The case for (some sort of) optimism about the end of Trumpism

I saw a bunch of really apocalyptic stuff in the immediate wake of the passage of the Trump bill, including high profile normally sensible people suggesting that the America they would spend the rest of their lives in was going to be basically Trumpist, which is to say for several decades at least.

Psychologically this was an understandable reaction. The current political situation is a disaster, there’s no getting around that, and even the very best realistic case scenario, which this post will try to lay out, doesn’t deny that Trump has been and will be a catastrophe for America in countless ways.

That said, here’s a case for resisting despair, leaving aside for the moment that despair is under the circumstances an objectively pro-fascist reaction.

First, the odds that Trump dies in the next 42 months are, actuarially speaking, far from trivial. I realize that actuarial figures have limited usefulness when applied to specific individuals, especially presidents for obvious reasons, but those figures say that Trump’s odds of dying between now and January 2029 are 21%. I also realize of course that Trump dying doesn’t end Trumpism per se, and that the idea of Amy Chua’s factotum as president isn’t exactly a bowl of cherries either, but this blessed event is still something for every decent person to look forward to, as this Onion article pointed out with characteristic perceptiveness a dozen years ago now.

Second, the enormous burst of narcissistic vengeance-fueled energy given off by the Trump universe in the eight months since the election would be unsustainable even under normal circumstances, but is even more so given Trump’s very evident ongoing physical decline. I realize that the idea of a spry energetic man in his mid-70s becoming a shambling husk of his former self by his early 80s remains a completely hypothetical development within in the context of American presidential history, but nevertheless it could happen. Less facetiously, if you pay close attention to Trump’s public appearances, as unpleasant as that is, the waning energy is already evident: the slumped physique, the deteriorating combover, the even higher than normal amount of slurred and incoherent speech, and so forth. I think it’s a reasonable expectation that the remainder of Trump’s second presidency will feature sharply declining energy and interest from him personally, which will lead to much backstabbing among his satraps, as they try to take advantage of this development on America’s Got Fascists, which is the reality TV show that Mark Burnett decided it was a good idea to invent 25 years ago.

Third, this op-ed from a reactionary Catholic (no not that one) in the New York Times lays out a case that Trump is too disorganized and undisciplined, and too easily bored and distracted, to ultimately do much beyond implementing normal Republican policies, as horrendous as those are:

We have been advised to take Mr. Trump, if not literally, then at least seriously. I do not think we should extend him even that courtesy. We should see him not as a Caesarean figure set upon remaking the United States in his own image or an ideologue who has attempted to impose a coherent philosophical vision on our unruly public life, but as a somewhat hapless, distracted character, equally beholden to vast structural forces and to the limitations of his own personality.

The only thing more remarkable than the rhetorical élan with which Mr. Trump has laid out a revolutionary new agenda for the Republican Party — realist in foreign policy, populist and protectionist in economics, moderate on social issues — is his gross unsuitability for any task more consequential than the lowering of marginal tax rates. On issues ranging from military intervention to health care to the stock market, Mr. Trump is simply the continuation of the G.O.P. establishment by other means.

Now not surprisingly this neo-falangist stooge greatly understates the extent to which Trump’s authoritarian tendencies make him a lot worse than a standard issue Republican, but for anyone inclined to see the glass as not completely empty, there’s something to this critique beyond trying to further normalize Trumpist authoritarianism and chaos.

I’m not saying that the realistic best case scenario is how the next three and a half years are going to play out. It is, after all, a best case scenario. The realistic worst case scenario is that we simply don’t have any real elections over the next few decades, and descend into pure Putin-style managed democracy. But there’s a good argument for why Trump isn’t a suitable vessel for that transformation, and I suggest we keep it well in mind as we try to negotiate life in this country over the next few years.

I’ll end this with a caveat, which was brought to mind yesterday by a message I got from someone who is a tenured professor at an elite university, who pointed out that for rich white guys things still seem pretty much the same. He acknowledged the legitimacy of general panic and the urgency of resistance, and he is still anticipating disaster, and he said he hates Trump like he’s never hated anyone in his life, and realizes he is doing really evil things. But he also said that if he didn’t follow the news, he wouldn’t have noticed any change between Trump and Biden, at least not yet.

And of course this is true. The stock market is at an all-time high, Trump’s TACO approach to tariffs hasn’t resulted in empty shelves and skyrocketing prices yet, the concentration camps are far away, the FPers are pointing out that Trumpism is fascistic without getting arrested or losing our jobs . . . There’s a version of the next three and a half years in which, as horrible as it is and will be, we get to the other side in more or less one recognizable piece, Trump fades from the scene, Trumpism goes into some sort of irreversible decline, and is replaced by standard issue horrible Mitt Romney Republicanism as opposed to the nascent authoritarian trending to fascist nightmare of the last decade.

And if that happens — again, very much a best case scenario at this point — a lot of people are going to spend a lot of time arguing that it wasn’t really all that bad, that Trump’s critics were being hysterical, that there were a lot of good things to say about Trumpism if not Trump himself, and so forth. And, if you happen to be as socially and economically privileged as my correspondent and I both are, it will on some level be easy to believe such claims, even though they will be noxious lies and represent the worst sort of revisionism. In other words, we will definitely get a Dunning school history of Trumpism in its wake. We just have to do everything we can to make sure in its wake is eight years from now, not eighty.