The Roman empire survived for four centuries despite having many rulers worse than Donald Trump (for instance, Caligula, Nero and Commodus), so we should not write off the United States of America just yet (248 years and counting). We should not even give up hope on the current cohort of American voters. Economic illiteracy, which led them to blame the Democrats for the great wave of inflation just past, is universal among electorates. They all live in national silos, most not even noticing that Covid caused the same wave of inflation in every other country and was impossible to avoid.
The other big factor in Trump’s spectacular comeback, the virulent dog-whistle racism that so many older white males responded to, is more specifically American and shameful. However, it is due to a period of demographic transition, which will pass.
For many white women, panic at the end of absolute majority status for American whites was counterbalanced by outrage at Trump’s complicity in the assault on abortion rights. Older white men had no such counterbalance and voted massively against the perceived threat to their status, jobs and privileges.
The driving force of political change in democratic societies is generational turnover. That generation will be politically irrelevant in 15 years and physically gone in 30. The younger voters who will replace them do not fear those changes to the same degree, so we need not despair yet for the future of the American Republic.
How much of Donald Trump’s radical agenda will become reality in the next four years?
Climate is the most important issue for the world. Trump will pull out of the Paris Agreement once again. He has promised to “drill, baby, drill”, but you can’t sell more oil than people are willing to buy and the world demand for oil is going into decline. Moreover, the US has not built a new coal-fired power plant in over a decade because coal is simply not competitive with solar and wind energy.
Trump has won the White House and both Houses of Congress and effectively controls the Supreme Court as well, so he is almost a dictator at the moment. He will repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Joe Biden’s big anti-global warming initiative, and there will probably be ugly federal legislation on social and religious issues as well.
The biggest of those issues is his promise (or threat) to deport around “20 million” people whom he believes to be undocumented immigrants. This would involve mass arrests and concentration camps to sort out the innocent from the guilty (if these terms are even relevant), and, of course, a border wall like the one he failed to build during his first term.
In foreign affairs, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza will both end badly for the victims. Trump will make Ukraine surrender to Russian demands by cutting US military and financial support. He will let the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, devastate and maybe even annex the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but he will stay out of the war with Iran that Netanyahu also wants to drag him into. He might even let China have Taiwan.
The US economy will probably be all right for a few years: Biden has already put it into recovery mode. Trump’s promised 20% tariff on all foreign imports (and 60%-100% on Chinese-made goods) will slow world trade and drive inflation in the US. But this will all unfold slowly.
Nor will there be a big wave of Americans seeking sanity or safety elsewhere. (Where would they go? Everywhere else is foreign.)
Liberals lament the encouragement Trump’s victory gives elsewhere to autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and ‘illiberal’ democrats like Victor Orbán and Narendra Modi, but Trump is too ignorant and nasty to be much of an example for anybody. It would be different if Trump’s cognitive decline became so severe that the vice-president, J.D. Vance, had to take over. Bad things happen to good people all the time. The rich have been getting richer and the middle class poorer in America for more than 50 years now under Republicans and Democrats alike, but that’s a problem only Americans can fix. In the meantime, the damage elsewhere can probably be contained.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth
