To hear Trump tell it, everything is broken. The facts suggest otherwise, but as Americans go to the polls in 2024, the Emperor of Anger just doubles down.
It’s midnight in America.
Things are falling apart. Prices are rising, crime is spreading, jobs are leaving. Cities are bursting. Schools are failing.
As the election campaign of 2024 opens formally next week in Iowa, the state of the union has never been worse. The United States is in crisis, led by an old, inept, corrupt, illegitimate, liberal.
Didn’t you know this? Isn’t it obvious? If you don’t, listen to Donald Trump, America’s avenging angel, who spins this tale of woe — this coming of the Apocalypse — in virtually every public utterance. Everywhere, it’s decline, decline, decline.
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It isn’t only that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen, though Trump can never let go of the lie, having repeated it so often that he no doubt believes it. It’s now far worse. Because he lost, everything has gone to hell.
Is America the “last, best hope of earth” of Abraham Lincoln? The “arsenal of democracy” of Franklin Roosevelt? The “shining city on a hill” of Ronald Reagan?
Forty years ago, Reagan campaigned for re-election announcing “It’s morning again in America,” restoring confidence to a people shaken by an energy crisis and humiliated by Iran’s seizure of its citizens as hostages.
Morning in America was a call for optimism. It’s in a president’s job description. Beyond commander-in-chief, manager of prosperity and other roles, the president is enthusiast-in-chief.
The presidency is also about heralding the country’s exceptionalism. Leaders have long embraced this — Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy — and celebrated a sense of opportunity, ambition and obligation.
Trump never celebrates anything but himself. He doesn’t know how to appeal beyond threats, cries and laments. “Make America Great Again” is brilliant because it evokes a yearning among his supporters for something lost. It’s a loss of their power and prominence in an aging, shrinking, white, Christian country becoming less white and less Christian and less what it was.
So Trump is emperor of anger. His stump speech is not what’s right about America but what‘s wrong: the courts, the Democrats, immigrants, Hispanics, Hollywood, abortion, environmentalists, Muslims, wokeism and political correctness. It is the evil of Blue America.
The good thing about Trump 2024 is that he is clear about his plans as the next president. He says he will weaponize the Department of Justice to prosecute his enemies, beginning with Joe Biden. He says he will fire thousands of civil servants, replacing them with a legion of true believers instructed to dismantle the “deep state.” He tells us he will round up illegal immigrants, intern them and deport them.
He won’t be a dictator, he promises, beyond “my first day,” which is reassuring.
No wonder then, as Iowans prepare to vote, that the liberal media is full of warnings about what’s at stake. The Atlantic dedicates its January issue (“If Trump Wins”) to what might happen. Commentators fill the pages of The New York Times, Washington Post, the New Yorker and likeminded publications, warning of the imminent threat to democracy.
It no longer matters that, materially, things are actually good in America. The country has come through the pandemic, softened by government relief. It has the lowest unemployment in a half-century. Inflation has fallen. Supply chains have cleared. Interest rates have peaked.
This is not yet the “Goldilocks” economy — not too hot, not too cold — that re-elected Bill Clinton in 1996. But the U.S. is growing again. The third quarter saw a sizzling 4.9 per cent GDP growth, with major investments in infrastructure and strong consumer spending. Unionization and energy independence is rising.
But to many in a nation of hypochondriacs and alarmists, things have never been worse. They believe what Trump tells them, evidence to the contrary, because he’s a seasoned demagogue who finds a black cloud behind every silver lining.
Standing between this and the republic as we know it is a president who hopes his party comes home, his coalition of minorities, women and moderates reassembles and his country understands the clear and emerging danger.
It isn’t midnight in America, but this is its most important election since 1860, and the most perilous moment since the outbreak of the Civil War, which followed.
Andrew Cohen is journalist, commentator and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.
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