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A Political Obituary for Donald Trump
The effects of his reign will linger. But democracy survived.
This article was published online on December 9, 2020.
To assess the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency, start by quantifying it.
Since last February, more than a quarter of a million Americans have died
from COVID-19—a fifth of the world’s deaths from the disease, the highest
number of any country. In the three years before the pandemic, 2.3 million
Americans lost their health insurance, accounting for up to 10,000 “excess
deaths”; millions more lost coverage during the pandemic. The United States
’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom House’s annual index
dropped from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump,
below that of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13
international organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of
refugees admitted into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000.
About 400 miles of barrier were built along the southern border. The
whereabouts of the parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S.
officials remain unknown.
Trump reversed 80 environmental rules and regulations. He appointed more
than 220 judges to the federal bench, including three to the Supreme Court—
24 percent female, 4 percent Black, and 100 percent conservative, with more
rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association than under any other
president in the past half century. The national debt increased by $7
trillion, or 37 percent. In Trump’s last year, the trade deficit was on
track to exceed $600 billion, the largest gap since 2008. Trump signed just
one major piece of legislation, the 2017 tax law, which, according to one
study, for the first time brought the total tax rate of the wealthiest 400
Americans below that of every other income group. In Trump’s first year as
president, he paid $750 in taxes. While he was in office, taxpayers and
campaign donors handed over at least $8 million to his family business.
America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone,
deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also
became more delusional. No number from Trump’s years in power will be more
lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-
spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens
of millions of people. Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the
atmosphere like radioactive dust.
Presidents lie routinely, about everything from war to sex to their health.
When the lies are consequential enough, they have a corrosive effect on
democracy. Lyndon B. Johnson deceived Americans about the Gulf of Tonkin
incident and everything else concerning the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon’s
lifelong habit of prevaricating gave him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” After
Vietnam and Watergate, Americans never fully recovered their trust in
government. But these cases of presidential lying came from a time when the
purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal, make a disaster
disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular goal. In a sense,
Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy
Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never lie to you,” and then
pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’
s gauzy fictions were far more popular.
Trump’s lies were different. They belonged to the postmodern era. They were
assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread
beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties
of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction
between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire
to conceal something shameful from the public. He was stunningly forthright
about things that other presidents would have gone to great lengths to keep
secret: his true feelings about Senator John McCain and other war heroes;
his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his desire for law
enforcement to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his effort to
extort a foreign leader for dirt on a political adversary; his affection for
Kim Jong Un and admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive view of white
nationalists; his hostility toward racial and religious minorities; and his
contempt for women.
The most mendacious of Trump’s predecessors would have been careful to
limit these thoughts to private recording systems. Trump spoke them openly,
not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but intentionally, even
systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would otherwise have
constrained his power. To his supporters, his shamelessness became a badge
of honesty and strength. They grasped the message that they, too, could say
whatever they wanted without apology. To his opponents, fighting by the
rules—even in as small a way as calling him “President Trump”—seemed
like a sucker’s game. So the level of American political language was
everywhere dragged down, leaving a gaping shame deficit.
Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many as 50 daily in the last fevered
months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his unconcealed brutality. Lying
was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he said aloud what he was
supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again about matters of
settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the better. Two days
after the polls closed, with the returns showing him almost certain to lose,
Trump stood at the White House podium and declared himself the winner of an
election that his opponent was trying to steal.
This crowning conspiracy theory of Trump’s presidency activated his
entitled children, compliant staff, and sycophants in Congress and the media
to issue dozens of statements declaring that the election was fraudulent.
Following the mechanism of every big lie of the Trump years, the Republican
Party establishment fell in line. Within a week of Election Day, false
claims of voter fraud in swing states had received almost 5 million mentions
in the press and on social media. In one poll, 70 percent of Republican
voters concluded that the election hadn’t been free or fair.
So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of
Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope,
consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and
values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their
compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And
that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where
reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or
out of office, including the power to destroy.
For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing.
Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any
difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t
matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion,
and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to
the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to
make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common
framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any
preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made
the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the
more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of voter fraud
began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist,
tweeted: “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the
left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any
subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a
larger truth: that liberals are evil.”
How did half the country—practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still
balancing family budgets and following complex repair manuals—slip into
such cognitive decline when it came to politics? Blaming ignorance or
stupidity would be a mistake. You have to summon an act of will, a certain
energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man
like Trump. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes the
susceptibility to propaganda of the atomized modern masses, “obsessed by a
desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they
can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.” They seek
refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that bears little
relation to reality. Though the U.S. is still a democratic republic, not a
totalitarian regime, and Trump was an all-American demagogue, not a fascist
dictator, his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the
world in him. Defeat won’t change that.
Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he did by appealing to
the perennial hostility of popular masses toward elites. In a democracy, who
gets to say what is true—the experts or the people? The historian Sophia
Rosenfeld, author of Democracy and Truth, traces this conflict back to the
Enlightenment, when modern democracy overthrew the authority of kings and
priests: “The ideal of the democratic truth process has been threatened
repeatedly ever since the late eighteenth century by the efforts of one or
the other of these epistemic cohorts, expert or popular, to monopolize it.”
Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government
bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the
populist backlash that empowered Trump. His reign of lies drove educated
Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the more
certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve it (the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, election pollsters). The war between populists and
experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to persuade. The
standoff turned them into caricatures.
Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on
to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward
its own version of extremism. He leaves behind a society in which the bonds
of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on
taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated
. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the
shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A
is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
But we now have the chance, because two events in Trump’s last year in
office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the truth. The first
was the coronavirus. The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived
on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the
subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth
. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into
a political weapon—it was too personal and frightening, too real. As
hundreds of thousands of Americans died, many of them needlessly, and the
administration flailed between fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal
negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized that Trump’s lies could
get someone they love killed.
The second event came on November 3. For months Trump had tried frantically
to destroy Americans’ trust in the election—the essence of the democratic
system, the one lever of power that belongs undeniably to the people. His
effort consisted of nonstop lies about the fraudulence of mail-in ballots.
But the ballots flooded into election offices, and people lined up before
dawn on the first day of early voting, and some of them waited 10 hours to
vote, and by the end of Election Day, despite the soaring threat of the
virus, more than 150 million Americans had cast ballots—the highest turnout
rate since at least 1900. The defeated president tried again to soil our
faith, by taking away our votes. The election didn’t end his lies—nothing
will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we
still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump.
This article appears in the January/February 2021 print edition with the
headline “The Legacy of Donald Trump.”
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