Maybe this should be titled "America post-mortem"? Trump, and Republicans more generally, won decisively: Trump looks on track to win the popular vote, and perhaps to sweep all the swing states as well.
The first bad sign came early Tuesday evening, when it became clear that Trump was winning Florida by a very substantial margin (we knew he would win Florida, but the vote tallies were, as I said on Twitter, "ominous")--a 13% margin in the end. That was a harbinger of the "red wave" to come. To make matters worse, the Republicans retook the Senate with at least 52 votes, and perhaps more, depending on how the close races in Nevada and Pennsylvania, especially, play out (it looks, as of this writing, like the Democrats may have squeaked through in the Wisconsin and Michigan Senate races). A symptom of the "red wave" is the fact that the excellent Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, an actual pro-labor Democrat, lost to a Trump-annointed right-wing crazy. Even Trump's losses in "blue" states like New York and Illinois were not by the margins one would have expected. As of this writing, we don't know if the Republicans also won the House of Representatives: indications are that the Democrats will recapture the House, and anyone concerned about abortion rights in particular, better hope they do!
So what does this all mean? The most plausible explanation was summed up well by someone on Twitter: "Spoken to plenty of Latino Trump voters, and many basically said: 'The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces—he's fired. Time for something new.' Sometimes it's not more deep than that." As we noted a couple of weeks ago, quoting the historian Adam Tooze, "If we focus only on food and energy, the price shock of 2021-2 was worse than that in 1973. It is second only to the Iran-crisis shock of 1979, the crisis that put paid to what little chance Jimmy Carter had of reelection in 1980." Add to that the "magical" correlation-is-causation thinking of the typical clueless voter (economy was better under Trump, therefore Trump caused it, therefore he will cause it again), and this is the outcome.
That means all the chatter about Trump's obvious mental and physical decline, his terrible campaign, his lack of a "ground game," the fact that most of his prior Administration thinks he is "unfit," Harris's "joyful" campaign, Republican "weirdness" etc.---all of it meant nothing. The whole event was another vindication of Achen and Bartels' Democracy for Realists. At least we may hope never to hear from that quack Allan Lichtman again (see #7)!
Readers may want to revisit my 2016 account of "How Trump Thinks," since we're potentially in for another four years of this. (As an aside: given his age [78] and his obvious decline, I do not rule out that he does not complete the full four years, due to disability, death, or the 25th Amendment. His VP Vance is less disturbed, but perhaps more dangerous.) But more concretely, what does a second Trump Presidency mean for the Benighted States of America? In no particular order:
Cabinet: With a solid Republican majority in the Senate, Trump is likely to face no obstacles to nominating the most craven loyalists to key Cabinet positions. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services? Mike Flynn as Secretary of Defense or CIA Director? John Yoo as Attorney General? Steve Bannon or Elon Musk as Secretary of the Treasury? Sean Hannity as Secretary of State? This could get very weird, and very fascist, very fast.
Judges: Because Trump has soured on Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society, he is likely to nominate really terrible federal judges. While he nominated lots of hard right judges last time, the vast majority were not batshit crazy, and some are actually quite good (outside politically charged cases). This time around we're likely to see some truly bizarre nominations, with serious consequences for the administration of justice in mundane matters.
Federal bureaucracy: Trump has made clear that he plans to gut federal civil service job protections, and replace thousands of experienced, lower-level bureaucrats with loyalists duly vetted by the Heritage Foundation. Many of these folks are likely to be hacks and incompetents (like their President!), which raises the specter of a federal government unable to discharge basic mundane tasks in a timely way, from tax refunds to passport renewals. We will see how bad it gets, but I'm not optimistic.
Economy: Domestic stock markets are roaring this morning at the prospect of an extension of the 2017 tax cuts, and perhaps more giveaways, like a cut in the corporate tax rate. When the trade wars, hwever, start in response to Trump's infatuation with tariffs, and inflation resumes, things may change. We know that Trump has no regard for the independence of the Federal Reserve, so it's certainly within the realm of possibility that he interferes with interest rates, in a way that then exacerbates inflation and brings about a genuine economic disaster. One thing we know about Trump is that he is sensitive to the stock markets, so if the market sends a strong enough message, he may step back from the brink. On the other hand, if external forces bring about an economic crisis, it's hard to imagine someone less competent to handle it.
Public health: With RFK Jr. floating around Trump's circle, this could get very bad, especially if they find a way to coerce localities into not mandating basic vaccination schedules. Welcome back polio, whooping cough, measles, etc.
Civil liberties: We know that Trump has no regard for freedom of the speech or press, and he's also now been mostly immunized from legal accountability by the U.S. Supreme Court. I would expect the deployment of federal troops or federalized National Guard to suppress a repeat of anything like the Black Lives Matters protests, or any other organized movement of mass street protests. I expect he will try to target the non-compliant media with threats of license revocation or other onerous regulatory burdens.
Immigration: Whatever other attacks on civil liberties Trump undertakes, the war on (legal and illegal) immigrants will, with certainty, lead to egregious abuses, much human misery, and probably economic disruption. And it's all based on a pack of lies: immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are more law-abiding than citizens, and they are essential to much of the economy, from construction to farming. This will no doubt be a priority for his fascist henchmen like Stephen Miller.
Universities: We've touched on this before, and the risk is very substantial. The federal purse strings give the federal government enormous power over even the private universities. Various civil rights statutes, like Title VI, empower the government to punish universities that do not suppress disfavored speech by faculty and students that is "discriminatory," a move legitimated by Biden's Department of Education. One can imagine how 'discriminatory' will be interpreted. A Trump Administration might push through onerous taxes on endowments, or legislation requiring massive reductions in tuition. Trump has an affection for elite higher education (did you know he went to Wharton?), so perhaps this will slow him down. But there's no question Trump could destroy America's leadership position in higher education, and since he is an ignoramus and idiot, he would barely notice.
Abortion: I do not think Trump will take the lead on any federal efforts to further restrict abortion. As a serial sexual predator, at risk of paternity suits, he surely has no objections to abortion. The risk is that he appoints hard right religious fanatics to key positions at the FDA or Justice Department, who use existing regulatory and legal powers to target abortion medications and their distribution. Will he notice? Perhaps Ivanka or his consigliere Jared will point it out to him.
Medicare, Social Security: I don't expect Trump will try to tamper with either, but he may not need to if he doesn't solve their funding issues, and there's no sign he will do that. (JD Vance has probably learned the lessons from "Law & Justice" in Poland and Orban in Hungary that social welfare benefits make it easier to push illiberal social and political policies.) Medicaid is a different matter, and I'm not optimistic, which will just create more misery for the poor.
Foreign affairs: Ukraine will soon have to reach a settlement with Russia, and cede some of its territory, maybe a lot of its territory. Indeed, with a friend in the White House, Putin may increase his ambitions in Ukraine or the Baltic states. NATO is likely to fall apart, which will put the burden on the UK and France, as nuclear powers, to step up their deterrence efforts. The race for nuclear weapons will accelerate, especially in Asia. The only good news is that the short-term risk of nuclear war and U.S. "troops on the ground" probably goes way down under Trump. The wild card here is Taiwan and China. While Japan and South Korea may decide it is time to have their own nuclear deterrent given Trump's allergy to alliances, Trump is also surrounded by a lot of China hawks, and if China moves on Taiwan, it's possible Trump would intervene, even if his instinct is to say, "Let China have Taiwan." (Addendum: things will obviously get much worse for the Palestinians now.)
The 22nd Amendment bars Trump from a third term, and I don't see a scenario in which he can get it repealed. I expect there to be elections in 2026 and in 2028, although whether they will be "free and fair" remains to be seen. I don't think Harris did anything particularly "wrong" in her campaign, except that, like Clinton, she ran too hard on the "Trump threat" and not enough on economics (see this interesting study via Jacobin). The tragedy here is that if the Democratic establishment had not put the fix in for Clinton in 2016, Sanders could have prevailed and would have beaten Trump (don't forget those 100,000 midwestern union voters who flipped from Sanders in the Democratic primaries to Trump in the general!). And, per Achen and Bartels, Democratic voters would have adjusted their views to be closer to those of Sanders. But Trumpism, whatever exactly it is, won't be permanently defeated without a genuinely economic populist agenda at the core of Democratic politics. That may push the suburban soccer Moms back to the Republicans, but it seems more likely to build a winning coalition.
Recent Comments