I spent the last week in Paris, which for me makes for days of restaurants, movies, bookstores, and museums. When I was living in Cambridge and its environs in the 1970s this area was a lot like it, but it isn't anymore. The break allowed me to think more clearly about the state of our own nation, and to perhaps get a better look at the great, ever-changing forest of American history, zooming backwards from that one orange-colored tree that so dominates our lives. Yes, our country is in a terrible mess, and yes, we have a president who is truly, in his own way, beyond compare. But how much of it is exactly his fault, and how many of our current misfortunes can we trace directly to him? It's an interesting question.
Trump cannot reasonably be blamed for the transformation of our economy over the last fifty years or so. He was not even a key figure in making it happen, nor does he seem to me have benefited much from it before he entered politics. The New Deal era began to die in the 1970s. The Republican Party had never really favored it, although Eisenhower and Nixon had lived with and even expanded upon some of its achievements, but by 1976 Ronald Reagan, who believed that government was the solution not the problem, was very nearly the dominant figure in the Republican Party, and he definitely took it over four years later. Something parallel had happened among the Democrats, where the new generation of 1974 had run against big government and special interests and had begun to replace the economic issues of previous decades with social ones. Reagan introduced long-term peacetime fiscal irresponsibility into American government in order to make the rich richer, and the deregulation of financial markets began. While Gordon Gecko was about as old as Donald Trump, he looms in retrospect as far more of a harbinger of things to come, since he worked in finance, not real estate. George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton each took major steps to cut Reagan's deficits, and by 2000 Clinton had created a significant federal surplus, but George W. Bush immediately returned to Reagan's permanent deficits, while allowing financialization to run wild and create the housing bubble. Barack Obama in 2009 might have revived some of the principles of the New Deal in response to the 2008 crash, but he chose not to, convinced that there was nothing fundamentally unsound about our new system. He did cut Bush's deficits substantially--as every Democratic President since JFK had done--but he was the last Democratic president to do so. Trump cut taxes again and the deficit ballooned again, exploding to unprecedented heights during the COVID response, and Biden did not reverse the damage. The deficit in Biden's last fiscal year, 2024, $1.83 trillion, was nearly twice as high as the deficit in Trump's last pre-pandemic year, 2019, when it was just $984 billion. Meanwhile the share of the richest 1 percent and ten percent of our nation has grown steadily, while the lower half of the population has been stuck at the same level.
Trump has claimed to repudiate the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, but even this is only a half truth. The end of the Cold War under Reagan ushered in a new idea of American indispensability and supremacy, celebrated publicly by both Bushes, Clinton, and Obama. More specifically, 9/11 unleashed an unprecedented era of American imperialism, marked by attempts to replace hostile Middle Eastern regimes with cooperative, friendly clients. Begun by George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, these attempts were continued by Obama in Libya and in Syria--but none of these initiatives left the target nation better off or turned it into a reliable friend of the US. And now, two years into his second term, Trump has embarked upon what is turning into the biggest catastrophe yet, the attempt to complete the neoconservative agenda by removing or crippling the Islamic regime in Iran. That was already orthodoxy among the Republican leadership thanks in large part to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby. Mitch McConnell had done everything it could to try to stop Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, and essentially recognized Benjamin Netanyahu, not President Obama, as his the spokesman for his preferred middle eastern policy. And it was Biden, not Trump, who allowed Israel completely to destroy the Gaza strip and leave its population homeless after October 7.
Writing in 1997, Bill Strauss and Neil Howe had argued in their book The Fourth Turning that during the next twenty years, a great crisis would allow a new president to mobilize the nation, solve critical problems, and build a new political consensus as FDR and Lincoln had done. Their list of possible crises included (but was not limited to) a terrorist attack, an economic crisis, and an epidemic. All three have now come to pass, and the first two at least did produce a broad surge of renewed patriotism, but Bush II and Obama failed to deal adequately with the first two, and the third one divided the country more than ever. Trump understood one key point. Disastrous consensus economic and foreign policies and the failure to respond effectively to these crises had utterly discredited the leadership of the two major parties, leaving an opening for a nationally known demagogue like himself. A large plurality of Republicans and a near-plurality of the country voted for him in 2016 not in spite of his opposition to consensus positions but because of them.
Trump in his second term, however, has made two kinds of changes that no one else would have made. To begin with, in foreign policy, he has treated the nation's oldest friends as enemies and even expressed designs upon the territory of Denmark and Canada. In Ukraine he has abandoned the role of the defender of nations against aggression that the US played for most of the twentieth century. And while the war against Iran was already part of the neoconservative playbook, he has waged it with unprecedented fecklessness, taking no account of what was going to happen, blindly following the advice of Prime Minister Netanyahu against the views of much of his own team, and doing unprecedented harm to the world economy. He has also crippled our foreign policy establishment, eliminating USAID and ignoring the State Department, while private citizens, including his own son-in-law, take over the most important diplomatic assignments without any oversight, and all the while using this role to build up their own economic power. We have never seen anything remotely like this before.
And at home, Trump has purposefully, consciously degraded our entire political process in an equally unprecedented fashion. I am not merely referring to his election denialism, but to the whole tenor of politics as he practices them. He constantly uses contemptuous language towards the whole opposition party, towards media critics, and towards anyone who gets in his way. This is exactly the kind of language that Washington and Jefferson, who occupied the White House at the beginning and the end of an equally contentious era, warned us against. No president--including Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War--ever used language like his towards opponents before. Trump also has no understanding of or respect for our Constitution and how our institutions are supposed to work. The whole idea of bureaucracies applying rules impartially is anathema to him--perhaps because he is such a chronic rule-breaker himself--and he has filled the most sensitive positions with flunkies who understand that their job is to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He has found numerous ways to use the presidency to make money for himself. And now he has offered every adult American $5,000 for their votes in the upcoming election.
Strauss and Howe showed that from 1774 to about 1794, from 1861 through 1865, and from 1933 through 1945, the United States established and then re-established confidence in our institutions and in ourselves by mobilizing effectively to deal with great national problems. They expected their (and my) generation to produce a new Lincoln or FDR who would do the same. According to the 80-year rhythm that they identified, that process should have been completed by now. I expect Trump to leave office in January 2029 if not sooner. He might be replaced by someone equally disruptive. The two parties don't seem likely to select very impressive candidates in 2028 either, and I expect at least one tech mogul to try for the White House then. But no matter who wins, I can't at this moment imagine how they might create some new national consensus comparable to the ones that emerged from our previous great crises. Entropy and fragmentation may have gone too far.
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