Astonishingly, Trump won the presidency again. Despite everything.
- Slate: Americans just voted to burn it all to the ground;
- Trump supporters are calling for executions; and how they laugh at Trump rallies;
- Zack Beauchamp on Trump’s existential threat, and some hope for optimism;
- Robert Reich on the Resistance;
- Tom Nichols suggests that the danger of a Trump administration might be undercut by his incompetence;
- Personal comments about sexism and racism; how Democrats are not denouncing the results as evidence of cheating; how it will be interesting to track Trump’s promises/threats against results; and how I find this result more shocking than the one in 2016.
Or to the rest of the world, this is what Americans are. This too shall pass.
Slate, Christina Cauterucci, 6 Nov 2024: Americans Just Voted to Burn It All to the Ground, subtitled “This is an even more decisive turning point than 2016.”
When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, America still had a sliver of plausible deniability. Yes, he had a history of shady business dealings, racist proclamations, and alleged sexual harassment. But maybe he didn’t really mean it. Maybe it was all just locker-room talk. Maybe he’d rise to the demands of the office. Maybe he’d be more like a regular Republican, just a lot rougher around the edges.
This time around, there were no excuses. Since his inauguration, Americans have gained an intimate understanding of Trump and his acolytes. We witnessed the chaos of his administration, which he ran on an engine of personal grievances. We lived through the degradation of public discourse and the normalization of blatant, unrepentant lying. We saw his extremist judicial appointees strip away hard-won reproductive rights and voting rights that Americans broadly support. We listened to him lust after the power held by autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Xi Jinping. We suffered and died because Trump was the one holding the reins when a pandemic took hold.
Are most Americans so depraved and cynical they would vote for this man a second time, in full awareness? I’ll try not to be so cynical and say no. Some are. Some just don’t pay attention and have short attention spans. And some care only about their personal circumstances, and make a judgment about which side would benefit themselves in the short term. These are not distinct sets. But some of that first set include Hillary Clinton’s deplorables. There really are such people in the world.
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Wired, Tess Owen, 6 Nov 2024: Far-Right Donald Trump Supporters Celebrate His Victory With Violent Memes and Calls for Executions
Subtitled: “Many many many executions are warranted,” one Trump supporter wrote on Truth Social. “These traitors are a terminal cancer that MUST BE completely eradicated to make America healthy again.”
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NY Times, Thomas L. Friedman, 6 Nov 2024: Why Were Trump Voters Laughing?
Every time I watched a clip where Trump was riffing to the crowd about Liz Cheney or “fake news” reporters being shot, or telling people that Kamala Harris is “a shit vice president,” or when he approved of audience members who referred to Harris as a “ho,” you saw crowds of people surrounding him who were laughing uproariously at his crude and violent language.
The jocks and bullies in high school who resented all the others who became successful? And now they’re in charge, yuck yuck?
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Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 6 Nov 2024: Donald Trump has won — and American democracy is now in grave danger, subtitled “Trump’s second term poses an existential threat to the republic. But there’s still good reason for hope.”
Trump and his team have developed detailed plans for turning the federal government into an extension of his will: an instrument for carrying out his oft-promised “retribution” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and anyone else who has opposed him. Trump’s inner circle, purged of nearly anyone who might challenge him, is ready to enact his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him sweeping immunity from his actions in office.
In nearly every conceivable way, a second Trump administration will likely be more dangerous than the first, a term that ended in over 1 million deaths from Covid-19 and a riot at the Capitol. A predictable crisis — a president consolidating power in his own hands and using it to punish his enemies — looms on the horizon, with many unpredictable crises likely waiting in the wings.
With well-known details about Trump’s planned 2nd term agenda. And then considers how the US is not Hungary.
But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.
While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.
This is the case against despair.
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Robert Reich, 6 Nov 2024: The Resistance Starts Now, subtitled “I still have faith in America, but we must mobilize to protect those at risk if Trump achieves his worst impulses.”
I won’t try to hide it. I’m heartbroken. Heartbroken and scared, to tell you the truth. I’m sure many of you are, too.
Donald Trump has decisively won the presidency, the Senate, and possibly the House of Representatives and the popular vote, too.
I still have faith in America. But right now, that’s little comfort to the people who are most at risk.
Millions of people must now live in fear of being swept up by Trump’s cruel mass deportation plan – documented immigrants, as he has threatened before, as well as undocumented, and millions of American citizens with undocumented parents or spouses.
Women and girls must now fear that they’ll be forced to give birth or be denied life-saving care during an ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage.
More. Ending:
All I can say to reassure you is that time and again, Americans have opted for the common good. Time and again, we have come to each other’s aid. We have resisted cruelty.
We supported one another during the Great Depression. We were victorious over Hitler’s fascism and Soviet communism. We survived Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, Richard Nixon’s crimes, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam war, the horrors of 9/11, and George W Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.
Although peaceful and non-violent, the resistance will nonetheless be committed and determined.
It will encompass every community in America. It will endure as long as necessary.
We will never give up on America.
The resistance starts now.
Listen to Reich read this, here.
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There are dozens of comment pieces about this at all the usual sites, and I can’t account for all of them. But I’ll note one more by a favorite writer. Tom Nichols makes the interesting point that Trump’s threats are undermined by his simply not being very smart.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 6 Nov 2024: Democracy Is Not Over, subtitled “Americans who care about democracy have every right to feel appalled and frightened. But then they have work to do.”
An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.
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So now what?
The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.
For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.
Here’s his key point.
Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.
Ending:
Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.
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Comments.
Pundits have, in fact, raised the issues of sexism, and racism. Trump won both times when a woman was his opponent in the race for president. There is a certain element of the US population, beholden to your standard issue tribal morality of base human nature, that can’t abide a woman as president. Trump had the advantage of this feeling, twice. When he ran against a man (Biden), he lost. Yet it would seem race is a lesser issue; Obama was black, but managed to win.
You will notice that there are no Democrats angrily denouncing the results as evidence that Republicans cheated to steal the election. Cheating is something Republicans contemplate, not Democrats. Ironically this means that it’s more likely that some Republicans *did* try to cheat.
It would be fun to create a Bingo card with all the promises/threats that Trump has made, and see whether he follows through (or not). Many commentators have noted that in his first term, Trump was restrained by those around him — all those Generals and senior staff who have recently denounced him as unfit to be president. Now, with those people gone and his chosen sycophants in place, he might get away with a lot more. How much more? It will be interesting to see. Do Republicans have no bounds? Even Hitler’s generals were trying to assassinate him by the end.
I find this election event far more shocking than the one in 2016. Then, Trump was a buffoon; now, he’s a dangerous demagogue. I have no respect for anyone who voted for him, for whatever reason. America is sliding into third-world fascism, half the country doesn’t mind, and the civilized world is shaking its head in sorrow.
