Monday, Nov. 11, 2024 | 2 a.m.
God assist us.
I can’t do higher than these phrases, uttered final 12 months by Donald Trump’s longest-serving White Home chief of workers, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, when he dolefully contemplated Trump returning to energy.
This isn’t going to be a normal reflection on how the election is over, the voters have spoken and now we are able to look ahead to the subsequent president’s management of our nation and hope for the most effective. That’s what I felt eight years in the past, after Trump had upset one other Democrat who would have been the primary feminine president.
In 2016, having coated presidents of each events as they got here and went, I naively believed that even the narcissist Trump can be humbled by the august energy and duty of being the chief of the free world. That he would develop within the job.
He wasn’t, and he didn’t. We all know that now — after his tens of 1000’s of lies in workplace, the near-daily chaos, his lethal botched response to the pandemic, undermining of Individuals’ religion in elections, flirtations with autocrats, unprecedented refusal to simply accept loss and peacefully switch energy in 2020, and his absconding with the nation’s high secrets and techniques.
In 2017, it was attainable to imagine that Trump, the purported deal-maker, meant it when he stated he needed to compromise with Congress on each gun management and immigration. He did neither, vexing Democrats and Republicans alike by his deal-breaking. Not solely that, Trump ever after demagogued immigration — proper again to the White Home, it appears.
And now, if he’s true to his dystopic phrases on the marketing campaign path about murderous migrants “poisoning the blood of our nation,” we are able to look ahead to “bloody” deportations of thousands and thousands of individuals, beginning on Day 1. Which, if carried out, would doom Trump’s different massive promise: to additional develop the economic system. Nonpartisan financial analyses counsel mass deportations of employees — as a result of that’s what the undocumented residents are: tax-paying employees — would hit the economic system tougher than the Nice Recession.
A few years in the past, a well known Republican strategist first schooled me within the political truism that though Individuals profess to need our candidates to embody hope and comity, worry and anger are by far the stronger vote-motivators. Trump by no means wanted to be schooled. His superpower is his innate grasp of the ability of worry and anger to construct an aggrieved following, what he known as in his victory declaration early Wednesday “the best political motion of all time.”
The now-vanquished Kamala Harris stated at her remaining, hopeful rally in Philadelphia on Monday evening: “We have now a chance on this election to lastly flip the web page on a decade of politics that has been pushed by worry and division. We’re performed with that.”
No, sadly, we aren’t.
Harris envisioned a United States “the place we see our fellow Individuals not as an enemy, however as a neighbor.” Trump, who started his marketing campaign final 12 months vowing “retribution,” couldn’t get by way of his 10-minute victory lap early Wednesday morning with out referring to “the enemy camp.” He was speaking concerning the TV networks, however for weeks in his closing marketing campaign arguments, he’d expansively — and ominously — outlined an “enemy inside” that included Democrats, journalists, his Republican critics and former advisers-turned-Cassandras, a la Kelly.
Democrats are “demonic,” Trump stated Sunday, and he repeatedly singled out Californians Nancy Pelosi, the previous Home speaker (“an evil, sick, loopy, b-b-b … begins with a ‘b’ ”), and “pencil neck” Adam Schiff, now a senator-elect. Each are among the many many Trump targets who’ve wanted pricey safety as a consequence of his assaults.
Trump repeatedly demeaned Harris as silly and worse. His working mate, Mini-Me JD Vance, known as her “trash” on the marketing campaign’s finish. Trump’s former vice chairman would by no means have stated such a factor, however Mike Pence additionally wouldn’t assist Trump overturn the 2020 election, which is why Trump dumped him for somebody who stated he would have. So the 40-year-old Vance would be the MAGA inheritor obvious to the oldest particular person ever elected as U.S. president.
In victory, Teleprompter Trump principally stated the fitting issues: “We’re going to attempt to assist our nation heal,” he learn, eyes shifting left to proper to scan ready remarks. “It will really be the golden age of America.” (Actual Trump ad-libbed the “enemy camp” remarks.)
However we all know Trump too properly. We’re getting into not a golden age however a brand new darkish age in America.
The Structure-respecting advisers that acted as guardrails in his first time period have been banished. The Supreme Courtroom he packed has given presidents digital immunity from prison prosecution. He’s surrounded by sycophants who’ve compiled the extremist Challenge 2025 agenda and a database of vetted MAGAts for federal jobs. As president, he’ll escape authorized accountability for the alleged federal crimes of his first time period, and sure the sentencing for 34 felony convictions in New York that he faces in simply three weeks.
Not like Trump and his supporters who by no means accepted Joe Biden as their president, I’ll acknowledge Trump as mine. And I belief Biden and Harris shall be on the west entrance of the Capitol — the place Trump’s violent supporters first breached the constructing of their tried coup — to witness his swearing-in Jan. 20, regardless of his failure to do the identical for them 4 years in the past.
Eight years in the past, it wasn’t utterly nuts on the morning after Election Day to hope that Trump may very well be a president for all of us. Idiot me as soon as … properly, you understand the remainder.
Jackie Calmes is a columnist for the Los Angeles Occasions.
