FYI: Part 1 of this Piece was Published earlier in November 2024 and can be found under the title: “2024 US Election Reaction.”
Introduction
This is part 2 of a short piece I wrote the day after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. What you’re reading now was written in middle to late November 2024, as all the people in America who didn’t vote for Donald Trump (and others all over the world) try to figure out just how bad everything will get once Republicans control the executive, legislative, and judicial branch with no guardrails to check their conduct. For any Lord of the Rings fans I feel like I’m sitting in Minas Tirith watching the darkening skies to the east as Mordor begins to envelop Middle Earth.
Part 2 will be a continuation of all the discussion points in part one. There will be some repetition from part 1 to lay the groundwork, but also new topics after I’d had more time to reflect and watch or listen to other commentary and reactions. This piece will also be divided into sections to break down each topic.
I firmly believe people in the future will look at the 2024 election as a moment of accelerating decline for the United States. This decline was accelerated by Americans who voted for a president that expressly promised to ignore democratic norms and further undermine every institution that could help keep authoritarian power in check. The second Trump administration will have what amounts to a pre-enlightenment attitude towards empirical science with climate change and vaccination denialism. If the second Trump administration follows through on its dire plans to deport millions of people it would be a humanitarian as well as economic disaster. Speaking of economic disasters and following through on dire and terrible plans, Trump’s proposal to slap tariffs on imported goods could start a trade war with countries all over the world that could be devastating for the global economy, not just the United States. All of this and more will be examined below.
Ignorance Isn’t an Excuse
Just after the election, I was listening to a British historian on a political podcast based in the UK discussing Trump’s victory. The historian was making the point that what most commentators and people interested in history get wrong is that a sizable portion of any population have no interest in politics. A decent number of the people who voted for Trump paid absolutely no attention to the news of the campaign, and the only issue that mattered to them was their perception and understanding of the economy. They associated the economic hardships of the Covid-19 pandemic with Biden and by extension Harris, and so they voted against Harris in the vague hope that Trump would be better, without actually being able to articulate why they came to that conclusion.
I don’t disagree with any of these assertions. I think they are all spot on in fact. What I find disagreeable is that there is a tendency to forgive or excuse these kinds of voters. The reader might be wondering, is it a bad thing to expect voters to vote for a candidate they think will represent their interests? Isn’t it the fault of the candidate who lost in not being able to articulate why they were the better candidate? What’s so disagreeable about an uninformed voter backing someone that they think will help them?
Think is the operative word in that sentence. More importantly, the people who voted for Trump because they thought a second Trump term would benefit them were also voting against all the people, institutions, and policies that Trump threatened during his campaign. A few examples of which are: American democracy as a concept, migrants and immigrants, people in the queer community, women’s rights to their own bodies, and the whole damn planet. These particular voters didn’t know any of this though, they didn’t pay attention to politics and the only issue they voted for was the economy. Should we hold these people accountable because they didn’t know what they were voting for? Yes. As I said in part 1, what’s the difference between an ardent fascist who votes for a fascist candidate, and someone disinterested in politics voting for a fascist because “the economy?” If the end result is fascism that’s a distinction without a difference. Ignorance is not an excuse.
If we apply this same logic on a small scale hopefully my point will become clear. Someone who is driving their car while intoxicated hits another motorist and kills them. Should the intoxicated driver be punished? They didn’t know they were going to cause any harm when they got in their car, and they didn’t intend to kill anyone. So they should go free with no consequences right? Or is that wrong? Should the driver be held to account even if the killing was accidental? Does it make a difference to the dead person if their death was accidental? It certainly doesn’t make them less dead. By the same token, if Trump does go through with plans to deport millions of people, to imprison his political opponents, to persecute people of the queer community, is that harm any less real because some of the people who voted for Trump didn’t know that would happen? The people who voted for Trump are partly responsible for the harm Trump and his administration caused, even if they didn’t bother listening to a single word Trump said since at least 2015.
The greater irony, as we will see in the next section, is that the people who voted for Trump to help themselves economically will almost certainly see the exact opposite result, even if they are incapable of connecting those two obvious dots. I don’t want to downplay the fact that there was suffering and hardship in the United States before the 2024 election, of course there was. It is also fair to point out the corruption and aloofness of the Democratic party, and their failure to help or even acknowledge working class struggles. I fail to see, however, how electing Trump, the embodiment of nepotism, corruption, and narcissistic disinterest is anyone’s answer to their hardships. Demagogues have always and will always exploit real issues to help themselves gain and keep power, a lesson that tens of millions of Americans in 2024 never learned.
Finally, before moving on to the next section I have one more point to add. Any analysis of why so many people voted for Trump, or who didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, would be incomplete without mentioning the powerful undercurrent of racism and sexism that is prevalent throughout American society. I can’t prove this, but I am also certain that there are voters who used economic reasons to justify their vote for Trump, while privately, they simply didn’t want to vote for a woman of color.
Tariffs are a Tax on the Brain
The 2024 election made clear that an alarming number of Americans understood macroeconomics about as well as a finch understands nuclear physics. They had a childlike view that the US president controlled the entire world economy with a magic wand sitting inside the White House, and if only Trump won he could make everything better with a wave of this magic wand. It’s also clear that people who voted for Trump for economic reasons either never listened to a word Trump said, or they had absolutely no idea what tariffs were. It’s also likely that Trump himself had no idea what tariffs were.
Sitting here in November 2024 it’s not clear yet if the second Trump administration will go through with their desire to implement tariffs on all imported goods to the US, if the tariff rate will be different based on the country where imported goods were manufactured, and what that tariff rate will be. Even a modest tariff rate on imported products could be absolutely devastating for the entire global economy. Companies that sell any imported commodities would simply pass the cost of the tariff onto the consumer by raising prices. That increase in price would mean people couldn’t spend as much because they couldn’t afford it. That drop in demand will ripple outward across the entire economic system. A significant drop in demand and disposable income could mean layoffs in big companies and potential closure for small businesses that can’t afford to take a massive hit. Layoffs and closures will increase the cascading effect of economic downturn, as more people suddenly are forced to spend their entire income on only essential goods and services.
Allow me to construct a quick hypothetical so the reader can see what this might look like in practice. Imagine you work at a big chain shoe store in a strip mall, where almost every shoe is made overseas and shipped to the country to take advantage of exploitative labor laws outside the US. Now the government has mandated that every single imported item, including all those shoes coming to your store, will now have a 20% tariff added to them. The corporate owners of the chain shoe store aren’t going to just eat the cost of that tariff, that would cut into their profits significantly. Instead they are raising the price of every item in the store by 25% (because why not). Since every other imported good sees a similar price hike, consumer buying power plummets. Business at the store you work at slows down to such an extent that half the staff is laid off to save costs, including you. Being a working class person in America you have almost no savings to fall back on. Getting unemployment benefits isn’t easy because so many people have lost their jobs, including a lot of people who work at the government who were fired in an effort to make the bureaucracy more “efficient.” Now that you’ve lost your job you struggle to keep a roof over your head even more than you did before, debt collection agencies are hounding you to settle the credit card debt you’ve accumulated, and you no longer have the ability to buy anything that you don’t absolutely need. You and a lot of other recently unemployed people stop patronizing local businesses now that you can no longer afford to do so, running many of them out of business. Now those business owners are in the same boat as you. This happens to enough people that the US enters a recession as the economy shrinks and unemployment soars. Further abroad, many of the people who worked at the sweatshops producing the shoes that wound up in the store you worked out lost their jobs as well. This isn’t a lamentation for sweatshop labor conditions, but those people’s livelihoods, however unfairly meager they were, also depended on demand from the United States. Their job loss contributes to a shrinking economy in their community. All this because the US government wanted to start a reciprocal tariff war with other countries for, some reason, probably. Causing a global recession doesn’t sound like the best way to protect American manufacturing, but what do I know?
Obviously I’m not an economist. I’m not a capitalist either and I think the idea in vogue when this is being written that businesses and economies can keep growing infinitely literally cannot be sustained on a finite planet. The real world is obviously far more complicated than the hypothetical I just created, but even people who don’t pay attention to the news or current events should surely be able to understand basic cause and effect. Are the same companies that kept prices high after the supply chain disruptions from the Covid-19 pandemic not going to raise prices again when they are forced to pay a tariff to get their goods into the United States? Who could possibly think that trading democracy for fascism all to get a worse economy out of the deal is a good idea? Tens of millions of American voters apparently.
Concentration Camps in America? Again?
I am writing this section the day after Trump said that he would declare a state of emergency and use the United States military to forcibly deport millions of people to countries all over the world. Military personnel legally aren’t allowed to take part in domestic policing roles, but that doesn’t matter. Carrying out an insurrection against the government is apparently illegal, it’s hard to tell if that’s true because Trump did just that and not only got away with it, but also was reelected. If Trump wants to use the military to round up people on US soil, he will do it, and he’ll purge anyone with enough of a spine or a conscience to object. If arresting millions of people, many of them US citizens, and corralling them into camps isn’t fascistic, then nothing is. I hope this doesn’t end up happening. The logistics of arresting, transporting, housing, and deporting millions of people would be a huge challenge, even if the people arrested are kept in squalid conditions. Those logistical challenges might be enough of a barrier to avert the worst case scenario. There is also the question of whether the countries where people would be deported to would even accept them back.
The fact that I have to resort to consoling myself with “maybe mass deportations will be too difficult” is extremely worrying in of itself. It goes to show that American values of welcoming desperate and poor immigrants have been eroded by decades of fascistic propaganda, or as I would contend, those values never really existed in the first place. It also painfully reminds me of what I said in part 1 of this piece, all of the guardrails that might have stopped this from happening have either been dismantled or were the equivalent of a pinky swear.
Trump and his creatures have the power to deport millions of people, the only question that remains as I write this is if they have the will. All of those logistical difficulties I just mentioned will be meaningless if there is enough ideological commitment to the plan. The Nazis carried out the Holocaust while they were fighting a catastrophic multi-front war. They were so committed to their goals of extermination that they built more than a thousand camps, they built railway lines to bring people to those camps. Ideological zeal can utterly dominate rational or practical considerations. Imagine all of the supplies and men the Nazis could have moved during the war if they had used all of their trains for wartime necessities all of the time. Aside from all questions of humanity and morality, it would have made more sense for the Nazis not to waste resources carrying out the Holocaust. If you think people won’t do something evil because it’s impractical and irrational, then you know nothing about people. Evil is going out of your way and inconveniencing yourself to victimize others.
If the reader finds themselves thinking, “c’mon, Americans wouldn’t put people in concentration camps, we’re better than that.” If there is someone reading this who genuinely thinks that then you haven’t been paying attention, at all. The most famous example in US history is the camps that people of Japanese descent were forced to live in for the duration of the Second World War. There are other examples depending on how exactly a concentration camp is defined. For decades the United States had a policy of forcing the children of Native Peoples to live in boarding schools, with the goal of assimilating them into American culture by attempting to obliterate their native culture and identity. The conditions many migrants were kept in after they had been arrested trying to cross the southern border during Trump’s first term and Biden’s time in office were also shockingly inhumane.
I hope no one makes this argument, but if someone were especially dimwitted they might say something like: “Well the purpose of all the camps or boarding houses you just mentioned were just to hold people. They weren’t built to deliberately kill people.” If that becomes the standard by which we measure what is or isn’t morally justifiable, then I give up. How low have we sunk when the best we can say is that we didn’t actively kill the people in our concentration camps? Anyone that’s tempted to say that this can’t happen here, it already has.
Finally, just to hammer this point one more time, deporting millions of taxpayers with crucial and important jobs is a terrible idea for the stability of a nation’s economy. The inhumanity of the act is obviously more important than the affects to the economy. I just wanted to remind the reader that millions of people voted for Trump in 2024 because they thought he would be better for the economy. Gag.
Destroying the Planet to Own the Libs, or Something
I’m not exactly sure why climate change denial became a central plank of the far-right agenda, but it has since the beginning of the 21st century. My best guess is that addressing climate change represents yet another way in which humanity must adapt and change, and any kind of change terrifies cowardly conservatives. So, instead of trying to help solve this existential problem for humanity, they adopt the position of: “Let’s deny that this is happening and make it even worse instead.” Which to me, sounds all too human.
Diagnosing why climate change denial became so popular is important to help address it and prevent something like it from happening again, but dealing with the direct effects of climate change is important too. That is infinitely harder to do when denialists gain control of one of the world’s great powers, which by no coincidence happens to produce huge amounts of carbon dioxide emissions and other environmental pollutants.
Federal regulatory agencies before the second Trump administration were already problematic. They were often understaffed and underfunded, while being almost toothless in their ability to actually enforce policy. Corruption was also a huge problem as far too many personnel traveled between an industry and the agency that was supposed to oversee it and vice versa. This is true both for environmental agencies and those that regulate things like public health or food and drug safety (which will be important in another section below).
If federal agencies were almost toothless before Trump they will be completely toothless afterward. Corruption will become the rule rather than just commonplace. If whole departments aren’t dissolved entirely then lack of staff and funds will likely lead to departmental paralysis. All of which means that companies that want to pollute the environment with their negligence and greed will be able to run roughshod, and the halting steps the United States was taking to combat climate change will slow down, stop, or be reversed. Which makes the decision to vote for Trump even less excusable. Whether American voters bothered to learn this or not, consequences of environmental damage are not confined to the borders of an individual country. The entire planet will suffer the consequences of Americans’ selfishness and myopia. If earth were a ship that was slowly sinking due to flooding, some people would be ignoring it, some would be saying that we will address the whole sinking issue later, a few would be trying to plug holes in the ship and pump out the water, and others would be poking more holes in the ship to make the flooding worse. Americans in 2024 voted to poke holes in the ship. The second Trump administration will almost certainly be a catastrophe for the environment, and the whole world will have to pay the cost.
There are a hundred reasons why far-right climate policy causes me to whiplash between fury and manic laughter. One of them is that the far-right’s denial of climate change is yet another example of their self-defeating nature. For the entire history of the United States, white bigots have dreamed of a white, patriarchal, “christian” ethno-state. Deporting millions of people of color is one way to further that goal. Throwing out undocumented immigrants and their families won’t stop desperate people from trying to come to the United States in search of safety and shelter. Refugees coming to the United States is a symptom of a disease, the cause of that disease lies in those refugees’ place of origin. There are many reasons people choose to risk perilous danger to come to America. One reason that will become increasingly important as the 21st century wears on is climate change. People from all over the global south will be forced to find new homes because their own have become uninhabitable either due to climate change directly, or the human conflicts that arise from climate change. The far-right in America wants to simultaneously keep people of color out, become ever more isolationist, and torpedo efforts to battle the climate crisis. Those are fundamentally incompatible and irrational goals. Making climate change worse will only create more refugees who are willing to risk deportation or imprisonment because even that is better than the alternative.
Interlude: The Danger of Irrationality
I think a mistake that centrists, liberals, and even some leftists continually make about authoritarianism in general, and fascists specifically, is to laugh off their beliefs and worldview until they become victims of that worldview. It is true, the pillars of fascist belief are irrational and fantastical. Fascists exist in a constructed reality. While it can be cathartic and sometimes necessary for reasons of sanity to laugh at fascists because their beliefs don’t make sense and as I said above they can even be self-defeating, that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. That irrationality, that Orwellian double-think actually makes them more dangerous, especially once they gain power. A person who has bought into a fantasy will rarely, if ever, come to their senses and acknowledge the fantasy. Instead if they have the means they will deploy violence in an attempt to force the real world to match their fantasy. This never works, but that doesn’t mean the violence will stop. If some violence can’t force a fantasy to be true, then maybe genocidal levels of violence will. This escalation will continue until something gives, either the fantasy collapses, or those who don’t believe in the fantasy intervene to stop it, or at least slow it down. The process of using violence as a tool to reinforce a delusion reminds me of one of my favorite quotes I’ve ever read. It’s from the book When the War was Over by Elizabeth Becker, which details the atrocities in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge seized power. I’m paraphrasing, but Becker said that at a certain point the Khmer Rouge started to “reach the end of their logic.” The danger of letting delusional people get control of power is that they will follow their own internal rationale until they reach the end of their own logic. It’s important to remember that something can be both laughable and a mortal threat.
Measles and Powdered Wigs are Making a Comeback
Along with environmental protections and public education, the second Trump administration promised to blow public health infrastructure straight to hell. At least at the time of this writing Trump’s cabinet picks for people to run health and human services and programs like medicare and medicaid are atrocious. Along with what is now standard corruption and incompetence, the people Trump puts in place to run agencies like the CDC will be active believers in vaccine conspiracy theories. The mere presence of people with such views in positions of authority is enough to damage and weaken the United States.
How exactly does it make a country great when you mismanage or slash programs that are designed to help people get medical care? Will dismantling infectious disease research lead to a healthier, more prosperous society? The especially pernicious fact of Trump’s political career is that the damage he causes will persist long after Trump has left the stage. If Trump is only in power till 2028 the aftershocks of his damage to public health infrastructure will reverberate for decades at least. As I said above, this is the danger of irrationality. People can simultaneously believe that they are making a society great while destroying all the mechanisms that keep it functioning.
The early years of the 21st century (really all of human history) has shown that the truth and objective reality are no match for conspiracy theories that are weaponized by people to gain power and achieve their objectives. If the reader will indulge me for a moment I want to contribute to the deluge of conspiracy rather than fight against it. What if infectious diseases are actually sentient, and they can influence or even control people? Maybe diseases could band together to help one another in secret, out of the public eye? What if this disease cabal made up of vaunted members such as measles, polio, avian flus, coronaviruses, typhus, and even tuberculosis orchestrated the 2024 election? They could puppet master members of the Trump administration, and get them to stop disease research, make vaccines illegal, and destroy medicare, medicaid, and social security while they’re at it. An already broken and unaffordable health care system becomes even worse, leaving more people sick and vulnerable to diseases that aren’t being researched in the country. An already troubled society becomes a playground for new and old diseases alike to once again wreak havoc and fell people just like could in the good old days of not that long before. The Trump administration thought they were there to be fascists, little did they know that they were simply puppets for the microbe overlords to turn America into an incubation chamber. Is any of that true? No, but it might as well be. The outcome will be the same.
Conclusion
Perhaps the gods that revel in tormenting humanity will throw a curveball and make the second Trump administration dull and uneventful. Maybe everything I’ve said here will be mocked as histrionic delusions. Even if that is the case (and it won’t be), I don’t think that changes my thesis that the United States has been mortally crippled as a great power as a result of Trump’s reelection. The fact that any of what I just said is possible means that the balance of power will begin to shift. Western Europe will likely see that the US is too unpredictable and volatile, and begin relying on itself for its collective security and economic needs. China, India, and perhaps states in the global south will rise as more dominant players as America retreats into isolationist fantasy. The severity of the damage that Trump’s second term will cause will only change how long the decline takes. Trump’s cabinet picks alone are so disastrous in their malevolence and incompetence that they will be the equivalent of swinging a nail-studded baseball bat into the side of America’s head.
There is so much more damage that Trump has already done or will do that I haven’t even mentioned, otherwise this piece would grow to the length of a full book. Some examples of which are: the extent of Trump’s corruption and grifting, how he unintentionally exposed that the legal system could not or would not take any steps to punish him for the hundreds of crimes he committed, Trump’s likely treasonous connection to foreign leaders, and Trump’s worship of authoritarian strong men that he wanted to emulate. The absolute best case scenario for America living through Trump’s second term is that he and his cronies are so busy destroying institutions through corruption, incompetence, and deliberate sabotage that they forget to carry out the rest of their fascist agenda. Or, as is often the case among people who have achieved ascendant political victory, they squabble amongst themselves and allow personal conflicts and policy disagreements to weaken them and stop them from accomplishing as much as they could have. When insane corruption and an economic recession is the good outcome, it doesn’t bode well for your country’s future prosperity and success.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about the eventual death of America as a global superpower. I’m not a nationalist, and I’m loyal to the idea of what America could have been in theory, rather than what it has always been in practice. What concerns me is how many people will suffer, and for how long, because people in democratic societies always seem to choose their leaders for selfish and myopic reasons. As I said above, people all over the planet will have to suffer the consequences of Trump’s second term, even though they had no say in the matter. Why I made America’s status as a superpower central to this piece is because it was central to many people who voted for Trump in 2024. As I’ve spelled out in both parts 1 and 2 this is a nonsensical position, they want to retain American greatness by destroying America’s ability to function in the modern world. Any study of human behavior should make clear, however, that people’s behavior does not need to make sense for them to act within those beliefs. That is what makes humanity so dangerous as a species. For a person about to live through Trump’s second administration, and guessing how angrily American nationalists will react when reality refuses to conform to their fantasy is terrifying. On the other hand, Americans mortally wounding America is uproariously funny when you look at it in a detached and cosmic way. Other societies in the past have wounded themselves, but America in 2024 might be the prototypical example.
What the shape of America’s decline will eventually look like I can’t begin to guess. Maybe it will be fast and loud like a bomb going off that takes tens of millions of people with it. Maybe the uneasy alliance that has always existed between federal states will eventually break down into individual or confederated states. Maybe a 23rd century Aurelian will come along and stitch the fragmented parts of the United States back together for a while. Or maybe, and I’m just reaching for an analogy here, America’s waning influence will be like glaciers melting. It can take decades to notice that glaciers are melting, and it might be another few decades before the rising sea levels are undeniable to everyone.
I can say three things with certainty. The first is that anyone reading this in a democratic society should shudder with fear, but also be compelled to action. I can’t even remember how many times I’ve repeated this but I will again, democracies are never safe from authoritarianism. Vigilance is always necessary to guard against threats to people’s rights and freedom. The second thing I can say is that the grievances that can make authoritarian and fascism appealing to people can be both real and imaginary at the same time. Authoritarians often campaign for influence on the back of the problems that they created or exacerbated, but they can also invent problems for people to be upset about while they promise a solution. Finally, Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 achieved something truly historic. They ushered fascism into the highest levels of American government, and they drew a knife across the throat of a superpower. Now the world gets to watch it bleed out for the next few decades or centuries.