What if Trump gets re-elected?
A thought experiment: Trump Tyrannus, 2.0
I’ll be honest — I don’t think Trump will get re-elected.
I don’t even think he can make it out of the Republican primary process alive, to be frank. The gradually increasing weight of all these legal judgements will probably break his political back. The snappage will probably occur midway through the campaign’s journey. How can someone so litigated against win in Midwest nice territory? How does a man with 20 sexual abuse accusations against him win Republican suburban women?
And yet Trump is the Republican frontrunner still. As skeptical as I am about his clearing the primary process and even more skeptical about him winning a general election, there is a remote possibility that win he could. That slim possibility involves the alignment of several trajectories, including no other candidate confronting him effectively and directly. There are already signs of it. The raw fear that everyone from Nikki Haley to Ron DeSantis projects reminds me of the way Mike Tyson’s opponents in the late 80s were defeated before they even stepped foot in the ring. Michael Spinks lost against Tyson before the bell even rang. Of which, I wrote:
If Trump can keep a double-digit distance between him and DeSantis and once again project inevitability it is not inconceivable that white evangelicals will fall in line. The next few weeks will be crucial to the DeSantis campaign, which still has more than $100 million to spend on the 2024 election. Can DeSantis project strength? Can DeSantis close the gap with Trump? Can DeSantis continue to raise big donor money — the mother’s milk of American politics (yuck)? Former Governor Chris Christie — who appears to be running for a full time job at ABC News and not President or Vice President — doesn’t seem to think so and is firing away, with extreme prejudice, at DeSantis.
And this is the key point here. Christie is a kamikaze pilot, relishing a grand political public death. He will not be the GOP nominee, that’s for sure. But how many other candidates will he destroy in the process of his annihilation? And if the other candidates focus their ammunition on DeSantis, perceiving him to be the easier target, then they will only have geometrically increased Trump’s lead over — well, everyone else. Thus insuring him the nomination. And with the nomination, Trump’s new re-election team — staffed with professional veterans, not C-listers — will run, and could possibly win, the general election campaign based cynically on Joe Biden’s impending mortality. It would be exceptionally ugly, but it always is with all things with Trump.
So, as horrible as it is to imagine: What if Trump gets re-elected in 2024? What can we expect? Aside from the fact, of course, that for brown-skinned people — particularly Muslim-Americans, for Jews, for gays, for women, life would become significantly harder, more mean, brutish and generally difficult.
Well, for one, Trump will pull the United States out of NATO. It is nearly impossible to fathom America’s involvement in NATO surviving a second Trump administration. President Biden ought to stress that point hard in the campaign and even the pre-campaign. And dramatically. Because an American exit from NATO under the auspices of “American First” would be an astonishingly self-defeating, nihilistic, anti-democratic act. Trump, we know, has already discussed pulling America from NATO. From a 2019 NYT report by Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper:
A move to withdraw from the alliance, in place since 1949, “would be one of the most damaging things that any president could do to U.S. interests,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, an under secretary of defense under President Barack Obama.
“It would destroy 70-plus years of painstaking work across multiple administrations, Republican and Democratic, to create perhaps the most powerful and advantageous alliance in history,” Ms. Flournoy said in an interview. “And it would be the wildest success that Vladimir Putin could dream of.”
Retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, said an American withdrawal from the alliance would be “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”
Imagine how emboldened Putin would be at the news. He would visibly salivate; he would oscillate wildly. Without delving too much into the very strange relationship between Putin and Trump, this news is quite literally the joy of the Russian autocrats desiring. The United States leaving NATO would leave Europe divided, weakened at Putin’s doorstep. It would essentially give Putin the excuse to interfere in the domestic policies of smaller, former Soviet era countries, like Moldova and Romania, at the very least. Further, Putin’s poisoners would have almost free range to assassinate at will on the European continent, exacting revenge for the litany of perceived historical grievances against the Continent. And God bless poor Britain, post Brexit, in their near leverageless dealings with Putin after its American partner under Trump withdraws from NATO. Expect many poisonings on British soil; Russian expatriates and British former spies alike suddenly sporting a colloidal silver skin tone.
Second, and less existentially dangerous to American democracy, is that another Trump Presidency would mean that the news cycle would once again revolve around the former’s whimsy. Trump’s every mood swing and chemically imbalanced moment would once again become the subject of our national conversation. Social media would go into outrage mode at least a couple of times a week, depending on trump’s blood sugar. And, as a result, our collective mental hygiene would suffer catastrophically. It is a controversial notion, for sure, but I do believe that Trump’s vacillating, tyrannical vortex of whimsy — as well as COVID — helped exacerbate America’s mental health crisis. Of course I have no hard statistics correlating the percentage of adults with mental illness and the Trump will-to-be the topic of every dinner conversation, but I do believe that there is one.
What else would we expect from Trump, 2.0? As Thomas Wright puts it:
Given who the president is, another theory—Trump unbound—seems more likely. In this scenario, his appetite will grow with the eating. As John Bolton concludes in his book, Trump in a second term will be “far less constrained by politics than he was in a first term.” He will be free to be himself—to pursue policies that benefit him personally by linking decisions to his business interests; by indulging his desire for ratings and drama; and by attacking people he does not like, such as Angela Merkel, and helping people he does, such as Kim Jong Un.
What exactly does this mean? Well, it reminds me of how Plato describes the desires of “Tyrannical Man” in Book IX of The Republic:
“What desires do you mean?” he said. “Those,” said I, “that are awakened in sleep4 when the rest of the soul, the rational, gentle and dominant part, slumbers, but the beastly and savage part, replete with food and wine, gambols and, repelling sleep, endeavors to sally forth and satisfy its own instincts.5 You are aware that in such case there is nothing it will not venture to undertake as being released from all sense of shame and all reason. It does not shrink from attempting to lie with a mother [571d] in fancy or with anyone else, man, god or brute. It is ready for any foul deed of blood; it abstains from no food, and, in a word, falls short of no extreme of folly6 and shamelessness.”
Trump’s chief psychological characteristic is Shamelessness. That is why to elect him President of the most powerful nation on earth defies logic. It also speaks to the sheer rage and aggrievement of white, non-college educated voters. That they would hand the reins of power — and the possibility of nuclear annihilation — to such an unstable, unrestrained Id. To let the bull free range in the China shop. One’s most precious porcelain exposed, irresponsibly, to the treachery of the cloven hoof. Imagine the hopelessness of the plight of the life of the Trump voter. How can one not feel a twinge of human compassion at lives so lost that electing a raper and a sadist sends a message, a middle finger raised upon high, to the Establishment? Their lives may be meaningless, they seem to be saying, but Trump will leave the Establishment sleepless, in turn — and in that way, at least, they are not forgotten. If you cannot feel compassion at such hopeless nihilism in one’s fellow man …
Trump’s second sailing as President would be most dangerous in the arena of foreign policy, where as head of the Executive branch of government, he has, Constitutionally, the greatest influence. Trump’s appetites and the appetites of autocrats around the world are commensurable. As a result, autocratic, right-wing regimes — like Orbán’s Hungary, Natanyahu’s Israel, Museveni’s Uganda, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey and the like — will get the green light to “do their thing” in a second Trump administration. “It’s funny, the relationships I have—the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them … The easy ones are the ones I maybe don’t like as much or don’t get along with so much,” Trump told Bob Woodward in a rare moment of what passes for self-reflection. Game recognize game.
Not all of Trump’s voters are the lost and the forgotten. Many of Trump’s supporters are rich, Chamber of Commerce types. Racism and sexism, to them, is not a deal breaker. It is, in fact, a state of being in which they often — and enthusiastically — participate. They are ultimately amoral and agnostic on values that don’t revolve around their money and how much they have to pay, reluctantly, in taxes to “the bastards.” To them, Trump is a righteous dude.
And for them, Trump, in his second incarnation, will deliver. Trump will cut taxes in a breathtaking manner. He will blow up the deficit with a fever. More breathtaking than he did in his first term. Because Trump’s true constituency — the people that he hangs with — are the billionaire class. The dead, shark-eyed set; simultaneously the wealthiest and the cheapest all at once. And billionaires are most concerned with managing their homes, their toys, their mistresses and tax avoidance. This is a class that has made tax avoidance into a performance art form and to which Trump, never a billionaire always a bridesmaid, seeks avidly to become an heroic honorary member. Trump’s greatest legacy, if he wins a second term, is to be remembered at the Club, in a hundred years, by the boys drinking bloody Marys and smoking cigars underneath his tacky portrait, as “one of us,” “swell” and a “hell of a guy.”
And while Trump would be much happier spending his retirement on a Superyacht on the Baltic or the Red Sea, consorting with seedy princes and ex-mercenaries, eating endangered species out of the navels of high-end escorts, there is also the matter of prosecution. Trump — like Netanyahu, Berlusconi and all the oily, right-wing autocrats before him — is literally running, not so much for office, but from criminal prosecution.
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