We all know what will happen if Trump wins. He has promised to be dictator — but “only one day” (riiight) — and his platform consists entirely of revenge, money, personal power, and escaping all accountability for his crimes. If he loses, he and far too many in the GOP have pretty much openly stated they will not accept the outcome. That can mean anything from another attempt to storm the Capitol to violence against election officials to forcing a vote in the House — where each state gets one vote, meaning that whether or not the Democrats regain the House, more states are going to be Republican and will vote Trump into the White House.
But I mean the title in a larger sense. We have reached a point where Trump no longer matters that much. Rachel Maddow made this point in a longer than usual ‘A’ block on Monday: Rachel Maddow Boldly Explains Why Republicans Are As Big A Problem As Trump.
“It’s also a matter of how Republicans, how the party, how American Republican leaders have reacted to this violence from their own leader, how they’ve reacted to this anti-democratic turn in the leadership of their party,” she continued. “It is not just a Trump problem. It’s that Republicans like what Trump did. And they don’t mind the idea of him doing it again.”
The GOP has been heading toward its current status for many years. A long time ago, the leadership realized they were never going to persuade a majority of voters to agree to their platform, so they started to plot how to win victories as a minority. (The Democrats helped by not seeing this, or if they did, by not fighting hard against it from the get-go.) Aside from the anti-democratic (small D) nature of this policy, it left the GOP vulnerable to the more extreme elements of the country. Most of these — the fanatical religious right, the conspiracy theorists and the tin-hat crowd, had been pushed to the margins by both parties. The GOP saw they could be useful. What they didn’t see is that the fringes wouldn’t be satisfied with just being “useful” or even with just having a seat at the table. Their modus operandi has always been to first get the camel’s nose inside the tent, then take over the tent, then knock down the tent and sit on the remains.
I recall a saying from a few years back, to the effect that the religious right didn’t buy the GOP because the GOP agreed with them; they bought it because it was for sale.
On top of all this, we are becoming a majority-minority country. No ethnic group is already in the majority in several states, and the trend is increasing. A majority-run democracy means that Whites, who have long controlled pretty much everything, now have to share. White supremacists don’t want to share with anyone, be it Blacks, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, even other Whites who worship the wrong version of Christianity or who think the wrong thoughts.
As I said, the GOP was heading down this path. Enter Trump, who pushed his way into the driver’s seat and stomped on the accelerator. This is the other sense in which it no longer matters if Trump manages to win the White House; the car is already out of control and will remain out of control.
Thomas Edsall in the New York Times posted this opinion piece today — A ‘National and Global Maelstrom’ Is Pulling Us Under — which makes this same point, mainly by surveying wide range of scholars who study these things. I recommend reading the whole thing, especially as not all of his interviewees are that pessimistic — though even the optimistic ones are struggling. But here is his closer:
Perhaps the most trenchant comment I received was from Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, who replied to my inquiry at the height of the controversy over the former Harvard president Claudine Gay:
“I have thought for some time that America was suffering multiple elite-driven institutional breakdowns across the board, opening the door to a national and global maelstrom. But now I find myself so overwhelmingly distressed by it all, including the collapse of core values at my own university, that I cannot write coherently about it.”
For decades, the Republican party has been chipping away at the institutions that protect our democracy, our freedoms, our way of life, our increasing diversity, our efforts to “provide for the general welfare” as promised in the Constitution. Trump took a sledgehammer to the cracks. Whether he personally wins or loses, the cracks will widen.
---------------Addendum------------------—
Reading the comments below, I see I either haven’t made my point, or people are missing it. So I made the title more specific: The country is in deep shit regardless of whether Trump wins. Yes, it will be worse if he does win, and worse if he loses and refuses to accept the loss.
But we are also already in big trouble, and it won’t go away when (finally!) Trump does, for two reasons: The GOP was already heading in this direction, and Trump accelerated them. In other words, Trump has already done enough damage to our institutions that we are in big trouble.
There is one other factor I should have mentioned: denial of reality. This is a big thing for the fringe — it has to be, since reality is telling them to take their idiot conspiracy theories and tinfoil for a long walk off a short pier. (One major such nutso idea is that the world is about to end with the Second Coming.) Trump has never liked reality and has a long history of denying it. He got away with it much of the time as a private citizen. But a president, more than any other officer, has to deal with the world as it really is; that’s why we spend so much money on the intelligence agencies. Trump was infamous for brushing off those agencies and for even trusting Putin, a master of disinformation, over them. His ultimate denial of reality (so far) was his loss of the 2020 election.
Trump’s refusal to accept that loss has led him to drive out of the GOP anyone who does accept it. That is to say, anyone who wants to play any public role as a Republican has to swallow the Big Lie and go along with Trump’s refusal to deal with reality. Even if they know it’s not true. And that sets a pattern where they start denying reality in other areas.
So, thanks to Trump, we now have one of the two major players on the American political scene, the Republican party, practicing wholesale denial of reality. And getting deeper and deeper into denial. This runs the range from abortion to foreign affairs to vaccines to maybe the end of the world. The GOP may have been heading there, but, again, Trump accelerated the trend and cut off any path out of it.
That is why it no longer matters what happens to Trump in 2024. The damage he has already done will live on after him.