What the future looks like from here.

Trumpism won't last forever. But people are going to suffer, and it will take decades to recover.

(NOTE: I’m still processing things. Writing is how I process.)

This is a disaster. I knew it was possible. We all knew it was possible. But I didn’t believe it would happen again. I thought, in the final tally, that Dobbs would matter and January 6th would matter and corruption would matter and Trump’s own rambling incompetence would matter. I did not think American Democracy was in any way perfect, but I did believe we were at least better than this.

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I find myself reflexively uninterested in dissecting Kamala Harris’s campaign decisions. There will be time for the pundit-class to fit these results to their priors. (…If only she had adopted my issue stance, the nation would have seen and the results would have been different. …If only Biden had dropped out sooner. …If only the Democratic Party had held an open sprint-primary in July and August. …If only, if only, if only.)

There’s something unserious about that instinct. We can’t run history twice. Donald J. Trump just ran the worst campaign I have seen in my lifetime. Harris, from my standpoint, assembled and executed quite an impressive campaign. Given that Trump emerged with a victory in the actual contest we just witnessed, I’m not certain any alternate candidate or granular campaign choice would have arrived at a different outcome.

I also have little taste, at least right now, for rehashing the broader structural failures and elite failures that led to this moment. Yes, Donald Trump should not have been on the ballot. He committed treason on January 6th. That ought to have mattered to elites. We are supposed to be governed by laws that apply to everyone, not just the little people. And yes, it turns out that conservative billionaires owning basically all mass media and social media is a big problem. Wish we could have a redo on that one. But we can’t run history twice.

What I find myself staring at is the future. What will these next few years look like? Where, pragmatically, can we go from here? And the answers are all pretty bleak. Here’s how it looks to me:

• This is, effectively, the end of the regulatory state. Elon and the tech billionaires got what they wanted. All the (non-military) three-letter agencies will be hollowed out. The SEC and FTC won’t have the capacity to monitor financial crimes. The DOJ, EPA, HHS, etc will be run by political appointees whose sole charge is to reward Trump allies and punish Trump critics.

• The courts will provide no protection. Alito and Thomas will retire, to be replaced with younger ideological carbon copies of themselves. Conservative activist judges will have a 6-3 Supreme Court majority for at least the next couple decades. And the lower courts will be filled with Trump loyalists as well.

• Institutional media won’t be much of a counterweight either. The Washington Post and New York Times will still employ some great reporters, but they’ll either learn to toe the line or lose their press passes. And Trump’s lieutenants will likely make an example of some news organization. The First Amendment says whatever they want it to say now.

• The tech billionaires are going to start behaving like courtiers. I suspect this will be pretty seamless for them. They know how to conduct business with authoritarian states. They just watched Elon Musk bet hard on Donald Trump and get rewarded. Meta and Google and Apple aren’t going to stand up for American democracy. They’re going to compete to curry favor in the hope that those antitrust suits will disappear.

• This will all go pretty well for tech executives and the VC class, at least at first. You can make a lot more money through financial fraud than you can through selling products in a competitive marketplace. You can bring products to market a lot faster if you don’t have to worry about breaking laws. (Hell… Elon might finally deliver Full Self Driving Teslas. If you get rid of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and insist that any car crashes are covered by NDAs, what’s to stop him from just self-certifying that they are safe-enough?)

• And, to state the obvious, it will be terrible for everyday people. Women will lose access to medical care. Trans people will be targeted. Undocumented immigrants, and people who look-undocumented-enough-to-the-local-enforcer, face imminent harm. If you live in a community near a SpaceX facility, then Elon will just poison the water supply with toxic runoff. If you live in a blue state and get hit by a natural disaster, the government will withhold support. People will die of this, and the government response will be to loudly insist that they didn’t.

• I suspect the mass movement resistance will be smaller than last time. This is both because people are exhausted — if the progressive response in 2017 was anger, the response in 2025 will have moved on to depression — and because Trump (or his goons) will respond with violence. Trump wanted to use the military against George Floyd protestors in 2020. His generals said no. He’ll have different generals this time. And he’s going to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists. What do you think they are going to do when liberals start marching?

• The economy will take a bad hit, but only in ways that impact normal people. The stock market will keep setting records. Companies can put together some wonderful quarterly reports once they no longer have to worry about committing financial fraud. Housing prices will keep rising, but if you’re rich you can afford it. Unemployment will rise, reducing worker power and undermining the recent gains of the labor movement. It’ll be a great time for bosses, so long as you tow the party line.

• What progress we have made on confronting the climate crisis will be undermined. Trump will claw back the commitments we made to clean energy infrastructure investment. He’ll abandon the Paris agreement. The best-case-scenario is that the gains in solar, batteries, etc have been large enough that we still make some market-based gains. But we are looking at losing another four critical years to climate inaction, and we did not have those years to lose. Trump’s management of the pandemic will be a blueprint for his management of climate disasters: just pretend it isn’t happening, yell at the media for covering it, and ask Jared if he knows a guy who can fix things.

• There will be a parade of corruption and incompetence scandals. If I had to guess, I’d say RFK Jr won’t last long in the administration — not because any Trumpist will stand up for basic public health protections, but because he has served his purpose, and his ego is too voluminous to show proper deference. Expect lots of infighting. Anyone not related to Donald Trump by blood or by marriage will have only a tenuous grasp on power.

This is, effectively, the end of the American Century. We’ll still have an important global role, because the dollar is still the worldwide reserve currency and also we have nuclear weapons and a massive military. But we’re going to abandon Ukraine and NATO. The international institutions that we built in the last century — international institutions that gave the United States a first-among-equals advantage — will all wither away.

But it isn’t the end of the United States. Trumpism is not a permanent condition. If the lesson from 2016 was Democracy is fragile, then we should also bear in mind that autocracy is fragile as well. There will, eventually, be mass unrest in response to the worsening of peoples’ actual lives. The billionaire class will be sheltered from its effects at first, but not in perpetuity.

It’s going to be a long road to unwind the damage this second administration will cause. A very long road. Anyone who says “we’ll beat him at the midterms” isn’t taking this seriously. This will get very bad for a great many people, and many of the effects will be locked in for decades. But it won’t last forever. There will come a time when we can rebuild.

The siren song of the authoritarian demagogue is “the reason things are bad right now is that the government is run by crooks and idiots. I’ll get rid of them, and then your lives will be better.” That’s a powerful, compelling electoral message, because it holds out the promise that the world is simple, and complex problems have easy solutions. But it’s a lie. Authoritarianism is unstable because it cannot fulfill its promise. People are going to miss the FDA and the FTC when they can no longer trust the products they buy.

Trumpism will fall. The Trump era will end. But it will take time. And I am despondent today, because I do not instinctively believe we had that time to spare. But the future is long.

This is an ending, but not the end. We can, one day, build something better.