Even Minimal Hope is Better than No Hope at All
Is Trumpism doomed? In "How the Tide Might Turn: The Inevitable End of Trumpism," which I published today on Verdict, I say that it is. Many readers will probably not find my analysis to be especially comforting, however, because I do not put an end-date on the Trumpist phenomenon. In some larger sense, of course, everything is doomed, if not when the Sun becomes a red giant then when the universe reaches the state of heat death. Literalism is such a cheap escape hatch.
My predictions of Trumpism's demise are a bit more short-term than that, of course, but in some sense my optimism-inducing historical example of an astonishingly positive political breakthrough is also achingly disheartening: the end of the Jim Crow era, a reign of terror that lasted for about ninety years before the Civil Rights movement's historic advances. That is a very long time for human beings (other than cosmologists) to contemplate, and a lot of horrible things happened during that time. Moreover, today's reactionary turn is not merely a reaction against social progress in general but against the Civil Rights era's laws specifically. When was America the Great thing that Donald Trump wants to Make it Again? By all evidence from Trump's utterances, the country's greatness ended exactly when it made its greatest strides -- inadequate to be sure, but historically thunderous by any standard -- in civil rights.
The now-epithet DEI is no longer even a concealed code on the right for the n-word and similar slurs against other racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and so on. Although it is currently difficult to imagine the return of, say, anti-miscegenation laws -- difficult, but not impossible! -- the main emphasis of the new administration's onslaught is clearly motivated by the idea that the country's supposed slide into non-greatness began with the civil rights gains during Trump's adolescence and early adulthood. It is thus a bit depressing to say that "we could have another Civil Rights movement," now that we know what a backlash to it looks like.
Even so, we had a decent sixty-year run of post-Jim Crow progress (uneven though it was), and frankly that sounds pretty great right now. And there is no reason why Trumpism might not fall apart much more quickly than Jim Crow did, especially given that the people alive today are accustomed to levels of freedom and equality that were broadly rejected in the US into the 1960's. Even many people who voted for Trump or who chose to enable his rise by not voting are probably going to be unwilling to start calling women "skirts" (or worse) and Black men "boys" (or worse) or to go along with the idea that LGBTQ+ people should go back into the closet.
The longer the Trumpist era lasts, of course, the more we will see retrograde attitudes become open and normal again. Even so, if Trumpists overplay their hands -- as they certainly will -- the new era of government-centered bigotry could end much sooner than later.
As complicated and unknowable as all of that is, I should also make an additional point here that I did not make in today's Verdict column, which is that there is a non-zero chance that the Trumpist tide will simply not turn -- at least, for as long as there are people. The despotic Chinese regime has been in place for more than 75 years and shows no signs of weakening, and brutally repressive empires have lasted for multiple centuries throughout history.
Although all of those empires ended eventually, the difference today is that the technologies of repression have not only reached but clearly exceeded George Orwell's dystopian vision in Nineteen Eighty-Four. That is one of the reasons that no serious analysts view China as "on the brink" of breaking out of its totalitarian era. But heck, even Putin has been able to hang on in Russia, even without much high-tech surveillance and in spite of having put his country's economy in the toilet.
But technologies of repression are certainly a helpful tool -- sufficient, if not completely necessary -- for dictators, and they are all now under the control of either Trump's new henchmen in government or the tech oligarchs who have eagerly rallied to his side. There is little reason to think that a ragtag group of plucky rebels stands a chance against, for example, a decision by Musk to shut down essential communication channels anytime he notices something that displeases him.
Even so, the point of today's Verdict column was to muster as many reasons as I could find to be at least minimally hopeful (given that actual optimism seems out of the question). I thus did not point out that the end of Trumpism might not happen within any meaningful time frame, saving that truly depressing material for my dear readers here on Dorf on Law. You're welcome. Now, can I pull back from sheer despondency yet again? I think so.
In addition to my argument that good things like the Civil Rights movement can succeed even when it seems impossible for the existing regime to be dislodged -- which might happen at any time, although I referred to it as "long term" in the column to make clear that it could take many years or decades to come about -- my two other scenarios for non-despondency are shorter-term in nature.
The first is simple infighting after a political win. Trump's first administration was often easy to dismiss as "the gang that couldn't shoot straight," because their incompetence (clearly coming from the top) was apparent for everyone to see. Today's administration is unfortunately much more competent because, while Trump has become even more inept, a large number of dictatorship-loving types (most obviously the people behind Project 2025, though certainly not only them) have decided to use him as their ventriloquist's dummy to install their new world order.
Although they are able to shoot straight, the best way to describe the current group of Trumpists might be "the gang that can't decide when they want to start shooting each other." Yes, they will mostly spend their time working uncomfortably together to punch down on the weak and defenseless, but the Musk-Bannon fight over immigration visas was no mere one-off. Also, now that red-state politicians are discovering that the Musk-ovites do not care at all about farmers, state universities' research activities, or anything else, we can already see the internal cracks starting to emerge.
Even more than the odd and internally contradictory Republican political coalition of Christian evangelicals, economic libertarians, conservative civil libertarians, old-fashioned anti-competitive big businesses, military imperialists, isolationists, and so on, the Trump coalition is filled with people who truly have nothing other than Trump in common. Some, like Vivek Ramaswamy, will be purged and go quietly. Others will stick around and decide when to start setting off explosives inside the house.
And that bleeds (pun intended) into the other short-ish term source of minimal hope, which is post-Trump internecine warfare. Whereas the analysis in the three preceding paragraphs focused on how the worst possible outcomes of Trumpism might not happen -- and the entire enterprise might even collapse on itself -- because of infighting, the Republicans' cult of personality is such that Trump's presence will generally allow intramural conflict only so much as Trump wants to keep all of his courtiers in a state of constant uncertainty and fear. When Trump exits the stage, the all-out political war will begin.
Yes, I do understand that one snarky way to describe this scenario is: "Well, Trump won't live forever, right?" But that is both literally true and politically meaningful, because cults of personality are difficult to pass on to designated successors, especially when the central persona is as insecure and vain as Trump is. As soon as there is a clear line of succession, the person currently at the top knows that the calculus for everyone below him changes. He needs people to need his approval, and he needs everyone to think that they can be the chosen one if they play up to him in exactly the right way.
To be sure, there is always the danger that the chaotic struggle for power below the dear leader can result in alliances of convenience, coup plots, and all the rest. The possibilities for ending up in a cabal that is exposed and purged (at best) being what they are, however, the danger to the man at the top of a clear line of succession arises from greater certainty among everyone regarding which of them will eventually have true power. So even though JD Vance is surely at this very moment trying to convince everyone to throw in with him, Trump's refusal to anoint him is utterly predictable -- and as I point out in the Verdict column, Vance is unlikely to get what he wants.
For the human beings whose lives are going to be made worse (and in many cases ended prematurely) while all of this is going on, this is all cold comfort indeed. But when the Republicans decided that even a violent attempted coup was not enough to send Trump into the wilderness, there were no longer any comfortable alternatives. As I noted many times, Trump and the Republicans were going to stage a successful coup in 2024-25 if he had lost the election (he said as much himself); and even if that had not happened, the level of Republican resistance (if not outright sedition) during a Harris presidency would have made their sabotage and subversion in the Obama and Biden eras seem quaint.
As so often happens in my writing across a wide range of topics, I find myself looking for the least-bad outcome here, because affirmatively good outcomes have all been ruled out by recent history. Whether it begins because of political entropy while Trump is still alive or outright pandemonium in his absence -- either of which could happen rather soon, though that is not guaranteed -- less-bad futures are possible. So are as-bad or worse futures, but given where we find ourselves less than a month into Trump the Sequel, even to be able to imagine a better future is nothing to take for granted.