If Trump wins reelection, freedom, opportunity, and equality will no longer be the normative social forces shaping the next generation of American children. They won’t be taught that this is a country of marvelous provenance and a glorious future. Instead, they will be steeped in the essence of Trumpism: nativist, negative, and fundamentally pessimistic. The Other is the enemy. They’ll learn the long-discredited notion that ethnicity defines character. The sort of stereotyping that met the nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration waves—drunken Irishmen, dour Germans, lazy Spaniards, fiery Italians, and inscrutable Chinese—are back with a vengeance under Trump. It’s one step short of the Department of Homeland Security having a Phrenology Division to screen migrants.
A generation will learn its behavior from the worst role model since Saddam Hussein.
Instead of learning that complex and persistent national challenges need solutions based on innovation, leadership, teamwork, and accountability, they’ll learn to hail the warlord with the biggest social-media following and the most wild-eyed support. Tweet-shouting “Only I can solve!” and engaging in endless bluff, bluster, and bullshit with no follow-up will be good enough.
They’ll learn that lying about everything, all the time, is the way great leaders operate, and that truth is a fleeting, conditional construct based on the president’s whims, moods, and blood-sugar level. They’ll learn what Garry Kasparov said so presciently in 2016: “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”15
They’ll be taught that it’s OK to keep people fleeing from shithole countries and desperate for refuge in cages like animals. They’ll learn to shrug at the sight of a father and his daughter drowned in the Rio Grande as they try to cross into America to seek a better life. They’ll learn that the way to stop illegal immigration is to tear children from their parents and incarcerate them in for-profit detention centers where they’re held under bright lights twenty-four hours a day—blankets, soap, and toothbrushes optional.
They’ll be taught that mocking the disabled and the disadvantaged isn’t to be greeted with disdain and anger, but rather a hearty “Womp womp!” They’ll be taught that egregious racism is bad only when you get caught, because, you know, “both sides.”
They’ll learn that the president can sexually assault women for decades and get away with it as long as he claims they are “not his type.” “Grab ’em by the pussy” is the new “Shall we dance?” and paying women for sex is OK, as long as it’s on the back end of a deal with an airtight NDA.
What they will learn, every day, is that threats, intimidation, serial deceptions, bullying, bluster, and bullshit are a full substitute for character. They will learn from the master of cons that after he took the highest office in the land with a series of brazen deceptions and help from hostile foreign governments,16 he faced absolutely no consequences.
They’ll learn that this man’s history of business failures and his sordid personal life, including paying hush money to a bevy (I love the chance to use “bevy”—sadly underplayed word) of porn stars, actresses, models, pageant contestants, and God knows what other random victims of his lusts, is perfectly acceptable for the president.
What a spectacular role model for the youth of America.
Four more years of a president normalizing the worst behaviors, enabled by his political party, will result in a generational change. JFK’s lofty postwar New Frontier resonated for a generation of leaders. Ronald Reagan shaped my cohort of young conservatives on matters of economic freedom and national security. Barack Obama shaped millennial attitudes and values on issues of inclusion and diversity.
Donald Trump’s legacy will be a generation of young people comfortable with casual cruelty, rampant dishonesty, and revenge as pillars of our politics. They’ll combine the dissonant images of a “Fuck Your Feelings” T-shirt and a string of pearls to clutch when anyone questions their behaviors.
As I’ve said before, Trump isn’t Hitler. Hitler had normal-sized hands and the ability to concentrate for more than thirty seconds.
Trump is, however, cut from the same modern authoritarian cloth as the leaders he publicly and slavishly worships: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Kim Jong-un, Rodrigo Duterte, and others.
Trump and his acolytes display a fundamental contempt for the American experiment and an obvious, persistent attachment to the trappings, affect, and untrammeled power of strongmen. A decent president would view these men with contempt and disgust; Trump views them with envy.
The Founders—whom Republicans once revered but whom they now conveniently forget—knew it. Madison wrote in Federalist 10, “Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”17
Trump is a complete package of the Founders’ greatest fears—delusions of royalty, appeals to the basest appetites of the polity, populism over small-r republicanism, and vulnerability to the blandishments of foreign powers who so obviously are welcome to corrupt him with gifts or flattery of his ravenous ego.
To date, his actions have had the possible check of the 2020 election hanging over him, which has influenced him whether or not he admits it. Trump needs to win reelection to continue his nation-state level, god-tier grifting and to avoid prosecution.
He thrives not on a competition of ideas but on the division of the country. Our parties and politics will follow him down, fighting a dirtier, more savage battle until we’ve forgotten what it means to share even the most common baseline with our fellow Americans. The cold civil war is warming by the day. He’s not the only centrifugal political force, but he’s the most powerful.
This will only accelerate if he is reelected. There will be no end to his ambition and no check on his actions. He will conclude that he’s the winner who wins, and for him that will justify everything in his catalog of errors and terrors. We’ve learned there is no bottom with Trump, no level to which he won’t sink, no excess he won’t embrace.
The future I’ve described in the preceding chapters isn’t inevitable, but if Trump wins a second term as president, it is all too likely. I never want to leave you with anything but a sense of existential dread, so let’s do something about it, shall we?