The images are surreal. Truckloads of National Guard troops pouring into the nation’s capital in the days before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration. As the perimeter of security fencing has been extended farther out from the recently violated Capitol, as well as the White House, these scenes symbolize not just the threat of disorder, but a deepening physical separation of the people from their elected leaders.
It should be a time of celebration, not of self-destruction and armed standoffs at the temples to our democracy, now fitted with extra metal detectors and swarming security.
President Trump has just been impeached for a second time for his actions before, and inaction during, the Capitol riots Jan. 6 that have left five dead. A second impeachment is unprecedented, as is the fact that 10 of the president’s own party members in the House voted in favor. Kicked off most popular social media sites, the president has lost his voice as well — there is the feeling that we’re all talking about him after he has left the room. A voiceless Donald Trump takes some getting used to.
My friend, the political analyst and columnist Jonah Goldberg, said in the early days of the Trump presidency, “The Trump Administration will not end well.” I doubt even Goldberg could have imagined all this. Yet, Trump’s base, including those who stormed the Capitol, and the many more who didn’t, will not go away quietly. In the age of facial recognition technology and ubiquitous surveillance cameras, rioters will learn hard lessons from prison time, lost jobs, ruined reputations, and criminal records.
But many of his voters will point not to the conspiracy theory of a stolen election but to his successes, which he did have: a churning economy; the sudden and unconventional breakthroughs in the Middle East; a ham-handed but welcome move toward ending “endless wars”; the cheap, plentiful, cleaner natural gas made available by fracking; recognition, after years of willful political blindness, that China’s theft of intellectual property, its attempted cover-up of COVID-19, and its long-term threatening military posture finally had to be reckoned with.
One day, history may recognize those achievements more kindly than they are recognized in the present. But many recognize them now, and many Republicans consider them building blocks for a better all-around GOP policy infrastructure. Trump will leave, but the double impeachment doesn’t undo the status quo that he leaves behind, which will still serve as the political playing field.
Trump’s future is much more of an open question. Pundits and analysts tend to see the future as an extension of a stagnant present, like a TV drama series with steady characters and a set narrative arc. In the real world, people and circumstances do change. There will be massive shifts we cannot foresee. Like the pandemic of 2020, the stock market crash of 1929, and the World Trade Center attack of 2001, the next two to four years will be shaped by some unpredictable events that realign the political planets and American priorities.
In 1965, my grandfather, then president of the Associated Press, delivered the Pulitzer Memorial Lecture at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “The concept, in any form, of a referee or a policeman sitting in judgment upon the performance of the press and seeking to enforce that judgment is fundamentally opposed to the concept of press freedom,” he said. He wrote frequently that to stave off a journalism “policeman,” the press needed to police itself — to be responsible.
Today, the gatekeepers are the geeky Zuckerbergs, the Jack Dorseys and Big Tech robber barons of Silicon Valley who, in their allegiance to the algorithm, to profits, to the increasing “wokeness” and goofy campus trends, are swimming in irresponsibility. In so doing, they are fomenting a public anger and anxiety that, too, will outlive Trump’s presidency.
The center of journalism is gone, and with it, the center of politics and of corporate America. In the absence of the center’s gravitational pull, the planets are spinning further out into a distant, radical orbit. It is worsening as the campus “woke” matriculate into the workforce.
But given the rapid evolution of technology, the Big Tech oligarchs who help shape opinion, whether through access or censorship, will evolve, too.
This week, I interviewed Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, who described how a team at Yale, and other computer scientists elsewhere, is developing block-chain technology that will, in effect, give ordinary citizens proprietary rights and ownership over their own social media postings, a form of citizen journalism that no corporate overlords, no algorithm, can censor or control — yet, anyway.
This is the battle most likely to determine the outcome of the post-Trump political wrangling we’re about to see, especially on the Right. The fact that the Senate trial won’t convene until after Trump is out of office, combined with the deplatforming medley, ensures the president a muted voice on his way out. But his supporters see this as a reflection of what they have been subjected to, namely being ignored until Trump came to speak to and for them. The near future of the country and of the Republican Party will be shaped by the legacy of a twice-impeached president and the fractured polity over which he presided.
