020.
To assess the legacy of Donald Trump’s
presidency, start by quantifying it. Since last February, more than a quarter
of a million Americans have died from COVID-19—a fifth of the world’s deaths
from the disease, the highest number of any country. In the three years before
the pandemic, 2.3 million Americans lost their health insurance, accounting for
up to 10,000 “excess deaths”; millions more lost coverage during the pandemic.
The United States’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom House’s annual index dropped
from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that
of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international
organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted into
the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of barrier
were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the parents of 666
children seized at the border by U.S. officials remain unknown.
Trump reversed 80 environmental rules and regulations. He appointed more than 220 judges to the federal
bench, including three to the Supreme Court—24 percent female, 4 percent Black,
and 100 percent conservative, with more rated “not qualified” by the American Bar
Association than under any other president in the past
half century. The national debt
increased by $7 trillion, or 37 percent. In Trump’s last year, the trade
deficit was on track to exceed $600 billion, the largest gap since 2008. Trump
signed just one major piece of legislation, the 2017 tax law, which, according
to one study, for the first time brought the total tax rate of the wealthiest
400 Americans below that of every other income group. In Trump’s first year as
president, he paid $750 in taxes. While he was in office, taxpayers and campaign
donors handed over at least $8 million to his family
business.
America under Trump became less free,
less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier,
meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from
Trump’s years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his
25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media
and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people.
Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive
dust.
Presidents lie routinely, about
everything from war to sex to their health. When the lies are consequential
enough, they have a corrosive effect on democracy. Lyndon B. Johnson deceived
Americans about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and everything else concerning the
Vietnam War. Richard Nixon’s lifelong habit of prevaricating gave him the
nickname “Tricky Dick.” After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans never fully
recovered their trust in government. But these cases of presidential lying came
from a time when the purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal,
make a disaster disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular goal.
In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders.
After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never lie to you,”
and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald
Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular.
Trump’s lies were different. They
belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that
fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private
life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air,
dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was
never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public. He
was stunningly forthright about things that other presidents would have gone to
great lengths to keep secret: his
true feelings about Senator John McCain and other war heroes;
his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his desire for law enforcement
to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his effort to extort a foreign
leader for dirt on a political adversary; his affection for Kim Jong Un and
admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive view of white nationalists; his
hostility toward racial and religious minorities; and his contempt for women.
The most mendacious of Trump’s predecessors would
have been careful to limit these thoughts to private recording systems. Trump
spoke them openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but
intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would
otherwise have constrained his power. To his supporters, his shamelessness
became a badge of honesty and strength. They grasped the message that they,
too, could say whatever they wanted without apology. To his opponents, fighting
by the rules—even in as small a way as calling him “President Trump”—seemed
like a sucker’s game. So the level of American political language was
everywhere dragged down, leaving a gaping shame deficit.
Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many
as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his
unconcealed brutality. Lying was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he
said aloud what he was supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again
about matters of settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the better.
Two days after the polls closed, with the returns showing him almost certain to
lose, Trump
stood at the White House podium and declared himself the winner of
an election that his opponent was trying to steal.
This crowning conspiracy theory of
Trump’s presidency activated his entitled children, compliant staff, and
sycophants in Congress and the media to issue dozens of statements declaring
that the election was fraudulent. Following the mechanism of every big lie of
the Trump years, the Republican Party establishment fell in line. Within a week
of Election Day, false claims of voter fraud in swing states had received
almost 5 million mentions in the press and on social media. In
one poll, 70 percent of Republican voters concluded that the
election hadn’t been free or fair.
So a stab-in-the-back narrative was
buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as
imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in
democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between
Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a
different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental
prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power,
whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.
For his opponents, the lies were
intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking
facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again
and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked
incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and
abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They
surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves
from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in
the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was
whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more
far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of
voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media
activist, tweeted:
“Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It
doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under
the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that
liberals are evil.”
How did half the country—practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still
balancing family budgets and following complex repair manuals—slip into such
cognitive decline when it came to politics? Blaming ignorance or stupidity
would be a mistake. You have to summon an act of will, a certain energy and
imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump.
Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, describes the susceptibility to propaganda of the atomized
modern masses, “obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their
essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible
aspects.” They seek refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that
bears little relation to reality. Though the U.S. is still a democratic
republic, not a totalitarian regime, and Trump was an all-American demagogue, not
a fascist dictator, his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide
to the world in him. Defeat won’t change that.
Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He
got as far as he did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses
toward elites. In a democracy, who gets to say what is true—the experts or the
people? The historian Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Democracy
and Truth, traces this conflict back to the Enlightenment, when modern
democracy overthrew the authority of kings and priests: “The ideal of the
democratic truth process has been threatened repeatedly ever since the late
eighteenth century by the efforts of one or the other of these epistemic
cohorts, expert or popular, to monopolize it.”
Monopoly of public policy by
experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors,
journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump. His reign
of lies drove educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity,
all the more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve it (the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, election pollsters). The war between
populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to
persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.
Trump’s legacy includes an extremist
Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic
means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism. He leaves
behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example
licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies
can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his
lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however
inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
But we now have the chance, because two events in
Trump’s last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the
truth. The first was the coronavirus. The beginning of the end of Trump’s
presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he
addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the
pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a
fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it
was too personal and frightening, too real. As hundreds of thousands of
Americans died, many of them needlessly, and the administration flailed between
fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of
Americans realized that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed.
The second event came on November 3.
For months Trump had tried frantically to destroy Americans’ trust in the
election—the essence of the democratic system, the one lever of power that
belongs undeniably to the people. His effort consisted of nonstop lies about
the fraudulence of mail-in ballots. But the ballots flooded into election offices,
and people lined up before dawn on the first day of early voting, and some of
them waited 10 hours to vote, and by the end of Election Day, despite the
soaring threat of the virus, more than 150 million Americans had cast
ballots—the highest turnout rate since at least 1900. The defeated president
tried again to soil our faith, by taking away our votes. The election didn’t
end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But
we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald
Trump.
This article appears in the January/February 2021
print edition with the headline “The Legacy of Donald Trump.”
We
want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or
write to letters@theatlantic.com.
GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer
at The Atlantic. He is the author
of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and
the End of the American Century and The Unwinding: An Inner History
of the New America.
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