What does the Trump Phenomenon Tell Us About the U.S.?

One of my Swiss cousins sent me an essay making the claim that Trump and his followers are emblematic of America's decline from greatness. My view of what's happened here is different from that writer's, even if I can understand that point of view. My feeling is that the character of the United States did not change with Trump; rather his arrival has revealed an aspect of our character that has been here for a long time. There is a school of thought that there has for generations been an angry, paranoid strain of American politics, most identified with the historian Richard Hofstadter's writings (cf The Paranoid Style in American Politics) where he connected the conservative right wing politics of 1964 with older movements in American history going back a century. Trump's followers' obsession with nonexistent conspiracies and anger at the "other" carries this tradition forward.

This is not to say that I haven't been shocked by what has happened, just that I think, with hindsight, the signs of this were here already, although only embodied in fringier candidates of the past like George Wallace. But one thing to keep in mind is that Trump ran a completely dishonest populist campaign in 2016, promising at various times to 1.) produce a comprehensive public health plan that would cover more people than Obamacare, 2.) raise taxes on the 1%, and 3.) pursue and punish corporations. So his election was not necessarily a mandate for the policies he revealed only after getting elected. And it's going to be much harder for him to take a populist angle this time, and this is why I think it is unlikely that he will be reelected. My biggest concern in the election to come is the prospect of Russian hacking of the voting apparatus, a prospect the Republican Senate has not been interested in countering.

Another amazing aspect of the American character that has been revealed in the last few years: Americans take their democracy and its institutions for granted, and are completely complacent with respect to the threat of authoritarianism. It is clear that we are working with an honor system here, where the president has way too much power but has traditionally held back from exercising it. Now we have a guy who doesn't care about tradition, and so he is exercising power to a degree which is way beyond our traditional norms, but is in some cases legal, and in other cases illegal but punishable only by impeachment, which seems to be off the table for the moment. This is true on both the left and right -- the anger against Trump is almost all due to his specific policies of the moment, not to his abuse of our institutions. If Americans cared about democracy, then a key issue during the coming election would be how we should restructure our institutions to make it easier to rein in a criminal president. For example, it clearly is a weakness of our institutional architecture that the president directly controls the Department of Justice and has the ability to replace inspectors general. But I don't see people making much of an issue of this. The Republicans love Trump, Democrats hate him, and independents are trending -- for now -- toward dislike for him. But our vulnerability to dictatorship that he has so clearly revealed? That does not seem to be on the radar at all!

Reading about our history one sees so much talk about American liberty and freedom, but this talk does not reflect concern or focus of any depth. I think we are lucky for the moment that Trump's political instincts are not very sound, and so he persists with policies which are loved by his base but not the majority of the country. The successful American dictator of the future will craft his policies to appeal to a majority of the people. That man -- or woman -- will rule like a king.