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American presidential elections are a moment when the nation holds up a mirror to look at itself. They are a reflection of values and dreams, of grievances and scores to be settled.
The results say much about a country’s character, future and core beliefs. On Tuesday, America looked into that mirror and more voters saw former president Donald Trump, delivering him a far-reaching victory in the most contested states.
He won for many reasons. One of them was that a formidable number of Americans, from different angles, said the state of democracy was a prime concern.
The candidate they chose had campaigned through a lens of darkness, calling the country “garbage” and his opponent “stupid,” a “communist” and “the b-word.”
The mirror reflected not only a restive nation’s discontent but childless cat ladies, false stories of pets devoured by Haitian immigrant neighbors, a sustained emphasis on calling things “weird,” and a sudden bout of Democratic “joy” now crushed. The campaign will be remembered both for profound developments, like the two assassination attempts on Trump, and his curious chatter about golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.
Even as Trump prevailed, most voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that electing Trump would bring the U.S. closer to being an authoritarian country, where a single leader has unchecked power, according to the AP VoteCast survey. Still, 1 in 10 of those voters backed him anyway. Nearly 4 in 10 Trump voters said they wanted complete upheaval in how the country is run.
In Trump’s telling, the economy was in shambles, even when almost every measure said otherwise, and the border was an open sore leeching murderous migrants, when the actual number of crossings had dropped precipitously. All this came wrapped in his signature language of catastrophism.
His win, only the second time in U.S. history that a candidate won the presidency in non-consecutive terms, demonstrated Trump’s keen ear for what stirs emotions, especially the sense of millions of voters of being left out — whether because someone else cheated or got special treatment or otherwise fell to the ravages of the enemy within.
That’s whom Americans decisively chose.
The centuries-old democracy delivered power to the presidential candidate who gave voters fair warning he might take core elements of that democracy apart.
After already having tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power when he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mused that he would be justified if he decided to pursue “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
This, in contrast to the oath of office he took, and will again, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” as best he can.
One rough and decidedly imperfect measure of whether Trump might mean what he says is how many times he says it. His direct threat to try to end or suspend the Constitution was largely a one-off.
But the 2024 campaign was thick with his vows, rally after rally, interview after interview, that if realized would upend democracy’s basic practices, protections and institutions as Americans have known them.
And now, he says after his win, “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”
Through the campaign, to lusty cheers, Trump promised to use presidential power over the justice system to go after his personal political adversaries. He then raised the stakes further by threatening to enlist military force against such domestic foes — “the enemy from within.”
Doing so would shatter any semblance of Justice Department independence and turn soldiers against citizens in ways not seen in modern times.
He’s promised to track down and deport immigrants in massive numbers, raising the prospect of using military or military-style assets for that as well.
Spurred by his fury and denialism over his 2020 defeat, Trump’s supporters in some state governments have already engineered changes in how votes are cast, counted and affirmed, an effort centered on the false notion that the last election was rigged against him.
On Tuesday, Trump won an election in the time of a Democratic administration. The effort to revise election procedures will now be fought out by states in his time.
Yet another pillar of the system is also in his sights — the non-political civil service and its political masters, whom Trump together calls the deep state.
He means the generals who didn’t always heed him last time, but this time shall.
He means the Justice Department people who refused to indulge his desperate effort to cook up votes he didn’t get in 2020. He means the bureaucrats who dragged their heels on parts of his first-term agenda and whom Trump now wants purged.
Trump wants to make it easier to fire federal workers by classifying thousands of them as being outside civil service protections. That could weaken the government’s power to enforce statutes and rules by draining parts of the workforce and permit his administration to staff offices with more malleable employees than last time.
But if some or all of these tenets of modern democracy are to fall, it will be through the most democratic of means. Voters chose him — and by extension, this — not Democrat Kamala Harris, the vice president.
And by early measures, it was a clean election, just like 2020.
Eric Dezenhall is a scandal-management expert who has followed Trump’s business and political career and correctly predicted his wins in 2016 and now. He also foresaw that the criminal cases against Trump would help, not hurt, him.
Sussing out what Trump truly intends to do and what might be bluster is not always easy, he said. “There are certain things that he says because they cross his brain at a certain moment,” Dezenhall said. “I don’t put stock in that. I put stock in themes, and there is a theme of vengeance.”
So it remains to be seen whether America will get two special days Trump has promised.
Upon taking office again, he said, he’ll be a “dictator,” but only for a day. And he’s promised to let police stage “one really violent day” to crack down on crime with impunity, a remark his campaign said he didn’t really mean, just as his people said he wasn’t serious about subverting the U.S. Constitution.
The voters also gave Trump’s Republicans clear control of the Senate, and therefore majority say in whether to confirm the loyalists Trump will nominate for top jobs in government. Trump controls his party in ways he didn’t in his first term, when major figures in his administration repeatedly frustrated his most outlier ambitions.
“The fact that a once proud people chose, twice, to demean itself with a leader like Donald Trump will be one of history’s great cautionary tales,” said Cal Jillson, a constitutional and presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University whose new book, “Race, Ethnicity, and American Decline,” anticipated some of the existential issues of the election.
“Donald Trump’s actions will be as divisive, ill-considered, and mean-spirited in his second term as in his first,” he said. “He will undercut Ukraine, NATO, and the U.N. abroad and the rule of law, individual rights, and our senses of national cohesion and purpose at home.”
From the political left, any threats to democracy were not on the mind of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont when he offered a blistering critique of the Democratic campaign.
“It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said in a statement. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?”
He concluded: “Probably not.”
For his part, Trump says he is intent on restoring democracy, not tearing it down.
There was nothing democratic, he and his allies assert, in seeing military leaders defy the elected commander in chief, whether the issue was troop deployments or his wish for a splashy military parade. Or in seeing Democratic presidents establish immigration policy and vast student loan relief though executive action, bypassing Congress.
But that case is built from the ground up on the lie of a stolen 2020 election, his machinations to stall the certification of that vote and his mob’s bloody attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He comes to office intending to pardon some of the people convicted for that riot and perhaps clear himself of criminal cases against him.
Guardrails remain. One is the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority loosened the leash on presidential behavior in its ruling expanding their immunity from prosecution. The court has not been fully tested on how far it will go to accommodate Trump’s actions and agenda. And which party will control the House is not yet known.
The Republican’s victory came from a public so put off by America’s trajectory that it welcomed his brash and disruptive approach.
Among voters under 30, just under half went for Trump, an improvement from his 2020 performance, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters. About three-quarters of young voters said the country was headed in the wrong direction, and roughly one-third said they wanted total upheaval in how the country is run.
By Trump’s words, at least, that’s what they’ll get.
Image credits: AP/Evan Vucci