The Resurrection of Donald Trump
Many are to blame for Mango Mussolini’s return
“America chose this, and there’s nothing ambiguous about it. It isn’t like 2016, when Trump was an outsider businessman, or 2020 when he was the sitting president. This time it’s after a coup attempt, criminal prosecutions, prominent officials from his first administration warning he’s a fascist, and a presidential campaign that lived down to that label.”
- Nicholas Grossman, political scientist
I’m ashamed to be an American and it breaks my heart to say it. I love this country and its ideals, but our exceptionalism is a myth. It was only a matter of time until we fell prey to the same sort of authoritarianism and illiberalism that has plagued so many countries past and present. I guess it’s simply our turn. America has become a sick country that relishes in ignorance and cruelty. Maybe one day, America will be better, but today is not that day. Too many Americans hate liberals more than they love democracy.
From now on, you will hear a lot of soothing voices in the media and elsewhere telling us that we’re overreacting, that it won’t be so bad, that we’ve gone through this before. Don’t kid yourself. I gave Donald Trump a chance the first time and I won’t be fooled again. Trump is out for revenge and it’ll be vicious. This time, Trump is surrounded by sycophants who will let him do whatever the hell he wants. Many people will suffer and unnecessarily so.
The blame game has already begun and everyone is eager to wash their hands of this mess. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people are to blame for Trump’s return and few hands are clean. As I see it, there are four major culprits: inflation, The Democrats, right-wing propaganda, and the Republicans.
Inflation
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
There’s just no getting around it. Inflation and the economy were the deciding factors in this election. A Gallup poll in October 2024 found that 52% of voters saw the economy as the most important issue. Sure enough, exit polling from ABC News after the election found that 80% of Republicans chose the economy as the deciding factor for their vote, while a Navigator exit poll found that among swing state voters, 52% listed inflation and the state of the economy as reasons to vote for Trump.
Inflation refers to a decrease in purchasing power due to a rapid increase in prices. The post-pandemic inflation surge was caused by the high demand in online shopping during lockdown, the disruption to the global supply chain due to the pandemic, the necessary economic stimulus in pandemic relief, housing shortages due to restrictive zoning laws, a rise in extreme weather events due to climate change, opportunistic price-gouging by corporations (also known as “greedflation”), and Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine affecting energy and corn production. It goes without saying that much of this is largely out of Joe Biden’s hands. The roots of inflation are often complex, and isn’t possible for a single leader to end the issue overnight.
Under Biden, inflation rose to a peak of 9.1% in 2022, the highest since 1981. As a result, America saw increases in the costs of energy, food, rent, and medical care, while the federal minimum wage reached its lowest value since 1956. To help deal with inflation, Biden oversaw the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which put a cap on insulin costs under Medicare to $35 a month, required the government to negotiate prices for some drugs under Medicare, increased financial assistance to those buying healthcare insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and has created 99,500 new jobs (80% of which are in Republican-led districts). By November 2023, inflation had begun to sink and unemployment stayed below 4%. Compared to many other countries, the American economy had the best post-COVID recovery and avoided a much-predicted recession.
Still, problems remained. In 2023, the cost of rent and utilities outpaced median home values and child care costs rose faster than overall prices. By 2024, the cost of electricity in particular had outpaced the cost of food and is set to continue. Americans were frustrated that prices haven’t returned to what they were before the pandemic. As you can imagine, when Biden said “inflation keeps coming down” at his 2024 State of the Union address, it came off as tone-deaf despite being factually true.
Trump, on the hand, railed against inflation during his second presidential campaign. He called it “the worst in our nation’s history,” he attacked Harris as “a radical California liberal who broke the economy,” and he also asked his followers: “Is anything less expensive under Kamala Harris and Crooked Joe?” Much of this rhetoric was false, but it resonated with American anger over the economy. In fact, in elections across the globe, incumbents have suffered losses over the post-pandemic inflation, but voting for Trump to improve the economy was irrational and foolish.
Many voters fondly remember the economy as better under Trump. This is because Trump was the last president before the pandemic and he had inherited a growing economy from Obama. Trump wasted this economy to hurt the working class. Under him, Americans who lacked health care insurance increased by 2.5 million due to his repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate penalty. Trump also allowed for greater access to health insurance scams that didn’t cover preexisting conditions or provide comprehensive coverage for major medical bills. He passed tax cuts for the rich that hurt America’s revenue base and helped billionaires pay a smaller tax rate than the working class for the first time in American history. His cutbacks in OSHA safety regulations led to a 10 year high in workplace fatality investigations. He also opposed worker protections for overtime pay and tips. Income inequality unsurprisingly grew under Trump by 9%. Lest we forget that Trump also undermined the federal response to COVID by delaying testing, discrediting masks, and pushing “miracle cures” like hydroxychloroquine. This made the inevitable economic fallout much worse than it needed to be.
Furthermore, Trump’s proposed economic policies, if enacted, will be devastating to the working class. Trump has promised to press heavy tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China, in order to coerce them into cracking down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking. The U.S. companies who purchase these foreign imports will often pass on the cost of the tariff onto the consumer, leading to higher prices. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned, “The Trump tariffs could cause a spike in global poverty — and, it’s easy to imagine, global conflict.” Sixteen other Nobel Prize winning economists also warned in June that Trump’s tariff policies would increase inflation. Trump is also open to cutting Social Security and Medicare and has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which provides health insurance to 45 million Americans.
Do I even have to mention that Trump is a proven con-man and scam artist? Trump University has defrauded hundreds of students of thousands of dollars with fake courses. The Donald J. Trump Foundation misused charitable donations for political purposes. Trump was also found guilty of civil fraud by New York for purposely inflating his wealth for better loans and for saving money on interest. This is not a man to be trusted with your money.
Sadly, most Americans are more easily swayed by the cheap showmanship of McDonald’s cosplay than by a proven history of being anti-worker. While the Democrats had better economic policies overall, they did a poor job of communicating them, and furthermore, the policies they proposed didn’t go far enough in meeting people’s needs.
The Democrats
"If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans — that candidate existed, and she just lost."
Trump is easily the most unqualified person to ever run for office, and the Democrats lost to him twice. The Democrats lost in 2024 as they did in 2016 because they underestimated American’s dislike for Trump. They made the mistake of assuming that most Americans were decent enough to be bothered by Trump’s crimes, bigotry, and untruths. It turns out that Americans are quite comfortable with Trump so long as he promises to lower the grocery prices. Both in 2016 and in 2024, the Democrats failed to accept this reality, harping too much on Trump’s evils, and not enough on how they would do better for America.
The Democrat most responsible for Trump’s return is Joe Biden. Biden did his country a service by defeating Trump and helping us through the end of the pandemic. I will always give Biden credit for arming the Ukrainians, reuniting migrant families separated by Trump, and passing the largest climate legislation in American history. While Biden never explicitly promised to be a one-term president, he called himself a “transition candidate.” This was fair given that he was 78 at the time of his inauguration. Despite concerns from the press about his age and mental fitness, Biden and many Democrats dismissed these worries as pro-Trump. Only during his disastrous debate with Trump did Biden’s age problems become obvious beyond denial. While Biden did the right thing by dropping out, he did so too late. The Democrats didn’t have the time to have a proper primary, pick the most popular candidate, and plan out an effective strategy.
Now, I want to cut Kamala Harris a little slack. She was thrust into the spotlight with only three months left to run a presidential campaign. The fact that she was a black woman certainly didn’t help her chances. Then there was the post-pandemic inflation which hurt incumbents across the globe. Harris was facing an uphill battle, and she has my sympathies, but nevertheless, she made the mistake of pandering too much to centrists and Republicans.
Harris’s 2024 platform was still fairly progressive in some respects (abortion access, supporting Ukraine, $15 minimum wage, etc), but it still ran considerably to the right of her own positions in 2020. Hell, not even Biden bent-over-backwards this far to get Republicans to like him. Consider: Harris abandoned her commitment to Medicare For All, she boasted of oil drilling under Biden and opposed a fracking ban, she ruled out an arms embargo on Israel and refused to let a Palestinian speak at the DNC, she agreed to a Fox News interview, she promised to put a Republican in her cabinet, she promised to let a bipartisan panel of advisors help shape her policies, she said that she’d shoot anyone who enters her home, she endorsed a stricter border policy, and she even had friendly get-togethers with Liz Cheney. Far from being “woke”, Harris avoided mentioning her race or gender on the campaign and even evoked the American Revolution in her closing speech. That didn’t stop the right from calling her woke, a DEI hire, a communist, and a would-be Soviet despot. Conservatives who viewed Harris’s pivot to the right as dishonest were more than willing to overlook Trump’s notorious lack of political consistency. For all her pandering, Harris only won 5% of the Republican vote. She played it safe for nothing.
And here lies the problem. Conservatives won’t vote “Republican-lite” when they can still get the whole thing. Harris ran like a Rockefeller Republican. She should’ve run like a New Deal Democrat. Instead for serving the Democratic base, her campaign chastised it. Her campaign sent alleged sex pest Bill Clinton to lecture Arab-Americans in Michigan disturbed by our support for Israel’s disastrous war in Gaza. Her campaign sent Barack Obama to lecture black men in Pennsylvania who were hesitant to vote for Harris. This is why Trump remains popular. He feeds his base red meat on a big steaming platter, while the Democrats lecture their base to eat raw vegetables.
Democrats need to stop being such cowards about what they want to stand for. Bill Clinton’s Third Way served its purpose to salvage the Democrats from three terms of Reaganism, but it is not sufficient now. Barack Obama brought an end to the Bush’s neo-conservatism, but the Obama Democrats will not save us, either. The Democrats must learn from the rise of Bernie Sanders and adopt a progressive program that will radically transform the country akin to Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. This isn’t to say that Democrats should abandon moderation altogether, (Harris in fact won the majority of independents and moderates), but that we need to stand for bold, transformative policies which will inspire the American people and renew faith in the government.
The Democrats should fight for healthcare as a human right. They should fight for a Green New Deal to help us rapidly transition to a zero carbon economy. They should fight for a human rights based foreign policy that holds Israel and Saudi Arabia accountable. They should fight for a woman’s right to have an abortion and to be safe from sexual abuse or harassment. They should fight to expand and pack the Supreme Court with progressive judges. They should fight for separation of corporation and state by getting big money out of politics, increasing taxes on the rich, and abolishing billionaires. They should fight for a just immigration system that recognizes asylum as a human right, puts everyone who comes here on a path to citizenship, and creates an infrastructure to properly vet and process all those who cross our borders. They should fight to demilitarize the police, strengthen police accountability, and confront the roots of crime. They should fight for LGBT rights without apology and not concede an inch to the bigots.
And if the American people are not yet with us on these issues, then we will need to convince them. If the Republicans can convince the people to vote for an idiot like Trump, then surely the Democrats can convince people that America has the wealth and ingenuity to be a proper social democracy. We can do it if we make the effort, and we should demand nothing less from the Democrats going forward.
Now, having recognized the real faults of the Democrats, I’m frankly fed up with post-election takes which refuse to grapple with the major role of bigotry, misinformation, and the Republican cowardice in Trump’s re-election. On the right, Ben Shapiro, Rich Lowry, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali ignore these factors altogether and praise his re-election as a victory against the evils of “woke.” On the left, Shadi Hamid, Ben Burgis, and Nathan J. Robinson are so eager to settle old scores with the Democrats, that they basically treat Trump voters like toddlers who can’t be held responsible as to know who they’re voting for.
To the right, if you hate wokeness to the point of excusing real bigotry, then your problem isn’t wokeness. It is no coincidence that two terms of Obama were followed by a man who denied that he was born here. It is no coincidence that Hillary and Kamala, the first female presidential candidates of a major political party, both lost to a serial sexual predator. It is no coincidence that Trump paraphrased Mein Kampf when he said that immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country. It is no coincidence that after his victory, men are chanting “your body, my choice” at women. Either you see what this is or you are choosing not to.
To the left, I say that even if the Democrats fully embraced progressive policies and won the election in a landslide, the underlying racial and sexual resentments excited by Trump would still be lying under the surface, ready to be turned on by the next demagogue. Ignoring economics while focusing on everything else is wrong, but focusing exclusively on economics at the cost of everything else is also wrong. You don’t defeat bigotry in the electorate by pretending it doesn’t exist. Europe has a far more generous welfare state than the U.S., but this hasn’t stopped the rise of the European far-right. “Listen to the voters” shouldn’t mean “Never criticize the voters.”
It’s time to face the facts. By the end of the day, millions of voters decided that they’d rather have a rapist in the White House than a woman. By the end of the day, millions of voters decided that they’d rather have a racist in the White House than a person of color. By the end of the day, millions of voters decided that they’d rather have an insurrectionist in the White House than a Democrat committed to bipartisanship. This is no small thing, and it hints at a greater sickness at the heart of the country. A sickness which the Democrats could not completely stop.
I am against a theory of Trump’s victory that let’s the Democrats off the hook, but I am also against a theory of Trump’s victory that let’s everyone else off the hook. Blaming the Democrats, and the Democrats alone, pretends as if they are the only ones with agency in America. As if everyone else had no choice but to react to their failings in the most irresponsible way imaginable. This was a choice. It was always a choice, and there are many reasons for it. The biggest reason may be that we live in a post-truth era, where whatever lie Trump cooks up is taken as gospel. This was a pitiful outcome, but it was fostered by decades of right-wing propaganda.
Right-Wing Propaganda
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
“Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.”
Trump’s re-election represents the failure of the public education system to properly teach critical thinking. Americans excel in ignorance and that is not entirely by accident. An ignorant people are easy to manipulate, and indeed, there are many powers who want to keep us docile, fearful, and divided, while they exploit us for power and influence. The right-wing media has grown into a propaganda behemoth that has indoctrinated millions to abandon truth, democracy, and equality. To be sure, there’s dishonest left-wing media, too. (Atrocity denial of Syria, Russia, China, and Hamas’ crimes runs rampant in The Grayzone). However, left-wing media doesn’t influence the nation’s consciousness to the same extent that the right-wing media does. How else can you explain Trump’s latest comeback?
This isn’t to say that all conservative media is bad. National Review once took a firm stand against Ayn Rand’s objectivists, the conspiratorial John Birchers, and Trump’s first electoral campaign. The Weekly Standard also stood its ground against Trumpism, despite this causing a loss in subscribers. It’s telling that in the wake of Trump’s political success, these standard bearers of conservative thought have either folded (The Standard) or have turned apologist for Trumpism (National Review). In their place, we have a populist strain of conservative media which appeals to anti-intellectualism, irrational phobias, and a blind hatred towards all things liberal.
The godfather of Trumpism is radio host Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh had a major role in popularizing the type of douchebag conservatism that has become Trump’s trademark. Limbaugh’s radio show ran from 1988 until 2021, aired on more than 600 stations, and enjoyed 27 million listeners a week. When it came to lies, Limbaugh downplayed the risks of second-hand smoke, called climate change a hoax, denied that AIDS spread among heterosexuals, denied that chlorofluorocarbons caused ozone depletion, and questioned Obama’s birth certificate. When it came to cruelty, he mocked LGBT men who died of AIDS, routinely derided feminists as ugly “feminazis”, and celebrated the torture at Abu Gharib by U.S. soldiers during the Iraq War as “people having a good time.”
Since 1982, The Washington Times did its part to bring far-right prejudice and conspiracies into the mainstream. The paper was founded by Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon (a misogynist, homophobe, and Anti-Semite), as means to counter the perceived “liberal bias” of The Washington Post. Over its history, the paper raised money for the far-right Contras in Nicaragua, published columns which slandered Obama as a secret Muslim courting jihadis, and often printed excerpts from white nationalist publications. Like Limbaugh, The Washington Times also endorsed climate denial, ozone depletion denial, secondhand smoke denial, and Obama birtherism. The Washington Times was actively promoted by Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and has become an advancement vehicle for conservative columnists.
Of course, no discussion of right-wing propaganda is complete without Fox News. The plans for the cable news channel go back to 1970, when Richard Nixon aide, Roger Ailes, outlined a memo “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”, which called for “pro-Administration, videotape, hard news actualities to the major cities of the United States.” Billionaire Rupert Murdoch, whose NewsCorp bought 20th Century Fox in 1985, selected Ailes to run Fox when it was founded in 1996. It is now the most-watched cable news show in the U.S. and is among the most trusted news sources for Republicans. What is said on Fox helps set the tone for American conservatism, as George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum said back in 2010, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.” If we take just a dip into Fox’s coverage over the years, we can easily see how Americans were primed for Trumpism.
Consider the normalization of conspiracies, phobias, and nationalism on their channel. Fox led the charge for the criminal 2003 invasion of Iraq, for which they reached the very top of cable news ratings. This had a measurable effect. A 2003 PIPA poll found that among regular Fox viewers, 67% believed that there were links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and that 33% thought that the US had found Iraqi WMDs. Their ratings success even pushed MSNBC and CNN to be more pro-war. Fox has also routinely trafficked in climate denial. In 2013, Media Matters For America found that even though 97% of climate scientists accept that climate change is caused by humans, the 3% of climate doubters were over-represented on Fox 69% of the time. A 2010 Standford University study found that more exposure to Fox led to greater denial of climate science and a greater distrust in scientists. When it came to Obama, Fox lost its mind, claiming that the Affordable Care Act would have “death panels”, pushed birtherism, mocked him for crying over murdered kids, claimed he was a Marxist, claimed he hated white people, and suggested that he was secret Muslim who might impose sharia law. Trumpism is clearly the child of Fox, as journalist Sabrina Siddiqui observed in The Guardian, “The election of Donald Trump eight years later would go on to be regarded as Ailes’ greatest triumph: an apex of the politics of grievance, largely rooted in race and nationalism, that Fox News dedicated itself to as America was led by its first black president.”
Another news organization that played a major role in propelling Trumpism was the far-right website Breitbart. The site was founded by Andrew Breitbart, a libertarian conservative, as an alternative to the liberal Huffington Post. Breitbart himself had dismissed Trump as a fake conservative, but after his death, his website shifted further to right under the leadership of Steve Bannon, giving rise to the insidious “alt-right.” Breitbart famously elevated Milo Yiannopolous, a professional troll who helped mainstream “owning the libs” (aka “pissing liberals off for the laughs”) by calling the actresses of the Ghostbusters remake ugly and fat, publicly humiliating a trans college student, and smearing all Muslims as threats to liberal democracy. Bannon used Yiannopolous to seize on the sexist Gamergate backlash against social justice in gaming to seduce young people into Trumpism: “I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away. You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” Bannon’s Breitbart also accused Obama of supporting ISIS, accused Hillary of abusing children in Satanic rituals, and has published sympathetic profiles of white supremacist movements.
For decades, right-wing propaganda has taught Americans to be more rabidly conspiratorial, more hostile towards science, more prejudiced towards others, and more politically partisan. Trump spoke plainly to these Americans in this new language which is a major reason why they see him as authentic. For many Americans, right-wing propaganda is the only media they ever consume. Trump won the 2024 election by landslides in counties with no local news sources, also known as “news deserts.” These citizens never get to hear the alternative viewpoint.
Trump’s massive support simply wouldn’t be possible without the continued sycophancy of a right-wing media that will defend, excuse, or celebrate anything he does. Fox spread the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and refused to air the January 6th hearings. The channel One America News (OAN), a creation of The Washington Times, falsely claimed that Trump was wiretapped by the FBI, claimed that the George Floyd protests were part of a coup to overthrow Trump, and said that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Limbaugh defended Trump’s attempted blackmailing of Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden and said that Trump may have lost the 2016 popular vote due to illegal immigrants. Billionaire Elon Musk, the richest man alive, endorsed Trump after his first assassination attempt. Musk said that there would be no more elections if Trump lost, claimed that voting machines were rigged, and allowed Russian anti-Harris propaganda to proliferate on Twitter (which he owns).
Trump, in turn, rewards those who kiss his ass. Breitbart’s Bannon was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor during Trump’s first term. Trump gave Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2020 shortly before his death. OAN’s Trey Yingst was among the most called upon reporters at press briefings in the Trump White House. Trump placed 20 Fox employees into his cabinet during his first term and plans to appoint at least 16 in his second. Musk will now head a bogus advisory committee called DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which will propose massive regulation and spending cuts. It is the duty of the media to hold those in power accountable, but conservative media now coddles the powerful for favors. Though they aren’t the only ones.
The Republicans
The Republican Party has failed to resist Trumpism and defend the Constitution. All moderate opposition to Trump in the Republican Party has been chased out, while the most devoted believers have been elevated to the highest ranks. No more can we call the Republicans a normal political party, but an anti-democratic revolt. They have become traitors to the Republic, but how did it get this far?
The Republicans were once the party of Abraham Lincoln, who stood against the evils of slavery and racism. They were once the party of Theodore Roosevelt, who stood against corporate greed and for environmental conservation. They were once the party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who oversaw the creation of NASA and forced the integration of Little Rock Central. The roots of Trumpism date back to the backlash against the Civil Rights and counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
As the Democrats under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson started to champion civil rights in the 1960s, the American South began to turn away from the party. This shift was solidified by the rise of Senator Barry Goldwater to presidential nominee in 1964. Despite his libertarian leanings, Goldwater was a militant anti-communist who defended the McCarthy witch hunts, curried support from the far-right John Birch Society, and advocated an interventionist foreign policy to achieve “total victory” against communism. While a supporter of racial equality, Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, seeing it as government overreach. This vote helped Goldwater win over racists in the American South. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr observed at the time, “While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racists.” Nelson Rockefeller, the last of the liberal Republicans, warned at the 1964 GOP convention that “The Republican Party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed and highly disciplined minority.” Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide that year, but the creeping rise of illiberalism in the GOP had begun. Rockefeller’s warning would prove prophetic of the eventual takeover by the MAGA cult.
Richard Nixon won two presidential terms in 1968 and 1972 thanks to his “southern strategy” of covertly appealing to white backlash against civil rights. As Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips revealed in 1970, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” Nixon gained these votes by using coded rhetoric like “law and order” and “states rights”, which appealed to fears of anti-war and civil rights protests as well as to resistance to federal civil rights mandates.
While in office, Nixon notoriously made enemies of those who opposed him and was not above waging personal vengeance. As he once told his security advisors, “the press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy.” He secretly used promises of a better peace deal to interfere in the Vietnam War peace talks of 1968 in order to make the Democrats look bad before an election. He believed that marijuana was introduced by communists to destroy America, and possibly began the War on Drugs in 1971 to criminalize blacks and anti-war activists. Nixon also directed the FBI to surveil John Lennon for his peace activism, and tried to get him deported to Britain. Nixon will also forever be tied to the Watergate scandal, where he tried to stop an FBI investigation into the burglary and bugging of the DNC headquarters ahead of an election. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment and was hastily pardoned by his successor, Gerald R. Ford. This pardon set the precedent that the president would always be safe from prosecution, no matter his crimes. And Trump took note.
The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s also had its role in the rise of MAGA. Ronald Reagan had his start as an actor and he knew how to work the camera. The landslide victories of Reagan in 1980 and 1984 signified the power of showmanship and celebrity in politics. Even now, Reagan’s name still elicits a positive and nostalgic image that has washed over his scandals, crimes, and terrible policies. Reagan was a master class in branding and manipulation that Trump would later replicate.
AIDS was first identified in 1981, but Reagan refused to make a public address about it until 1987 after 21,000 Americans had already died. Reagan escalated the War on Drugs in 1986, where he passed a law that introduced mandatory minimums for drug possession. Reagan cut the top tax rate from 70% to 50% and cut spending on public housing and local governments, all of which widened inequality and made America the largest debtor nation. Reagan’s foreign policy was particularly gruesome. He gave arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as he warred against Iran with chemical weapons. He aided the Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt as he committed genocide against the Ixil Mayans. In defiance of congressional arms restrictions on Iran and Nicaragua, Reagan’s administration illegally sold weapons to Iran and used the money to fund the far-right Nicaraguan Contra terrorists. This was known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, continued Ford’s example and pardoned six Reagan officials who were convicted over Iran-Contra. Reagan’s anti-government posturing, savage foreign policy, and flubbing of a pandemic, are all too familiar in the Trump Era. And like Reagan, Trump will get away with all of it because the people find him so damn funny.
George W. Bush was elected president in 2000 after a number of controversial decisions. Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who co-chaired Bush’s presidential campaign in Florida, used a voter purging program known as ChoicePoint to remove 173,000 “felons” from the rolls, even though it was prone to error and disproportionately targeted minorities. The results in Florida were too close to call on election night and demanded an official recount. A machine recount found Bush to be the leader, but this was challenged in four counties who wanted a recount by hand and an extension of the recount deadline. The Florida Supreme Court granted an extension until November 25th, but on November 22th, a GOP official incited a riot, known as “the Brooks Bothers Riot”, to shut down the recount in Miami-Dade county. By the deadline of November 25th, the statewide recount still hadn’t finished, and Harris refused to include the recounted ballots in her vote certification. The Florida Supreme Court allowed for a recount deadline extension until December 10th, but the US Supreme Court decided on ideological lines in Bush v Gore that all recounts must be halted, awarding Bush the electoral votes he needed to win.
While the Democrats ludicrously demanded that some questionable ballots be counted for Gore, SCOTUS could’ve set a clear method for counting controversial ballots, (as an Illinois state court did in 1990), instead of ending the recounts altogether. We’ll never know who would’ve won Florida after the recounts, but Bush v Gore was the start of the naked partisanship of conservative SCOTUS justices which would later lead to Trump gaining immunity for illegal acts so long as they were “official.” The Brooks Brothers Riot, now a forgotten footnote, would later be replicated on a grander scale on January 6th.
After the horrific 9/11 attacks, which killed 3,000 innocent people, Bush overreacted with the War on Terror, perhaps the greatest American policy failure of the 21st century. He launched two disastrous and unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former may have been prevented, or at least shortened, through negotiation with the Taliban, while the latter was based on lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. These wars led to the deaths of 7,000 U.S. soldiers, 177,000 allied military, 408,000 civilians, and a rise in U.S. military suicides. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq caused a brutal insurgency that allowed ISIS to form and terrorize the nation. Bush also capitalized on America’s fears of terrorism to blatantly violate the Constitution. He had the CIA detain 119 terror suspects without trial at hidden prisons known as “black sites” where they were subject to torture and poor living conditions. Terror suspects were similarly held without trial and tortured at the infamous Guantanamo Bay.
At home, Bush signed the Patriot Act, which degraded our civil liberties by allowing law enforcement to do secret searches, investigate US citizens without probable cause, and allow non-citizens to be detained on mere suspicion. Bush also had the NSA secretly engage in warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. These acts exploited Anti-Muslim bigotry and disproportionately targeted men of Arab or South Asian descent. The Patriot Act further enabled the NYPD to engage in religious profiling and suspiciousless surveillance of several of Muslim communities. Bush also militarized immigration through the creation of ICE, which re-framed illegal immigration as a terror issue, and aimed to remove all illegal migrants by 2012. Bush also mainstreamed pseudoscience in the GOP with his promotion of intelligent design and his silencing of climate scientists.
Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination, in part, by speaking out against the failed invasion of Iraq. The War on Terror apparatus created by Bush was utilized by Trump for his own policies. Trump abused ICE to detain migrants at unsafe facilities and separate thousands of migrant families. Trump capitalized on fear of terror to institute a ban on all Muslims into the country. Trump abused the Department of Homeland Security to seize peaceful Oregonian protestors into unmarked vehicles without cause and detain them. Trump used pseudoscience to undo climate regulations and promote fake COVID cures. Trump is ultimately a monster that the Republican party created over many generations.
This fact became clear when you look at longstanding Republican support for Trump. Most House Republicans either supported or were silent over the sadistic family separations of migrant children. When Trump tweeted that four representatives of color should go back where they came from, only four House Republicans voted on a resolution to condemn him. When Trump was first impeached for trying to blackmail Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy into investigating Biden over false charges, the Republicans acquitted him. 126 House Republicans supported a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election based on Trump’s lies. After Trump was impeached again for inciting an insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, 43 Senate Republicans voted to acquit him.
Let us be clear. The Democrats didn’t force the Republicans to do any of this. They didn’t force the Republicans to elect Trump over all the other conservative candidates in 2016. They didn’t force the Republicans to support Trump after he threatened to block aid to Ukraine unless Zelenskyy investigated Biden. They didn’t force the Republicans to support Trump after tried to overturn the 2020 election. They didn’t force the Republicans to support Trump after he was found liable of sexual assault. They didn’t force the Republicans to support Trump over all the over conservative candidates in 2024. They chose to do this. They chose to embrace racism, misogyny, pseudoscience, sadopopulism, and authoritarianism. They chose to abandon truth and democracy for power and greed.
Never forget that.
Conclusion
“Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Anti-Nazi theologian
The prospect of dealing with another four years of Trump gives me a migraine. I didn’t want to believe that Americans would so hateful and irrational as to vote this man in again. I was proven wrong. America can no longer claim to be the beacon of light for the free world. That fire of liberty has been crudely snuffed. We are not a shining city on a hill. We are a dumpster fire on a mountain of shit. America was never as great as we told ourselves it was, but there was always some truth to the myth. There was something inspiring and beautiful about the idea of America, but now, that idea has failed. Those of us who still carry the torch of freedom and equality must steel ourselves for a terrible fight.
At this point, the average Trump voter is either apathetic, cruel, or brainwashed. They aren’t all bad people, or even above persuasion, but Hillary had a point about half of MAGA being deplorable. They either support Trump’s bigotry, pseudoscience, and authoritarianism, or are too misinformed or indifferent to notice it. Out of either malice or ignorance, they have willingly set the rule of law and the climate on fire. Our hunger for spectacle has finally outpaced our capacity to reason. Never again do I want to hear America claim that its the greatest country in the history of the world. We have become the fool among nations. The sick man of the West.
Do not take my anger for hatred. I do not hate this country, but I am angry with it, indeed, I condemn it of its foolishness. As the great James Baldwin wrote in Notes on a Native Son, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” If America truly is to be great again, then it must undergo a deep reckoning to rout the darkness of Trumpism. We will require true patriots who will be willing to stand against the menace of MAGA, even when doing so is unpopular, to quote the founding father Thomas Paine:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
