Donald Trump’s Revenge

Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.

Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was no upset, nor was it as unimaginable as when he beat Hillary Clinton, in 2016. But it was no less shocking. For much of the country, Trump’s past offenses were simply disqualifying. Just a week ago, Harris gave her closing argument to the nation in advance of the vote. Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other—that’s who he is,” she said. “But, America, I’m here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.” Millions of voters in the states that mattered most, however, chose him anyway. In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.

Eight years ago, at the dawn of what historians will call the Age of Trump in American politics, the outgoing President, Barack Obama, famously insisted that “this is not the apocalypse.” Privately, he summed up what would become the conventional view in Washington. Four years of Trump would be bad but survivable—the nation, he told a group of journalists just a few days before Trump’s Inauguration, was like a leaky boat, taking on water but hopefully still sturdy enough to stay afloat. Two terms of Trump, he warned, would be another matter entirely.

Four years later, after Joe Biden defeated Trump, Democrats and the dwindling ranks of anti-Trump Republicans made the fatal miscalculation of thinking that it was Trump who had sunk. Too many of them were sure that the hubris and folly of his reluctant exit from the Presidency had destroyed him politically. They saw him as nothing more than a sideshow—a malevolent figure in his Mar-a-Lago exile, but nonetheless a disgraced loser with no prospect of returning to power.

They were wrong. Rule No. 1 in politics is never underestimate your enemy. Trump’s enemies hungered for a reckoning, for Trump to pay a price, legally and politically, for the damage that he had wreaked on American democracy. Instead, Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020. In 2024, it’s even possible, as votes are being counted overnight, that Trump might win the popular vote outright for the first time in his three races. With such backing, Trump, the first President since Grover Cleveland to be restored to the office that he lost, has vowed a second term of retribution and revenge. This time, shall we finally take him seriously?

President Biden will receive much of the blame for this catastrophic outcome—by refusing to step aside when he should have, the eighty-one-year-old President, who rationalized his entire candidacy four years ago on the existential need to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, will have contributed greatly to Trump’s return. Biden’s reckless insistence on running again despite the visible signs of his aging may well have been the 2024 campaign’s most consequential decision. When he finally bowed out, in late July, after a disastrous debate performance with Trump, was it already too late? This will be a hypothetical for the ages. Politicians from both parties make unfulfillable promises to the American electorate all the time. But the implicit premise of Biden’s candidacy might have been one of the most sadly impossible campaign pledges ever—as it turned out, there was to be no restoration of normalcy, no return to a pre-Trump America.

Harris moved swiftly and largely successfully to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. She ran a polished if late-starting campaign during the subsequent hundred and seven days—a brief dash to Election Day more customary for a parliamentary election in Britain than for the years-long slog of endless politicking which Americans require of their candidates. But Harris, despite four years as Vice-President, had little national identity or constituency to fall back on. She was embraced by her party, thrown a rollicking, celebrity-studded Convention in Chicago, and cheered after her trouncing of Trump in their one and only debate, in September, but the net effect of her rise was to return the race to where it was before Biden’s implosion: deadlock.

In the weeks before the election, poll after poll in the seven battleground states found a contest within the margin of error. Pennsylvania and Nevada were a dead heat in the final Five Thirty Eight polling averages; Michigan and Wisconsin finished with a single-point advantage for Harris; and Arizona and Georgia showed a slight edge for Trump. Even that, in retrospect, turned out to be overly optimistic for Harris, who was losing, narrowly but decisively, in all of the battleground states at the time that the election was called. Her defeat in Pennsylvania—long considered her must-win bulwark—will probably lead to years of second-guessing her decision to bypass the state’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, as her Vice-Presidential running mate, in favor of Tim Walz, the governor of safely Democratic Minnesota. But, given her across-the-board defeat, perhaps it would not have mattered.

Harris now becomes one of a long line of incumbent Vice-Presidents who tried and failed to secure a promotion; her difficulty in separating herself from the liabilities of Biden’s record has proved why only one sitting No. 2, George H. W. Bush, has been elected to the Presidency since Martin Van Buren did so, in 1836. Too many voters appeared to have seen Harris as effectively the incumbent President in the race—at a time when large majorities of Americans report dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. This, according to Doug Sosnik, the White House political director for President Bill Clinton, is why ten of the twelve elections leading up to this one have resulted in a change of control in the House, the Senate, and/or the White House.

Trump’s victory, in that sense, was a predictable outcome for a Republican nominee, perhaps even the expected one. And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump, a celebrity businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake things up in Washington. But this is the post-2020 Trump—an older, angrier, more profane Trump, who demanded that his followers embrace his big lie about the last election and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history. His slogan is now openly the stuff of strongmen—Trump alone can fix it—and he will return to office unconstrained by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from inside his own Cabinet. Many of those figures refused to endorse Trump, including his own Vice-President, Mike Pence. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, the retired four-star marine general John Kelly, told the Times during the campaign that Trump met the literal definition of a “fascist,” and yet even that was not enough to deter the enablers and facilitators in the Republican Party who voted for Trump.

The new gang surrounding Trump will have few of Kelly’s qualms. He will make sure of that. One of the main lessons that Trump took from his Presidency was about the power of the staff surrounding him; his son-in-law Jared Kushner left the White House concluding that poor personnel decisions represented the biggest problem for their Administration. Soon after Trump left office, I interviewed a senior national-security official who spent extensive time with him in the Oval Office. The official warned me that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first term, specifically because he had learned how better to get his way—he was, the official said, like the velociraptors in the first “Jurassic Park” movie, who proved capable of learning while hunting their prey. Already, one of Trump’s transition chairs, the billionaire Howard Lutnick, has said publicly that jobs in a new Administration will go only to those who pledge loyalty to Trump himself. Having beaten off impeachment twice, this second-term Trump will have little to fear from Congress reining him in, either, especially now that Republicans have managed to retake control of the Senate. And the Supreme Court, with its far-right majority solidified thanks to three Trump-appointed Justices, has recently granted the Presidency near-total immunity in a case brought by Trump seeking to quash the post-January 6th cases against him.

Throughout this campaign, Trump has been deliberately coy about his extreme and radical agenda for a second term. He disavowed Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page governing blueprint spearheaded by an array of his former advisers, eschewing the specifics that might have turned off voters in swing states. Trump said, for example, that he was no longer in favor of a national abortion ban, despite pledging to sign a twenty-week ban when he was in office the first time. Project 2025, if Trump were to adopt its proposals as his own, includes an extensive menu of ways to further restrict women’s access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive-health services.

But the agenda that Trump has publicly committed himself to is cause enough for grave alarm. He has said that he will begin “mass deportations” of undocumented migrants as soon as his new term begins; that he will be a dictator for a day when he is sworn in, on January 20th; that he will pardon the thousands of January 6th “hostages” who stormed the U.S. Capitol, in 2021, on his behalf; and that he will go after his opponents, the political “enemy from within,” deploying the U.S. military to quell domestic disturbances and even suggesting that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who dared to challenge him while wearing America’s uniform, was guilty of treason and deserving of execution. It is not inconceivable that Trump will move quickly to follow through on earlier threats to fire independent officials, including two of his own appointees whom he later turned on—the F.B.I. director Christopher Wray and Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Even before his Inauguration, Trump’s victory will shake alliances and embolden autocrats around the world. What power will NATO’s Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense hold with an American President who has publicly said that, as far as he is concerned, Russia can do whatever it wants to NATO members who do not, in Trump’s view, pay their fair share? And what about embattled Ukraine, whose ability to fight on against Russia has been sustained by billions of dollars in U.S. military aid that Trump opposed? Trump has promised he can end the war in twenty-four hours—how will he do that, other than to pressure Ukraine to cede its stolen territory to Russia in exchange for peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms?

On the economy, many Trump voters seemed to have believed his promise to restore the greatest economy in the history of the world—though it never was. Independent experts believe that his vows to enact sweeping tariffs on goods from other countries and to deport immigrants will likely result not in a boom but in an inflationary, deficit-busting spiral that will make those same voters nostalgic for the Biden-era price hikes that contributed to Trump’s return to power. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, spent more than a hundred million dollars helping to elect Trump and promoting his lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories on his social-media site, X; what, now, can we expect as Musk, a major government contractor through his SpaceX venture, seeks to collect on his investment? Even before announcing that he planned to make Musk his unofficial “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” Trump already had plans to oust vast numbers of nonpartisan federal employees by executive order and replace them with political appointees—a move he attempted just before his defeat, in 2020, but which was swiftly overturned when Biden took office. All of it portends a deeply destabilizing period for the country and the world, which is still highly dependent on American power and leadership. And it is likely to happen with a swiftness that may stun Trump’s opponents.

At Harris’s rallies, her audiences during these past hundred and seven days would chant her slogan, “We’re not going back!” But, it turns out, we are. Harris fell short. Americans, at least enough of them to tilt the outcome, chose Trump’s retrograde appeal. The question now is a different one: not if we are going back but how far? ♦