As Donald Trump settles back into the White House, there is every reason to believe this American president, with his disturbing strongman impulses, will be far more uninhibited over the next four years than he was in his first term. Now he has thoroughly conquered the Republican Party; anti-Trump Republicans hardly exist at all, and his new administration is stocked with unstinting allies and sycophants who are thirsty to do his bidding. The men who stood up to him during his first term, like John Kelly, his former chief of staff, are long departed, and there are fewer Republican politicians in Congress who dare buck Trump openly.
His new vice president, JD Vance, will not follow in the footsteps of Mike Pence, who was a steadfast ally until 6 January 2021, when he put the fate of the republic over the unhinged ravings of his boss. Vance wants to be president one day, and to be president means winning, with ease, the Republican nomination. He can only do that if he remains in Trump’s good graces.
There is the reality, too, that Trump is more popular today than he was eight years ago. For many, this is difficult to comprehend. How did Trump, who spurred on an insurrection and was indicted four separate times and became a convicted felon, win a greater share of the vote in each of the three general elections he competed in? How did he finally win the actual popular vote, thus negating the Democratic Party’s great talking point – that he was an illegitimate president who could never beat their candidates, genuinely, head to head?
Trump’s success can be explained through remarkable luck, inarguable charisma, and a native instinct for where voters reside. Last year, he hammered Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over persistently high inflation and the surge in immigration across the southern border. He intuited Americans were ready to turn inward, tired of free-trade deals and hungry for an economic nationalism that the elderly Biden, in part, was already delivering but could not adequately communicate to the public.
Many commentators and analysts warn of the dark spectre of fascism that a second Trump term brings. With fewer guardrails, can the American republic survive? Is this like late Weimar, right as the Nazis took power? Should the UK, with their staid Labour government, fear the rise of a far-right tyrant across the ocean? Elon Musk, who many have quipped is Trump’s co-president, just performed what looked like a Nazi salute at a Trump inauguration event. No matter his intention, that alone is unnerving.
Fear, with Trump, is always warranted. He is unreliable and unpredictable. For now, he talks peace, and appears to have pressured Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal in the war in Gaza. But violence is never far from his mind. The Western world has every right to be wary. An isolationist Trump is preferable to a classic neoconservative — if Trump had any of George W. Bush’s adventurism in him, it’d mean cataclysms across the globe – but one can never know where his id will take him.
Here’s the truth of Trump, though, and the United States itself: the nation is simply too big for fascism. Many liberals in the US rarely acknowledge this, preferring to imagine their federated sprawl is the equivalent of a small European nation living under the yoke of a strongman like Viktor Orbán. The closest America ever came to fascism was on 12 September 2001, and even then – with the febrile conditions virtually perfect, never again to be repeated – democracy did not die. There’s a spectral American patriotism that flickers to life whenever there’s war on the horizon. Yet the United States remains a country of regions and counties and townships, of miniature republics and fiefdoms.
Yet experiencing America online, through Twitter or any other social media platform, allows us to believe otherwise, especially when Musk is there to pollute so much of it. If Musk represents oligarchy run amok – he was deeply intertwined with the American government through both SpaceX and Tesla even before Trump handed him the Department of Government Efficiency to run – he has no serious governing programme. He’d rather post 50 times a day than go through the effort to subdue the world’s richest nation.
Those who speak of American fascism tend to do so from the airy citadels of media and academia. They barely seem to understand how the US functions. Consider public education. Any American fascist worth his bright red tie would be able to subdue the schools and begin to teach MAGAdemics, or at least get all those pesky liberal books banned – all of them, because fascism doesn’t demand anything less. In the US, there are nearly 14,000 separate public school districts with more than 94,000 elected board members. Some of the larger counties, like the battleground of Loudoun in Virginia, have a single board. Others are carved up into so many segregated duchies that consensus can never be achieved. On New York’s Long Island, among just two counties, there are 125 public school districts. There is no such thing as a centralised educational system in America. The US’s educational sprawl is Hapsburgian, with no single monarch able to dictate its direction for very long.
How is Trump supposed to actually make the Democratic governors and legislatures listen to him? Most crucial American law-making is done at the local level. It is state and county governments setting tax rates, managing healthcare networks, and overseeing public transport. Presidents, certainly, can be a hindrance to governors, and there’s no doubt liberal New York and California will fare worse under another Trump presidency than they did under a Biden one. The governors could see their federal cash allotments dwindle and find communication with the White House mostly impossible. Any infrastructure project that does require federal approval could be dead on arrival.
But this doesn’t mean the democratic project is over. Trump, who loses focus easily and lacks managerial competence, will struggle to get much legislation passed in a Congress that Republicans only narrowly control. If he strains, like in 2020, to hold onto power illegally as his term winds down, the party will be newly incentivised to boot him aside. He’ll be in his eighties then, and other ambitious Republicans like Vance long for the Oval Office.
US democracy is more durable than it appears. It must be remembered that the Weimar republic, at the time of its dissolution, had barely lasted 14 years. Putin’s Russia toyed with democracy for ten. Xi’s China has never known anything approaching mass elections. The US, for all its absurdities and manias, has been a functioning republic for more than two centuries. It will take more than Donald Trump to break it.
[See more: Elon Musk’s hostile takeover]
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