SOURCE
The Second Coming
Fintan O’Toole

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

December 5, 2024 issue
[New York Review of Books]


Brooklyn Museum. Winslow Homer: Sharks (The Derelict), 1885

Karl Marx famously wrote that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic
facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce.” Donald Trump’s crushing victory over Kamala Harris
makes him undoubtedly a world-historic personage whose impact will be felt around the
world for a very long time. But his second coming is no farce. It is a brutal show of
strength.

It has turned out that the drama that best encapsulates this momentous period is, after
all, the shadow play of death and resurrection that unfolded in Butler, Pennsylvania, on
July 13. As Trump was grazed by a fragment of a bullet fired by Thomas Matthew
Crooks, he dropped to the ground, then rose again, fist in the air, triumphant and
defiantly alive. Distilled into this moment and lit by a glow of heroism was the whole
story of what had happened since Trump’s apparent political death on January 6, 2021,
and of what was to come in the 2024 election: that which does not kill him makes him
stronger.

There has been, in recent times, something of a pattern here: the strongman gets
elected, is thrown out of office, and then makes a triumphant return. This is what
happened with one of Trump’s political models, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. It happened
with Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and Benjamin Netanyahu in
Israel. And what this pattern suggests is not just that the strongman comes back—he
returns as a more radically authoritarian ruler. The second time he is infused with the
swagger of impunity. The man they couldn’t kill is also the man they cannot inhibit.
“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into
that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly
unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very
obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it
now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the
Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably, at the time of
writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.
And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no
longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses. Up to now it has been
possible to take some comfort in Trump’s failure to win the popular vote in either 2016
or 2020, and in the fact that not once during his time in the Oval Office did a majority of
Americans approve of the job he was doing. (This was true of no previous president in
the era of polling.) It could be said with some justice that he did not really embody
America.

But now he does. The comprehensive nature of his victory suggests that alongside the
very large core of voters who are thrilled by his misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and
mendacity, there are many more who are at the very least not repelled by his ever more
extreme indulgence in those sadistic pleasures. They know what he’s like and don’t
much mind.

This is hard for Democrats (and just plain democrats) to get their heads around. Both
inside and outside the US, liberals and progressives have had a default assumption
that, even if their government sometimes does terrible things, Americans themselves
are essentially decent and benign. The Harris campaign, with its messages of joy and
hope and its (bleakly fruitless) pursuit of an imagined reservoir of Republicans too well-
mannered to vote for Trump, rested on the same supposition.

In retrospect, one of the most telling moments of the election campaign came on
September 14 in Superior, Wisconsin. Toward the end of a barnstorming speech,
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, told his audience: “I’ll go to my grave not
understanding why, but I know it’s a fact that this is going to be a margin-of-error race.”
The second part of this sentence was entirely unsurprising, but in the first part Walz
surely said more than he meant to. He expressed a sense of incomprehension that went
far beyond his own bafflement. Hovering over his words was the dread that the
American republic might go to its grave with its defenders still wondering why.
Part of what made the election so strange was that everyone was flying blind. The
instruments that are supposed to peer through the darkness—the polls—merely
thickened the great cloud of unknowing. They are, of course, often wrong, but they
usually conjure at least a mirage of what awaits on the horizon. When all the results are
within the margin of error they leave us stranded in that liminal space where there is, as
W.B. Yeats put it at a different time of murky anxiety, “no clear fact to be discerned.”

The actual vote came down not to the margin of error but to the margin for error. Half of
Americans seem to think that their country has none, the other half that it has plenty.
One tribe fears that, after almost a decade of Trump bombarding its laws, institutions,
and civic life with verbal and physical assaults, another four years of him in the White
House will kill them off for good. Harris appealed to those fears.

But the other tribe thinks the US can afford to gamble its future on a carnival barker, a
wild improviser, a reckless disrupter. It has, paradoxically, a deep confidence in the
America that Trump disparages with such dark relish, believing that a good shaking-up
will not break the country but bring it back to its true self. Trump is a confidence man in
both senses—he may be conning much of his own electorate, but they give him the
benefit of their nonchalant belief that he is not destroying American norms, merely
restoring an imagined American normalcy.

This is something else that made the campaign hard to comprehend. Trump drew a
picture of an America on the brink of extinction—but many of his voters trust in an idea
of an America that is so fundamentally resilient that it can afford to take breathtaking
risks. Harris offered hope in the promise of America—but many of her voters see the
country as too fragile to survive another disordered presidency.

Without taking this contradiction into account, it would be quite rational to struggle to
understand Trump’s astonishing political potency. He is surely the
most known candidate ever to face an electorate anywhere. It is not just that he has
been a national celebrity since The Apprentice first aired twenty years ago. Or that he
has dominated American politics for almost a decade, sucking in most of the attention
that citizens give to public life. Or even that he has—unlike in 2016—actually been
president for four years of malign incompetence, ruling over an administration whose
inner workings have been amply revealed by his own closest advisers. (The description
of him as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our
Constitution, and the rule of law” comes not from one of his enemies but from his
longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly.)

Beyond all of that, there is the knowledge that Trump is (in the judgment of a jury of his
peers) a rapist, that he illegally paid hush money to a porn star, that he has boasted of
grabbing women’s genitals, that his businesses engaged in large-scale fraud, that he
kept government secrets in boxes stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, and that he tried
to steal the last presidential election by any means necessary, up to and including a
violent invasion of the Capitol.

And in this campaign, he let everything (from Arnold Palmer’s penis to the greatness of
the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter) hang out more than ever. Trump
presented to the electorate not just his Ego but his Id. His public utterances were
increasingly like a version of Ulysses written by someone on a bad acid trip. His stream
of consciousness was more like a meander of unconsciousness. Random thoughts
surfaced like the sharks with which he was so weirdly obsessed:

A lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that?… I watched some guys justifying it
today: “Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of
the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.” These people
are crazy.

This supersaturation of knowledge about Trump is what was discombobulating for the
Democrats. In the old normality they still inhabit, it was natural to think, “If only people
knew…” In the old politics, it was sensible to ask (with T.S. Eliot), “After such
knowledge, what forgiveness?” But voters did know, and they were, on the whole,
willing to offer not just forgiveness but trust and approbation. In this new era the New
Age creed that letting it all hang out is a sign of honesty and authenticity has become
the great asset of the right. The more unfiltered Trump became, the more real and
sincere he seemed to a majority of voters.

If on Trump’s side of the great divide there was a crazy overload of knowledge, on
Harris’s there was a dearth. The fundamental problem was not just that Harris was
relatively unknown to most voters—a problem compounded by Biden’s disastrous
reluctance to honor his pledge to be a bridge to a new generation and step aside after
his first term. Also unknown were, to a remarkable extent, the actual achievements of
the Biden administration, of which Harris was part.

Biden has been very good at doing what Trump claims to be capable of but isn’t: getting
big things done. The president had tangible successes in overseeing the rollout of the
Covid-19 vaccine, reducing unemployment to its lowest level in fifty years, extending
access to health care, beginning the transition of American industry to a post-carbon
economy, and tackling the dreadful state of much of the country’s infrastructure.
Yet he was terrible at communicating those achievements to the general public. This
was partly because of his wan and increasingly frail presence. But it was also because
many Americans saw his presidency as a truck stop rather than a highway, a hiatus
rather than a trajectory. Biden got elected by offering quiet and healing. Perhaps
Americans got bored with quietness.

His administration’s objectively significant accomplishments could not break through to
swing voters, many of whom had chosen Biden because they wanted to get politics
(which had become, in effect, Trump’s tantrums and frenzies) out of their heads for a
while. And in this Biden succeeded all too well. Biden allowed people not to have to
think about Trump. His administration was understood as a form of convalescence, a
respite from all the craziness and chaos of Trump’s feverish presidency. But it’s hard to
make voters think of a nursing home as a source of energy.

The very existence of a competent federal government, going about the ordinary
business of trying to make people’s lives better, allowed for a creeping amnesia. It
became possible to forget what it felt like to live under a Trump presidency, to wipe
away all the reasons Trump left the Oval Office with an abysmal approval rating of 34
percent. The paroxysms of rage, the sulks of self-pity, the murderous ineptitude of his
handling of the pandemic, the relentless lies and untethered violence of his attempted
coup—all of this receded into the past with extraordinary rapidity.

Something odd has happened with American memory. With the “Again” in MAGA,
Trump appeals to a notion of a better past to which he will allow the US to return. This
certainly works: CNN’s exit polls suggest that two thirds of those who believe that
“America’s best days are in the past” voted for Trump. But “the past” now seems to
include at least the first three quarters of the Trump presidency, before the arrival of
Covid. A glow of nostalgia surrounds a period that ought to be too recent for wistful
longing.

This strange twist in time helped to shape a contradiction Harris struggled—and
ultimately failed—to resolve. Was she running as a guarantor of continuity or a force for
change? Perhaps, if there could be said to be a moment that she lost the election, it
was her answer on ABC’s The View on October 8 to the question “Would you have done
something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”: “There is not a
thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that
have had impact, the work that we have done.” She was trying, not unreasonably, to
claim a share of the credit for Biden’s considerable achievements. Her problem was that
there was precious little credit to go around. Half of a small dish of public approval
makes for pretty meager fare.

Harris embodied radical change in who she is—Black and female. But she struggled to
represent change in what she would do. Her signature issues—access to abortion and
the defense of democracy—necessarily involved her defending rights and institutions
that had seemed stable before Trump and his movement revolted against them.
However just these causes, they meant that she was standing up for what was (at least
until very recently) the status quo. The bold vision for progressive change embodied in
her persona was blurred.

While Harris was trying for uplift, Trump’s method was overkill. In a TV ad that a group
allied with his campaign aired nearly six thousand times in just six days in late October
(at a cost of almost $20 million), a voice like something from a trailer for a horror movie
intoned, over mug shots of dark-skinned men and pictures of female victims, that these
women were “bludgeoned, raped, strangled, stabbed, shot, and murdered.” It was as
though each of them had been killed several times—and slaughtered by Harris herself.
The primary message that Trump hammered home, over and over, was that Harris
personally unleashed this frenzy of violence by opening the southern border to the
hordes of madmen and murderers loosed from the hellish asylums and prisons of
foreign countries.

The strength of this terroristic messaging was that it fused racism and misogyny to
produce the sum of all fears. Its apparent weakness was that the misogyny seemed too
generalized. It was intended to appeal not just to sexist men but to women frightened of
the kind of violence that sexist men inflict. But Trump would not keep it on target. His
statement in Wisconsin on October 30 that he was going to “protect” women “whether

the women like it or not” was too blatant a tell. It encapsulated the sick paradox of the
grabber of women posturing as their guard.

Trump’s constant personal denigration of Harris’s intellect, career, and sexuality was, on
any ordinary view of political utility, the wrong kind of misogyny. It laced his potent
cocktail of race- and gender-based phobias with raw rotgut chauvinism. It seemed
reasonable to think that Trump was going too far and provoking a backlash from
women. As Nikki Haley put it, “This bromance and masculinity stuff, it borders on edgy
to the point that it’s going to make women uncomfortable.”

But not, it seems, uncomfortable enough. Trump’s bet was that this parade of misogyny
would attract disgruntled young men to vote for him more than it would animate
otherwise undecided women to vote against him. His instincts turned out to be right. A
majority of white suburban women seem to have voted for Trump. According to exit
polls, the gender gap was perfectly balanced, with Harris ten points ahead among
women and Trump ten points ahead among men.

The gender divide partly accounts too for Trump’s increased popularity with men of
color. This trend was already evident in 2020, but this time he seems to have made
even deeper inroads. CNN’s exit poll suggests that 21 percent of Black men and a clear
majority (55 percent) of Latino men voted for Trump. In such a profoundly gendered
election, being male mattered more for many voters than any assumptions about racial
or ethnic solidarity.

On the other side of that divide, even while pro-choice referendums passed in seven
states (though they were defeated in Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska), it may well
be that the prospect of passing these measures gave many women a degree of comfort
that they could protect their reproductive rights at the state level. Or it may simply be
that garish misogyny is now so normalized that many women had already priced it in.
In a disinhibited America, a lot of women may now be expecting nothing better from
men. Perhaps, like Haley, they rolled their eyes at the spectacle of Trump’s big Madison
Square Garden rally being “overly masculine,” and then voted for him anyway because
men being boorish is just the way of the world. Whatever this means for the future of
gender relations in America, it is not likely to be pleasant.

It’s tempting, in some ways, to do the same for the election result as a whole—to
normalize it by putting it down to prosaic explanations like the impact of inflation and the
anti-incumbency mood that has swept through most of the democratic world. Those
factors are of course very real. Inflation, in particular, acts as a cipher for a much wider
range of perceptions, not only of immediate hardship but of unfairness and
powerlessness. But we must not lose sight of the much larger consequence of Trump’s
victory: it decisively shifts the idea of who is a normal American.
It was not wrong to see this election as pivotal, and what America has pivoted toward is
a knowing and deliberate transfer of power to a nexus of interest groups whose
interests are inimical to pluralist democracy. One of them is of course Trump and his
family. He will have free rein for personal vengeance against his enemies and for
untrammeled self-enrichment.

Another is made up of fundamentalist Christians who will gain control of federal
education and health care policies and of federal court appointments and use that
control to further roll back the gains made over many decades for the rights of
women, LGBTQ+ people, and people who just believe that they should be able to live

their lives as they see fit. A third is the oligarchs who will be allowed to do as they see
fit, whether in a free-for-all of oil and gas drilling or in already dangerous areas like
social media disinformation, AI, and cryptocurrencies.

Trump’s second coming may not quite herald the end of the world, but it will hand the
ship of state over to a motley crew of libertines and libertarians, control freaks and
fanatics. It will stage its own spectacles of mass roundups and treason trials for the
amusement of the many millions who are, it now seems abundantly clear, entertained
by exhibitions of cruelty. It will be a nonstop show, its cacophonous soundtrack amplified
by Elon Musk and the thriving denizens of the digital manosphere.

For those who are now defeated, there is the task of creating a story and a movement
that can provide an alternative clear and coherent enough to break through the coming
bedlam. Blaming Harris or retreating into the old orthodoxy that only white men can
hope to win will not be useful. Neither will an insistence on chasing a supposed centrism
that avoids the conflicts that have to be faced and the choices that have to be made.
Arguably, Harris had both too many messages—abortion rights, the protection of
democracy, an industrial revival, support for Ukraine and NATO, prescription drug
prices, housing, simultaneous loyalty to Israel and sympathy for Palestinian suffering,
the creation of an “opportunity economy”—and too few. The Democrats played down
two very big things: the climate crisis and the income inequality that is sure to rise as
new technologies further enrich existing elites. The result was an offering that was
broad but shallow, based as it was on a decision not to address issues that are shaping
the lives of Americans now and will continue to shape them in the coming decades.
Harris’s defeat showed that grace, good humor, intelligence, and energy—all of which
she demonstrated amply—will not be enough. There has to be a capacity to tap into and
redirect the discontent that Trump has been able to channel into hatred and fear. Trump
has moved American politics away from parties and toward movements, away from
process and toward performance. Those who oppose him will have to be better at
playing on this new stage. Harris showed that the Democrats can summon crowds, that
they too have the potential to create and sustain the kind of permanent campaign that
has allowed Trump to ride out every setback.

Such a campaign must start from the recognition that the people who can form it now
constitute the official “enemy from within,” a minority at risk of becoming, unless they
can find an effective voice, the erroneous margin of the newly dominant America.

NYRB 12/05/24. Fintan O'Toole (born 16 February 1958) is a Dublin native and a 34-year columnist and drama critic for The Irish Times who is the author of nearly two dozen books.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.