Bookman: We knew Trump was a snake when we took him in
Columnist Jay Bookman writes that White evangelicals have played kingmaker for Donald Trump, in full expectation that he will reward them, and he will even if He won't. Former President Donald Trump spoke at a late October 2024 Believers and Ballots rally in Zebulon. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder
"America just decided everything you stand for is a sham," a gleeful Trump fan told me on Twitter in the aftermath of Tuesday night. "MAGA, Baby."
I cannot argue. That is indeed what has happened.
Let's look it dead in the eye: This is who we have become, as a people and a nation. This is who we are. We have sold our birthright for a ticket to the freak show.
It has not come as a surprise or shock. Not this time. You could see it in the polls. You could see in their campaign and TV ads that the Trump camp had a very specific theory about the American electorate, about how it could be manipulated and energized. They executed on that theory, and they proved it correct.
Fear, anger and resentment are powerful corrosives.
Yes, inflation played an important role. Pandemic spending under Donald Trump contributed at least as much to the problem as spending under Joe Biden, and the problem was much worse for other industrialized countries than here, but it was the Democrats who paid the price for it. Sometimes that happens.
Immigration played a major role as well, and for that Democrats have largely themselves to blame. They did not take the matter seriously enough, early enough, as politics or as policy, and the voters punished them for it.
However, this ran a lot deeper than policy. According to exit polls, for example, 81% of those who identify as white, born-again Christians voted for Trump, seeing him as their means to seize the earthly power that they crave, that the Bible and the First Amendment warn them against seeking.
Take all the rest of the country, voters of every religion, race and color, and 58% of them rejected Trump. White evangelicals have played kingmaker for him, in full expectation that he will reward them, and he will even if He won't.
Internationally, this election marks the abdication of our role as leader of the free world, and no one else will pick up the responsibility that we have tossed in the gutter.
The confidence and faith that other countries long placed in us, that we had earned, is now gone and can never be restored. The world will begin to rearrange itself, and I fear the initial victims will be our friends in Ukraine and later Taiwan, who have no doubt watched all this in dread of what is coming.
Around the world, other nations see us exposed as unreliable allies and will seek to reorient to other power centers, to find safety under other shields. That is part of what Trump campaigned upon, and that is what will happen.
Those who see themselves as friends of Israel, and of this particular Israeli government, are no doubt celebrating, but the loss of American prestige and influence this entails can only make Israel more vulnerable in the long run. In a world increasing unfriendly to their cause, we will no longer be able to provide Israel with diplomatic or economic cover. We have no credibility.
The 19th century economic policies that Trump sold, that he apparently believes deeply in, are dangerous and impractical, guaranteed to produce wide suffering.
Tariffs, the deportation of millions, the unleashing of predatory capitalism ... it is unworkable, but who in his circle or in the Republican Party now dares to tell him so?
Excuses are easy in times like this. Explanations are more difficult, both intellectually and emotionally. For example, it is an excuse, not an explanation, to argue that this is the fault of Kamala Harris. She ran an excellent campaign under uniquely challenging circumstances, trying to launch a candidacy from nothing. She was up against something bigger than herself.
Nor is it a failure of the media. That excuse assumes that people just did not know, that they voted out of ignorance and that there is some bit of news or insight that might have changed the outcome.
None of that is remotely true. This is the third consecutive time in which Trump has led a national ticket. He has been our dominant political and cultural figure for a decade now, remaking much of the country in his image. By this point there is nothing about Trump's character or intentions that we do not know in fine-grain detail, nothing that remains hidden. What we have done, we have done in full, complete knowledge. To borrow from Trump's favorite parable, we knew he was a snake when we took him in.
I get pushback from some on the left when I write that "we" have done this. They respond with a defensive insistence that "we" didn't do this, that "they" did this. That is a false comfort.
If we see ourselves as a nation, as we should, as we must, then we as a nation, together, have done this. We can't wash our hands of it. If "we" helped win World War II, if "we" put a man on the moon, then we have also elected Trump a second time.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court told Trump that there would be no legal consequences to anything he does as president. The voters have now told him that he also faces no political consequences. A vindictive Donald Trump, with the power of the presidency and a free hand, is a terrible thing to ponder. He has stoked a thirst for retribution among his followers that he might not be able to resist even if he wanted to do so. And he doesn't.
An election will come in two years. The pendulum swings. Seasons change. Two years of an unfettered, utterly triumphant Trump may produce a case of buyers' remorse on a scale not seen in decades.
If it does not, if the public continues to embrace what is coming our way, then that's who we have allowed ourselves to become.
MAGA, baby.
