Don't Panic
there's a certain narcissism in thinking that you live in the worst of times
Look, the reelection of Donald Trump is bad news. A lot of awful stuff is going to happen. Some immediate pain points include the replacement of Lina Khan at the FTC with a pliable pro-corporate stooge, the dismantling of Joe Biden’s excellent NLRB, and an immediate gutting of federal wildlife and environmental protections. A lot worse will follow, very likely including even more tax cuts, which are the real reason so many upper-crust types held their nose and voted for Trump. (At the end of the day, there’s always enough will in Congress to cut taxes.) The incoherence that’s inherent to Trump’s foreign policy means that an honest-to-go shooting war might be possible. No relief will be coming for the Rust Belt or any other part of the United States hurt by deindustrialization. This all sucks and there’s going to be some dark times ahead.
At the same time, recent doomsaying has a lot of that usual Trump-era liberal chauvinism in it, where the relentless panic seems competitive and performative. (It’s hard not to detect the self-importance in many people’s public wailing, the sense that they think this hardship validates their own status as a very important person.) Yes, things are bad, but they’ve been bad before, and as destructive as the first Trump term was it wasn’t as terrible as people predicted. We’ve also had a worse presidential administration in clear living memory. In general, it’s important to always remember: the hard times never end, but because they never end, they aren’t really hard times, they’re just times. It’s all just life. Let me take you through a few reasons why you shouldn’t give up.
Trump’s first term was not exactly an efficient machine for achieving conservative policy goals. This is the most obvious objection and reflects on the weirdest aspect of the current moment - the idea that the next Trump term will ruthlessly implement his awful agenda. For one thing, it’s hard to say that Trump has an agenda. He’s going to rattle the saber about the border and probably find some ways to beef up enforcement, although it’s hard to say to what effect. He seems really intent on this tariffs thing, but that’s an issue that’s going to prompt huge corporate resistance which will in turn create turmoil within the Republican coalition; it seems very unlikely that he’s going to get anything like what he wants at the scale he wants. And, anyway, what he wants is very far from what he can get, as his first term proved. Do people really not remember this? The Trump administration was a daily exercise in corruption, controversy, and scandal. Major admin officials seemed to resign by the day. As I won’t stop pointing out, Trump’s signature policy objective (according to him!) was Obamacare repeal, and he was incapable of getting it past his own party in Congress. Yes, there was a lot of hurting that came from Trump I. I’m not underestimating the destructive potential here. But it’s bizarre to look at Donald Trump and the kind of people he attracts and assign them some sort of godlike competence in getting what they want. He’ll be dogged by fierce opposition and scandal from day one, just like he was last time. Don’t dismiss his malice but don’t exaggerate his competence.
Ronald Reagan had just as much ill intent, and was actually good at getting what he wanted, which is an inherently more dangerous combination. It’s just that he was genteel and grandfatherly, so he didn’t embarrass people as much.