by The outcome of the 2016 presidential election was such a shocking event that, for people of a certain mindset, Donald Trump is less a politician than a force in history.
For this class of observers, Trump is something like the world spirit made flesh, where the “world spirit” is a global tide of reactionary populism. He may not have begun the furious effort to defend existing hierarchies of status and personality, but he seems to represent their essential qualities, from the ridiculous incompetence that often undermines his great intentions to the relentless, sometimes violent intensity that has sustained a march forward. through failure back to power.
The upshot of this idea of Trump as a kind of incarnation is that resistance is futile. You can defeat him at the polls, you can put him at the mercy of the penal system, you can even disqualify him under the Constitution, but the spirit endures. Trump or not, it is argued, we live in an era of popular reaction. Trump is just an avatar. His followers (the forgotten, if not exactly silent, remnant of the nation’s former majority) will find another something.
It is difficult not to feel at least a little persuaded by this assessment of the state of affairs, even more so if one leans toward the fatalism that pervades much of American life at this particular moment.
But let’s back up for a moment. Before embracing this almost baroque conception of the former president, let’s take a complete overview of the last eight years of American politics. Let’s take a magnifying glass and look at the details. What we see? There are no inexorable forces at work, but rather chance events and contingent choices.
In other words, it is true that Trump was produced by (and took advantage of) a particular set of social forces inside and outside the Republican Party. It is true that these forces exist with or without Trump. But Trump himself was not inevitable.
Had Republican elites united around a single candidate in the early days of the 2016 presidential race, they could have derailed Trump before he had a chance to gain momentum. If Republicans had chosen, after the “Access Hollywood” video, to completely reject their presence in American politics, they could have failed and failed in the November elections. If Hillary Clinton had won a few more votes in a few more states (a total of 77,744 in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), Trump would never have won the White House.
Not that the reactionary populism that fueled Trump’s campaign had completely dissipated. But the character of his politics might have been very different without Trump in the highest office in the land to lead and shape the movement. As it is, he had that power and stature, and now there is a reason why the most MAGA-friendly Republican politicians, or those with aspirations to lead Trump’s Republican Party, work tirelessly to imitate and recapitulate the cruelty, corruption and the former president’s disdain for constitutional government.
We saw this with Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who went so far as to imitate Trump’s movements and stance, and we are seeing it with Representative Elise Stefanik, an enthusiastic and unapologetic demagogue last seen, in a recent interview, defending to Jan. 6 insurgents and refuse to commit to certify an electoral defeat for Trump.
If nothing else, it’s hard to imagine another Republican politician who would have inspired the same cult of personality that has enveloped Trump during his years on the national stage. It is no coincidence that to ensure loyalty or force compliance, the former president’s followers have appealed to intimidation and death threats.
If Trump maintains a dynamic relationship with the social forces that produced him (if he is both product and producer), then it stands to reason that his absence from the scene, even now, would have some effect on the way those forces express themselves.
Trump still leads the field for the Republican presidential nomination. But imagine if he loses. Let’s imagine that he, somehow, is rejected by a majority of Republican voters. Does the character of American-style reactionary populism remain the same or does it adapt (along with the politicians who exercise it) to fit the new political environment? Will the next generation of Republican politicians have the force of personality to mold their supporters into a weapon to use against the constitutional order, or will they accept (with Trump’s persistent failure in mind) the fundamentals of democratic society?
One of the arguments against the attempt to disqualify Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is that removing him from the polls will not save American democracy. That’s true enough — the problems with American democracy run deeper than one man — but that’s also beside the point.
If the character of a political movement is forged through contingency (the circumstances of its birth, the context of its growth, the personalities of its leaders), then it matters who is at the top.
The point, then, is that the challenges to American democracy would be better met without a constitutional arsonist at the head of one of our two major political parties. A world in which Trump cannot hold office is not necessarily normal, but it is a world in which the danger is a little less serious.
Trump, of course, will not be removed from the ballot. No Supreme Court, and certainly not ours, would allow this effort to go this far. The only way to overcome Trump will be, once again, to defeat him at the polls.
However, it is still worth the effort to say what is true: that our constitutional system, however imperfect, is worth defending; that Trump is a clear and present threat to that system; and that we should use all legitimate tools at our disposal to keep him out of power.
