There is no escaping the fact that the United States is now being wrenched into a new reality that replaces the rule of law and democratic accountability with a naked version of autocratic rule. Along with some other commentators, I have been warning about this for years. Despite having seen this coming, however, the new lawlessness is turning out in its particulars to be scarier than even my worst fears, especially in the speed with which the federal government is being dismantled.
All the way back in the summer of 2016, the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republicans’ leader prompted me to ask: “Is This the Beginning of the End of Constitutional Democracy in the U.S.?” And here we are. Even so, the word “end” could have been preceded by one of two modifiers: temporary or permanent. Is it the latter? Forever is a long time, so the answer almost certainly must be that this is temporary.
But temporary things can last for decades, centuries, or even millennia. What are the prospects for this being a relatively short, albeit bleak period in human history? There are immediate, short-term, and long-term possible reasons to believe that the future could bend back toward decency.
The Immediate Situation: Prospects for Stopping or Slowing the Slide Toward Totalitarianism
At the end of my most recent Verdict column, I called back to a promise that I made in my final 2024 column to “begin to try to offer a glimmer of optimism—or if not optimism, at least some reasons to fight the understandable urge to give up hope.” Having set that rather low bar, I do think that there are reasons to feel that all is not lost permanently.
I am not a political strategist, so I will not pretend to know what the majority of Americans who did not vote for Trump should be doing at this very moment. I do know that the supposedly well-meaning people who are heckling the Democrats to “do something” have no answers to what the Democrats should—correction: could—be doing right now. Mocking the party out of power for being out of power seems particularly unwise, given the toll that such criticism inevitably takes on the public’s morale.
Beyond that, however, I should stipulate up front that my intended contribution here does not include a how-to list for stopping and reversing the country’s turn toward dictatorship. My version of morale-building can only involve describing how and why the future might turn out better than currently seems inevitable. I can nonetheless emphasize that there are reasons for guarded optimism, both in the relatively immediate term and in the longer sweep of history.
For those who understandably desire more immediate words of encouragement, I can do no better than the expert on democracy and tyranny Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian who noted in an interview last month (starting at the 3:21 mark of the video) that the Trumpists
want to make you feel alone, they want to make you feel powerless…. They want to make you feel that way, so catch yourself before you do. And … if you act, especially if you act with other people—with other people you admire, who you think are doing good things—you’re gonna feel better. If you do the little things that you can do, you can catch yourself before you starting being dismayed. … There will be openings. There will be openings for protesters, for civil society. There will certainly be openings for Democrats in the next six months, but you have to have your head up and look for those openings.
I have neither expertise nor experience in political organizing, and I respect those who are willing to take action and engage in public displays of opposition and civic engagement. Snyder’s implicit point is that not doing any of that is both a recipe for personal despair and a guarantee that the worst will indeed happen. So long as people have realistic expectations, immediate efforts to slow things down or even stop some bad actions are surely a good idea.
The Not-Quite-Immediate Prospects for Defeating Trumpism
Again, we are looking at an immediate future in which the opposition’s formal powers under the Constitution are almost nonexistent. Moreover, unlike every other time in American history when one party controlled all branches of government, Trump’s new regime shows every sign of ignoring what few powers non-Trumpists might try to exercise.
Most ominously, we are all holding our collective breath as we wait to see whether Trump’s people will invoke a variation on Stalin’s rhetorical question—“How many divisions has [the Pope] got?”—and openly defy the courts. I should note that there is also a quote from President Andrew Jackson that is more directly on point—challenging the Chief Justice to enforce the Court’s ruling against Jackson—which the Trump team is openly touting. Even so, the new administration is giving off much more of a Stalinist vibe than even the most repellent version of Jacksonian populism, so Stalin’s words seem like the more apt encapsulation of what we are facing.
All of this means that there will be loads and loads of very bad news over the coming weeks, months, and most likely years. Much of the gratuitous harm that Trump will inflict is going to be irreversible, as people die unnecessarily from diseases and disasters that the government will no longer contain (and might even make worse), all while many people’s livelihoods will be ruined. Where is the optimism, however limited?
The simple answer is that this is a cult of personality, and not only is there no obvious successor to Trump but he is clearly trying to maintain his own power by keeping his supporters at odds with each other. For example, a friendly reporter asked Trump earlier this week whether he viewed J.D. Vance—who was, to be clear, the person Trump chose to be his Vice President—as his “successor.” Trump immediately said “No, but he’s very capable. I think you have a lot of very capable people.” Although some Trump supporters tried to spin that comment not as disrespect but as “Vance has to earn it,” that is obviously a lie. Vance earned the right in 2024 to be constitutionally first in line to the presidency but not to be Trump’s choice “yet”? Get real.
The larger point, however, is that Trump’s time on this planet is quite limited (given his age, his already evident mental decline, and his poor health), and whenever the time arrives for him to meet his eternal fate, he will leave behind a Republican Party that is a complete mess. Whether or not Trump is consciously trying to create a brutal succession fight, that is what will surely ensue the very second that Trump is gone.
After all, none of the highly ambitious would-be Presidents who ended up backing Trump in 2024 ever thought that they would have to wait four additional years for “their turn.” Even though they strategically chose not to challenge him, they all came out of January 2021 thinking that they would be the one’s enjoying their first one hundred days in office right now. His comeback was therefore not only surprising but frustrating to all of them, even though they have good reasons not to say so in public.
That Trump is now openly admitting that he is interested in defying term limits is even worse for the self-imagined future Republican Presidents—but again, they are boxed in when it comes to Trump himself. If he lives another twenty years and keeps his cult of personality going, everyone else will be stuck in limbo.
Whenever Trump depart the scene, however, all bets are off. Not only is Vance not the heir apparent, but he would be the first person whom everyone else would try to take down. Vance would by law become the President, of course, but because he has no natural voter base (and is a terrible politician to boot), that would not stop others from challenging him both internally and in a future election.
This means that all of the deluded narcissists who populate the Senate and many governor’s mansions—Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, and on and on—will have the knives out for Vance and for each other. None of them are crowd-pleasing campaigners (Cruz being especially well endowed with a voter-repelling personality), and they would climb over each other to try to become the new leader.
Such succession fights do not, however, necessarily lead to a better outcome. Stalin, after all, was the victor in the deadly game of thrones that followed Lenin’s death in the early days of the Soviet Union, so things can get worse even when that seems impossible to imagine.
The good news, however, is that there are examples of dictatorships that do in fact end with the dictator’s death. Most prominently, consider that Spain transitioned very quickly from a fascist state to a modern democracy after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. Unfortunately for the Spanish, Franco was still relatively young when the victorious Allies decided after World War II to leave him in power rather than finishing the job of defeating fascism. Be that as it may, Trump’s life expectancy is certainly not measured in decades.
Whenever Trump is out of office (and for whatever reason), post-Trump politics will not simply return to pre-Trump politics. Even so, the Trumpist movement includes a multitude of contradictions and irreconcilable conflicts that are being held together by the sheer force of Trump’s popularity with his base. Without him in the picture, there will not be a smooth transition (along the lines of the Kim dynasty in North Korea), to say the least.
The Long-Term Prospects for Democratic Renewal
To be clear, the existing contradictions within the Trumpist movement will most likely hamper some Republican efforts and offer a few openings to stanch the constitutional bleeding even while Trump is still in the Oval Office, but things will no doubt continue to be frightening so long as he is the chief executive. And again, the result of a post-Trump melee could even be worse, although I would not bet against some improvement.
In any case, we do not only need to rely on the inevitabilities of human mortality as the basis for any optimism. After all, even a despotic regime can be reformed or toppled. And rather than looking abroad for examples, we can look to the U.S.’s own history.
When the election of 1876 effectively ended post-Civil War reconstruction, the country was plunged into a near-century of the Jim Crow era, a time when terroristic violence was inflicted on Black Americans and other minority groups, with that violence tolerated by the legal and political systems—that is, when police and politicians were not themselves actively involved.
As horrible as that era was, however, it ended. Moreover, it ended even though the country’s voting laws systematically kept white supremacists in power, and even though politicians were comfortable defending openly de jure segregation while using dehumanizing language to describe their victims. That things changed for the better is in some sense nothing short of a miracle—but also a precedent and a cause for hope.
This could only happen if there were something to “the arc of the moral universe” that Dr. King described so memorably, with even some people who benefited from an unjust system agreeing to make changes for the better. Seeing peaceful protesters brutalized and assaulted did not bother far too many Americans, but a sufficient number of others came to see that their country could and should be better than it had been.
It took ninety years for the Jim Crow era to end, which is far too long. One of the silver linings of watching things fall apart so quickly today, however, is that it is becoming more and more difficult for people to continue to pretend that “Trump doesn’t mean the crazy stuff he says,” that “our system is too strong to be destroyed by one man,” or any of the other straws at which people who should know better have been grasping. Some people will never open their eyes, of course, but the advantage of Trumpian shamelessness is that he and his followers no longer see any reason to pretend that they are playing by the rules. Inevitably, people are beginning to open see what is happening.
In other words, rock bottom has nothing but upsides. There is no more room for wishful thinking, as much as some people will cling to old habits.
Because much of my scholarly work has been dedicated to the question of what current generations owe to future generations, I tend to think in longer time frames than I otherwise would. I am depressingly aware that waiting even days for relief, much less decades, sentences many vulnerable people to unnecessary misery and even death. Telling the family of a lynching victim in, say, 1925 that the world would be different in forty years would hardly have been a balm for their agonizing pain.
Even so, civil rights movements have made progress throughout history, in the U.S. and elsewhere. Trump’s current reactionary moment is rolling back the Civil Rights movement in many important ways, but what can be turned in one direction can be turned back in the other.
Should people of good will be disheartened by what we are seeing? Yes, obviously. I am in many ways a pessimist, and it is difficult not to feel despondent right now. But Trumpism is still self-sabotaging, Trump’s would-be successors will not fill his shoes, and good can triumph over evil. For now, those facts are the source of my remaining hope.
