The Age of Trump Continues
I tend to avoid cable news these days, but when I got the word on Friday that Donald Trump had been indicted a second time, I fired up MSNBC like it was 2017. There I was again, living in what felt like a fraught, unprecedented moment that demanded my immediate attention and investment, with Donald Trump right at the center. It’s a place I have been countless times now.
Ever since that fateful day that he descended Trump Tower’s escalator, he has completely dominated public life in this country. That dominance had ebbed a bit in the past few months, but this weekend proves that he is still the sun that the political planets revolve around.
It has been eight years of chaos, a ridiculous and dangerous amount of time for a country's politics to be dominated by a man so cravenly immoral and palpably ignorant. This week the length of our nightmare came home to me as I was talking to students and they told me the 2016 election was the first presidential election they were old enough to actually follow. I came to the depressing realization that they do not have a political memory of a time before our current insanity. I can call back on memories of prior political eras, for young people our system as been in a state of collapse since they can first remember.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the Antebellum period the Age of Jackson in his book of that title, and Orville Vernon Burton called his history of the second half of the nineteenth century The Age of Lincoln. These past eight years we have been living in the Age of Trump, one that like the Age of Jackson and Age of Lincoln will outlast the man himself. He has set the tone for a dysfunctional politics revolutionized by a right-wing Leninism that justifies any bad behavior and law breaking as long as it advances the Right’s ideology and power. Anyone confused as to the lack of condemnation from the Right for January 6 or after the recent indictments needs to absorb this basic fact.
The Age of Trump did not come out of nowhere. The Republican base had been crying out for a champion who would make smiting liberals his sine non qua, and they finally got him. They will never abandon him because he is willing to be as hateful of their enemies and contemptuous of the rules as they wished Bush, McCain, and Romney could have been. The only candidates with a chance to get the nomination who aren’t Trump are merely auditioning for this same champion role. Nobody who challenges his brand of politics in the Republican Party has a chance. I would even argue that DeSantis’ venomous attacks on Disney, which seem pretty ridiculous, are actually a way of signaling to the base that he is willing to give them the Trumpian chaos they crave.
Politics have been contentious my entire lifetime, but in the Age of Trump basic principles of majority rule no longer apply. In 2015, the same year Trump came down the escalator, Mitch McConnell refused to give Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee a hearing. This is an underrated moment in American history, since it signaled two extremely important shifts. In the first place, it showed that conservatives were willing to break with established rules and practices for their own benefit, and second, that they understood the courts to be a key component of their minority rule. Trump’s administration failed to pass much legislation, but it was very effective in filling the bench with extremist judges. Those judges will be destroying any new attempts at progressive legislation for at least another generation. Similarly, Republican state legislatures have gerrymandered themselves into supermajorities that can enact their most extreme fantasies without facing any political consequences.
These tactics reflect the core political issue in the Age of Trump: a very large minority of Americans mostly made up of older white people is unwilling to allow the power and cultural dynamics of the country to change, and is willing to get their way by any means necessary. This is a reckoning our country has been dodging for over fifty years. The changes of the 1960s in regards to race, gender, sexuality, and cultural values forced the issue over what kind of country this is to be. Those changes were met similar levels of opposition at the time, but the backlash won without needing to resort to minority rule. Nixon and Reagan built broad majorities, and conservatibes downplayed the xenophobia and white nationalism while still making the reactionaries feel as if they were still in charge.
Since 1988 however, the conservative candidate for president has won the popular vote just once (and that was during a war.) Barack Obama’s election and popularity viscerally demonstrated that the nation had changed at the highest levels. Conservatives are confronting younger generations broadly opposed to their values and unconvinced by the kind of reactionary politics that used to draw in the middle. Once upon a time cracking down on drugs and banning gay marriage were pretty popular, not so much anymore. (The trans and CRT panics are really just attempts to conjure the old “tough on crime”/”family values” magic.) They do not have majorities for their vision of the nation, and they refuse to tolerate defeat because that would mean “real America" dies. The only way forward is to stop playing by the rules. In their minds the rules only exist to the extent that they maintain their version of the nation anyway.
The media landscape of the Age of Trump means that any consensus is impossible. The vast majority of people exist in epistemic bubbles. Meanwhile, prestige legacy media like the Times is so scared of being seen as partisan that they have to “both sides” and downplay Trump’s crimes. It is hard for me to see a way forward, because in the Age of Trump we do not just disagree about politics, we disagree about reality itself. Trump the liar and fabulist has cultivated a following that lives in an alternate universe. They reject vaccinations and believe the last election was stolen. There is no way to convince them otherwise, even if older naive liberals still refuse to acknowledge this reality.
They are able to maintain these fictions because shamelessness is the coin of the realm in the Age of Trump. Think back to the Access Hollywood tape reveal in 2016. The rules of our society say that someone ought to apologize or even drop from the race after such a disgrace, but Trump doubled down and attacked. This is what he does every time, because he realized that our society’s unwritten and unenforced rules are meaningless. So many other politicians have witnessed this too, and have achieved fame and power by abandoning shame altogether. Just think of Ted Cruz, who stumped for Trump after he insulted his wife and father. Politicians like Lauren Goebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene have become celebrities by being as crass and shameless as possible. Once upon a time, disrupting a State of the Union Address would kill a legislative career; it has only given them more attention and fame. They learned at the feet of the master.
The Age of Trump ends in one of two ways: through a supermajority of voters giving Democrats lopsided power, or by the Republican base rejecting Trumpism. Neither possibility looks to be in the offing. At least last week’s news is welcome evidence that the rule of law may still win the day. This being the Age of Trump, however, the prosecution will only raise his esteem in the minds of his followers, encouraging them to defend him with greater ferocity. To paraphrase James Joyce, this age is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.