By some measures, it doesn’t seem like Donald Trump was really ever the president. He just didn’t do a lot of work. Most of our interactions with him were virtual. He was seemingly on vacation half the time, or at least wasting time at one of his hotels or resorts. The daily press conferences disappeared. He stopped talking to anyone except right-wing media outlets, for the most part, and eventually the cable news simply stopped covering him when he spoke because he was just spreading lies. He had so few legislative accomplishments that signing ceremonies were rare. He didn’t know how to console the nation during tragedies, so he mostly didn’t try. His foreign adventures were universally bizarre and humiliating, but also fewer in number than is ordinary.
That’s why this doesn’t really seem like much of a change:
It is as if the vast machinery of diplomacy, business and lobbying has suddenly been recalibrated for the Biden era. Mr. Trump, by far the dominant world figure for the past four years, is increasingly treated as irrelevant.
Trump may not be recognizing his own defeat, but the rest of the world is meeting with Joe Biden and preparing to deal with him as a dominant global leader.
Mr. Biden is seizing the moment, not to aggressively confront the president he defeated, but to act presidential in his stead. Even as he demands that an orderly transfer of power be allowed to begin, the president-elect is proceeding as if the political drama created by Mr. Trump amounts to little more than noise — or what his new chief of staff called the “hysterics” of a lame-duck president.
There is going to be a nasty hangover from the Trump Era, of that I have no doubt. At the same time, I’m hoping that with the passage of a little time, the last four years will almost seem like a bad dream, like something we’re not even sure really happened.
That’s the best-case scenario. We’ll look back and think, could that really have happened? Did we really live through that?
If we ever get to that place, I think I’ll be happy again for the first time in a very long time.
Personally, I expect to be enraged for the rest of my life. My life goal is to outlive as many Republican senators of this era as I can, so I can travel to the cemeteries they’re buried in, and take a massive shit on their headstones.
Wait, are you me?
As in, that is literally what I’ve been planning to do and will be doing when the time is right.
Can’t fucking wait too.
I think I might be joining you. I’ll bring along extra burritos and refried beans, and plenty of thermoses of coffee. This has to be done right.
I think collectively, including Trump’s supporters, as a people we will be living with a kind of PTSD for years afterwards. On a personal level I can advise that PTSD is like a lingering tooth ache that you’re almost numb to until it periodically gets gets infected and inflamed. Then it subsidies again but its still there.
There are multiple questions facing us that we don’t know yet, and I don’t think anyone is going to like the next ~10 years as we continue our journey along “The Long Disjunction” in the US.
1. Trump’s ability to get white voters out to the booth — to support him, but also to oppose him — is unparalleled. White voter turnout is probably going to be 72% or so. Maybe more. However, is this due to Trump and his outsized persona? Or do the factors underlying his rise take the wheel, and are we in an era of higher turnout in general which results in “holy shit” levels of white voter turnout. He suffered during the midterms, but white voter turnout was still as high in 2018 as it was in 1996!
2. If these levels of turnout change or stay the same, do white rural voters in the north continue their march rightward, or does the elevation of Biden get them to regress a bit to the mean? Do educated suburban voters shift right (they will, but how much? is still an open question).
3. Are the inroads Trump made with Hispanic voters permanent? Or are they specific to him personally? Does the Latin gender gap begin to mirror what is already being seen among younger white voters, with women powering the shift left as men move right?
It seems unsustainable to me to maintain 70%+ white voter turnout. Black voter turnout hit ~68-70% in 2008-2012. It’ll probably end up being ~65% in 2020. So if Barack is to black voter turnout is to trump with white voters the conversation changes dramatically. But if it’s the underlying structural changes that is propelling it, we are in for a world of pain.
There’s a lot of evidence this isn’t specific to Trump, if we look internationally. Gender gaps are forming everywhere in the developed world, most notable in South Korea. Education polarization is everywhere. And the center left is struggling — though new is being born, under the radical left and green banners.
There be a lot of monsters afoot.
I’m hoping that with the passage of a little time, the last four years will almost seem like a bad dream, like something we’re not even sure really happened.
It will seem like a bad dream, but then we will only have to look at the Supreme Court, at the irreversible environmental damage, at the graves of tens of thousands of dead, and we will know that it was real.
But it could have been so much worse, so we will also be thankful that he and his evil enablers were also incompetent.
In the news this evening the RNC and Michigan state GOP are calling for a two week delay in certifying the vote. The MI delegation that met with Trump yesterday was observed celebrating late at night in the Trump Hotel. What deal did they make, because you KNOW they made a deal. Who knows what will happen in PA, but the thing I know is happening is that the GOP has learned that there are no limits to the extreme anti-democratic behavior their base will expect from them, demand from them. It was bad before Trump, but now it is far worse. With the encouragement of right wing media it is hard to imagine. If Trump died tomorrow, would any of this change? Hard to see it. It’s been a bad dream, but the dream is our reality and will be for a long long time.
Brendan may have to push me out of the way to be first at those graves.
I saw a notice that Trump lost a court case in Pa. where he sought to block Bidens win.