Donald Trump’s openly authoritarian instincts are about to be unleashed

This is America now. It is a country that sees its authentic self reflected most clearly in the figure of a sexual predator, a racist, a misogynist, a fraudster, a felon, a coup monger, an inveterate liar and a senescent spewer of increasingly deranged and vulgar nonsense. The world must now come to terms with the undeniable fact that the US has freely and fairly chosen to embody its values in a man it knows damn well to be all those things.
This is not like 2016, when Donald Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency because of the way a relative handful of votes fell in a small number of swing states. It is not even like the four years that followed when all the signs were that Trump was historically unpopular.
Back then, it was possible to say that many Americans voted for Trump without really having a clear idea of how he would govern, that many others imagined that he would be safely controlled by responsible adults and that, after all, most Americans didn’t vote for him. It was possible to think that, however grim his tenure might be, it would be a passing phase, a temporary derangement.
There is nothing temporary in the meaning of Trump’s comprehensive victory over Kamala Harris. The widely touted belief that this was a pivotal election in US history was not overblown. That history has taken a turn, not just because of Trump himself but because of the new majority that either embraces his fascistic rhetoric or is at the very least not seriously repelled by it.
The turn is not, as promised, towards a renewed American greatness. On the contrary, America will be diminished, both internally and externally. The vigour of America’s society and of its economy are fundamentally dependent on the health of its democratic traditions, the strength of the rule of law, the quality of its scientific and educational cultures and its openness to new people and new ideas.
All of these will be weakened. Trump’s Supreme Court has already cleared the way for him to act with virtual impunity and his control of Congress (certain in relation to the Senate, probable for the House of Representatives) will be further enhanced by the crushing nature of his victory. His openly authoritarian instincts will not be constrained.
As for the rule of law, it was not one of his enemies who described Trump as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.” It was his own former chief of staff John Kelly. Not only is Trump already a convicted felon, but he now does not even have to consider re-election. It will be open season for both personal corruption and for the weaponisation of the justice system against his opponents and critics.
The scientific culture that is so vital to American prosperity has already had a taste of Trump’s glorification of ignorance in his appalling indulgence of crackpot “cures” during the Covid pandemic. With the brain-addled conspiracy theorist Robert Kennedy Jr and the enthusiastic spreader of disinformation Elon Musk now by Trump’s side, the assault on science will be all the more fundamental. Its primary aim will, of course, be the enhancement of climate change denial to the benefit of the fossil fuel industries.
Educational policy, meanwhile, will almost certainly be handed over to the religious fanatics who have, in many states, already started to remove books they don’t like from schools and libraries. Musk’s enthusiasm for firing “obsolete” public school teachers will be a great start to the project of making America ignorant again.
And the openness to migration that has given the US its social, cultural and economic dynamism is threatened by Trump’s plans to terrorise immigrant communities by unleashing a military-led campaign of mass arrests and deportations. But it is also undermined by the spectacular electoral success of Trump’s violently anti-immigrant rhetoric. Every opportunist politician now knows that there are no limits to how far you can go in your attacks on non-white migrants. The long-term consequences are obvious.
For the outside world, Trump’s win is a triumph for dictators and authoritarians everywhere. But it is specifically a victory for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. For Putin, it means that US backing for Ukraine will likely cease in the new year, raising the stark question of whether the European Union is willing and able to assume the burden of funding and supplying its resistance to invasion. Since the answer to that question is most probably no, the chances of an end to the war on Russia’s terms are now very high. That in turn would leave Putin free to throw his weight around the rest of the former Soviet empire.
As for China, Trump will almost certainly hand it global leadership on the single most important issue facing humanity: climate change. By reversing Joe Biden’s progress towards a green transition for the world’s biggest carbon polluter, Trump will offer China the opportunity to leap ahead with green technologies, take the moral high ground and present itself as the sane and responsible superpower. That ought to be a staggering prospect.
It is no longer possible to batten down the hatches and think “this too will pass”. For all his chaotic and instinctive impulses Trump has already created huge long-term changes in the US: completely altering the nature of the Republican Party, unravelling reproductive rights, installing a militantly right-wing Supreme Court. He now has the chance to follow the other right-wing authoritarian leaders he so admires and create a semi-permanent hegemony.
He has a mandate to do this. His agenda has been not so much spelled out as roared across the entire landscape of American politics. He was very clear in his intention to redefine those who are not loyal to him as the “enemy from within” who must be crushed, by state-controlled violence if necessary. The America he has conjured in his own image is okay with that.