In the wake of the storming of the Capitol, it has been easy to feel despair about the future of the United States and fear that former President Donald Trump’s reckless demagoguery has done deep and irreparable damage to the nation. But with Trump’s term now over, the events of the last four years can be looked at in another way: They proved that the U.S.’s institutions are strong, and they survived the stress test posed by Trump.
While one could point to a lot of disturbing episodes over the past four years, it should also be noted that many of the fears of a Trump presidency never came to fruition.
Sure, journalists were mocked and berated, but the nightmare scenarios, such as the jailing of journalists and martial law, never became reality. Trump tweeted irresponsibly, but he did not talk us into a global thermonuclear war (he was, in fact, more reluctant to use military force than his predecessors).
When it came time to leave office, Trump was anything but gracious. He did not accept the outcome, claimed well after exhausting his legal options that the election was stolen, and rattled off months of lies and angry speeches that culminated with the deadly riot on the Capitol. Thanks to him, tens of millions of people believe that President Biden stole the election, and the threat of violence remains.
That said, Trump did not somehow keep himself chained to the Oval Office or orchestrate some sort of military coup.
Instead, during every inflection point in the post-election period, there was a person who was willing to do the responsible thing when it counted.
State and local election officials, especially Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, behaved with integrity and carried out their oaths of office under tremendous pressure. The same goes for state legislatures and judges, many of whom were appointed by Trump. As the dispute came to Washington, while far too many elected Republicans indulged the madness, both Sen. Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence did the right thing, even as it turned out to be potentially life-threatening.
Throughout his presidency, when he pushed too hard, he received pushback from advisers or was rebuffed in court, not to mention the fact that he was incredibly unpopular as a result of his behavior, which is why his party lost control of Congress and why he couldn’t get reelected.
There are some people who have argued that we cannot celebrate because we lucked out that the person who got elected with autocratic impulses just happened to be buffoonish. What if, these folks argue, we were to elect a more determined and competent autocrat?
While we should always be on guard against anybody with tyrannical ambitions, I’m skeptical that somebody who was more serious-minded than Trump could have gotten as far as he did.
Part of Trump’s style, half-joking, half-serious, made it more difficult to raise alarms about his behavior. Defenders of Trump who did not want to defend him explicitly would often mock people for getting hysterical about bombastic Trump statements that they argued were obviously jokes. Trump likes mocking the media, but he would never actually get around to trying to revisit libel laws, for instance. The buffoonery, in other words, provided a shield not only to Trump but to those inclined to support him without wanting to back a legit autocrat.
There are deep divisions within the U.S., and there is a raging debate over whether Trump was an outgrowth of these trends or an accelerator of them. My view is that he was a bit of both. There was deep anger and distrust of institutions that helped lead to Trump. But also, Trump exploited and deepened that anger, as did the response of his opponents to his election.
So, it’s possible that we will look back at Trump as somebody who paved the way for more effective and determined populist autocrats, showing the weaknesses in institutions that smarter politicians go on to exploit. But we could also look at it as an era that demonstrated exactly how hard it would be for a true authoritarian to take over the U.S. and as an affirmation of the genius of our Founding Fathers, who created a system that makes dramatic change difficult and that places many checks on the power of any one person or institution.
On Wednesday, exactly two weeks after rioters stormed the Capitol and put one of our institutions in peril, Biden stood in the same place and was sworn into office, and the traditional transfer of power occurred as it has for hundreds of years.
