A Failure of Imagination About Trump

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In a recent interview with Time magazine, Donald Trump once again told Americans what he will do to their system of government. Why don’t they believe him?

While I was away from the Daily this past month, a lot of news and life happened, including the passage of a major foreign-aid bill, campus protests, and House Democrats offering to save the job of a GOP speaker. But Donald Trump also gave an interview to Time magazine that, after the usual burst of shock and commentary, has flown under the radar, relatively speaking, pushed out of the headlines by the unrest at elite colleges.

In the interview, Trump once again promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists; once again, he vowed to use the Justice Department as his personal legal hit squad. He said he will prosecute Joe Biden, deport millions of people, and allow states with newly strict abortion regulations to monitor pregnant women. He will kneecap NATO and throw Ukraine to the Russians.

Trump told Time that he thinks people actually like it when he sounds like a dictator, and he’s not entirely wrong: As I’ve noted, much of his base loves talk of “vermin” and the idea of exacting revenge on other Americans. But there are two other important reasons that many people are not taking Trump seriously enough—and that Biden, a long-serving American politician, is struggling in the polls with an often incoherent would-be autocrat.

One problem has been around as long as the republic: Americans don’t pay attention to politics, and when they do, they frequently blame the current president for whatever is going wrong in their lives. For most people, economic cause and effect is mostly notional; if gas prices are high today, or if someone is still not working despite low unemployment rates, it’s because of the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Combine this with the peculiar amnesia that helps people forget how many Americans needlessly died of COVID while Trump talked about injecting bleach, and you have a population that fondly remembers how good they had it during a terrifying pandemic.

Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.

When I was in high school and taking driver’s education, our teachers would show us horrible films, with names like Death on the Highway, that included gory footage of actual car wrecks. The goal was to scare us into being responsible drivers by showing us the reality of being mangled or burned to death in a crash. The idea made sense: Most people have never seen a car wreck, and expanding our imaginations by showing us the actual carnage did, I suspect, scare some of us into holding that steering wheel at the steady 10-and-2 position.

Likewise, Americans had a hard time conceiving of a nuclear war until 1983, when ABC showed the made-for-television movie The Day After. The movie (as I wrote here) made an impact not because anyone thought a nuclear exchange would be a walk in the park but because no one could really get their head around what would happen if one took place. (That’s despite how thoroughly fears of nuclear war had otherwise permeated the culture.) The movie includes a stomach-churning scene of people watching a football game at a stadium, looking up to see the contrails of American missiles in the sky, and realizing that the world as they’ve known it would last for another 30 minutes at most. This was not Dr. Strangelove; it was a moment people could see happening to themselves.

We just don’t have a similar conceptualization for the end of democracy in America. I have not seen the film Civil War, but I’m not worried about another civil war—at least not the kind we had before. Rather, I’m worried about the gray fog of authoritarianism settling, in patches and pieces, across the United States. In 2021, my colleague George Packer tried to present a realistic scenario of democratic collapse; the next year, I wrote about what such a process might look like. But looking back, I see the limits of my imagination.

I did not, for example, think it possible that state troopers would stop women who might try to leave their state to seek an abortion. In his concurrence with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that threw out Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that such travel bans on pregnant women might be unconstitutional, and no state has tried to enact one—yet. But I now view this as only one of many inhuman outrages that could come to pass if the federal government is overtaken by Trump and his authoritarian cronies and the state courts feel free, with Trump’s blessing, to ignore the Constitution. I can imagine state legislatures passing repressive laws and expelling any representatives who oppose them. And I can easily see the former president and right-wing governors attempting to use the U.S. military and the National Guard as their personal muscle.

People have a hard time imagining all of this is in part because Trump has a compliant, right-wing media ecosystem arrayed around him that tries to explain away his behavior. But it doesn’t help that others in the national media remain locked in the mindset that this is a normal election. Today, The New York Times ran an op-ed from Matthew Schmitz, a right-wing writer who assured readers that all will be well: “Mr. Trump may pose a threat to our political system as it now exists,” he writes, “but it is a threat animated by a democratic spirit.” (Back in December, the Times ran an essay by Schmitz in which he argued that Trump is a moderate: “Mr. Trump’s moderation can be easy to miss, because he is not a stylistic centrist—the sort who calls for bipartisan budget cutting and a return to civility.” Well, that’s one way to put it.)

Crucial to deadening our imaginations about Trump is the idea pushed by some of his supporters that his unhinged statements are just a lot of tough talk, and that the second term would be like the first, only without the pandemic and with cheaper eggs. In reality, of course, Trump’s first term was (to use a rather vivid Russian expression I learned in my days in the Soviet Union) about as organized as a whorehouse on fire during an earthquake. Even before COVID, responsible men and women, some of whom agreed deeply with Trump on many issues, nonetheless had to run around stamping out one crisis after another. None of those people will be present to restrain Trump this time, and he will bring to Washington a crew that is even more morally reprehensible—and far more organized—than those who joined him in his first term.

Trump’s most alarmist opponents are wrong to insist that he would march into Washington in January 2025 like Hitler entering Paris. The process will be slower and more bureaucratic, starting with the seizure of the Justice Department and the Defense Department, two keys to controlling the nation. If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like.

A sperm donor fathers more than 150 children. A cryobank misleads prospective parents about a donor’s stellar credentials and spotless health record. A cancer survivor’s eggs are stored in a glorified meat locker that malfunctions, ruining her chance at biological motherhood. A doctor implants a dozen embryos in a woman, inviting life-threatening complications. A clinic puts a couple’s embryos into the wrong woman—and the biological parents have no recourse.

All of these things have happened in America. There’s no reason they won’t happen again.

Watch. In the third season of Hacks, premiering today on Max, the show faces the failures of late-night comedy head-on.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses a provocative scientific debate: Are plants intelligent?

A lot of other things happened while I was gone (and you’ll continue to see me here a little less frequently than usual for a stretch, as I’m still working on some longer-term projects). Some of you may have seen the personal news that my cat, the amazing Carla, passed away. I will write about Carla here next week, but thanks to the many of you on social media who sent your condolences. As anyone who’s loved an animal knows (and as Tommy Tomlinson wrote here), it’s astonishing how much you can miss them.

I’ll be back next week, but in the meantime, I also want to wish my fellow Eastern Orthodox Christians a happy Easter, which for us is this Sunday. (It’s because we rely on the Julian calendar. Why can’t we just change it, and use a common calendar, like we do with Christmas? Well, we’re Orthodox, and … Look, it’s complicated.) Anyway, a blessed Easter to those who are celebrating this weekend.

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