Trump, redux
At the dawn of the second Trump presidency, Democrats find themselves in a weird position: hoping he's just as bad as they warned he would be
There is a thing that happens just about every season in just about every sport. A team that was thought to be a championship contender loses surprisingly early, and then everyone sets out to explain what happened. People point to flaws that were evident all along.
It mostly amounts to reverse engineering. The Maple Leafs lost, and their goaltending wasn’t great, so therefore the reason they lost was goaltending.
There was a lot of that going on after the U.S. presidential election in November. Theories abound for why Kamala Harris lost. She was doomed by the association with her unpopular boss, Joe Biden. She couldn’t beat back the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment that has swept democracies across the post-pandemic. Voters embraced the dark anti-immigrant messaging of Donald Trump. Or they didn’t take any of that seriously and just voted for the guy who said he would make everything cheaper.
Every argument for What Just Happened can immediately be countered. I listened to an interview a while ago in which the host was earnestly making the case that the Democrats had blown it by letting an obviously-too-old Biden be their nominee. It sounded like a fair point, but if age was any kind of determining factor Harris would have had a significant advantage over Trump.
Whatever the reasons, and they are almost certainly myriad, it is beyond doubt that many American voters weren’t concerned with the most dire warnings that Democrats offered about a second Trump presidency in the closing stages of the campaign. The final margin of victory ended up much closer than it first appeared, but if you were paying close attention to the campaign you heard Harris and her supporters explain that Trump had vowed to jail his enemies, round up anyone who even looked like an illegal immigrant, and slash government spending while throwing untold numbers of public servants out of work. Trump even said those things himself, repeatedly. And on election night, the race was called before a lot of Americans had even turned on their televisions to watch the results.
All of which puts Democrats in a curious position, at the dawn of the second Trump era. They need him to be as bad as they insisted he would be to prove that they were right, except for the fact that Trump doing what he said he would do would lead to poor outcomes for a lot of people.
The good news, such as it is, is that so far Trump appears inclined to prove them correct. In nominating appointees to his administration, he has selected people who almost seem designed to elicit expressions of alarm from Democrats, much of the media, and moderate Republicans. Tulsi Gabbard, a former Congresswoman who has spoken supportively of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, as the director of national intelligence? Notorious vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the secretary of health and human services? Dr. Oz, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and on and on: Trump often seems to have chosen people specifically because they have previously said controversial things on television. Preferably on Fox News.
The president-elect has meanwhile given a leading role to billionaire Elon Musk, tasking him to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency that is supposed to slash tens of billions of dollars of federal spending, DOGE is also named, quite literally, for a crypto meme coin because Musk thought that would be funny.
Rather than tame it down a bit now that he is attached to the Trump administration, Musk is becoming more extremist, touting far-right politicians in Britain and Germany and giving what sure looked like a Nazi salute at the inauguration on Monday. (“Sorry, I did not intend to give what looks like a Nazi salute,” would have been easy enough to say.)
As with so many things in Trumpworld, it is almost too crazy to believe: the world’s richest man, in an unelected role that seems to have been invented over cocktails at Mar-a-Lago, flirting with Nazis while he isn’t making plans to throw countless people out of work just to own the libs.
Trump himself seems to be having a grand old time: musing about invading allies, threatening nonsensical trade wars that suggest a basic misunderstanding of economics, filing lawsuits against media outlets that he thinks were unfair to him, and trolling Justin Trudeau, and indirectly all of Canada, for reasons that remain unclear. Probably because it gets just the right kind of people to freak out, which seems to be the thing he loves most.
His first day on the job was just as wild as would have been expected. Releasing Jan. 6 criminals, including those who attacked police officers at the Capitol, bringing back the federal death penalty, declaring an end to birthright citizenship. He gave a speech that was his usual mix of boasting vindictiveness, and then later on contradicted his own prepared remarks. It is as though he intends to be as chaotic as possible, and this time he doesn’t even have re-election to worry about — and has been bolstered by the support of his additions to the Supreme Court.
A Trump with nothing to lose? Yikes.
Which might just help his opponents. They didn’t win, but they will at least get to say, Told you so.
In lighter news: baseball!
The Toronto Blue Jays actually had a good day on Monday. Look, I’m as surprised as you are. It was starting to look like the front office was on a quest to make themselves seem as incompetent as possible. But there remains much to be done, especially as pertains to one Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. My latest for theScore considers where they are at.
And now, back to politics
The Liberal leadership race is just underway, but the front-runners are backing away from the carbon tax that they once strongly championed. In a practical sense this is not that big a deal, as it’s very likely that Pierre Poilievre will win the next election easily and dump that policy just as soon as he can. But it also seems awfully telling that Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney couldn’t be arsed to defend the signature policy of the Trudeau government on the climate file for just a couple more months. I wrote about the sorry spectacle for the Toronto Star.