How the Trump Era Will End
How will Trump’s era end? I believe it will end in an overwhelming loss at the polls, followed by a flow of information regarding incredible abuses of power and corrupt personal enrichment. As soon as Trump is repudiated, people will begin to talk, and there will be a landslide of stories and evidence produced. There will also be a reckoning of why rational elected officials, knowingly, and wholeheartedly, supported a charlatan, a con-man, and a wannabe authoritarian. This reckoning is long overdue.
I have explained, in my article, Donald Trump’s Charismatic Hold on his Followers and Why it is so Dangerous, how Trump gained his support, beginning with “birtherism” and stirring the pot of white rage. We have to realize that Trump could never have come into power without being collectively endorsed by the culture of his followers. Trump was able to take this cultural anger and stir it into support, but he did not invent the fear and rage that brought him to power. A nation is not swayed or molded by its leader, rather has the leader been shaped and molded by the culture of his supporters. In the case of America, Trump’s election occurred only because of the long-outdated Electoral College. The masses did not vote to elect him, if we had direct democracy, Hillary Clinton won by over three million votes.
Trump’s core supporters are certainly still enthusiastic, and willingly believe what he tells them, not wanting to hear any facts to the contrary, but many of the voters who put him in office in 2016 can see that he has failed to rise to the gravity of the office of president. He has not grown into the presidency because he is not able to, his temperament and mental faculties are not equal to the task. Trump is monumentally self-centered, he can only see events and actions with regard to how it impacts him, and he is unable to pretend otherwise. We can call these faults narcissism and sociopathy, or we can say he is delusional in the aspect that he can only see reality as he wants it to be, not as it is. This race-baiter who supported a Muslim ban and called Mexicans rapists has such grandiosity that he tells us he is another Abraham Lincoln! (Add another personality disorder to Trump’s kitty, Histrionic…over dramatizing and self-aggrandizing.) As our nation’s coronavirus spread spikes to the highest levels ever, he is on the campaign trail saying that we are “rounding the corner”, the virus is going away. He has actually claimed that his administration beat the virus. That is delusional. He is incapable of living in actual reality.
Charismatic authority is inherently unstable, and Trump’s failures, his lies, his abuses of power, the constant chaos surrounding him have peeled the rational voters from him. For them, he has failed to prove himself and has shown himself to be antithetical to democracy itself. Look at the groups of Republicans who are standing against him: Republicans for Biden, Lincoln Project, 43 Alumni for Biden, and the Trump appointees, cabinet members, generals, and aides who have come out to say he is absolutely unfit. He will go down as the most corrupt president in American history, an aberration of circumstance, and a dying 1950s white worldview.
The core group of Trump supporters will not abandon him, it will take time and effort to reunite this nation. Trump’s attempts to delegitimize this election will be believed by his militant and hardcore supporters, and there could well be pockets of violence when the election goes against him. Trump himself will refuse to believe that he lost the election, he will not accept the results without trying to foment opposition. His supporters will try to stop ballots from being counted. Will he concede the election? I doubt it. Will he allow a transition? Probably not since he barely had a transition team himself, he was too cheap to even put one together. Will he leave the White House? I think he will. I doubt people in the government will support Trump in his attempt to hold on to power.
Of course, I could be wrong. Every norm and tradition we hold dear in our democracy has been ignored by Trump, and by many of his followers. It is possible there could be trouble with the electoral college results, with Republican state legislatures, and the illegitimate stacking of the Supreme Court will bring about deep conflict in the country. I rationally believe the Trump era will be over, but not without great upheaval. It’s impossible to know what he will do during the lame-duck period, I think it fair to say those seventy-nine days will be fraught with chaos. And, it is possible that Trump could win again, though if the ballots are counted fairly I cannot see that happening. This election is about the survival of the idea of the United States of America. We the People. Truths that are self-evident. If Trump holds on to power, the experiment of this democracy will be over, defeated.
Trump will lose the 2020 election. It is my hope that we can navigate safely until the inauguration in January. The only thing I’m sure of is it will be a bumpy ride.
