If in 2016, you had correctly predicted what Trump would do, you would have been branded hysterical and deluded.
To take one recent example, note that the Trump administration was seriously floating the possibility of carrying out a live-streamed public execution by firing squad. Thankfully, they have walked back the planned public broadcast. But if in 2016, you had predicted that the Trump administration would be seriously considering executing people by firing squad on livestream, then you would have been regarded insane.
Back in 2016, people talked about the ugly and deleterious effect that a Trump administration would have on the quality of our public discourse. This claim was seen as hysterical and overblown. But this claim has, once again, been completely vindicated. The vice president recently insinuated that Talarico is gay. While politics was always a pretty nasty place, it’s hard to imagine that kind of thing flying before 2016.
At one point, Trump’s press secretary said “The Democrat Party’s main constituency are made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.” Can you imagine someone saying that before 2016? Or of someone saying, as Trump did, that someone who had worked for the administration committed “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Note that the person in question, Mark Milley, has been convicted of no crime.
Back in 2016, there was a good deal of talk about the country becoming more racially divided in the wake of the Trump administration. MAGA proponents suggested that the charge of sowing racial division was hysterical lunacy. Now, there is serious discussion among right-wingers of the so-called Indian question—whether to be happy that America has many immigrants. Bo French, likely to soon be an elected official in Texas, complained publicly that “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” after seeing a lot of Indian Americans at a football game at UT Austin.
Bo French is disturbed that there are too many Indians. Many on the right join him. I don’t think I’m some extreme left-winger on racial issues, but I think if you have intrinsic concern about there being too many members of one race, that’s just about the textbook definition of racism.
Now, it would be one thing if French’s comments were isolated. But open racial grievance against non-whites seems to be increasingly common on the American right. As points out “All of the Republican tweets denouncing French were heavily attacked on X. Rightist journalists, activists, and even a few GOP politicians poured out of the woodwork to support French and affirm his message.”
And once one starts thinking about things that Trump did that would have been unbelievable in 2016, it’s easy to come up with many. For example, remember when he proposed taking over Greenland? Or when right after ICE killed an American citizen, the Trump administration brazenly lied about the American citizen being a domestic terrorist, demonstrably fabricating details about the case? Or that Trump would try to destroy most of foreign aid?
There’s so much insanity that you can’t even keep track of it. Like the fact that Trump got a jet gifted from Qatar and gives legal reprieve to those who pump money into his crypto dealings. And that he repeatedly pardons his friends and donors. And that he’s made a billion dollars from crypto holdings that only have value because he’s the president. Many more examples could be given.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this is the fake electors plot. I know this one has been memory-holed, because the American electorate has the memory of a goldfish, but I think it’s worth remarking on the fact that we have a president who carried out a months-long conspiracy to try to stay in office after losing a fair election.
If in 2016, you’d predicted that Trump would lose in 2020, then get a conspiracy of fake electors to declare him the president, pressure state legislators and then the vice president into approving the fake electors, and then do nothing for hours as rioters stormed the Capitol, even telling Kevin McCarthy that the rioters cared about America more than McCarthy, this would have seemed so far outside the bounds of normalcy that it would have been regarded as totally impossible. But it happened. Remarkably, it seems the world has basically forgot about it. It’s been buried in the deluge of other insanity.
This isn’t to say that all that Trump’s critics predicted in 2016 has come true. There were definitely a lot of people who were way too hysterical. For example, predictions that Trump would put Muslims in camps were ridiculous and didn’t happen. But at a high level, the main predictions made were that Trump would:
Make America more racially divided and bring us backwards on issues of race. That has happened. Exactly how to apportion blame is unclear—some of the blame must surely go to the 2020 racial grievance mongers like Ibram X Kendi, who treated racism as ubiquitous, infinite, and omnipresent—but Trump and his affiliates get most of the blame.
Harm the economy. He has done that too, with both tariffs and the Iran war. Note that while there was inflation under Biden, this wasn’t caused by Biden and it was mirrored all across the world. Not so with Trump. It was the direct effect of both tariffs and the war with Iran that he started.
Coarsen public discourse more broadly. This one can’t be seriously denied.
Carry out undemocratic actions. Even setting aside Trump’s attempt to take over after losing a fair election, he has carried out far more direct power grabs than any other administration in recent memory. To take one example, his decision to impose tariffs unilaterally has been
so egregious as to be struck down by the Supreme Court.
When seeing who is right in a dispute, it’s often helpful to analyze whose past predictions have been more substantially correct. This is obviously a hard thing to do, and there’s a good degree of subjective error that can creep in. Nonetheless, how events have played out have substantially been in line with the predictions of Trump’s opponents, not his proponents.
There are all sorts of wonkish reasons not to like Trump too. His policies on foreign aid and AI are quite bad. But just at a high level, it’s pretty hard to deny that he has made our politics crazier, dumber, and more divisive. This is a good reason to oppose the MAGA movement.
