One year into Donald Trump’s second reign, it is easy enough to argue that, in a short while, there won’t be much of an American republic anymore. Not long before he died in 2012, Gore Vidal predicted the United States would eventually backslide into a military dictatorship. The celebrated author and intellectual was a declinist by nature, and he was musing about the collapse of democracy before Trump even rode down his golden escalator. Vidal’s observation was that the postwar American empire naturally strangled popular institutions. Each president seemed to be more imperial than the last and now had in their possession the nuclear weapons to annihilate civilization many times over. Once the military-industrial complex was born, could there be a democracy any longer? Trump’s de facto war on Venezuela, where he’s illegally captured the president and promised boots on the ground — and done so without congressional authorization — is just the latest sign portending a darker age. 

Trump certainly has tested our nation, battered it repeatedly, and delighted in the fissures he’s left behind. He has, like George W. Bush, enthusiastically launched a regime-change war, courting chaos and catastrophe if a leadership vacuum opens up in Venezuela, home to multiple sophisticated armed factions that are prepared to fight. Yet the Republican Party remains in lockstep on this neoconservative misadventure. Back home, thanks to a pliant Supreme Court that is, for him, the ideal blend of Bush appointees and his own, the legal system cannot touch him. He has fired hundreds of thousands of federal employees, flooded Democrat-run cities with National Guard troops, wantonly harassed and deported peaceful immigrants, violated speech rights on college campuses, and attempted, as much as he can, to impose his megalomaniacal will on the government and the culture. The FBI and Justice Department are fully tools of the MAGA movement. If he has a few more favorable Supreme Court rulings in the next year, bedrock American principles like birthright citizenship might vanish. For liberals like Timothy Snyder, the famed historian and author now waiting out the Trump years in Canada, this all amounts to a curious blend of terror and Schadenfreude: See, we told you. Fascism is nigh.

Except it’s not. Not yet, anyway. If one lesson of the first Trump year is that Trump means it and no one should underestimate the damage he might do to the federal government and democratic institutions, there is another story to be told, one that doesn’t sell as many books but will nevertheless prove to be true. America is, in fact, enduring. Democracy has not vanished. This isn’t Weimar Germany or Nazi Germany or Russia in the early Putin years. This is a very flawed and unwieldy nation that has proved, for all the MAGA Sturm und Drang, to be one capable of resisting Trump. And not in the histrionic manner of 2017 and 2018, when Democratic elites and anti-Trump pundits treated every last presidential tweet and utterance as a national........

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