Donald Trump has transformed the American story | Osita Nwanevu

Making America great again was never a promise Donald Trump could deliver on, nor one that he intended to. That said, he has undoubtedly thrust the US back into history ⁠– and not just through his assault, in recent days, on the global economic order.

About 50 years ago, the tumults of the late 1960s and early 1970s began giving way to a quietude that would carry us through the end of the cold war. Tested as we may have been by conflict, scandals and crises economic and not, we entered this new century ⁠– and met the uncertainties of a new world we’d forced into being ⁠– surer of ourselves than ever before. The towers fell, yes, but the US’s sense of purpose was as much of a settled fact in the world as American power. The American people were divided, true, but for all but an impertinent and implacable few, the major questions of American identity had been resolved. The meaning of American values, the contents of the American dream, the members, in good standing, of American society ⁠– these things were known and known so deeply, we supposed, that they hardly needed articulation.

In 2008, the election of Barack Obama offered impatient readers a place to close the book on the American story for good. And many did ⁠– as though everything that followed the first Black presidency would be epilogue. But the triumphalism of that moment gave way to doubt almost immediately. Donald Trump barrelled into political conversation, four years before he launched his first run for the presidency, as the loudest proponent of the theory that Obama had actually been born in Kenya ⁠– a foreign invader perhaps backed by shadowy forces threatening the American way of life. It wasn’t difficult to see where this rhetoric would lead the right if left unchecked. It also wasn’t surprising, for those who knew the American right well, to see the Republican party, including its establishment nominee for the presidency, Mitt Romney, elevate and embrace him anyway.

A little over a decade on, and just over two months into Trump’s second term, the book has been thrown back open. Who we are, what we are, where we are going as a country ⁠– everything is up for grabs again. And the president is going in for it all with both hands. After two or three years of resigned concessions from Trump’s putative critics to his framing of the immigration problem, the solution we’ve chosen is barbarism ⁠– women in a Miami detention facility, for instance, sleeping 27 to a cell on concrete floors that are also their only toilets, or innocent men being flown over to goons in El Salvador.

There, it’s been reported that many of the new prisoners at the “Terrorism Confinement Center” were labeled by our immigration authorities as members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for having tattoos – including a man bearing one for Real Madrid and another man with one for autism awareness. On 15 March, a photojournalist for Time captured the intake of a man who said he was a gay barber. “A sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste,” he wrote. “The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.” This week, the administration admitted that a Maryland father had been deported to El Salvador by mistake. The administration also said that it would not be returning him to the United States ⁠– as he is now in the custody of El Salvador.

A French scientist barred from entering the county after criticisms of the administration were found on his phone. A Canadian actor detained for nearly two weeks over permit paperwork. A permanent resident from Germany, stripped naked, interrogated and detained by immigration officials upon returning from Luxembourg. No one with sense expected Trump to act judiciously here; the prejudices and paranoia driving immigration hardliners are no longer news. But seemingly every day, the dragnet constructed by the administration manages to surprise. Many of the most telling anecdotes still to come will be from our campuses. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who was confirmed with the support of every Democrat in the Senate, has told the press that many of the more than 300 visas department officials have evoked since he’s taken office had belonged to student “lunatics”. The detentions of two of the students in question ⁠have already made headlines: Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil, guilty, per the administration, of the crime of organizing against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and Tufts’s Rumeysa Ozturk, taken into federal custody apparently for writing an op-ed about the same.

The images from the video of her arrest ⁠may mark this era as indelibly as the frames of George Floyd’s murder and stills from the attack on the Capitol four years ago ⁠– masked agents of the state, appearing from nowhere, surrounding and snatching a frightened woman off the street for having expressed an opinion. Nothing could seem more irrelevant, as you watch her being led into an unmarked car, than the debate over whether Trumpism constitutes fascism as a technical matter, though it is surely a point in the “it’s fascism” camp’s favor that the administration may not allow the debate to continue. Nine billion dollars in federal grants to Harvard, a rhetorical target of the conservative movement since time immemorial, have been placed under review with the tissue-thin pretext that the university has not done enough to fight antisemitism ⁠– which the US president is something of an expert in given his stance that the American Jews worthy of respect are the ones who’ve proven themselves sufficiently loyal to the Republican party and its objectives. Grants to other institutions have already been suspended on the same grounds, including $400m in grants to Columbia, which appointed an overseer to monitor its Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies department for wrongthink in response to the administration’s demands.

‘Here, finally, after years of elite hyperventilation on the subject, an extraordinary, concrete, and non-conjectural threat to free speech on and off campus has arrived.’ Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Here, finally, after years of elite hyperventilation on the subject, an extraordinary, concrete and non-conjectural threat to free speech on and off campus has arrived. And many of those who branded themselves warriors in its defense, making sweeping and lucrative generalizations about some of the Americans now in the administration’s sights to that end ⁠– student activists and advocates for Palestinian rights, transgender people broadly speaking ⁠– have yet to speak out. According to In These Times, only 24% of those who signed on to Harper’s Magazine’s Letter on Justice and Open Debate in 2020 ⁠– a courageous stand against the brutal tyranny of sophomores and sensitivity readers, akin, we were so often told, to the terrors of Mao’s China ⁠– have publicly condemned the administration’s moves against colleges and dissident students. Perhaps that’s due to broad agreement among speech pundits: just days after Ozturk was carted off to a detention facility, a New York Times op-ed by Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University, claimed the prevalence of progressive beliefs on campus constituted a threat to free expression “comparable” to state censorship.

The word for this is acquiescence and we’re seeing it all around. Major law firms responding to the president’s formalized thuggery with offers to do its bidding pro bono. Companies and non-profits pre-emptively doing away with diversity initiatives and any other activities that may raise the hackles of an administration that, per an executive order on “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, has officially rejected the view “that race is not a biological reality”. One could make a little game of guessing each day which leaders and institutions might fold to the new regime and how. That isn’t to say some aren’t stretching themselves in opposition. This week, Cory Booker, out of sheer, sweaty ambition and a sense of political opportunity that has eluded most Democrats, broke Strom Thurmond’s record for the longest speech in the Senate’s history with a 25-hour jeremiad against the administration and the material havoc its policies are already wreaking across the country. This beats the huffy indignation about the violation of governing norms many Democrats have been given to over the last few weeks ⁠– though there is also a potent argument about the form Trump’s misgovernance is taking and the precipice he’s brought the country to that’s actually worth making.

On 19 April will be the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the war that founded this country ⁠– a war that, as we would do well to remember, was animated in large part by an ideal that stands undiminished by time and unmarred by the sins of our past. Human beings are not made to bear arbitrary, capricious and unaccountable rule. Whatever our social standing or economic status, whatever side of national borders we happen to fall upon, we have rights that should prohibit others from abusing us to their narrow ends and entitle us to governance that allows us to pursue our own. In the time since the founding, we’ve come to commit ourselves to this ideal more deeply and sincerely than those who first arrived at it. And those of us who remain committed to defending it have reached a point of decision and decisive action. What we face now, at the juncture in history we’ve been dragged to, is nothing less than the end of the American republic. And the chief danger to it, we should insist, is something much larger than the third term the president is considering to the laughter of elected Republicans, something that will outlast this administration and outlive Trump if we allow it. It is the ideology that brought Trump to power to begin with.

Even now, many are keeping to the idea that Trump’s rise was an aberration, as though the country had merely wandered off a path towards progress that our leaders ⁠– Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative ⁠alike – were leading us down with a common purpose, despite their disagreements. When Trump finally leaves the political arena, Democrats such as the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, have insisted publicly and privately, the US will find and walk that sunny path again, strengthened by the Republican party’s remorse. At the heart of this delusion is a refusal to understand the nature of the Republican project: a refusal to understand that US conservatism has been built upon the idea that men like Trump ought to control our government and our society.

To be a conservative is to believe that a natural order rightly produces winners and losers ⁠– rulers and the ruled – and that the meddling hands of government or those who hope to change society shouldn’t interfere in that sound and sacred process ⁠or upend the hierarchies it produces on the basis of abstract principle. This is the ideological basis of the right’s attacks upon the right to vote and the democratic process ⁠– the reason why even some of Trump’s critics on the right can be heard musing aloud about restricting the franchise to the worthy and intelligent. It is why animus towards immigrants and minorities ⁠– for getting more resources and sympathy than they deserve, for the ways they might unduly influence our culture and values ⁠– will always find receptive audiences within the conservative electorate.

And it is why conservative policymakers have worked for the last half century to build a political economy where executives and investors can accrue unlimited returns to their supposed genius and daring ⁠– in the millions, billions and soon trillions ⁠– unrestrained by government or organized labor. The candidacies and now presidencies of Donald Trump, an autocratic bigot and billionaire, sprang from this ground as predictably as a jack in the box. And as troubled as they seem by the material and political costs of his trade agenda, Republican policymakers and donors have surely taken heart in how totally the conservative agenda has succeeded elsewhere under Trump’s leadership. Federal programs and federal employment are being slashed, federal regulations are being dismantled, the renewal of a major tax cut is around the corner, undesirables are being punished and discouraged from entering the country, and even our universities and other pillars of liberal civil society are being brought to heel in keeping with conservative social objectives.

As difficult as it might be to imagine that whatever follows Trump might be even worse, we have ample reason to believe it could. In ways he hardly intends, Elon Musk, who purchased control of the federal bureaucracy with $260m in contributions to Donald Trump’s campaign, is a vision of the future being created for us ⁠– rule by a class of madmen with messianic pretensions, deranged by their own wealth into a confidence that dominion over the heavens and even eternal life are within their reach. But the wealthy aren’t gods entitled by providence or some holy and immutable laws of nature or commerce to dominate us. In fact, Donald Trump and Elon Musk are, by some distance, the stupidest men ever to hold executive power in this country, inferior in character and intelligence to the very workers they’ve spent the last two months driving out of government ⁠– researchers, scientists, humanitarians whose efforts have saved the lives of millions across the globe⁠, all sent packing by an administration so captured by idiocy it has announced it intends to seek trade remedies against two uninhabited islands near Antarctica.

Humiliation, immiseration, chaos and more of all to come ⁠– this is what the US’s promise is being traded for, thanks to a Republican party that, plainly, poses the greatest threat to the endurance of this country since the Confederacy. The policies it pursues will materially ruin us as thoroughly as the ideology motivating it has morally coarsened and corroded us. And the constitutional order so many are still appealing to in our collective defense has only aided and abetted it ⁠– in anti-democratically bringing Donald Trump to office in the first place, making his removal functionally impossible and structurally empowering the most conservative parts of this country so deeply that the right has been substantially insulated from paying the electoral price of its extremism. We will be judged harshly by history the longer we delay in coming to terms with these truths and building the political response the moment demands of us ⁠– not a set of strategies or rhetorical approaches aimed merely at victory in the next few elections or a drive to restore our norms and institutions, but a movement aimed at defeating the US right decisively and completing the still unfinished project of US democracy.

National disintegration at the hands of the Republican party or a future where political and economic power are held by the many and not a now dangerous few ⁠– this is the choice that must be presented to the American people. This is the fight we’re now in.

• Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist