The Friday after the election, I spoke on the phone with a friend from Europe while wandering around the riverfront park near the n+1 office. My friend informed me that he would soon be sending me an election rant. Within minutes the email appeared, subject line “rant.” “How come you didn’t see what was so obvious?” he wrote.
The transactional nature of Trump’s appeal shouldn’t have been surprising. Especially not in a society where everything from your daughter’s education to your health care is commodified: is it a wonder that people vote for the candidate who promises the best “deal”? Someone just offered a more promising deal, while the Democrats offered the moral high ground IN A COUNTRY WHERE THE GROUND ITSELF IS UP FOR SALE.
This was a helpful email, a bracing check on provincial self-soothing. But was it true? Had we so missed the obvious? During the spring and summer, before Joe Biden finally took himself out of the running, it had seemed self-evident that Donald Trump would win — not necessarily because he was offering a better deal, but because his vulgar magnetism contrasted so starkly with Biden’s life-sucking anti-charisma. Elections, after all, are rarely won by candidates wholly unable to deliver their own (paltry) messages. Even after Kamala Harris stepped in, her possible victory was persistently shadowed by a likelier scenario: the reelection of a man with wider name recognition, clearer if more hateful messaging, and superior if more pernicious political gifts.
I suppose my friend was at least partly right. In the days leading up to the election — as the upper rows of arenas emptied during Trump’s droning speeches, as the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe slandered Puerto Rico in front of a rapt Madison Square Garden audience, as news trickled out about the chaos and despair inside the flailing Trump campaign — it began to seem possible that Harris would pull it off, even in a country where the moral high ground itself is up for sale. Never mind the polls, which were always very close; the Harris campaign’s stiflingly stage-managed media strategy; its refusal, after a promising dalliance with anti–price gouging talk, to articulate a forceful economic program; or the choice of warmongering nepo baby Liz Cheney as top campaign surrogate, in a wasted effort to court affluent centrists. Even amid the hope, there was something in the air, a textural similarity to 2016, when the warning signs and ominous vibes coalesced into the inevitable triumph of the worst.
No stance would be taken, much less any risk.
Tweet
Contra Trump, the 2024 election result was no landslide: he won the popular vote by the smallest margin since 2000, in one of the tightest races of the past century. And still it’s tempting to see Trumpism, especially this time around, as “what was and is always written on American foreheads,” as my friend put it in his email. Early on election night, I pored over a batch of results from Loudoun County, Virginia — the county with the highest median household income in the nation — that seemed to augur the worst about Harris’s odds with the wealthy suburban voters she and Cheney were counting on. For the first time in eight years, I felt the stomach-hollowing dread I’d last experienced when one state after another was called for Trump and Hillary Clinton’s path started to narrow, to use an exhausted euphemism. This was the dread of inevitability, my body’s belated rejection of the false reassurance my brain had assiduously cultivated over the preceding weeks.
But unlike in 2016, that pang of horror didn’t linger. The upside of recapitulation is a clarity about what lies ahead, or at least a degree of sobriety painfully absent in the aftermath of Clinton’s defeat. I wonder if the past eight years have been so disillusioning, so hardening, that the intensity of that earlier shock is no longer available. The emotional and political paradox of 2024 is profound: on one hand, the sense of cold lucidity. On the other, the reality that what happened on November 5 is in every respect worse than what happened in 2016: less of an aberration, less reducible to contingency, more decisive and more destructive.
The almost three-month interregnum between election and inauguration is a limbo unique to American politics. If Trump himself seemed as blindsided as the rest of the country during the post-election transition in 2016, this time around he has been a study in action. The announcements and appointments have come so fast that it has been easy to read Trump 2 as a steroidal, maximally effective version of Trump 1. This time there would be no glitches, no crises, no administrative state to gum up the works — Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy would take care of that. There would be no obstacles to Trump’s vision of government as climate change accelerant, killer of wokeness, punisher of enemies large and small, honeypot to CEOs both petty and powerful, and concentration camp for immigrants foolish enough to have found their way to this side of the border.
There have been glitches, of course. The swiftness of alleged sex pest Matt Gaetz’s rise and fall as attorney general nominee suggests that for all his unprecedented luck and intuitive political genius, Trump has not yet figured out a way to cast aside the entire edifice of American government. While most of his appointees — uniformly unqualified, repellent, or both — may find their way into office, some are yet too unqualified and repellent to pass muster, even in what will likely be the most right-wing US Senate in recent history. There will be limits to Trump’s infantile drive to get whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Writing in the Times about Trump’s mass deportation scheme, Dara Lind argued that while many critics “assume that a second Trump Administration will have no problem breaking the law en masse to deport large numbers of people . . . that doesn’t exempt them from the logistical realities: beds in detention, seats on planes.” Bureaucracies cannot be broken overnight. During this punishing pre-inauguration countdown, it is some consolation that Trump is still subject to certain laws of physics.
But not, I fear, that much consolation. When Texas Governor Greg Abbott crows about the border security “actions” and “schematics” his state officials are discussing with Trump transition deputies, it’s a reminder that bureaucracies are built to enact destruction as much as to mitigate it. Texas, already at the vanguard of anti-immigrant policy and virtually shielded from federal law, but also dependent on undocumented labor, will show us just how far things will go. Republican margins in the House are narrow, but at least for the next two years, the President’s party has the upper hand. Things might have gone worse for the Democrats in the Senate — four Democratic senators won in states Harris lost — but at fifty-three to forty-seven, the situation is far from optimal.
The lasting legislative achievements of Trump’s first term were the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the biggest tax cut for the wealthy in the nation’s history) and the 2020 CARES Act, a massive bipartisan law that staved off the pandemic’s most ruinous economic effects. More consequential than either, however, were Trump’s judicial appointments. In its 2023–24 term alone, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority gave the right what it wanted on bump-stock bans (struck down), homeless encampments (constitutionally unprotected), Chevron deference (now a legal fiction), and presidential immunity (invented out of whole cloth). Lower down, the decisions have been no less cataclysmic. The first Trump Administration’s most notorious appointee, Amarillo federal district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, has been the chosen vessel for conservative legal challenges to Biden Administration policies, duly striking down nearly every law that is sent his way. On sex discrimination, asylum procedure, and abortion rights, what President Kacsmaryk decrees is what shall be.
Like justice, injustice moves slowly, and a distributed legal system contains backstops and redundancies; Trump will encounter friction here, too. But in an age of judge shopping and shadow dockets, when lavishly funded front groups scour the land for cases and plaintiffs, when courts ignore basic factual errors and balk at even the suggestion of ethics guidelines, when right-wing jurists’ sense of grievance seems to grow in proportion to their impunity, there is little doubt about whose agenda the justice system will ultimately serve.1
The day afterI received my friend’s rant, two friends and I took our kids to MoMA. The smoke from the wildfires in New Jersey and the brush fire in Prospect Park gave the hot air a heavy, turgid quality. Sixth Avenue was barricaded for the Veterans Day parade, closed to all traffic except the occasional unmarked cop car speeding by with a brazenness that felt appropriate to the moment. To the south, the midtown skyline gave way to a wash of hazy light, the promise of a late Turner painting somewhere beyond the high-rises. It was hard not to joke about the end of the world, about the avenue having been emptied out by Stephen Miller in anticipation of a DHS raid no one had informed us of. (We were an immigrant and two children of immigrants, along with our — for now — American children.)
Checking the MoMA floor map on my phone, I noticed that our little group was wandering in the direction of the Philip Johnson Galleries, named for the museum’s first architecture curator, “an unpaid agent of the Nazi state” (per Mark Lamster’s biography) who traveled to Hitler’s Germany out of gleeful enthusiasm and attended a handful of Nazi rallies, and then another back at Madison Square Garden organized by the pro-Nazi German American Bund. (That rally had provided a template for Trump’s epic stand-up comedy set with Hinchcliffe.) In France, Johnson reported in Father Coughlin’s newspaper shortly before World War II, a “lack of leadership and direction . . . has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation’s time of weakness — the Jews.”
The Johnson galleries were closed, so we walked over to the Robert Frank show, where, among the photographer’s restless images of the long American midcentury, I found myself staring at a contact sheet of photos of William F. Buckley that Frank shot for Mademoiselle in 1962. Buckley’s was a smug, detestable face, and Frank, mostly shooting Buckley from below, captured his priggishness but not, I think, his unnerving coldness. Despite the distaste for Trump he voiced a few years before he died, Buckley would have been thrilled by Trump’s victories. So would Johnson: he and Trump worked together on a redesign of Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and the master plan for Riverside South on the Upper West Side, though their collaborations never materialized.
Like the openly fascist Johnson and the fascism-curious Buckley, Trump combines an outsider’s paranoid antipathy with an insider’s moneyed entitlement. And like his enemy turned lackey JD Vance, Trump has cannily distracted from his elite allegiances with a thin rhetoric of workerist populism. However extreme Trump’s threats of tariffs or his erratic insults to the “rules-based international order” might be, I have a very hard time imagining him undermining the demands of the capitalist class. It’s true that Trump’s most committed donors have long been among what the late Mike Davis, citing historian Samuel Farber, called “lumpen capitalists”: “post-industrial robber barons from hinterland places . . . whose fortunes derive from real estate, private equity, casinos, and services ranging from private armies to chain usury.” With their more domestically conscribed economic stakes — for them low taxes and lax regulation take priority over free trade — these lower orders of the 1 percent may be amenable to Trump’s zero-sum neomercantilism. But who really believes that a President whose closest deputy is the richest man in the world will serve anyone other than global capital?2The only certainty is obscene levels of corruption. (Tariff carve-outs and H-2B visas to the highest bidder!)
A fortress nation with ever thicker and higher walls, recklessly belligerent toward the rest of the world: this, if nothing else, is a point of bipartisan consensus.
Tweet
Trump’s transactional logic extends to his own future cabinet. Already indicted for trying to help overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona, Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn allegedly tried to filch $30,000 a month from treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent and “later asked Bessent to invest $10 million in a three-on-three basketball league,” according to the Washington Post (which also noted that he referred to himself as “Boris Fucking Epshteyn”).3 The approach of someone like Pam Bondi, Gaetz’s replacement as attorney general nominee, feels far more congenial. Bondi won’t solicit bribes and will merely do Trump’s bidding, no questions asked. Bottom-feeding lobbyists, fracking magnates, crypto shills: these are the soldiers of the new Trump Administration, and like their boss, they will collect their winnings at the expense of any greater good.
I don’t want to brush past the reality that for many of his supporters, Trump’s vengeful fantasies, violent misogyny, lifelong racism, primal loathing of immigrants, and delight in saying the unsayable are nothing but upside. For some, the cruelty is the draw. But it’s also clear that voters were wildly dissatisfied with Biden’s presidency and with years of acute inflation felt disproportionately by the working and middle classes — the very groups who, in key states, swung to Trump in 2024. Again and again during the past two years, commentators pointed to the strength of the Biden economy — rebounding GDP growth, rising employment — and looked down on voters who felt otherwise as victims of a “vibecession.” But the expiration of expanded child tax credits is not a vibe. Neither is crippling indebtedness, nor the housing crisis (nearly half of America’s renter households spend upward of a third of their income on rent). A person who puts off a doctor’s visit or declines to buy health insurance is up against more than just vibes. The great tragedy of this election is that the candidate voters turned to for relief will instead deliver relentless punishment. How many voters actually cast their vote for an assault on public health, for the further erosion of regulations on everything from pollution to food safety, for Medicare privatization, for climate chaos, for a federal bitcoin reserve, for the depletion of Earth’s resources to fuel Musk’s dreams of Martian conquest?
Ranking Trump’s nominees and plans by sheer sadism is a losing game, but the “medical contrarians picked to lead health agencies,” per the AP’s understated locution, feel almost mythic in their potential for harm. Of course there’s nothing novel about vaccine denialism and raw-milk fetishism — a recent Times column by Tressie McMillan Cottom brilliantly surveyed what she calls the “wellness left-right configuration” — but it’s hard to remain calm in the face of an oncoming bird flu pandemic (spread, in part, through raw milk). Bobby Kennedy Jr., Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Dr. Oz all seem to feel more residual anger about insufficiently robust debate over herd immunity than about the millions killed by Covid itself (Kennedy called the Covid RNA vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made”), never mind that the social distancing, masking, and immunization programs they find enraging were presided over, however fecklessly, by their new boss. The “Covid-revenge administration,” as Benjamin Mazer put it in the Atlantic, is prepared to radically undermine the nation’s public health, making life worse for nearly everyone. This, too, can’t have been what most voters wanted.
After leaving MoMA, we took the tram to Roosevelt Island, where we could observe the smoke-enhanced changing light over the East River. Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, with its huge, careworn bust of FDR suspended in a granite alcove, was an ironic place to end up. The election had not delivered freedom from want or freedom from fear, and freedom of speech and worship appeared newly imperiled — but at least I got the light I wanted.
In the following days and weeks, the emerging narrative within the party of FDR was that the Democrats had lost because they’d veered too far left. Is there ever any other conclusion? On a podcast released November 6, neoconservative apostate Francis Fukuyama lamented that Harris hadn’t had a “Sister Souljah moment where you say definitely ‘I’m not in favor of gender transitions of a 12-year-old’ and make the case about why that’s wrong and dangerous.” Fukuyama’s interlocutor, the tiresome cancel-culture obsessive Yascha Mounk, countered that Harris should have opted for a different Sister Souljah moment, one that condemned the White Dudes for Harris fundraising Zoom, an internet microevent no one remembers. I don’t pay for Mounk’s Substack, so I wasn’t privy to the rest of this high-minded conversation, in which, per the summary, “Yascha and Frank discuss the left’s fixation on identity politics, and the role it may have played in ceding its cultural advantage — as typified by shows like 30 Rock and The Office — to Donald Trump.”
For years now, commentators like Mounk have singled out the Democrats’ alleged fealty to “wokeness” as the reason for their electoral underperformance. Never mind that no nationally visible Democratic politician actually uses abolitionist jargon or gender-fluid pronouns; unlike the economic pain felt by a plurality of voters, the wokeness backlash really is mostly vibes. As Aziz Rana remarked in Dissent, “the current centrist talk of the party becoming too beholden to the left . . . is not really about what politicians running for office are saying,” but instead is the result of a “profound suspicion toward many of the constituents essential for the party’s big tent.” The way these pundits sneer and spit on wokeness — and, by extension, the people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and immigrants implicitly grouped under that designation — is repulsive: barred by social opprobrium from calling out vulnerable groups by name, they resort to barely veiled synonyms. A reasonable critique can be made of the way corporations and institutions cynically deploy social-justice rhetoric, but this isn’t that; it’s pure hostility toward marginalized groups. The woke, it seems, are the Democrats’ own “enemy within.”
I’m very skeptical of the idea that the Democrats’ support for trans people — as coiled and parsimonious as that support was — cost them the election. But so what if it had? One does not support a community subjected to extraordinary legal assaults, to say nothing of violence and economic precarity, on the condition that it’s good for the party. Yet many commentators seem thrilled at the opportunity to abandon even the symbolic defense of LGBTQ rights. The political advantage of staying silent about trans lives or orchestrating a “Sister Souljah moment” is dubious at best. More importantly it is a moral disaster.
No issue provoked as much tortured wriggling from the Harris team as the genocide in Gaza. Was there a more pitiful moment in the campaign than the highly public push and pull over whether the Democratic National Convention would platform a Palestinian American speaker? Such a small ask — there were well over a hundred speaking slots at the DNC — but it was all too easy to imagine this already inadequate gesture getting subsumed in a whirlwind of frantic phone calls, Zoom meetings, discussions of costs and benefits. In case it was still needed, here was proof that the opportunity to stand for anything worth standing for would be muzzled by triangulation. No stance would be taken, much less any risk.4
An early hope of Harris’s candidacy was the tacit notion that she might, perhaps, maybe, be a little more confrontational toward Israel than Biden had been — but we would have to trust her, because the situation was too fraught to discuss aloud before the election. And maybe Harris wouldn’t have been any different on Gaza, and we’d have had to confront that, too. I suspect that Democratic operatives have hardly considered that Gaza could have cost them the election. But for those of us who care whether people live or die, the spectacle of an otherwise cadaverous Joe Biden’s passionate support for Israel, his administration’s regurgitation of every Netanyahu propaganda line, and liberals’ approval of the clampdown on pro-Palestine protests aren’t simply political atrocities. They’re statements of values that cast every other utterance and decision by Democrats into stark relief.
Over and over, Democrats denounced Trump’s antidemocratic tendencies and his amoral worldview. But how could this be squared with their own unwavering endorsement of a genocide everyone knows is happening, and the party’s equally determined refusal to brook any opposition to that genocide? On foreign policy more generally, the Democrats and Republicans are as aligned as ever. There is little daylight between Biden and Trump on the matter of boundless military support and diplomatic cover for the indicted war criminals destroying Gaza. Likewise with both parties’ zeal for escalating sanctions against Iran and, especially, neo–cold war antagonism toward China.5 A fortress nation with ever thicker and higher walls, recklessly belligerent toward the rest of the world: this, if nothing else, is a point of bipartisan consensus.
And then there are the intellectuals. Democratic politicians cheering the deployment of tanks and riot police to wrest antiwar protesters from their tents on the very same campuses that fetishize their own legacies as sites on the 1968 walk of fame — discouraging but not surprising. There are donors to service, trustees to placate, one’s own moral cowardice to nurture. But the procession of American intellectuals who in the past year have done everything in their power to muddle the obvious, to invent spurious distinctions, to shunt the genocide offstage and denounce the real enemy (impoliteness, illiberalism, maybe youth itself?), or simply to stay silent — well, I guess that was to be expected, too. Two decades ago, American intellectuals (including Fukuyama) showed that out of convenience or vengeance, they could embrace the party line and support the Iraq war. In 1917, Randolph Bourne wrote caustically of the “willingness of the American intellect to open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of the war spirit.” While it ebbs and flows, the flood has never really stopped.
I like to think there is another way. A week after the election, this magazine celebrated its twentieth anniversary with readings from a new anthology, The Intellectual Situation. Most striking about the evening was that three of the book’s contributors — Andrea Long Chu, Sarah Resnick, and my colleague Dayna Tortorici — read from essays published around the end of the Obama presidency and the beginning of Trump’s, and all felt considerably less hopeful than they had even at their deeply unhopeful time of publication. When these essays first appeared, their optimism was tentative at best; now even the tentativeness seemed optimistic. So much anti-trans legislation has passed in recent years that Chu’s ecstatic case that transition needs no further justification beyond one’s own desire feels further from the mainstream than it did in 2018. The prospects for criminal justice reform are much reduced from an already low low, making Resnick’s hope for more safe injection sites increasingly distant. And against a bloc of antifeminist activists and manosphere influencers directly affiliated with the incoming President, Tortorici’s essay about the limits of #MeToo, already gloomy, feels not gloomy enough. In spite of these dispiriting realities, my hope is that the intellectually honest writers among us will continue to account for what is happening around them, to search out and imagine revolutionary ideas, and assess failed ones in moments of success and despair.
Many media organizations are justifiably terrified of what a second Trump Administration will do to an information ecosystem already ravaged by social media and corporate consolidation. The so-called nonprofit-killer bill, H.R. 9495, which the House recently passed with support from fifteen Democrats, could become a blunt tool for Trump to silence anyone whose perspectives any member of his administration deems unacceptable. Even with their 501(c)(3) status intact, most institutions will find themselves tested by self-censorship, complacency, and fear. Resistance may well become a more potent word than it was during the first Trump term. In recent weeks I’ve thought a lot about the librarians and teachers caught up in culture-war assaults, individuals negotiating already unforgiving bureaucracies targeted by the right’s multimodal anti-woke machine. These are the unwitting figures of the age; their experience offers a vision of what may come for all of us. More so than after 2016, Americans will have to think seriously about their own personal tolerance for risk and sacrifice. Who will teach “racist” texts that have been banned from classrooms? Who will send abortion medication by mail if doing so becomes illegal? Who will organize bail funds knowing that, like their comrades in Atlanta, they could get hit with RICO charges? Who will contaminate the chemicals used in weapons production?
There is much we still don’t know about what happened, or what happens next. Trump “just offered a more promising deal,” my friend wrote. The rotten contents of that deal will begin to be felt very soon. How will we take care of one another?
Law professor Steve Vladeck’s report from a Federalist Society convention is especially enlightening in this regard. Vladeck was invited to participate in a convention panel, only to be harangued by a judge from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a reactionary court dominated by Republican appointees, for daring to write critically about judge shopping. “Over and over again,” Vladeck wrote on his Substack, “Judge Jones attempted to portray my own words as casting aspersions on these judges—saying, at one point, ‘if that’s not a personal attack, I don’t know what is.’ Indeed.” ↩
The contradictory play of pro-worker symbolism with service to capital is sometimes dizzying. Musk and Jeff Bezos—seasoned union busters with a combined net worth of more than half a trillion dollars—are working to rob the National Labor Relations Board of its already limited enforcement powers. Meanwhile, as Hassan Ali Kanu wrote in the American Prospect, Trump’s surprise pick for labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, “has distinguished herself within the GOP only by virtue of a mostly symbolic endorsement of the PRO Act, and in making some outreach to labor, rather than constantly attacking unions.” Despite these rhetorical overtures, the Oregon Republican congresswoman “is most likely to be a Trump loyalist . . . pro-business, anti-union.” ↩
This was a new low for a fellow Soviet-American millennial whose career I’ve been following closely for some time. There are many menacing Trump associates of my generation whom we’ll be hearing about for the rest of our lives—Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, defense contractor (and Gaetz brother-in-law) Palmer Luckey—but Epshteyn, I feel reasonably confident, won’t be one of them. ↩
In this respect, the Pod Save America postmortem interview with Harris-Walz campaign officials Jen O’Malley Dillon, David Plouffe, Quentin Fulks, and Stephanie Cutter provided the year’s grimmest listening. Harris, we are told, wouldn’t take the obvious step of distancing herself from her extraordinarily unpopular boss, who had gotten everyone into this mess, because “she had tremendous loyalty to President Biden.” (That boss’s campaign chair was, of course, O’Malley Dillon herself.) It’s nice to know that the campaign paid for Harris murals so that “people could walk down a street and . . . see something that’s cultural and cool and something that connected with them, not in a political way,” but given Plouffe’s and campaign adviser (and Harris brother-in-law) Tony West’s senior roles at Uber, it’s no surprise that the $15 minimum wage went almost unmentioned. In a blistering piece in the Irish Times, Sally Rooney bemoaned the fact that “a handful of voters in US swing states have more power to determine the speed and scale of planetary overheating than billions of other people on Earth.” Fair enough, but perhaps the real power lay with this handful of campaign officials who lost in states where Democratic senators won—and couldn’t even say they were sorry. At least Hunter Biden was pardoned. ↩
In an extraordinary assessment of Bidenomics for Phenomenal World, Andrew Elrod notes that when they finally needed to make some kind of deal in the Senate, “the administration whipped up a war scare.” That did the trick. Meanwhile, unlike the unruly Americans, the Iranian and Chinese regimes have proven themselves to be models of diplomatic sophistication. The most striking aspect of a Wall Street Journal report about Beijing’s relief about Trump’s “tough-on- China ‘dream team,’” which could have included even more hawkish players like Mike Pompeo, was that a passage from Pompeo’s memoir “enraged Xi as the book made the rounds in Beijing in early 2023.” The idea that Pompeo’s book, completely ignored in the US, was being examined by the Chinese premier suggests a degree of know-your-enemy engagement unheard of in Jake Sullivan’s White House. ↩
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!