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The Opinions
Stop Pretending Trump Is Not Who We Are
00:13:19
For those caught off guard, Trump’s victory has been a shock. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnist and “Matter of Opinion” co-host Carlos Lozada encourages his fellow Americans to ask a sobering question: If Trump is our preferred leader, what does that mean for who we are as a nation?
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- [00:02]
Derek Arthur
This is the Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.
- [00:16]
Carlos Lozada
I remember when Donald Trump was not normal. When Trump was a fever that would break, when he was running as a joke, when he was best covered in the entertainment section. I remember when Trump would never become the Republican nominee, when he couldn't win the general election, when his attacks on John McCain were disqualified, when his Axis Hollywood tape would force him out. I remember when the office of the presidency would temper Trump, when the adults in the room would contain him, when his Ukraine phone call went too far, and when he learned his lesson after that first impeachment. I remember when January 6th would be the end of Trump's political career, when the 2022 midterms meant the country was moving on, when Trump's indictments would give voters pause, when his felony convictions would give voters paus. I remember when Kamala Harris Joy would overpower Trump's fear mongering. I remember when Trump was just weird. I remember when Trump was not who we are I'm Carlos Lozada, an opinion columnist for the New York Times and co host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. I've always been fascinated by the many attempts to explain away Trump's hold on the nation's politics and cultural imagination, to reinterpret him as aberrant and temporary normalizing. Trump became an affront to good taste, to norms, to the American experiment. We can now let go of these illusions. Trump is very much part of who we are. Nearly 63 million Americans voted for him in 201674 million did in 2020. And now, once again, enough voters in enough places have cast their lot with him to return him to the White House. Trump is no fluke, and Trumpism is no fad. After all, what is more normal than a thing that keeps happening? I've wondered in the past if Trump has changed America or revealed it. I decided that it was both. Trump changed the country by revealing it after election day 2024, though, I'm considering an addendum. Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American he can be. He has embodied every national money and greed in the 1980s, sex scandals in the 1990s, reality TV in the 2000s, social media in the 2000s. So why wouldn't we deserve him now? It seemed hard to grasp at first that we'd really done it. Not even Trump seemed to believe his victory that November night in 2016. We had plenty of excuses, some exculpatory, some damning. The hangover of the Great Recession, exhaustion with forever wars, a racist backlash against the first black president, a populist surge in America, and beyond it, deaths of despair. Surely no one like Trump would ever have come to power if not for such a potent mix. Now we'll come up with more explanations, no matter how contradictory they might be. If only Harris had been more attuned to the suffering in Gaza, or maybe more supportive of Israel. If only she'd picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate. If only that lingering fury over Covid had landed at Trump's feet. If only Harris hadn't been so centrist, or if she weren't such a California progressive. If only Biden hadn't waited so long to withdraw from the race, or hadn't mumbled something about garbage in her campaign. Harris decried Trump as a fascist, a petty tyrant. She called him divisive, angry, aggrieved. And that was a smart case to make, if deep down, most voters held democracy dear, and if so many of them weren't already angry. Except they didn't, and they were. If all America needed was an articulate case for why Trump was bad, then Harris was the right candidate with the right message at the right moment, the prosecutor who would defeat the felon. Except the voters heard her case, and they still found for the defendant. He's a politician who admires dictators and says he'll be one for a day. Trump's former top aides regard him as a threat to the Constitution, a document he believes can be, quote, terminated when it doesn't suit him. And yet he has won power, not for just one more day, but for nearly 1500 more to come. The Harris campaign, like the Biden campaign before it, labored under the misapprehension that more exposure to Trump would repel voters. They must simply have forgotten the mayhem of his presidency, the distaste that the former president surely inspired. She compared him to the crooks and predators she battled as a California prosecutor.
- [05:18]
Kamala Harris
Fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.
- [05:34]
Carlos Lozada
She even urged voters to watch Trump's rallies, as if doing so would inoculate the electorate against him. It didn't. America knew his Type 2, and it liked it. Trump's disinhibition spoke to and for his voters. He won't because of it, not despite it. His critics have argued that he's just conning his voters by making them feel like he's fighting for them when he's just in it for himself and his wealthy allies. But part of Trump's appeal is that his supporters recognize the con and that they feel they're in on it. Trump conflates himself with America, with the ambitions of its people. In his 2000 book, the America We Deserve, he wrote, when you mess with the American dream, you're on the fighting side of Trump. The Democrats tried hard to puncture those fantasies in this latest campaign. They raised absurd amounts of cash. They pushed the incumbent president out of the race when it became clear he wouldn't win, and they replaced him with a younger, more dynamic candidate who proceeded to trounce Trump in their lone presidential debate. None of that was enough. America had voted early, long before any mail in ballots were available, and it gave Trump the mandate he claimed early Wednesday morning. America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate.
- [07:06]
Kamala Harris
Wow, that's good.
- [07:09]
Carlos Lozada
This time. That choice came with full knowledge of who Trump is, how he behaves in office, and what he'll do to stay there. It's not just that he has shifted the political consensus on immigration or on trade, though he certainly has done that. It's that the rationalization of 2016 is no longer operative. This idea that Trump was a protest vote by desperate Americans trying to send a message to the establishment of both parties, the grotesque rally at Madison Square Garden, that carnival of insults against everyone that the speakers do not want in their America, was not an anomaly, but a summation. It was Trumpism's closing argument, and it landed. One of the more common critiques of Harris is that her word salad moments and default platitudes in extended interviews made it hard to know what she really believed. The irony is that Trump manages to seem real even when his positions shift and his words weave. Authenticity doesn't require consistency or clarity when it's grounded in pitch perfect cynicism. We don't call this period the Trump era just because the once and future president won lots of votes and has now prevailed in two presidential contests. It's the Trump era because Trump has captured not just a national party, but a national mood, or at least enough of it. And Democrats kept the focus on Trump. They presented the choice this year as a referendum on Trumpism, not as an affirmative case for Harris. Kamala Harris gave it away whenever she called on voters to, quote, turn the page from Trump.
- [08:46]
Kamala Harris
So for everyone watching who remembers what January 6th was, I say, we don't have to go back let's not go back. We're not going back. It's time to turn the page.
- [08:59]
Carlos Lozada
Didn't we do that in 2020 when we chose Biden and Harris? Not really. Trump was still waiting in the epilogue. For those who have insisted that Trump is not who we are, that he doesn't represent American values, there are now two possibilities. Either America's not what they thought it was, or Trump's not as threatening as they think he is. I lean toward that first conclusion, but I understand that with time, the second will become easier to accept. A state of permanent emergency is just not tenable. Weariness and resignation eventually win out. As we live through a second Trump term, more of us will make our accommodations. We'll call it illiberal democracy, or maybe just self care, harris told us. We're not going back. But the tragedy of this election is not that it's taken us back, it's that it shows there are parts of America's history that we've never fully gotten past. When Trump first rose in presidential politics, some readers turned to it can't happen here. Sinclair Lewis novel from 1935. It's about homegrown authoritarianism in the United States. In the story, a well meaning newspaper editor named Dormus Jessup marvels at the power of Buzz Windrip, a demagogue who captivates the country and imposes strongman rule. The similarities between Trump and Windrip are clear, but the real protagonists of the story are the well meaning citizens like Jessup, who can't quite bring themselves to grasp what is happening. Jessup tells his readers that the insanity can't last. As Lewis wrote, he simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. When it does endure, Jessup blames himself and his class for their obliviousness. He laments that if it hadn't been one wind drip, it'd have been another. We had it coming. We respectables. For too long, today's respectables have insisted on Trump's abnormality. It's a reflex, a defense mechanism, as though accepting his ordinariness is too much to bear. Because if Trump is normal, then America must be too. And who wants to be roused from dreams of exceptionalism? It's more comforting to think of Trumpism as a temporary ailment, not a preexisting condition. The way to render Trump abnormal is not to insist that he is, or to find more excuses, or to indulge in that great and inevitable second guessing of Democratic campaign strategy. It begins by recognizing that who we are is decided not only on Election Day, but on every day that we strive to be something other than what we've become. I remember when I thought Trump wasn't normal. Now he is, no matter how fiercely I cling to that memory.
- [12:24]
Derek Arthur
If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez, Boyd, Vishaka Durba, Phoebe Lett, Christina Samulewski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Brusek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing and original music by Isaac Jones, sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sohota. The Fact Check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary, Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samulewski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose, Dresser.