Speaking in Sioux Center a few days before the Iowa Caucuses in 2016, Donald Trump did something more rare than a sighting of Halley’s comet: he made a true statement: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
It is. He proved it again on Election Day 2024 with that 312-226 win over Kamala Harris, the most decisive since Obama’s in 2012 and the most prescient: Trump’s body count on American soil since 2016 has not been minor. Prepare more body bags.
Underestimating America’s capacity for folly is the flip side of a country that habitually makes fairytale stick figures of its past presidents and forgets its atrocities at home or abroad, all the while fabricating mythologies for school kids about “the oldest democracy on earth.” In context, Trump’s second win, picking up where his first term’s insurrection ended, is not that extraordinary.
We had the near fascism of Coolidge and Prohibition in the 1920s, Eisenhower’s AWOL presidency in the 1950s, the Kennedys’ private little wars in the early 60s, Nixon’s (absence of) law and order police state and, at least in private, Trump-like lawbreaking until more balanced courts at the time did Nixon in until Ford’s pardon. Ronald Reagan ran the most corrupt administration since Ulysses Grant, put the country on its debt-ridden path to a second-rate empire and ended his senescent second term in complicity with Iran’s mullahs and Nicaragua’s terrorists. The second Bush’s White House was a black site.
Trump was watching. It was all Sesame Street to him. He’s known what boomer-crashing Americans and their kids have a hard time admitting to themselves: the democratic moment is over.
It may not explain how Democrats manage so spectacularly to fumble a layup. But Monday-morning-quarterbacking Democrats’ mistakes is a dead end. Let’s say Harris had eked out a win, or even won by the same margin that Trump did. It would still be a win for Trumpism, because it wouldn’t change the fact that the country is evenly divided and in a state of cold civil war. Like 2020, it would have been a calamity deferred.
Because the question isn’t why Harris lost. The question isn’t whether she picked the right vice president, did the right interviews, nailed her theses to the right houses of worship, laughed and scolded too much or too little and played by the media’s cynical rules enough. The question is why any Democrat, however unlikable, uninteresting, uncharismatic, uninspiring, could possibly not win against Trump by at least 80 percent.
There are no doubt a thousand and one valid answers. That enough Americans are no longer interested in representative democracy should be near the top of the list. Most don’t know who 99 percent of their representatives are and don’t care. They put more trust in their favorite fount of disinformation on social media than they do in their friends’ opinions–not because they’re deplorable, but because the society of like-minded ignorance bred on DIY “research” and conspiratorial certainties rings more true than the condescension of mass media, or this column.
The more The New York Times talks of Trump’s fascism, the more the disillusioned of democracy loathe the New York Times and worship Trump. The more the nation declines from uncontested global supremacy abroad and uncontested white supremacy at home, as it is declining precipitously in both, the more they cheer a strongman to tell them what they want to hear: you’re great. We’re great. They’re the enemy. Democrats are still talking facts, science, morals, law, justice, democracy. Maga-world laughs and pisses in the Rubicon.
The Harris campaign and the liberal press’ echo chamber went into hysterics about maga’s Madison Square Garden rally last week, for good reason. There’s little question that Trump in his perpetual ignorance–he gets even his own references wrong–was dog-whistling the German-American Bund’s Madison Square rally of February 1939, when that orgy of anti-Semitism, xenophobia and Nazism was billed as a celebration of George Washington’s birthday and speakers addressed the crowd as “my fellow Christian Americans.” Fritz Kuhn, national Fuehrer of the Bund, told the crowd they were determined “to protect themselves, their children and their homes against those who would turn the United States into a Bolshevik paradise.” The words were identical to Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s KKK-inspired “America is for Americans and Americans only,” among the milder words spoken that day.
The difference is that the 22,000 people who paid 40 cents to $1.10 to attend the 1939 rally were close to the sum total of that era’s maga movement. The 20,000 at Madison Square last Sunday were the lucky few who snapped up free tickets. If Trump had held the rally at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, he’d have filled those 82,000 seats. America is his Giant Stadium now.
The Bund, rebranded as John Birchers after the war and as tea partiers during the Obama years, boosted Republicans from Goldwater to Bush II but could never manage to do what Trump pulled off. The “paranoid style in American politics” Richard Hofstadter identified in 1964, on the first anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, is now the dominant style of American politics. The “nice people” of Charlottesville have gone mainstream. Nothing Harris could do about it. Not even if she was Jesus Christ, who could now be Trump’s victim on Fifth Avenue.
I don’t think I’m exaggerating. Dostoevsky anticipated Trump’s famous line. He wrote the script to this election in The Brothers Karamazov, his 1888 novel, where he tells a story within the story: Christ returns to 16th century Seville in Spain, “in the most terrible time of the Inquisition.” The masses recognize Him, huddle around Him and are filled with wonder–until the Grand Inquisitor appears and all but spits in Christ’s face.
Your freedoms have only destroyed men, the Inquisitor tells Him. They’ve made them miserable. They don’t want your freedom, your science, your love. They want our bread, our myths, our infowars of the divine. We are their god, and so “they gather around us like fearful chicks to a hen.” You are nothing but a trouble-maker. “I will condemn you and burn you at the stake as the worst of heretics,” the inquisitor tells Christ, and “at a sign from me your own flock will fuel the pile roasting your limbs.” Christ kisses the Inquisitor on the lips and walks on, vanquished.
The maga masses are right to deplore the Harris press’ comparison of the Madison Square bacchanal to Nazi sympathies. The more appropriate comparison, the comparison J.D. Vance would approve–because that’s what his neo-Catholic world view is aiming for–is the Inquisition, what you could fairly call fascism with an inhuman face.
So it wouldn’t have mattered who ran against Trump–Biden, Whitmer, Newsom, Christ. You saw the fearful chicks gathered around the henhouse that was Madison Square, chirping and flapping over democracy’s curdles as Trump pledged allegiance to Christian nationalism. The feeling of resurgence is as glorious as a shot of fentanyl, especially when the resurgence is synthetic. Maga is riding an incredible high because it cannot thank Trump enough for the euphoria of denialism.
We’re a nation in decline. We can’t control wars, climate, inequality, debt. We spend more just to pay the interest on our growing debt ($1 trillion a year) than we do on the military or Medicare. This is not sustainable under any scenario, no matter what illusionists of American power like Peter Zeihan and Steve Bannon tell you. We are no longer capable of influencing the international scene. It’s a matter of time before Putin annexes his third of Ukraine, China reclaims Taiwan and Israel disappears Palestine like so many corpses in Pinochet’s concrete walls. America’s majority-white reign has withered as surely as the globalist consensus. So how do we create a new order if not around national, racially selective greatness, the one illusion you can always fabricate?
Trump didn’t make this moment. It was made for him, in no small part by liberalism’s abdication. The more liberalism projected self-loathing without a hint of pride in country or redemptive hope for it, the more it ceded the ground to “a bottom-up populist revolt,” as Richard Rorty foresaw in 1998. It’s not Nazism. But it’s nearer to the easy fixes of fascism than to any democratic experiment we’ve known–an American fascism as only this country can appropriate and transfigure into yet another myth of god-given exceptionalism: The city on a hill. The world’s last great hope. Sea to shining sea. Manifest destiny. New frontier. Morning again in America. Maga.
Imagine Trump’s triumph on Jan. 20, the Supreme Court majority he appointed at his feet, immunity at his fingertips. Watch his left hand. That ring he’ll be wearing isn’t his wedding ring. It’s the Ring of Gyges, the ring that gives him ultimate power of invulnerability (invisibility not being in Trump’s vocabulary). Herodotus tells us that Gyges reigned for 38 years. Clearly, Trump thinks he can do better. After this election, no one can doubt it.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. Reach him by email here. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.
