Back to Abnormal
The election outcome is uncertain, but the damage done isn't
Man wasn’t meant to endure three Trump campaigns. At this point, the cycle of “he can’t win, so we can laugh at it”, “he might win so we have to give to Democrats”, “he’s going to win and we’re all doomed”, and “what just happened” has become wearingly, drearily familiar. Despite what hashtag resistance accounts assured you in 2017, this is normal—this is politics now.
Three examples from middlebrow fiction come to mind about the gap between desire and reality we face now:
“I want another story!” screams the child in the 2016 film The Room. “No! This is the story you get!” the mother replies.
“You want it to be one way... But it's the other way,” Marlo tells the security guard in The Wire.
“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”—The Handmaid’s Tale
This year, we’ve reached the point of the campaign cycle when the just-world fallacy of the ordinary Democratic-leaning “elite”—you know, an adjunct English professor, not a salt-of-the-earth rocket-ship-launching billionaire—smashes into the evidence of polling that Trump isn’t collapsing, that his support remains steady, and that there’s a very good chance that he will be re-elected.
How good a chance? We’ve reached a point of data saturation, so more numbers won’t help. Despite my admiration for the technical skills of election modelers, the marginal value of data to help us answer this question is now subjective. Cribbing from Dan Davies, fundamentally there are three states of an election:
Only one candidate could plausibly win
One candidate is favored to win, but the other one might win based on circumstances and effort
Either candidate could plausibly win and there’s no good reason to favor one’s chances.
Much of the debate in the neoblogosphere of social media and newsletters revolves around whether we are in the second or third category. All of the quantitative indices we have demonstrate that we are likely in the third category; if you favor thicker but imprecise narratives—about the parlous state of Trump’s ground game, about likely meaningless signals regarding early voting turnout, and the rest—we are in the second. That is, for Democratic and anti-Trump folks, an improvement over the summer, where it looked like the race was headed toward the first category, but it is also far from the atmosphere that produced hopes that this time Trump would finally be vanquished. There’s no storybook end to this story—no dramatic revelation, no catharsis. Just the slog of this to varying degrees for years to come.
Trump has catalyzed these changes, although he did not create them nor does he control them. He poses unusual threats to the international and domestic order. Unbound by any custom or law, Trump acts, repeatedly, in what he takes to be his best short-term interest. He shreds customs and traditions with aplomb. People deeply invested in those norms and traditions, and people deeply hopeful that he will finally wreck his political fortunes, are constantly flummoxed that the laws of political gravity seem not to apply to him.
After nine years of Trumpian experimentation, though, we should just chuck out the old theories. If two impeachments and scads of indictments and a well-documented series of former advisers calling him cuckoo and fascist haven’t moved the needle on this guy—if his floor is about 46 percent and his ceiling is about 49 percent, maybe 50 percent, nationally—then any fine-grained theory that relies on the electorate sifting through detailed signals to judge candidate quality is about as useless as plotting a satellite’s orbit using a copy of Aristotle. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but I think it’s clear that circa-2015 “nudge” triumphalism should be relegated to other Obama-era enthusiasms.)
The world is neither easily described nor easily theorized. Donny Trump keeps wriggling out of the jams people expected would have ended him, and by this point I think it’s clear that any rejection he receives at the ballot box won’t even necessarily be enough to keep him from office. Nor will the examples he has set so easily disappear.
(Fun times! As I used to say, really!, during the first term, election modeling in the United States now not only has to model the likely behavior of voters, but the likely response of the political system to voters’ decisions—that is, you can’t take the election night outcome as decisive anymore.)
The stakes are momentous. I don’t believe this for the ordinary Online reasons. At this point, I think Project 2025 has been sufficiently meme-ified that most people who invoke it haven’t read it, and I conjecture that the project itself is too closely tied to people outside Trump’s orbit that any resemblance between what his administration will do and what it says will be coincidental. (Don’t forget that P2025 may have put forward proposals they knew Trump would do anyway, so even a simple scorecard of P2025 proposals and measures enacted will tend to inflate its importance. I really think you should read P2025 not as a Trumpian roadmap but as an example of working toward the leader—revealing because of what it says that sophisticated right-wing operatives who want influence think Trump want, rather than as something designed by the Trump organization.)
For all that, though, the thrust of a Trump term is clear. U.S. foreign policy will become erratic, swerving away from multilateralism and toward short-horizoned aggressive unilateralism. (Maybe the USA will invade Mexico! You can’t actually rule it out!) Even if “mass deportations” become the “repeal and replace” of the administration—which I doubt—it’s clear that federal, state, and private entities will be allowed to run roughshod over affirmative action, gender equality, toleration for LGBT+ folks, and so on. (The tentacles will reach deeper than I think people suspect; I for one expect much more control over curriculum to be exercised through federal leverage over funding for universities.) Elon Musk will see his bet on X pay off, bigly, and to boot he will get to help manage the federal government the way he managed ex-Twitter and how he manages Tesla. Move fast and break things!
The second-order effects will be large as well. To take one example, businesses and other private actors will accommodate themselves to a second Trump term; a one-time Trump administration is an aberration, but a second Trump election would signal the arrival of a new regularity in U.S. political life, and we will find that firms who cut off donations post-January 6 (temporarily, of course) will be quite happy to sponsor inaugural balls, “American Greatness” endowed chairs, and all the rest. Other institutions may be full of those who try to resist the entangling corruption of Trumpism, but four years of appointments and staffing will weaken their cultures over time.
In other words, Trump II won’t be like the first term, with a gleeful and ardent resistance working overtime; that strategy would have abjectly failed, and people are much less willing to risk their careers and reputations for a doomed cause. Resistance won’t vanish but don’t expect it to produce similar results.
This isn’t even mentioning the environment or civil rights.
Laying out all of this makes the future seem grim. But, hey! Maybe this won’t come to pass. It’s possible that it won’t! My fear is that if Trump is defeated, people in important positions will assume that, as they did after January 6 (!!!), the worst of this will be over and we can turn to other issues. This would be a mistake. An electoral setback for Trumpism would not diminish the harms that have already been done—the United States is palpably a different political culture than it was in 2016. Assuming that a renewed Democratic mandate means “the system works” would too easily let the system off the hook for its myriad failures and weaknesses (beginning, of course, with the Electoral College, but extending well into the size and scope of the Supreme Court, voting rights, and all the rest).
Normalcy isn’t around the corner. I would not even bother to bet that a claque of moderates in Congress will urge moving beyond “divisive” issues like Court reform. That will happen, and I (and probably you) can name which members will bring that up. Yet there are only four states for a political system to be in:
All major power centers agree on the tenets of the system and will support it
Dissent is minor but abiding—it does not threaten the system but could if more defectors were attracted
Conflict over the fundamentals of the system is a constant feature of political fights
The system has failed but has not been replaced
It is clear we are not in the first category. That by itself rules out business as usual—minor changes to regulations and passing tax-advantaged savings accounts—as satisfactory tools to address systemic issues (although I recommend them as a way of palliating voters). That is a lesson of Trumpism.
Another lesson is that the “rules” of politics as imbibed by generations of dutiful students may just be wrong. Instead of appealing to what amount to etiquette guides and devising ways to please the minders of political manners, candidates should run on what wins, rather than what we wish would win. It turns out the key voters don’t care if you release tax returns, health records, or any of the rest of it—these aren’t even misdemeanor offenses, despite having been treated as holy obligations. Actual evidence rather than obedience to invented niceties determines electoral validity. (I mean, heck: the Democrats changed their presidential candidate this term! And have been rewarded for it! That’s more unprecedented than anything Trump’s done in electoral strategy.)
It’s really easy to fall for the belief that normalcy can be restored. But you can’t step foot in the same river twice, especially if the river has been drained and refilled with acid. You have to confront the system as it is, not how you were told it was supposed to be. (This applies just as much to people pining for a last-minute third-party savior because they don’t like Trump or Harris. See above re wanting a different story.) “We’re not going back” is less a slogan than a recognition of reality. Let’s just hope we can go forward.
I mast be overly naive here, but if things go well in November, one reason i would be hopeful is that the unified national media environment that Trump became a celebrity in is gone. I don't think in any foreseeable future we'll have a situation where someone good at celebrity and fraud will be able to use a show likeThe Apprentice to build a false narrative of broad-based business acumen.
Obviously we will still have billionaires that combine some genuine skill and survivorship bias, but i think celebrity culture is a difficult to replicate part of Trump's rise. (If the assassination attempt has succeeded, that wouldn't hold, as martyrdom has its own set of dynamics not to mention the larger terrible implications of political violence.)
The river is crossed and we're not going back to normal. But his would be a difficult model to reproduce.