Don’t Panic

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

Look, the reelection of Donald Trump is bad news. A lot of awful stuff is going to happen. Some immediate pain points include the replacement of Lina Khan at the FTC with a pliable pro-corporate stooge, the dismantling of Joe Biden’s excellent NLRB, and an immediate gutting of federal wildlife and environmental protections. A lot worse will follow, very likely including even more tax cuts, which are the real reason so many upper-crust types held their nose and voted for Trump. (At the end of the day, there’s always enough will in Congress to cut taxes.) The incoherence that’s inherent to Trump’s foreign policy means that an actual shooting war might be possible. No relief will be coming for the Rust Belt or any other part of the United States hurt by deindustrialization. This all sucks and there’s going to be some dark times ahead.

At the same time, recent doomsaying has a lot of that usual Trump-era liberal chauvinism in it, where the relentless panic seems competitive and performative. (It’s hard not to detect the self-importance in many people’s public wailing, the sense that they think this hardship validates their own status as a very important person.) Yes, things are bad, but they’ve been bad before, and as destructive as the first Trump term was, it wasn’t as terrible as people predicted. We’ve also had a worse presidential administration in clear living memory. In general, it’s important to always remember: the hard times never end, but because they never end, they aren’t really hard times, they’re just times. It’s all just life. Let me take you through a few reasons why you shouldn’t give up.

Trump’s first term was not exactly an efficient machine for achieving conservative policy goals

This is the most obvious objection and reflects on the weirdest aspect of the current moment — the idea that the next Trump term will ruthlessly implement his awful agenda. For one thing, it’s hard to say that Trump has an agenda. He’s going to rattle the saber about the border and probably find some ways to beef up enforcement, although it’s hard to say to what effect. He seems really intent on this tariffs thing, but that’s an issue that’s going to prompt huge corporate resistance which will in turn create turmoil within the Republican coalition; it seems very unlikely that he’s going to get anything like what he wants at the scale he wants. And, anyway, what he wants is very far from what he can get, as his first term proved. Do people really not remember this? The Trump administration was a daily exercise in corruption, controversy and scandal. Major administration officials seemed to resign by the day. As I won’t stop pointing out, Trump’s signature policy objective (according to him!) was Obamacare repeal, and he was incapable of getting it past his own party in Congress. Yes, there was a lot of hurting that came from Trump I. I’m not underestimating the destructive potential here. But it’s bizarre to look at Donald Trump and the kind of people he attracts and assign them some sort of godlike competence in getting what they want. He’ll be dogged by fierce opposition and scandal from Day One, just like he was last time. Don’t dismiss his malice, but don’t exaggerate his competence.

Ronald Reagan had just as much ill intent, and was actually good at getting what he wanted, which is an inherently more dangerous combination. It’s just that he was genteel and grandfatherly, so he didn’t embarrass people as much.

George W. Bush was much worse

This gets back to my whole “presentism as chauvinism” thing. As conscious beings living in the flow of time, it’s really hard for us to avoid thinking that right now has to be very special because we live right now. And while I don’t want to get into a grand conversation about what the right kind of perspective on history should be, it’s definitely important to remember that previous times felt special too, and future ones inevitably will as well. And in particular, when we’re talking about evil presidential administrations, it’s helpful to remember that many of us lived through a far more destructive one, specifically from January 2001 to January 2009. That wasn’t that long ago.

The George W. Bush administration combined the malice of Trump with a grim competency in getting what they wanted, with a profoundly destructive indifference toward other affairs as the cherry on top. 9/11 happened under Bush’s watch, and yet for some bizarre reason it redounded to his political benefit, enabling him to enact a sweeping “homeland security” agenda in response; this included mass warrantless surveillance, a torture program that we still don’t know the extent of, a lot of bullshit hassle at the airport we’re still dealing with, and a general assault on civil liberties with no clear security benefits. They parlayed the 9/11 moment into the Iraq War, which killed at least half a million Iraqis and 4,400 Americans, destroyed Iraq’s civic infrastructure, prompted millions of refugees to flee the country, created the instability that allowed for the rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war, and ruined America’s international reputation. Bush’s signature legislative victories included tax cuts that benefited the wealthiest Americans while ballooning the national debt, as well as No Child Left Behind, the single biggest failure in the history of American education policy. New Orleans, a large majority Black city, was swallowed by the ocean in a terrible hurricane, and the federal government sat on its hands as hundreds of people literally drowned in the streets. The Bush administration did nothing as the conditions that caused the financial crisis bubbled along, until the pot boiled over and the country was plunged into a terrible recession. Bush attempted to seat his personal lawyer Harriet Miers, a woman with no academic or judicial experience at all, on the Supreme Court. Even Republicans found the attempt to be embarrassing, demonstrating that Bush was both deeply stupid and deeply personally corrupt.

So … not great.

Does the fact that the Bush administration was really bad mean that the Trump administration isn’t also bad? Of course not. But it’s worth pointing out that bad things are always happening, we are always fighting back, and eventually something new happens. It would take a tremendous amount of evil and incompetence for Trump to surpass Bush’s aggregate badness, and he does not enjoy the bipartisan deference that Bush enjoyed for several years after the 9/11 attacks. I’M NOT SAYING TRUMP ISN’T REALLY BAD. I’m saying we know from really bad and we’ve fought it and the worst-case scenario is not inevitable, not even very likely. When evil makes the law, you take power from the evil and then you make a better law.

Being in power fractures coalitions

Many, many people have pointed out that Trump’s political philosophy and policy agenda are fundamentally incoherent, that he follows no clear established school of politics and has never really defined one of his own. This has proven advantageous for him; famously, his willingness to back off of longstanding Republican commitment to cutting Medicare and Social Security helped him in the early days of his candidacy. (A core contradiction of the modern Republican coalition is that it’s a party with an intellectual opposition to entitlement programs and a base full of voters who rely on such programs.) Trump is not a neocon but not a “realist,” he’s neither a small-government zealot nor a Bush-style compassionate conservative, he talks about fiscal responsibility but proposes policies that would increase the deficit, he’s a self-professed inflation hawk whose signature economic ambitions would dramatically increase inflation. He’s a Wall Street financier with a gold toilet who sells economic populism, sort of. He’s all over the place. As noted, this has advantages on the campaign trail. But it also introduces instability into an actual governing administration.

The thing about being president, as opposed to being a presidential candidate, is that you now have power, and when you have power, the people who helped you get power expect things. Taking power inevitably creates internal divisions within political movements; the entire history of modern political power teaches us that. (See, at an extreme, the Night of the Long Knives.) When you’re scrambling around for power, you can imagine a world where your particular faction or sect gets everything it wants. Once in power, the leader will give you what you want or he won’t, and when he doesn’t, resentment grows. All of this deepens when you have a demagogue with as little grasp on a core ideology as Trump. This kind of petty reversal was exactly what happened during the Trump White House 1.0, a big part of why there were endless resignations and leaks and recriminations. A great example of a promise not kept is when Trump, at a campaign rally a month after his first election, responded to chants of “Lock her up!” by saying “Now we don’t care.” A core campaign concept, discarded as soon as it was no longer politically useful. There will be similar betrayals that have more obvious policy dimensions and they will piss off people of influence. You can already see it now with MAGA complaints that Trump is planning to empower neocons in his next administration. The more that Trump picks favorites the more he pisses off other elements of his confused coalition.

Things change

Think back to George W. Bush again. After his victory over John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, Bush seemed to hold imperial power of a kind that rivaled Reagan after his demolition of Walter Mondale in 1984. His party gained three seats in the House and four in the Senate, after very unusual gains in the midterms in 2002. Many people in the country sincerely believed that to stand against Bush was to betray the country; he enjoyed immense public support even among Democrats thanks to the perceived social commandment to rally around the flag. Karl Rove’s expert use of gay marriage as a wedge issue had demonstrated the continuing power of social conservatism, which the Republicans controlled. It was difficult to imagine a future in which Bush was not a dominant political force, and already there was a great deal of chatter about his brother Jeb continuing the dynasty. (It’s hard to believe now, but Jeb was once perceived to be a potential political juggernaut.)

And yet two years after that 2004 election, Bush’s party was absolutely “thumped,” to use his term, handing control of Congress over to the Democrats and acting as an expression of profound public unhappiness with Republican leadership. The debacle in Iraq had become massively unpopular, with a scuffling economy and the very public indifference in the response to Katrina demonstrating that Bush was not the man to help average Americans. Bush would become a particularly reticent lame duck president in his last several years; I particularly remember his response to the financial crisis, which amounted to his usual shrugging, “aw shucks”-ing and an implication that things were gonna suck for the next guy. Once hung with a kind of patriotic mystique, in very short order Bush had come to be perceived as a reckless idiot, and his polling numbers reflected this reversal of fortune. Conditions change and they change fast. I could point out many other times when fortunes turned dramatically in American politics. For example, the 1984 Reagan moment that provoked many in the GOP to think that they had secured permanent victory led, in time, to a 1996 moment when many of those same Republicans feared that Democrats would hold power for a lifetime. Things change! And they will change again.

In particular, while Trump’s federal trifecta is truly depressing and very dangerous, it’s built on small majorities that are very, very likely to be erased in the 2026 midterms. And while I’m not a fan of Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom, both are the kind of slimy opportunists who Americans love to elect to the presidency. Right now is not forever. The opposition will evolve. The question is, what can be done to minimize the bleeding, and how can the Democrats get out of this current malaise that sees them lacking any sort of coherent party identity? I’ve already written more than you might care to read on that question. But you can only participate in finding the answers if you don’t give up now.

Keep perspective. It’s bad. But it’s always bad, and it could be so much worse.

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