Trump Without Guardrails

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.—Proverbs 26:11

The American people have voted for Donald Trump again, this time by a decisive margin and with no excuses, after plenty of evidence about exactly who and what he is.

In retrospect, the turning point was the moment in the Trump-Harris debate when he raved about Haitians eating cats and dogs. Many of us saw that as a disaster for Trump, a lapse in message discipline that would turn the election into a blowout. Instead, his poll numbers went up, and in the final weeks of the campaign, it seemed that the worse Trump got—the more incoherent and hateful his rants—the higher he went in the polls.

If a leader can openly campaign on authoritarianism and condone open racism—and then win a higher percentage of the vote, then this country is in worse shape than I hoped.

There is no way to sugar-coat this. Trump swept all the swing states last night, by clear margins, and it looks like he will end up with an outright majority of the popular vote, which he has never achieved before. And Republicans got a narrow majority in the Senate and may yet get a majority in the House. This is no trick of the Electoral College.

This time, we will get Trump without guardrails, and American voters chose this.

They will, in due course, regret it.

I already laid out the many ways a new Trump administration could lead to disaster, and it was not a complete list. If Trump manages to get even partway toward his stated goals, the consequences will be awful, and there is not much to prevent him from doing that. I am expecting the remorse to come soon, and hard. Some people are good at figuring out how to project consequences and avoid mistakes before they make them. Others—a majority, it turns out—need to feel the consequences directly, concretely, and painfully before they realize their mistake.

I’m still analyzing the exit polls, but one thing that jumps out at me is that voters chose Trump while still claiming not to choose all the things he campaigned on openly and repeatedly.

What was not appealing about Trump as voters made their choice? Some of the best-known positions he took on controversial policies: 

Trump barnstormed the country calling for a mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants. Voters panned the idea: Just 39% supported it, while 56% preferred offering immigrants a chance to apply for legal status. 

Trump, through his Supreme Court nominees, is associated with the court’s Dobbs ruling, which overturned a national right to abortion, and Democrats took every opportunity to tie him to post-Dobbs state abortion bans. He said he would not support a national ban, though he was coy during his September debate with Harris about whether he would veto a national ban. One big reason: It’s a very unpopular idea. Just 30% of voters this year said abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, a number noticeably lower than four years ago, when it was 42%.

Oh, and Trump improved his results with Hispanic voters, despite vilifying Latin American immigrants, and with black men, despite running a campaign honeycombed with white nationalists. It was a good day for the Leopards Eating Peoples’ Faces Party.

I will expect a backlash next year and the year after, partly as people discover to their shock and horror what they actually, predictably voted for, and partly as the practical consequences hit. Hopefully the recoil will be big enough, soon enough, to keep things from getting even worse.

In the meantime, Trump will break parts of our system that will be hard to put back together again—and when the backlash comes, that broken system could very well fall into the hands of people from the opposite end of the illiberal spectrum. I can tell you right now that the far left is claiming this as vindication. With Biden and Harris, Democrats led with their moderate, establishment wing, and look where that got them. There is a faction that is going to use this to advocate for, in essence, a left-wing Trump to take on the right-wing one. The authoritarian mind never projects far enough ahead to consider what might happen if someone else takes over the power they worked so hard to acquire.

In short, things will get worse before they get better.

My main advice, to adapt an old slogan, is to think nationally but act locally. One of the good things that remains in the American system is that it disperses power widely, and I suggest you focus more of your attention at the state and local level, where you are likely to be able to make more of a difference and alleviate some of the worst consequences.

When everything else fails, it means that those who still value freedom and the truth have to step up and do more—and that will include the Europeans, who will now have to fundamentally change their entire defense policy to defend themselves against Russian domination without help from America.

I will be focusing in the months ahead on those issues, and on the deeper job of moral and intellectual reform that is clearly needed.