholic theocracies, white nationalism, the amorphous “national conservatism,” Silicon Valley rationalism, and more, although these lines are often blurred. The fact is that, however bad conservative ideologues used to be, they’ve gotten worse and more authoritarian.

Trump has also reshaped the Democratic Party and American politics more broadly in his image. When Biden won his brief interregnum and became a future trivia question, he did so promising protectionism, quite a contrast from Hillary Clinton’s flip-flopping on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In pursuit of the few hundred thousand voters in the Upper Midwest who really decide America’s fate, the Democratic Party has gone all in on tariffs and industrial policy, destroying the reliable free trade consensus which had majority support in both parties for decades. To be sure, there has been a constituency in the Democratic Party against free trade during that period, and Clinton dropped her support of the TPP to fend off Bernie Sanders, not Trump, but it is remarkable how thoroughly protectionism became a bipartisan concern once again. It remains to be seen if this will survive the “Liberation Day” tariffs, although judging by the fact that many Democratic responses have called for using tariffs “as a scalpel, not as a hammer,” free trade will remain in the political wilderness for now.

Perhaps the most important thing Trump did was demonstrate the frailty of America’s democratic institutions. Anyone who watched Bush v. Gore, the lead-up to the Iraq War and the constant abuse of the filibuster of the first 15 years of the 21st century could see the rot in the American political system. It was overly anti-majoritarian when it came to passing legislation, which let various social and economic issues fester without Congressional action, it allowed the wholesale buying and selling of elections by the wealthy, its basic institutions on a local, state and federal level were underfunded and unaccountable, and any significant reforms that might have improved its functioning were stifled by its anti-majoritarian institutions and by partisanship stoked by an entirely mendacious media. Trump did not come from nowhere but instead fed on a pervasive feeling among Americans that the political and economic fabric did not work for them. It is notable that both Clinton and Harris lost while presenting themselves as defenders of the way things were, while Biden won by credibly claiming to be a change candidate who would calm things down after a tumultuous four years. Americans are cynical about the way things are, and enough of them are willing for a change that Trump won twice by promising to shake things up.

But Trump is not merely an anti-establishment candidate. It is considered gauche to say so even by many in the “liberal” media, but many of his supporters are in fact motivated by base bigotry. This should not be controversial, given the anxieties he stokes about immigrants or about Black radicals “defunding the police” or “men in dresses invading women’s bathrooms,” but it is blatantly true. Trump appealed to an aggrieved whiteness as the first BLM protests occurred in Ferguson and which felt threatened by constant talk of their impending minority status. He also appealed to an aggrieved masculinity as the achievements of feminism and rise of the service economy have enabled women to enter the workforce on more equal terms than ever. He appealed to various petit and regional bourgeois, who always feel threatened by their workers from below and bigger corporations from above, just as so many right-wing movements before him have. He also collected a variety of cranks around him who could project their beliefs onto him - antivaxxers, various body fascists obsessed with the purity of beef tallow and their precious bodily fluids, QAnoners and other insane conspiracists of all types. America, from its very inception, has been full of racists and cranks, misogynists and small business tyrants and they have all proven to be a reliably pro-Trump voting group. Trump’s voting base, in short, is what Arendt called the mob, the “residue of all classes,” what we might even call a basket of deplorables. One would like to be oppressed with a modicum of dignity, but instead we’re ruled by a man who occasionally tweets an image of himself as a king or as the Pope, and we hardly bat an eye anymore.

Politics, culture, American society - these have all been remade in Trump’s image in the last decade. Everywhere from Congress to sports you see his mark; the unabashed corruption, the cruelty towards those who are different, the utter disregard for anything that might be termed virtuous. Crypto grifters make millions rugpulling memecoins, then buy their way into the White House. The same billionaires who own the social media platforms and LLMs that erode civil society and obliterate trust all line up like obedient courtiers to kiss the ring. Assaulted a woman? Your sins will be forgiven, you will be protected and pardoned, so long as you kiss the ring. After all, everyone else is doing it. Everything and nothing is true, everyone is soaked in thick layers of irony, of memes, of noxious cynicism. Sports gambling and scams proliferate, any sense of idealism is regarded as just another scam. The hallmark of the Trump era is that it is easy - you are not asked to sacrifice anything except your conscience. Get rich, say “retard,” do it for the meme, because everyone else is. George Bush committed his crimes while speaking of democracy and American values; there is no longer even a pretense of anything but vulgar transactional relationships and promises of cruelty to the right people. None of this originated with Trump and much of it would have happened without him. Yet he embodies these trends - he embodies the mob - more than any other man.

Due to the general fecklessness of the Democratic Party, the ungodly evil that has lurked in this country’s heart since Jamestown and one handy assist from America’s idiotic electoral system, the mob has now won two terms. The wretched absurdity of it all is overwhelming - how far have we come from the days when his candidacy was merely fodder for hackneyed late-night comedians? The country has been turned over to a gang of grifters, rapists and fascists who will inflict their cruelty on anyone they can get away with hurting. The Democratic Party did not, when it was in power, finish the job of consigning Trump and his movement to the dustbin of history where it belongs. Trump is more dangerous than ever before and he has a loyal Congress and a cadre of the lesser demons of Hell for his staff. Innocent people are abducted from their homes, schools and workplaces and sent to foreign countries while Congress is about to pass tax cuts for the rich paid for by austerity for the poor. The Age of Trump is now a decade old and so much is worse in its wake - and God only knows how long it will continue.

1. For instance, around 2009 I was taken to a Tea Party protest. My homeschool co-op group in 8th grade was taught by a future backer of Ted Cruz and local Republican party chair who assigned Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order and compared Obamacare to the Holocaust.