The spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs
Adam Gopnik wrote this in the New Yorker before the election:
Think hard about the probable consequences of a second Trump Administration—about the things he has promised to do and can do, the things that the hard-core group of rancidly discontented figures (as usual with authoritarians, more committed than he is to an ideology) who surround him wants him to do and can do. Having lost the popular vote, as he surely will*, he will not speak up to reconcile “all Americans.” He will insist that he won the popular vote, and by a landslide. He will pardon and then celebrate the January 6th insurrectionists, and thereby guarantee the existence of a paramilitary organization that’s capable of committing violence on his behalf without fear of consequences. He will, with an obedient Attorney General, begin prosecuting his political opponents; he was largely unsuccessful in his previous attempt only because the heads of two U.S. Attorneys’ offices, who are no longer there, refused to coöperate. When he begins to pressure CNN and ABC, and they, with all the vulnerabilities of large corporations, bend to his will, telling themselves that his is now the will of the people, what will we do to fend off the slow degradation of open debate?
Trump will certainly abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin and realign this country with dictatorships and against NATO and the democratic alliance of Europe. Above all, the spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his beliefs—very much like the fascists of the twentieth century in being a man and a movement without any positive doctrine except revenge against his imagined enemies. And against this: What? Who? The spirit of resistance may prove too frail, and too exhausted, to rise again to the contest. Who can have confidence that a democracy could endure such a figure in absolute control and survive? An oncologist who, in the face of this much evidence, shrugged and proposed watchful waiting as the best therapy would not be an optimist. He would be guilty of gross malpractice. One of those personal-injury lawyers on the billboards would sue him, and win.
What any plausible explanation must confront is the fact that Trump is a distinctively vile human being and a spectacularly malignant political actor. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon and Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing and understanding the villains. They are embittered, canny, ludicrous in some ways and shrewd in others, their lives governed by envy and resentment, often rooted in the acts of people who’ve slighted them. (“They’ll never laugh at me again!”) They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability to attract a cult following. This is Ursula, Hades, Scar—to go no further than the Disney canon. Extend it, if that seems too childlike, to the realms of Edmund in “King Lear” and Richard III: smart people, all, almost lovable in their self-recognition of their deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Villains in fables are rarely grounded in any cause larger than their own grievances—they hate Snow White for being beautiful, resent Hercules for being strong and virtuous. Bane is blowing up Gotham because he feels misused, not because he truly has a better city in mind.
Trump is a villain. He would be a cartoon villain, if only this were a cartoon. Every time you try to give him a break—to grasp his charisma, historicize his ascent, sympathize with his admirers—the sinister truth asserts itself and can’t be squashed down. He will tell another lie so preposterous, or malign another shared decency so absolutely, or threaten violence so plausibly, or just engage in behavior so unhinged and hate-filled that you’ll recoil and rebound to your original terror at his return to power.
And that’s where we live now.
Villainy inheres in individuals. There is certainly a far-right political space alive in the developed world, but none of its inhabitants—not Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni or even Viktor Orbán—are remotely as reckless or as crazy as Trump. Our self-soothing habit of imagining that what has not yet happened cannot happen is the space in which Trump lives, just as comically deranged as he seems and still more dangerous than we know.
Comforting.
And we chose this. That’s what the US is – the country that chose this. In 2008 it chose Obama and in 2024 it chose this.
And at the very same time, Earth’s atmosphere hits its highest temperature anomaly in hundreds of thousands of years—1.55 degrees C—while CO2, CH4, N2O keep soaring . . . Where’s our leader? It is the stuff of tragedy, of nightmares.
It’s a small comfort to know that I wasn’t the only one to make that mistake. When Joe Biden was finally declared the winner of the 2020 election, I literally cried of joy. I never particularly liked Biden for reasons that are only too familiar, but at least he was within (what used to be) the normal range for a politician. At least he was dedicated to basic democratic rules of the game. But perhaps more importantly, I thought the people who cared about liberal democracy had finally gotten the message and began to take the threat seriously.
The feeling of relief was short-lived. Even more alarming than the insurrection of January 6th was seeing the majority of Republicans go along with the Big Lie of the stolen election and use it as a pretext to redouble their voter suppression efforts, refuse to vote for impeaching Trump*, or even certifying Biden’s victory (!), and make it clear that Trump had their unconditional support if he should decide to run again in 2024.
Yet, I kept seeing liberals confidently declaring the Trump-era over and talking as if the whole thing had been a great big misunderstanding and now everything was back to normal. While the court cases against Trump kept fizzling out, and even after SCOTUS had basically declared him above the law, people kept talking as if he was more likely to spend 2025 in jail than in the White House. Right up until election day, I kept hearing how Trump’s latest blunder would be his downfall. Meanwhile more centrist commentators kept talking as if this was just another normal election about policies (one of the candidates just happened to have a somewhat “unconventional style”), rather than a referendum for or against the survival of democracy and the rule of law.
Once again, it all sounded too much like 2016 when so many liberals and leftists kept talking as if Trumps followers were supporting him by mistake, because they just didn’t know how awful he truly was, and would start abandoning him in droves as soon as they realized their mistake. Of course there is only so much you can conclude from a few (highly unrepresentative, and perhaps not even American) individual cases, but of the people on my radar (mostly related to the Gender Wars) more people were moving towards Trump than away from him. As I keep saying, it’s only too tempting to conclude that any enemy of my enemy is my friend: that someone has to be the good guy, and since it’s definitely not the people experimenting on children and putting male rapists in women’s jails, it has to be Trump.
Much of what I do in my daily job involves measurements of various sorts. Some of these measurements are always off, so you have to apply rules of thumb like “this Sensor consistently yields a water flow that’s about 15 m³/s too high, so if the sensor tells me the flow is 155 m³/s, it probably means the real value is closer to 140 m³/s”. I think we have to apply a similar rule of thumb to compensate for the optimistic bias (“wishful thinking” as we used to say back in my movement skeptic days) when assessing dangers like climate change and the rise of authoritarianism: If Trump were clearly more likely than not to win, people would say the odds were fifty-fifty, if the odds were fifty-fifty, people would say it was highly unlikely etc., so you have to assume that things are generally worse than most people are saying. This is why I fully expected Trump to win. As it turns out, I still didn’t compensate enough, which is why even I didn’t expect him to win the popular vote.
I might as well start learning Russian right away…
*And purge from their ranks the tiny minority who did.
I was sort of 50-50 on whether she would win the popular vote. She certainly won the sign polls around my neighborhood, but it’s a blue city, and she won the city.
A lot of people think she lost because of transgender, or economics, or…fill in whatever blank (AOC, Biden, immigration…). I think she lost because of misogyny. I think she lost the popular vote because of those issues.
The part about learning Russian was not entirely a joke btw. Earlier today I filled up two 15 liter water jugs. The Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection recently sent out a leaflet asking all citizen to stock up on water, durable food items, hygiene products, matches, candles, firewood etc. to be prepared to survive for up to a week without electricity, tap water, open stores etc. in case of a “crisis or war”, so if it’s just my paranoid delusion, at least It’s not just me.
To my country, and Europe in general, one obvious implication of Trump’s return to power is that our NATO membership no longer offers us any strong protection against Russia. All I can do is hope that the nuclear arsenals of France and Great Britain will make Putin think twice about attacking, but honestly, if I were Putin, even I wouldn’t put much stock in their willingness to use them. As others have pointed out, outsourcing our security concerns to America will go down in history as one of the greatest blunders ever, almost as bad as outsourcing our manufacturing sector to China.
Trump’s promised trade-war with Europe, tariffs on European goods etc. is also likely to trigger a recession that will almost certainly lead to increased support for the already powerful, pro-Putin, right-wing populist movements of Europe like Rassemblement National and Alternative für Deutschland. A tiny country like my own, which cannot fight a war on our own for very long no matter how much we spend on national defense (far too little, admittedly), may soon find itself out of allies, and, of course the threat from our own far right is only too real.
Love it or hate it, one of the most memorable movie experiences of my life was the battle of Helm’s Deep from the Lord of the Rings movie Two Towers. The main battle itself was, of course, entertaining enough, but to me the most memorable part was the tense, claustrophobic feeling inside the fortress while Saruman’s vast army was approaching, the lights of thousands of burning torches were appearing on the horizon, and the sound of thousands of marching feet kept getting louder every minute. It’s one of those scenes you really have to see in a good cinema to get the full effect: Seeing it on a computer screen or even a large TV doesn’t do it justice. That’s kind of how this feels, except that this time it’s for real, and there is no Gandalf, or Éomer, or Treebeard coming to the rescue. The enemy is not yet inside the fortress, or even at the gates, but the torches are on the horizon and the sound of marching feet is getting louder by the minute…
Am I the only one who isn’t at all surprised by the outcome?
From the moment he raised his fist after being shot at, I was 90% sure the election was settled. Seeing Democratic voters (both regular people and “influencers”) openly stating that they wished the would-be assassin hadn’t missed? That removed all doubt.
Bjarte:
I don’t think it’s an enemy-of-my-enemy situation, but rather a vote-for-the-lesser-evil one. Swing voters are constantly told to stop complaining and vote for the lesser evil. Now they’ve weighed in on who they think that is.
Good luck. Russian’s hard.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The spirit of vengeful reprisal is the totality of his […]
Nullius:
That’s also part of it, of course. There also seems to be a certain “boy who cried wolf” kind of logic at work:
As I keep saying, as much as the woke crowd hate Trump, they absolutely love what he has done to factual discourse. After all Trumpism and wokeism are both post-truth movements. For all their mutual antagonism, Trump-supporters and wokesters both want to live in a world in which sound volume and endless repetitions trump (no pun intended) facts and the biggest bully, capable of mobilizing the biggest mob, has a blank check to take whatever he wants and destroy anyone who gets in his way. Trump’s endless stream of blatant, unambiguous, shameless lies are meant to sow as much doubt, distrust, and cynicism as possible, and the woke crowd have been going out of their way to prove him right.
And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, it might not be rational, and it might not be right, but if cognitive psychology has taught us anything, it’s that humans are not particularly rational, and if you make people sufficiently pissed off they may eventually decide that: “I don’t care who wins, or what else is included in the deal, or who else gets hurt as a result, as long as these assholes lose!”
I still don’t think these are good reasons for voting to abolish democracy and the rule of law (once, again, it’s not as if Trump has been subtle about his illiberal and authoritarian dispositions, his disregard for the rule of law etc.), including their own ability to influence politics, and spend the rest of their lives at the mercy of the whims of a tyrant who enjoys cruelty for its own sake. Anyway, what’s done is done. Whatever happens next is on them, and now they have to own it. I sure as hell will not forget.
If the conversation is “why did people vote for Trump?” I have a pet theory to throw into the ring. It’s one that I’ve been honing for a while, and if anything, after his latest win I feel like it’s very much validated by the reactions I’m seeing in people. But fair warning: my view is, as the kids say, a hot take.
My sense is that people did it because they felt constricted in their liberties. Some people genuinely voted for Trump out of a sense of responsibility towards democracy and liberty. I know. It sounds crazy. But bear with me. People everywhere truly feel like they’re not allowed to speak freely anymore. And freedom of expression is at the foundation of American democracy.
I’m not saying that I agree with their logic. Far from it. Anyone who knows me knows that I think Trump is an extinction-level danger to civilization. But I am saying that as a humanist I’m listening to the humans who did this, and this seems to be their feeling: they actually felt that the constrictions of Democratic Party/liberal/leftist/woke overreach were so severe, that the fresh air of Trumpism was a better fit to the idea of freedom that they very truly still hold dear.
And they’re causing the reaction they wanted: some people I know who up until now signalled their alignment with wokeness seem to be softening after this latest blow. A few days after the election, the attitude is not a sense of despair but one of quiet surrender. Behind their stoicism, there’s a sense that they’re taking the hit, and recalibrating their principles. They’re resigning themselves to the difficult lesson that maybe they went too far. And that right there is what people wanted to see, by voting for Trump. They wanted to break the wall of arrogance and condescension.
I’ve recently taken a job outside of downtown, outside of my former bubbles of inner-city arts and gay culture (because I’ve been expelled from those). Now I work as a bartender in a completely “normie” bar outside the cultural hub of the city. And the “normie” opinions I’ve been exposed to have been genuinely mind-opening. In the few years since I ditched my New Yorker tote bag and dropped my hard-edged more-urban-sophisticate-than-thou attitude, I’ve woken up to how bad the social divisions have become, and how negative a role the “elite” media has played in exacerbating it. My old downtown-or-die friends were the problem; my new midtown-let’s-just-live-and-let-live friends are much more sensible. (Although I don’t think I’m ready to adapt to their taste in music, cinema, and art, tbh! My cultural tastes remain strictly inner-city even if my politics have moved uptown.)
Of course, in the grand scheme of politics, domestic and international, Trumpism is far more volatile than merely a force for breaking down the sense of constricted speech that people feel in their day-to-day lives. No need to itemize the ways here. But it’s tragic that the Dems and the left failed to see how badly they were alienating everyone by putting on such airs of puritanism. They really should have known better.
Artymorty, I’m certainly not going to dispute your pet theory; I think everyone who voted in this election believed they were voting for freedom and democracy and against tyranny and despotism. I also think they have thought that for a long time; ever since the day it first became societally unacceptable to use certain words about groups of people, they have felt like they had no freedom. Never mind that they weren’t being jailed for what they said, maybe just avoided, and occasionally losing jobs or being sanctioned. Nonetheless, it seemed like the most horrible restriction any of them had to suffer. Part of that is because they lack any real knowledge of history.
They aren’t aware (and I know this, from talking to people on both sides) that women were once jailed simply for holding signs in public saying ‘Votes for Women’. They aren’t aware that people did time in jail for giving out information about contraception. They aren’t aware that people were jailed for speaking against the draft. They aren’t aware how many people did jail time just for daring to be in a gay bar when the police raided (and why they aren’t aware of that, I don’t now; there have been books and documentaries about it through my life).
For people who belong to the demographic that has been privileged, it galls them to see women and minorities with the same rights they have. They don’t realize that is freedom; it isn’t other people gaining freedom, it’s them losing it. What freedoms did they lose? The freedom to tell the rest of us to sit down and shut up. For some reason, allowing same-sex marriage was restricting the freedoms of those who aren’t same-sex attracted; it meant they might see people they didn’t approve of walking down the street hand in hand, or even kissing…in public!
That’s the real problem we face. No one is voting against democracy; we are all voting for democracy. We just interpret what that means in vastly different ways. For a lot of American straight white males, their idea of true freedom and democracy looks suspiciously like the Taliban.
Iknclast,
I get your point, but at the same time, many women and minorities are the ones I was referring to, who switched their votes to Trump. It was far from just straight white males who voted for Trump. And I’d go so far as to say that trying to isolate the Trump phenomenon to straight white males is at least a little bit of the problem.
Sorry, Arty, I wasn’t clear about that. I am aware of the women and minorities switch; it baffles me, but I think it’s still related to the same phenomenon. Something they believe is taking their rights away…and perhaps it is trans, perhaps it is in some cases CRT, perhaps it is the patriarchy…I certainly can’t see their motivations in their faces. Any way we look at it, they have voted for someone who is the least likely to protect their rights of nearly anyone else on the planet…certainly anyone else in the presidential race. To me, it seems impossible not to see that, since Trump has made no secret of who he is, and these are not stupid people.
If I ever understand it, I’ll be sure to share my knowledge with the rest of you. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting.
Ah, yes. I agree completely. It’s hard for me to fathom, too, on that level. Especially the part where Trump clearly couldn’t care less about women’s rights. He’s throwing abortion out the window, and that’s just the start.
I heard a gay guy say on twitter that gay men are fine because he doesn’t hate us. So it’s fine for gay men to vote for Trump. But that’s just it: he doesn’t hate us and he doesn’t love us, either: he couldn’t care less! That doesn’t mean we’re safe; it means we’re up for sale as an asset he can sell to get what he wants.
Trump doesn’t care about abortion, either. He’s famously been a supporter of it in his personal life. But it wasn’t him under threat of carrying a child to term inside his body, so it wasn’t worth anything for him to sell the rights around women’s bodies off for votes and money.
It’s nuts. It’s not rational at all.
When the choice was between representatives of two parties, both of which are hell-bent on drastically reducing women’s rights and freedoms, it was going to be a hard calculation.
I imagine a typical thought process to go something like this:
So, Trump will restrict abortion rights? Well, the Dems have done absolutely nothing about re-instating them when they were in power; they might promise to do so before every election but they never get around to it. Besides, I’m not likely to need one. But I do need to use the toilets at work and in public places, my daughter needs to use the toilets in school and would really like to play sports without boys ruining her enjoyment and chance to win, both of us would like to be able to use changing rooms in shops and leisure centres without men there, and we both want to be able to call a man what he actually is, regardless of what he might say! And the Dems are being vicious to women who don’t want to pander to weird men. I’ll vote for the guy who has promised to remove the fewest rights, thank you!
tigger, I think you’re giving the American voter too much credit. There are lots of reasons people have for voting how they do, but most of them (at least according to studies I have read) are not that thought out. There may be some of that ‘I’m not likely to need an abortion’ thinking, thereby going with the ability to use the toilet sans men. But a lot of studies show that people simply vote based on a gut reaction at the moment. The sort of analysis you describe isn’t usually in the mix.
That’s why the Republicans are winning. They appeal to the gut fears of Americans (some of them real, some imagined). I’ve heard people say Harris didn’t talk enough about policies; talking about policies doesn’t usually do well with the voters. You need emotions, and the Dems simply aren’t good at that, because they want the election to make sense.
iknklast, I think you can argue that (at least some of) the fears Democrats have tried to exploit are more justifiable and reasonable than those used by the Republicans. That’s certainly something I’d get behind. To suggest that Democrats don’t abuse fear, however, is just not supportable. Not when the Democrats have spent years now stoking fears about racists around every corner, transphobes trying to kill trans kids, and illegitimate presidents working for foreign powers. Never mind all the rhetoric about how democracy itself is on the ballot.
If that isn’t an attempt to instill and appeal to fear, even a gut fear of existential violence, I honestly have zero idea what is.
I have family members so terrified that they’ve actually come to me to help them shop for firearms.
Well, isn’t it? If refusing to accept the outcome of an election and inciting a violent insurrection – as Trump has already been doing – isn’t a good enough reason to say that democracy is on the ballot, then what would be good enough? In many of the places where democracy is already dead (Hungary etc.) the warning signs were never as obvious as this.
Again, you can argue that some of the fears they exploit are justifiable. Just don’t piss on my foot and tell me it’s raining. You can’t argue that they don’t exploit fear.
Left media and Democratic politicians have amplified fear to the degree that we had multiple assassination attempts on a major political candidate, and a not uncommon reaction was, “I wish it had been successful.” Keep calling the man Hitler, and you breed an environment where the only rational, moral recourse is murder. (That’s stochastic terrorism, by the way.) Keep fostering the mentality that everything you are and cherish is under siege, that the other side is literally an existential threat, and the greater good justifies any anti-democratic agenda.
Speaking for myself, I can definitely say that no one has done more to make me see Trump as a naked existential threat than Trump. No need for any help from the Democrats when he’s doing such a perfect job of it himself.
Are we supposed to say Trump isn’t an existential threat? Keep quiet? What?
Of course he’s not! It’s just that every other person on the planet is even less of an existential threat
/s
What are we supposed to do? One hundred percent honest answer: I don’t know.
What I do know is that fear only works as a lever on people who already see you as someone who shares their values. They have to see you as a reasonable judge of what to fear. If that perception is undermined, say by gender gaslighting or years of us-vs-them rhetoric, the lever won’t budge.
Nullius, I didn’t actually say the Dems don’t use fear; I just said they aren’t good at it. I think those are two very different things. The fears they stoke – the trans genocide, for instance – are really no more bizarre than the ones the Republicans stoke – pedophile pizza parlors, for instance – but they don’t resonate with the voters, and the Dems aren’t very persuasive about why they should.
iknklast, you’re right, those are very different things. I misinterpreted your pointing to a need for sense-making to be an explanation for why Dems don’t use fear. My bad.