It’s going to be a very long 1,461 days. If we’re lucky, it will only be 1,461 days, and if we’re very, very lucky, we might be able to piece our fragmented democracy back together. There is no scenario in which many bad things don’t happen, however.
I am not breaking any news here. Because of Trump’s unstable personality, not to mention the dysfunction of the congressional GOP, it’s hard to guess how things will play out and guessing is not time well-spent. For me it’s more helpful to think of categories of worry—within these, trouble is guaranteed, if not specific details.
1. Corruption. Americans have never seen serious corruption before. We’ve had corrupt politicians—men like Menendez who take bribes for favors. But it’s been a century plus since the *system* was corrupt (though less in the South). We got a foretaste of what this will look like with Supreme Court justices taking large, unreported gifts from billionaires with many interests before the court.
Trump is going to make that look tame. In his first term, he made a mockery of emoluments, coaxing foreign governments to use his hotel and Mar-a-Lago as they came calling to affect U.S. policy. Now he will accept open bribes. Tariffs? Exemptions available if you make certain donations. Regulations short-circuited? Mining rights opened? Certain mergers approved? Safety laws dumped? No problem! Just buy some TrumpCoin and we’ll put this issue at the top of the list.
The ways Trump can monetize being president with the DOJ, courts, and Congress aligned with him are going to be something to witness. He will also be running his usual kinds of Trump Steaks scams, penny-ante, obvious frauds that are beneath a mail carrier, what to speak of a president. They will be so many and so resplendent we will soon lose track of them.
Worse, government itself will be oriented toward corruption. Trump will direct agencies to benefit wealthy patrons, political cronies, and allies. This stuff is going to be legion and people are going to mostly ignore it. Republicans have already perfected the mechanisms of much of this over the past 45 years, so the wheels are well-greased. The President oversees the vast federal governments, and agencies have broad latitude to direct their resources where he wishes (sadly, still “he”). So the IRS can either conduct the business for which it was designed—taxing and gathering revenue—or it can be an engine for rewarding favors to rich friends. Gut the agency and tell workers to go after lower-income Americans and the IRS is still doing work, but it’s doing *your* work. The FDA, Transportation, Interior, Ag, Energy—these will become the mechanism of a vast spoils system.
2. Punishing political foes. We have never seen a president to use the power of the DOJ to go after his antagonists (or protect himself from his own corruption), so this will be a little startling. Yet it won’t be unprecedented: Trump signaled his instincts in the way he attacked enemies in the Andrew McCabe case (indeed, everything I’m worried about has precedents in Trump’s first term).
Trump employs a mob boss’s sensibility to punishment and reward, so this will likely be capricious and negotiable. The more foes who bend the knee, take deals, and so on, the stronger his hand. We’ve seen a shocking amount of pre-obeying already, so I wouldn’t expect many to stand their ground. This is, needless to say, total banana republic stuff. It is the foundation of autocracy. Trump’s choice of Pam Bondi for AG is a five-alarm fire—she is a complete sycophant and is happily signing up to become Trump’s trigger-man.
3. Red states. Trump won’t be the only one pushing the envelope. Red states are going to test laws that wouldn’t remotely pass constitutional muster in normal times, with a normal judiciary. Some of these will affect voting rights, others will attack civil and possibly racial liberty, and others might test novel theories about state power to control their borders or women’s access to contraception or the flow of commerce. They will be significant because they’ll move through the courts and some will get judicial approval. At that point, they can become national law as well.
4. Foreign policy. The President has nearly unrestrained control over U.S. foreign policy and the military. In addition to more opportunities for corruption—and this has always been an area soft for corruption, anyway—Trump can literally upend world politics. Americans don’t really get foreign policy and thanks to saber-rattling (Saddam Hussein is the greatest and most dangerous monster since Hitler! Iran is an existential threat!), they have felt the world a dangerous place even since the fall of the Soviet bloc. But for the U.S. and our allies it has been good, safe times.
Every indication is that Trump isn’t happy with this stability—and why would he? Chaos has always been his friend. Again, predictions are a mug’s game, but figures like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kristi Noem are very telling. Russia/Ukraine and China are the biggest worries, but with Trump putting Greenland and Panama on the table, basically anything is possible.
The bigger issue the potential chaos unleashed by a United States no longer trusted by allies. South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine are in the immediate crosshairs, but the instability would ripple across the world. The Democratic world has guided international relations for most of the past century, restraining actors like China and Russia. If the U.S. is no longer a reliable partner on team democracy, it strengthens our enemies. A chaotic world is a dangerous one. This could be disastrous.
5. The system’s reactions to these stresses. Whether things are merely bad or catastrophic will depend on the way various internal and external mechanisms react to all these stressors. Will the judiciary enable or restrain Trump and red states? Will military leadership stop Trump if he attempts something insane and/or unconstitutional? (If they did, that would trigger a major constitutional crisis—and that would likely be the *better* outcome, just to illustrate haw dark times are becoming.) How will agency heads respond to Trump’s pressure? These internal gears can either spin freely and speed Trump’s and the GOP’s agenda, or be gummed up and slow it.
Then there are the outside actors—the media, Democrats, business leaders, and the public. Will they take personal and financial risks to oppose this agenda, or go along to get along, figuring that it will be safer to comply? (Early indications are not encouraging.)
There are a couple of other things I’ll be watching. A number of people have pointed to the narrow margin in the House, the fractious GOP coalition, and Trump’s many deficits as reasons for hope: his incompetence and stupidity, age-related decline, and status as an instant lame duck. Again, if we’re lucky, these factors may mitigate the worst outcomes. But let’s be clear, things are going to be bad, immediately, no matter how chaotic and dumb Trump is. He has a lot of power, unified government, and the experience of a first term. I don’t think people are doing themselves any emotional favors thinking it’s going to be all right. It’s not.
That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. The last thing I’ll be looking at is the way blue states battle all these forces. Trump and the GOP will have a free hand to do a bunch of bad things—but they can’t do *all* the bad things. Blue states can help slow things down. They just need to take a page out of the GOP playbook, and resist in all the ways the law allows. A big part of managing the second Trump term is slowing it down.
Moreover, blue states can also pass a bunch of laws that contrast sharply with the direction of the federal government. In terms of creating a contrast in visions that actually break through a lazy and incurious public, this is our best bet. The parties have radically different visions for the U.S., and they have ground Washington to a stalemate—which has been part of the reason these visions haven’t broken through in the minds of that dozing electorate.
States are a different matter. Dems have complete control of 15; the GOP 23. They are passing starkly different laws and that split is going to get even more dramatic. So we need good, effective leadership that addresses the real needs of citizens in blue states. If Trump and the GOP are the disaster we expect, a competing vision is critical.
Finally, and most importantly, I hope we all take care of ourselves. The sun will still rise each morning and most of the things that make our lives joyful and meaningful will still be close at hand. Trump will make our lives tangibly worse, and for some of us, much, much worse. But that makes it even more important that we don’t grant him control of our inner lives. Both for our own wellbeing and as members of a resistance movement, it’s important not to fall into a depressive hole. Things will get worse. We will persevere.
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