On Christmas Day, Donald Trump issued his traditional holiday greetings. Posting on Truth Social, the social media site created to serve as a platform for his personal enrichment and political aggrandizement, he repeated his threats to restore the Panama Canal from its current status of being controlled by the country in which it is located. He amended Canada to become America’s future “51st state,” pushed his plan to buy Greenland “for purposes of national security,” and wished Merry Christmas to the “radical left lunatics” whom he recently defeated in “the greatest election.” In the history of our country.” Would it be 2016 to suggest that these are ridiculous, embarrassing, and troubling things? As 2024 winds down, the prevailing attitude toward the frenzied methods and frenetic threats of the former and future president, even among his die-hard critics, seems closer to intentional indifference than resistance. Frankly, call it surrender or simply surrender to the political reality that Trump is, after all, twenty-five days away from returning to the Oval Office.
A year ago, Trump’s victory would have been unthinkable — the sombre, anti-incumbent mood of voters, the former president’s easy, almost comical disposal of a group of GOP primary rivals who were, for the most part, afraid to criticize him. , suggest that this is not just a possible outcome, but even a likely outcome. However, it is also true that at the start of 2024, Trump’s victory was far from inevitable – an alternative reality that, like the half of the country who could not accept his return to office, was erased from the Trumpian narrative about his “unprecedented and surprising” victory. A strong mandate.” In the weeks since Election Day, it has been as if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and all the polite technocratic discussions of their polite technocratic administration had vanished into the mists of time — the past four years in Washington have all been a bizarre dream sequence, like this entire season. From “Dallas” in the 1980s?
Radical revisionism—by and on behalf of Trump—is a strong contender for this turbulent year’s theme, as some unique idiosyncrasy of political alchemy has managed to transform a defeated and disgraced former president facing four criminal indictments into a perfectly electable Republican candidate. With a quirky communications style, a set of more or less legitimate grievances, and a plan to make America great again by empowering his billionaire friends and overturning laws, regulations, geopolitical trends, and social policies. Standards that he and his voters don’t like. Rewriting history, revisiting old battles, plain old vindictiveness – all of these worked for Trump in 2024, and they, along with revenge and vengeance, are sure to be the themes of the new Trump administration that takes office on January 20.
Whether it’s peremptory attacks on the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty whose terms he now wants to reject, a revival of 19th-century economic protectionism, or a fictional reimagining of the January 6 rioters who stormed the US Capitol as innocent martyrs, Trump is conservative in his stance. . It’s a very different feeling from the one we know: He’s not a status quo Republican, but instead a would-be strongman connected to his own past. Imagination will now, once again, become the country’s ruling ideology.
Every year since 2018, I have written a version of this year-end letter from Washington. What’s striking about reading these letters now, on the eve of Trump’s return to the White House, is not so much his continued dominance of our politics as the consistency of the way he has achieved it — the obsession that governs social media pronouncements, bizarre news cycles, and the normalization of what was previously considered unspeakable. Politically normalizable. Even his targets are remarkably similar year after year, like radical left-wing lunatics, windmills, and Justin Trudeau. In Trump’s 2023 Christmas social media post, he wished the nation a happy holiday while praying for his enemies to “rot in hell.” What we’ve managed to forget about Trump in the past few years would fill entire books about other presidents. This end-of-year exercise has been a small effort in trying to remember.
This seems to me to be more important than ever in 2024, after an election year in which tapping into America’s capacity for collective forgetting has proven to be one of Trump’s superpowers. Many of the year’s defining events were so dramatic that they don’t need much recounting now: Trump’s unprecedented criminal trial and 34 felony convictions in a New York state court last May; the incoherent June 27 debate that effectively ended Biden’s career; The attempted assassination of Trump as he spoke at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, and the stunning images of him waving his fist in the air and saying “Fight!” Right after a bullet hit his ear but saved his life. Just a few days later, Biden dropped out of the race, reinvigorating Democrats with a sudden hope that they might defeat Trump, after all, only for Harris to win, despite a wave of cheerful online memes and more than $1 billion in campaign contributions. He is suffering a greater defeat against Trump than Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to him in 2016.
Even the 2024 bylines were epic, from the specter of the world’s richest man jumping around Trump’s rallies like a feverish schoolboy, to the overwhelming success of a Republican ad campaign that portrayed America as a dangerous hellscape of invading illegal immigrants, rampant inflation, and corruption. Leftist fanatics eager to force transgender surgery on your children. Shortly after the election, Trump tried to appoint Matt Gaetz to the position of attorney general, despite knowing that his Republican colleagues in Congress had been investigated for paying a minor for sex — a choice that led to one of the fastest implosion in the Select House. Ministers. In modern history.
We won’t forget all that soon. What Trump benefits most from this failure to remember is the common practice, among his allies and critics alike, of ignoring much of what he says and does, be it his pledge to close the US border and initiate America’s largest mass deportations. date on the first day of his presidency, to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, or to abolish the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Which I hope will not be lost in this moment of indifference, when his enemies are distracted and his allies are so confident of the imminent arrival of… Maga Utopia they don’t need to sweat the details. (New to the Associated Press/ Your light The poll was released on Thursday Sixty-five percent say of American adults now feel the need to limit their consumption of news related to politics and government—the “Great Pause” is real.)
As we approach 2025, I don’t think the warnings about the dangers of an unchecked Trump are exaggerated. Instead, it’s the creeping sense that Trump is entering office largely unopposed that is increasingly worrying me. It’s a major warning sign, among many, that the ideological surveillance of Trump’s loud, hysterical, and hypocritical opponents has been too effective. I brace for impact, not only fearing but anticipating the worst.
But while Trump may now believe he is so powerful that he can rewrite history on his behalf, it is also fair to expect that his past will serve not just as a prelude but as a precedent for 2025. If neither American voters nor the Republican Party can stop Trump, It may be his many personal weaknesses. Presidents, especially presidents serving a second term, often falter. Many of the White House’s occupants find themselves mired in scandal and infighting, victims of their own excesses, arrogance, or just plain incompetence. This was the story of Trump’s first administration, and there are plenty of reasons to believe this will happen in his second term as well. Should one encourage the failure of the American president? Half the country, half Trump, has done so with great success in 2024; In 2025, it will be everyone’s turn. ♦