Ill fares the land

The 2024 American election, Part I

EVERY ELECTION DONALD TRUMP has contested summed up a part of his personality. The 2016 result was fitting for a conman and ex-casino boss. He gambled that a diffuse rage running like a coal seam through the thick middle of America could be played for handsome odds. Slip in the quarters, jiggle the dice, pray to the vague gods of the electoral college, and ding-ding-ding – out pops the presidency. It was a huckster’s dream, that year. A chancer’s election. And the press loves a winner. They kept plying him with free four-foot-tall piña coladas he could suck through a loopy straw. All that free airtime. All that outraged exposure. Even as he flaunted his strategy to treat the house like suckers. Even as he told us, openly, that it was blind luck and no skill.

Last time out, we got the queenie version of Trump: the mewling and aggrieved aspect of his style learned at the knee of Roy Cohn, around the gossipy cokepiles of Studio 54, that side of himself prone to provoking mortal combat with Graydon Carter’s Oscars Party. Never admit you’re a loser, he was taught. Never admit you’re no longer hot. So he didn’t. He chucked the kind of sook particular to the entitled rich: a continent-sized bedwetting tantrum climaxing under the Capitol rotunda. Some of Trump’s disciples gave their lives for his folly, others their freedom. Rudy Giuliani gave a standup in front of a Holmesburg lawnmowing business. For their sacrifice, Trump angled his nose to the heavens, and stuck to regarding them lesser beings not fit to breathe the same swampish Floridian air.

This time it was ruthless. A snarl of a win. A from-the-top-rope elbow-through-the-floor victory from a character actor whose lonely and unrealised fantasy is to play the heel at WrestleMania every night for eternity. When we say Trump has the instincts of a fascist, this is what we mean: the gleam in the eye at the possibility of an enemy’s humiliation, the sneer in the face of all human qualities. Popular vote. Clean sweep of swing states. Roaring mandate. The branches of government triple-locked. Pack away the petitions. Return the rifle to its cupboard. Shake off the shaman’s get-up. There will be no insurrection this time, as so many people were not-so-secretly hoping. A rebellion isn’t needed to defend a result this overwhelming, this humiliating. For once Trump will not be able to resort to the usual whimpers of the outsider, to pretend the system is cocked against him. He is America now, and America is him. Let us join in oath to the new regime:

We the Rubes of the United States, in Order to form a more corrupted Union, establish Injustice, insure domestic Strife, provide for the common defence of the Rich, promote the general Welfare of a few, and secure the Curses of Exploitation to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this warrant for the ruin of the American Empire.

Do not be shocked. Do not be surprised. What good does it do? The only startling result would have been for the Democrats to succeed running with what they had. Remember instead that people who vote for Trump – at the absolute maximum, tapped out – make up around thirty percent of the country; that his hypermobilised ‘base’ is smaller still. Take courage: only a million or so people watched Trump dance a double-handy to ‘YMCA’ for eight years and changed their minds, giving assent to his rule when they hadn’t previously. And isn’t this turnout much the same as it has been for Republicans since the dawn of the Southern Strategy? There is MAGA, yes. There is Trumpism as a mass movement. There are the diehards who, like Hiroo Onoda carrying the flag of the Rising Sun in the jungles of the Philippines until 1974, will still be chanting ‘Lock her up’ long past Hilary Clinton’s irrelevance and death. But they comprise one part (the larger part) of the nation’s unswerving conservative bloc, fixed and fast, who will always slump that way no matter what. The election did not pass Trump the reins of a rainbow coalition. Minorities did not rush to embrace a racist. The racists wouldn’t want them anyway. It’s still frosty-white out there, in Trumpland.

Remember instead that forty percent of eligible voters took one peek at the nightmare pitch made to them at discount prices and chose the only wise option: to sit it out. This bloc, vaster by far than the split-down-the-middle group of election regulars, is the bulk of the nation. They remain stolidly immune to propaganda from either direction, recognise nothing of themselves in their alleged ‘leaders’, and rightly suspect that their material position would not be made any better by scribbling in a box every two or four years. Call it cynicism, if you wish; call it good sense. They are the true majority. They are the key to a better future. To aim for anything nearer than their hearts is to abandon the horizon for the gummy sole of your own shoe.

Unlike the ‘silent majority’ of the 1980s – who were never silent nor a majority – this enormous pool of sitters-out really are quiet. No exit-pollster will grade their ‘economic anxiety’, survey the last time they could afford a dental checkup, or aggregate how much debt they must heap on themselves to have someone look after their children. Data is sparse. Data is absent. We know nothing of their attitudes beyond a determined, consistent, reliable rejection of politics as it’s currently played. To fret of working class ‘realignment’ to the right, or ‘dealignment’ into a funk of malaise is no more founded in fact than my own instinctive feeling and impulse: that in this forty percent resides the greater mass of American workers. Beaten down workers. Exhausted workers. Above all: abandoned workers. In 2020, Bernie Sanders was the only figure who thought their opinion and their vote worth soliciting. His movement sought to put those untapped legions on the march. His theory – to the shame of Joe Biden, to the shame of Jim Clyburn – remains yet untested.

Some credit to the press. They weren’t going to look like fools again. Not this time. They took Trump at his word when he said to a room of braying bible-eaters, “You know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.” They rung the alarm on Cleta Mitchell and the hard-right Only Citizens Vote Coalition. “Are we barreling toward a legitimacy crisis in this election?” Vox asked. The Hill had “three big and scary questions” about what loomed on November 6th. Instead of premature spurts of triumph, as in 2016, this year we got a quavering spree of war games about the constitutional nightmare of a cheesewire-thin margin. Colin Kidd in the LRB intoned darkly of a “dictatorial coup” or “another civil war” if Trump, sensing a loss, really stress-tested those fêted institutions Democrats leaned on so heavily during his first term. As it turns out, the Constitution might’ve been good enough for eighteenth-century slave planters, not so great for the hyperpolitical morass of the twenty-first. But these trembles of crisis and paralysis – the guns arrayed on Fort Sumter again – were the still expressions of confidence, still premature. This nervousness took for granted that Kamala Harris might at least match Biden’s vote total four years earlier. That the gap would be narrow enough to trigger Trump’s strategy of theft. Democracy dies in darkness? No, it’s dying in the light, out here on the pavement, and everyone’s watching.

American Carnage is what he called it, at the first inaugural…A brutal admixture, clarifying in its cruelty, of bipartisan bureaucratic inertia, standard Republican programme, and a cartoon of herrenvolk crankery.

It is the curse of the stupid and gullible not to recognise stupidity or gullibility in others. Thus the stinking brew of Trump Admin II will be staffed for maximum incoherence: one-part quack to one-part ideologue, charlatan snake-oilers mingled with watery yes-men, populists butting horns with neocons, hayseeds vs elites, paedophiles against non-paedophiles, fascists contra globalists, pro-lifers in rank with war criminals. Their singular point of connection, their locus and lonely cause for unity, is the protection and adoration of Trump himself – and he is the most incoherent, the most bewildered, the most impulsive of them all.

American Carnage is what he called it, at the first inaugural. That was what we got, and what we’ll get again. A brutal admixture, clarifying in its cruelty, of bipartisan bureaucratic inertia, standard Republican programme, and a cartoon of herrenvolk crankery. This government will set out to do many crimes, and in these it will succeed; it will blunder into others and blunder its way back out of several more. There is no way of knowing where the worst of their plans – concentration camps, deportations, purges, tariffs, Israel – will fall on this continuum. Self-sabotage and incoherence might throttle their power; perhaps their momentum might surge them through the ‘guardrails’ of the American state which have been eroding for a long while. Ill fares the land over which Trumpism reigns. And the opposition who warned us that this election might be the last, that the republic was imperilled? The very same opposition who staked everything on this vote as a referendum on an American Caesar yet toured swing states with his senators? They brought you to this cusp. The only question worth asking, as hair comes out in fistfuls and the teeth start to soar, is whether the Democrats should ever be allowed to do so again.  

To be continued….