Donald Trump has transformed the American story
A
decade ago, it was easy to believe US identity was a settled question.
Now, as our institutions acquiesce to barbarism, the US’s promise has
been traded for chaos
Wed 9 Apr 2025
Making America great again was never a promise
Donald Trump
could deliver on, nor one that he intended to. That said, he has
undoubtedly thrust the US back into history – and not just through his
assault, in recent days, on the global economic order.
About
50 years ago, the tumults of the late 1960s and early 1970s began
giving way to a quietude that would carry us through the end of the cold
war. Tested as we may have been by conflict, scandals and crises
economic and not, we entered this new century – and met the
uncertainties of a new world we’d forced into being – surer of
ourselves than ever before. The towers fell, yes, but the US’s sense of
purpose was as much of a settled fact in the world as American power.
The American people were divided, true, but for all but an impertinent
and implacable few, the major questions of American identity had been
resolved. The meaning of American values, the contents of the American
dream, the members, in good standing, of American society – these
things were known and known so deeply, we supposed, that they hardly
needed articulation.
In
2008, the election of Barack Obama offered impatient readers a place to
close the book on the American story for good. And many did – as
though everything that followed the first Black presidency would be
epilogue. But the triumphalism of that moment gave way to doubt almost
immediately. Donald Trump barrelled into political conversation, four years
before he launched his first run for the presidency, as the loudest
proponent of the theory that Obama had actually been born in Kenya – a
foreign invader perhaps backed by shadowy forces threatening the
American way of life. It wasn’t difficult to see where this rhetoric
would lead the right if left unchecked. It also wasn’t surprising, for
those who knew the American right well, to see the Republican party,
including its establishment nominee for the presidency, Mitt Romney, elevate and embrace him anyway.
A
little over a decade on, and just over two months into Trump’s second
term, the book has been thrown back open. Who we are, what we are, where
we are going as a country – everything is up for grabs again. And the
president is going in for it all with both hands. After two or three
years of resigned concessions from Trump’s putative critics to his
framing of the immigration problem, the solution we’ve chosen is
barbarism – women in a Miami detention facility, for instance,
sleeping 27 to a cell on concrete floors that are also their only
toilets, or innocent men being flown over to goons in El Salvador.
Who we are, what we are, where we are going as a country – everything is up for grabs again
There,
it’s been reported that many of the new prisoners at the “Terrorism
Confinement Center” were labeled by our immigration authorities as
members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for having tattoos –
including a man bearing one for Real Madrid and another man with one for autism awareness. On 15 March, a photojournalist for Time captured
the intake of a man who said he was a gay barber. “A sea of trustees
descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with
haste,” he wrote. “The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper,
folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man
asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and
cried as he was slapped again.” This week, the administration admitted
that a Maryland father had been deported to El Salvador by mistake. The
administration also said that it would not be returning him to the
United States – as he is now in the custody of El Salvador.
A French scientist barred from entering the county after criticisms of the administration were found on his phone. A Canadian actor detained for nearly two weeks over permit paperwork. A permanent resident
from Germany, stripped naked, interrogated and detained by immigration
officials upon returning from Luxembourg. No one with sense expected
Trump to act judiciously here; the prejudices and paranoia driving
immigration hardliners are no longer news. But seemingly every day, the
dragnet constructed by the administration manages to surprise. Many of
the most telling anecdotes still to come will be from our campuses. The
secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was confirmed with the support of
every Democrat in the Senate, has told
the press that many of the more than 300 visas department officials
have evoked since he’s taken office had belonged to student “lunatics”.
The detentions of two of the students in question have already made
headlines: Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil, guilty, per the administration, of the crime of organizing against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and Tufts’s Rumeysa Ozturk, taken into federal custody apparently for writing an op-ed about the same.
The images from the video
of her arrest may mark this era as indelibly as the frames of George
Floyd’s murder and stills from the attack on the Capitol four years ago
– masked agents of the state, appearing from nowhere, surrounding and
snatching a frightened woman off the street for having expressed an
opinion. Nothing could seem more irrelevant, as you watch her being led
into an unmarked car, than the debate over whether Trumpism constitutes
fascism as a technical matter, though it is surely a point in the “it’s
fascism” camp’s favor that the administration may not allow the debate
to continue. Nine billion dollars in federal grants
to Harvard, a rhetorical target of the conservative movement since time
immemorial, have been placed under review with the tissue-thin pretext
that the university has not done enough to fight antisemitism – which
the US president is something of an expert in given his stance
that the American Jews worthy of respect are the ones who’ve proven
themselves sufficiently loyal to the Republican party and its
objectives. Grants to other institutions have already been suspended on
the same grounds, including $400m in grants to Columbia, which appointed an overseer
to monitor its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies
department for wrongthink in response to the administration’s demands.
![group of people protest in support of Palestinians]()
Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Here,
finally, after years of elite hyperventilation on the subject, an
extraordinary, concrete and non-conjectural threat to free speech on and
off campus has arrived. And many of those who branded themselves
warriors in its defense, making sweeping and lucrative generalizations
about some of the Americans now in the administration’s sights to that
end – student activists and advocates for Palestinian rights,
transgender people broadly speaking – have yet to speak out. According
to In These Times,
only 24% of those who signed on to Harper’s Magazine’s Letter on
Justice and Open Debate in 2020 – a courageous stand against the brutal
tyranny of sophomores and sensitivity readers, akin, we were so often
told, to the terrors of Mao’s China – have publicly condemned the
administration’s moves against colleges and dissident students. Perhaps
that’s due to broad agreement among speech pundits: just days after
Ozturk was carted off to a detention facility, a New York Times op-ed by
Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University, claimed the prevalence of progressive beliefs on campus constituted a threat to free _expression_ “comparable” to state censorship.
The
word for this is acquiescence and we’re seeing it all around. Major law
firms responding to the president’s formalized thuggery with offers to
do its bidding pro bono. Companies and non-profits pre-emptively doing away with diversity initiatives and any other activities that may raise the hackles of an administration that, per an executive order
on “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, has officially
rejected the view “that race is not a biological reality”. One could
make a little game of guessing each day which leaders and institutions
might fold to the new regime and how. That isn’t to say some aren’t
stretching themselves in opposition. This week, Cory Booker, out of
sheer, sweaty ambition and a sense of political opportunity that has
eluded most Democrats, broke
Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest speech in the Senate’s history
with a 25-hour jeremiad against the administration and the material
havoc its policies are already wreaking across the country. This beats
the huffy indignation about the violation of governing norms many
Democrats have been given to over the last few weeks – though there is
also a potent argument about the form Trump’s misgovernance is taking
and the precipice he’s brought the country to that’s actually worth
making.
On 19 April will be the 250th anniversary
of the beginning of the war that founded this country – a war that, as
we would do well to remember, was animated in large part by an ideal
that stands undiminished by time and unmarred by the sins of our past.
Human beings are not made to bear arbitrary, capricious and
unaccountable rule. Whatever our social standing or economic status,
whatever side of national borders we happen to fall upon, we have rights
that should prohibit others from abusing us to their narrow ends and
entitle us to governance that allows us to pursue our own. In the time
since the founding, we’ve come to commit ourselves to this ideal more
deeply and sincerely than those who first arrived at it. And those of us
who remain committed to defending it have reached a point of decision
and decisive action. What we face now, at the juncture in history we’ve
been dragged to, is nothing less than the end of the American republic.
And the chief danger to it, we should insist, is something much larger
than the third term the president is considering to the laughter
of elected Republicans, something that will outlast this administration
and outlive Trump if we allow it. It is the ideology that brought Trump
to power to begin with.
Even now, many are
keeping to the idea that Trump’s rise was an aberration, as though the
country had merely wandered off a path towards progress that our leaders
– Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative alike – were
leading us down with a common purpose, despite their disagreements. When
Trump finally leaves the political arena, Democrats such as the Senate
minority leader, Chuck Schumer, have insisted
publicly and privately, the US will find and walk that sunny path
again, strengthened by the Republican party’s remorse. At the heart of
this delusion is a refusal to understand the nature of the Republican
project: a refusal to understand that US conservatism has been built
upon the idea that men like Trump ought to control our government and
our society.
National
disintegration at the hands of the Republican party or a future where
power is held by the many and not a dangerous few – this is the choice
that must be presented to the American people
To
be a conservative is to believe that a natural order rightly produces
winners and losers – rulers and the ruled – and that the meddling hands
of government or those who hope to change society shouldn’t interfere
in that sound and sacred process or upend the hierarchies it produces
on the basis of abstract principle. This is the ideological basis of the
right’s attacks upon the right to vote and the democratic process –
the reason why even some of Trump’s critics on the right can be heard
musing aloud about restricting the franchise
to the worthy and intelligent. It is why animus towards immigrants and
minorities – for getting more resources and sympathy than they deserve,
for the ways they might unduly influence our culture and values – will
always find receptive audiences within the conservative electorate.
And
it is why conservative policymakers have worked for the last half
century to build a political economy where executives and investors can
accrue unlimited returns to their supposed genius and daring – in the
millions, billions and soon trillions – unrestrained by government or
organized labor. The candidacies and now presidencies of Donald Trump,
an autocratic bigot and billionaire, sprang from this ground as
predictably as a jack in the box. And as troubled as they seem by the
material and political costs of his trade agenda, Republican
policymakers and donors have surely taken heart in how totally the
conservative agenda has succeeded elsewhere under Trump’s leadership.
Federal programs and federal employment are being slashed, federal
regulations are being dismantled, the renewal of a major tax cut is
around the corner, undesirables are being punished and discouraged from
entering the country, and even our universities and other pillars of
liberal civil society are being brought to heel in keeping with
conservative social objectives.
As
difficult as it might be to imagine that whatever follows Trump might
be even worse, we have ample reason to believe it could. In ways he
hardly intends, Elon Musk, who purchased control of the federal
bureaucracy with $260m
in contributions to Donald Trump’s campaign, is a vision of the future
being created for us – rule by a class of madmen with messianic
pretensions, deranged by their own wealth into a confidence that
dominion over the heavens and even eternal life
are within their reach. But the wealthy aren’t gods entitled by
providence or some holy and immutable laws of nature or commerce to
dominate us. In fact, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are, by some distance,
the stupidest men ever to hold executive power in this country, inferior
in character and intelligence to the very workers they’ve spent the
last two months driving out of government – researchers, scientists,
humanitarians whose efforts have saved the lives of millions across the
globe, all sent packing by an administration so captured by idiocy it
has announced it intends to seek trade remedies against two uninhabited islands near Antarctica.
Humiliation,
immiseration, chaos and more of all to come – this is what the US’s
promise is being traded for, thanks to a Republican party that, plainly,
poses the greatest threat to the endurance of this country since the
Confederacy. The policies it pursues will materially ruin us as
thoroughly as the ideology motivating it has morally coarsened and
corroded us. And the constitutional order so many are still appealing to
in our collective defense has only aided and abetted it – in
anti-democratically bringing Donald Trump to office in the first place,
making his removal functionally impossible and structurally empowering
the most conservative parts of this country so deeply that the right has
been substantially insulated from paying the electoral price of its
extremism. We will be judged harshly by history the longer we delay in
coming to terms with these truths and building the political response
the moment demands of us – not a set of strategies or rhetorical
approaches aimed merely at victory in the next few elections or a drive
to restore our norms and institutions, but a movement aimed at defeating
the US right decisively and completing the still unfinished project of
US democracy.
National disintegration at the
hands of the Republican party or a future where political and economic
power are held by the many and not a now dangerous few – this is the
choice that must be presented to the American people. This is the fight
we’re now in.