Former U.S. president Donald Trump holds a Bible as he visits outside St. John's Church, on June 1, 2020, in Washington.Patrick Semansky/The Associated Press
Nina L. Khrushcheva is a professor of international affairs at The New School, and the co-author (with Jeffrey Tayler) of In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones.
Fans of The Lord of the Rings films will remember the scene where King Théoden, with his refuge of Helm’s Deep poised to fall to the marauding orcs and their “reckless hate” wonders: How did it come to this? Following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, many Americans are asking the same question.
How did a convicted felon, who sought to overturn a presidential election that he decisively lost just four years ago, win the votes of more than 72 million Americans?
Mr. Trump is not just a criminal. He is also a charlatan, who has proved time and again that he knows almost nothing about policy, and an aspiring dictator, who has pledged to carry out mass deportations and vowed to prosecute his “enemies.” Yet he has won not only the Electoral College, but also the popular vote – a feat he did not achieve in 2016 or 2020.
The explanation starts with Mr. Trump’s enablers. The same people who decry “wokeism” for supposedly suppressing open public discourse seem to consider it verboten to criticize the mainly white, older, and rural voters who have remained blindly loyal to Mr. Trump, no matter how nasty, dangerous, or capricious his behavior. They do not understand who Mr. Trump is or the threat he poses, the apologists say; they are responding to legitimate grievances, such as economic insecurity.
To be sure, Mr. Trump’s voters might not want him to make good on every menacing promise he has made. If anything, they reason, Mr. Trump’s exaggerations prove that he is a man of the people – not just another polished politician making carefully calibrated statements. It is the flattened logic of the blind believer – utterly incoherent and virtually impossible to challenge.
It helps that many of Mr. Trump’s supporters secretly – or, increasingly, vocally – share his worst instincts. His racism? Many white Americans are sick of talk of “privilege” and even sicker of immigrants supposedly pouring across the border to take their jobs and consume their tax dollars. His misogyny? Many of his young male voters, feeling outdone or rejected by their female counterparts, like the idea of reminding women of “their place.”
Mr. Trump’s backers dismiss all other criticism as well. The experts who warn that Mr. Trump’s plans will impose high costs on the U.S. economy fail to appreciate his exceptional business acumen. Those who highlight his self-dealing to enrich himself and his family are overstating its scale and impact. As for Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, it is a non-issue – even, apparently, for his evangelical supporters. Mr. Trump might feign fellatio on his microphone at a rally, but he has also been chosen by God to liberate (white) Christians from the “prison” that is modern America. Surely it was the hand of God that deflected the assassin’s bullet at a rally this summer.
Mr. Trump had plenty of help in converting voters to his debauched religion. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s highly profitable propaganda machine, distorted discourse and stoked outrage. Tech billionaires supported Mr. Trump’s rise more directly – Elon Musk was Mr. Trump’s second-largest financial backer – in the hopes of benefiting from a deregulation spree. (Tesla shares have already surged.) Such tech titans – together with the silent powerbrokers of Wall Street, like Jamie Dimon – are the modern American equivalents of the German business leaders who thought they could control Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans are under no such illusions, which helps to explain why even those who once attempted to challenge him have rolled over.
Cowardly Republican politicians have helped Mr. Trump to shake the political radioactivity that should have engulfed him after he incited his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The next day, figures like Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham finally seemed prepared to wash their hands of Mr. Trump. But days later, they refused to vote for his impeachment. And when Mr. Trump launched his campaign for the party’s nomination again, they quickly fell into line. Nobody wants to be on a dictator’s bad side. And, given the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling granting the president virtual immunity from criminal prosecution, Mr. Trump will be nothing if not a dictator.
How did it come to this? A majority of white Americans have lost faith in their country. Members of the profit-hungry business elite have gained an unfettered ability to use their pocketbooks to shape politics. And Republican politicians have sacrificed their own integrity – and American democracy – at the altar of power.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syndicate.org