President Trump and his MAGA Republicans and their forces are smashing American democracy, the Constitution, the rule of law, the institutions and norms. Trump has enacted over 50 executive orders since Jan. 20, the most in a president's first 100 days in more than 40 years. Some of the most egregious ones are blatantly unconstitutional and violate current law. It has only been three weeks since Trump returned to power; these are the good times compared to what will come next.
At the root of Trumpism and American fascism’s quick ascendance, and the pitiful resistance to it, is a profound failure of imagination.
Be very wary of any political observer or other public voice — or anyone else — who suggests that Trump and his MAGA movement are losing, in disarray, ineffective or somehow confused or weak. Such people are seeing what they want to see and not what is actually happening. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s strategy is chaos. Moreover, that chaos is in service to their shock and awe strategy to end America’s pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright fascism modeled on Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Vladimir Putin’s Russia with Trump as de facto leader for life. As Harold Meyerson observes in The American Prospect, “As to the wider world, if we ever sought to be that beacon on the hill, we’re now the bully on the hill. America, Trumpified.”
America’s center is rapidly collapsing, and it has not been very difficult for Trump and the MAGA movement and the other fascists and authoritarians to break it. During these last three weeks, I have been repeating aloud, on the bus, during my walks, and at random times throughout the day, William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” particularly his warning that “the centre cannot hold":
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand….
At the root of Trumpism and American fascism’s quick ascendance, and the pitiful resistance to it, is a profound failure of imagination. The phrase “failure of imagination” can trace its popular use in the United States to the Apollo 1 disaster and testimony by astronaut Col. Frank Borman. As depicted in the 1998 TV miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon”, Borman told Congress that:
A failure of imagination. We’ve always known there was the possibility of fire in a spacecraft. But the fear was that it would happen in space, when you’re 180 miles from terra firma and the nearest fire station. That was the worry. No one ever imagined it could happen on the ground. If anyone had thought of it, the test would’ve been classified as hazardous. But it wasn’t. We just didn’t think of it. Now whose fault is that? Well, it’s North American’s [the capsule manufacturer] fault. It’s NASA’s fault. It’s the fault of every person who ever worked on Apollo. It’s my fault. I didn’t think the test was hazardous. No one did. I wish to God we had.
The failure of imagination that allowed Donald Trump and the MAGA movement to ascend to power is of a different type. It was wholly predictable. Trump and his agents were direct, vocal, and public in their plans to make him the country’s first elected dictator on “day one” and to launch a revolutionary project to return the country to the Gilded Age, if not before, and the types of destruction it would necessitate as the rights and freedoms of entire groups of Americans are taken away, the social safety net is further gutted, and the plutocrats and kleptocrats and White Christian Nationalists and other White racial authoritarians are given free rein over American life.
In many ways, the failure of imagination by the country’s “responsible” political leaders, the mainstream news media and the American public that empowered Trump and MAGA’s ascendance is willful and negligent. For years, these so-called responsible voices repeatedly proclaimed that Donald Trump was done for after his first term in office after a coup attempt on Jan. 6, twice impeached, multiple criminal and civil trials, a botched COVID response and an economy left in tatters. That did not happen.
These same “responsible” and “mainstream” voices also declared that there was no way that the Republican Party would nominate Trump to be its candidate in 2024, he is damaged goods with too much baggage, and the “adults in the room” would step in and rise to the occasion. Again, this did not happen. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, almost quite literally, own today’s Republican Party and “conservative” and larger right-wing movement.
Throughout the Trumpocene, these “reasonable” and “mainstream” voices were confident that “the walls were closing in” and heroes would rise, like in an old Hollywood movie, to vanquish the bad guy and save the day. First, it was Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Then the hero was Attorney General Merrick Garland. Then it was Special Counsel Jack Smith. The state prosecutors and attorney generals would supposedly be a heroic firewall and last line of defense against Donald Trump and his perfidy. The walls never did close in. Trump would become more popular following his prosecutions and trial(s) than before. Trump now wears “felon” as a badge of honor and courage, one that his MAGA followers and other Americans who are disgusted with the system flock to.
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These “mainstream” and “reasonable” voices — especially the mainstream liberals and progressives — were mostly exuberant that Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden in the 2024 election. To them, Harris was a historic and compelling leader. She would be the first Black woman to be President of the United States. She is a committed public servant, magnetic, charismatic, compelling, and would attract young voters and college-educated white women who want to defend their reproductive rights and freedoms. The vibes! The brat energy! Beyonce and Taylor Swift and other celebrities are on Kamala Harris’ side! How can Donald Trump with his Village People "YMCA" dance, podcasts, the "manosphere" and professional wrestling and MMA fighters stop Kamala Harris and the Democrats? Impossible!
These “mainstream” and “reasonable” voices concluded that Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden and how it channeled the infamous American Nazi rally of 1939 was a “disaster” and would lead to his defeat. I warned, however, that Trump’s MSG rally was actually a genius strategic and tactical move that made his MAGA people feel seen, as he was so bold as to launch a version of a military raid behind enemy lines in a solidly blue state and the Democratic Party stronghold of New York City.
Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans went on to easily defeat Harris and take control of all three branches of government. The fabled blue wall was easily pierced and then shattered. The Democratic Party’s base did not show up to vote. A majority of white women, again, supported Trump. Trump’s coalition grew and now includes a large number of Hispanics and Latinos — even as he threatened mass deportations against their community. Trump expanded his base of support in New York — as I warned and predicted — among a range of groups, including Hispanics and Latinos. A new poll from Quinnipiac University shows that the Democratic Party’s favorable rating is 31 percent. 57 percent of the people polled have an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party. By comparison, the Republican Party has a 43 percent favorability rating and 45 percent unfavorable.
For more than eight years, the mainstream news media and political class and other “reasonable” and “responsible” political voices and leaders could have adapted to the rise of Trumpism, American neofascism and the authoritarian populist moment. Instead, they continued with a habitual failure of imagination and the American people — and their democracy and society and future and freedom — are being made to suffer and are greatly imperiled.
This did not have to happen. In an essay in the Atlantic in May of 2024, Tom Nichols diagnosed and warned about the dangers of a failure of imagination and Donald Trump’s return to power:
Nostalgia and presentism are part of politics. But a second problem is even more worrisome: Americans simply cannot imagine how badly Trump’s first term might have turned out, and how ghastly his second term is likely to be. Our minds are not equipped to embrace how fast democracy could disintegrate. We can better imagine alien invasions than we can an authoritarian America. The Atlantic tried to lay out what this future would look like, but perhaps even words can’t capture the magnitude of the threat.
When I was in high school and taking driver’s education, our teachers would show us horrible films, with names like Death on the Highway, that included gory footage of actual car wrecks. The goal was to scare us into being responsible drivers by showing us the reality of being mangled or burned to death in a crash. The idea made sense: Most people have never seen a car wreck, and expanding our imaginations by showing us the actual carnage did, I suspect, scare some of us into holding that steering wheel at the steady 10-and-2 position….We just don’t have a similar conceptualization for the end of democracy in America….
Trump’s most alarmist opponents are wrong to insist that he would march into Washington in January 2025 like Hitler entering Paris. The process will be slower and more bureaucratic, starting with the seizure of the Justice Department and the Defense Department, two keys to controlling the nation. If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like.
We need to start imagining what happens if he becomes president. Now, the American system doesn't actually give the chief executive a lot of power. There is an intricate system of checks and balances that will force him to mobilize things through rhetoric. And that basically means, I think, that we have to start imagining witch hunts, we have to start imagining kind of wars at home. We have to start imagining what kind of groups he is going to start blaming for all his problems and all our problems, whether real or imaginary.” Gessen would be proven correct in ways far worse than perhaps even they imagined at time….My advice to the news consumer is - imagine the worst.
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In a recent conversation with me here at Salon, Norm Orstein issued this ominous warning: “This is part of the biggest problem. We have lost our guardrails against autocracy. The press is pathetic. The Republicans running Congress are pathetic. The Supreme Court is in Trump's pocket. Civil society, starting with the business community, is worthless. Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
At the Bulwark, Jonathan Last says this about America’s failure of imagination and the worsening national emergency that is Trump’s return to power and his shock and awe campaign against American democracy and society:
And here’s the point I want you to remember: When I say today, on January 27, that Trump’s gangster government is going to end badly—maybe even very badly—it sounds crazy and hysterical.
But if I described the state of affairs as they exist on January 27 to you twelve weeks ago, you also would have thought that I was crazy and hysterical. You would have said, “I guess that’s possible, but you’re talking about something close to a worst-case scenario.”
Yes, Putinism would definitely be a worst-case scenario.
But we are living the worst-case scenario right now. Maybe in the future something will slide us down the scale to one of the lower-variant scenarios. That would be nice. I hope it happens. But right now we are on track to a dark place.
Ultimately, Trumpism and American fascism and authoritarianism are a symptom and not the cause of much deeper and profound problems in American society and life. There were some voices, most notably Black and brown people and others who are not enamored with or blinded by America’s various myths of its own exceptionalism and greatness and the permanence of its “democracy”, that saw the danger clearly because they were not blinded by Whiteness and its many small and big lies that in total created the failure of imagination that led to Trump and MAGA’s triumphant return to power.
Donald Trump’s autocracy is not a hypothetical or possibility far off in the future. It is here and now and very real. America’s crisis and failure of imagination has been subsumed by a horrible reality — one that is not going away anytime soon.
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