The Dawn of the Trump Era

To understand how Trump could become the dominant politician of this era, it’s time for all of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

Donald Trump arrives at an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on November 06, 2024 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Barring some extraordinarily unlikely twist, Donald Trump has won. Here are my first reflections, written on no sleep and a lot of caffeine, on what that means for the new political era we are about to enter. Thanks for reading and for supporting our work. It’ll be a long four years.

For the past decade, Donald Trump has been the most famous and influential man on the planet. But he had too many failures and too many electoral defeats to his name to be able to claim that he dominated a whole political era. That changed overnight.

Trump is now going to be remembered as both the 45th and the 47th President of the United States. He is very likely to win full control of Congress. He is even likely to win the popular vote—making him only the second Republican to do so in a third of a century. All of this will allow Trump to impose his will on the nation to a much greater extent than he did during his first term in office.

Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confidently pronounced that he represented the final, Pyrrhic victory of a declining electorate—the last, desperate stand of the old, white man.

But aberrations tend not to happen twice, and 2024 puts the last nail in the coffin of that distorted interpretation. Though some cable news hosts may be tempted to replay their old hits in months to come, only a few diehards will believe Trump to be the Manchurian Candidate this time around. Perhaps most interestingly, it is now clear that Trump put into action the advice which Reince Priebus gave Republicans after their second consecutive defeat to Barack Obama, to court minority votes the party had traditionally conceded to Democrats. His victory is not due to old white men but rather due to his success in building a deeply multiethnic coalition—as his crushing victory in Florida, a state that long ago became “majority minority,” attests.

How could this possibly have happened?

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It is time to take a long, hard look in the mirror.

I have, at this point, been going around warning the world about the danger posed by authoritarian populists like Donald Trump for about a decade. And I continue to believe that these politicians, from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela to Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and from Narendra Modi in India to Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, pose a serious threat to democracy. 

American institutions are much stronger than many observers have come to believe. But Trump, much more experienced than he was at the outset of his first term in office and emboldened by a much more resounding victory, will test American democracy in a more serious way. Over the next four years, we will, as I argued in these pages in the week before the election, see a clash between an unstoppable force and an immovable object. 

And yet, it is time to admit that, in purely electoral terms, the argument that democracy is on the ballot simply does not seem to work. The reason for that is not just that people care more about pocketbook issues like inflation or that incumbents have in general had a bad run of late. It’s that they don’t trust Democrats on the issue of democracy much more than they do Republicans. According to one exit poll in Pennsylvania, three out of four voters in the state believe that democracy in the United States is threatened; among those who do, it was Trump, not Harris, who had the edge.

This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade, a fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: Citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return anytime soon.

The extent to which most people now mistrust mainstream institutions is in many ways disproportionate. Despite Trump’s apocalyptic description of its current state, America remains one of the most affluent and successful societies in the history of humanity. And while ideological excesses have significantly weakened American institutions over the course of the last years, these institutions do remain capable of impressive work: For every ridiculous article about racism in the knitting community that The New York Times publishes, for example, it also puts out several sober reports about important world events.

And yet, we must admit that the wound is to a significant degree self-inflicted. A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.

This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign. While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.

Donald Trump is far outside the American cultural mainstream. (Yes, I believe that to be true even after reckoning with his unexpectedly strong showing tonight.) But the problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream. 

Harris’ campaign had many opportunities to address that problem. She could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the official nominee. She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities. She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to the most popular podcast in the country. But she did not do any of that.

I don’t know whether Harris’ failure to mitigate Democrats’ glaring political weaknesses was due to fear and indecision or due to ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality. But I do know that the price that she—and the rest of the world—is paying for that failure goes by the name of Donald J. Trump.

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Trump has, since his entry into politics, been the spearhead of a populist international. And so his ability to come back from the political dead, likely reconquering the White House even after his refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election had seemingly rendered him radioactive, should serve as a loud warning to moderate forces in other parts of the world.

Brazilians recently managed to oust Jair Bolsonaro. Poles last year managed to send Law and Justice to the opposition benches. It would be tempting to conclude that this closes the chapter on those political forces. But from the Peronists in Argentina to the Fujimoris in Peru, populists have, again and again, proven to be much more adept at returning to power than contemporaries assumed.

This makes it all the more important for citizens of other countries to resist the temptation to sit in judgment of Americans over the coming days. I can already observe in international media, especially in Europe, a tendency to blame Trump’s likely reelection on every conceivable stereotype about Americans. It is, hundreds of commentators around the continent will likely write, because Americans are racist and sexist and bigoted that Trump looks set to take office again.

But while each populist incarnates some of the particular qualities of their specific national context, it should by now be amply evident that every country is vulnerable to this form of political appeal. French and German elites have done a somewhat better job of protecting their countries’ institutions from the ideological capture that has contributed to the profound breakdown in trust in the American establishment. But many of the same trends are well underway in those countries as well. And sooner or later, voters who deeply distrust their own institutions are likely to vote for an anti-establishment bullfighter of their own.

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Until yesterday, it was still possible to hope that Trump would be remembered as a historical blip, an outsider who somehow managed to turn a few elections into a contest over his ideas and his personality, before finally exiting the political scene in disgrace. Today, it seems much more likely that he has cemented his standing as the figurehead of a political movement that will lastingly transform the politics of the United States—and, perhaps, much of the democratic world.

Trump will almost certainly attack some of the constitutional checks on his power over the course of the next four years. He may very well sell out key American allies in Central Europe and the Far East. Democrats should absolutely stand up to him when he does. Protecting the system of checks and balances that has allowed America to weather previous periods of deep partisan polarization must be a particular priority. And if Trump should overplay his hand, as well he may, he could quickly lose the support of those swing voters who just gave him such a resounding showing.

But Democrats would be making a big mistake if they simply reverted to the #resistance playbook which has failed to inflict a decisive defeat on Donald Trump or his movement in the past. What they need to do if they want to ensure that the Trump era lasts fifteen rather than thirty or even fifty years is much harder than that: They need to build a political coalition that is broad enough to win durable and sizable majorities against Trump as well as other politicians of his ilk. And that will prove impossible without a serious reckoning with the ways in which they, and the wider ecosystem for which they stand, have lost the trust of most Americans.