The answer matters, obviously, to 1.4 billion Catholics. But it bears heavily too on an issue at the heart of the contemporary crisis of democracy: the nature of authority. In 2023 Prevost said, “We must not hide behind an idea of authority that no longer makes sense today.” While serving as head of the Vatican’s commission on the appointment of bishops he remarked, “The bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom.” It seems likely that he also believes the pope is not supposed to be a little emperor sitting in his imperial court. In choosing to elevate him, the 132 other cardinals eligible to vote in the conclave would seem to have had a very particular little emperor in mind: the one in the White House.

The choice of Prevost is a reminder that the Church has not survived for so long without a kind of political genius. Although it is a male gerontocracy, the College of Cardinals has seemed at times to have a sixth sense for the undercurrents of history. Its choice in 1978 of a charismatic Pole, Karol Wojtyła, as Pope John Paul II brilliantly anticipated the fall of the Soviet empire. This time it has made an almost equally bold decision: to create, at a moment of crisis for the US and its place in the world, an alternative model of American global leadership.

The most immediately striking thing about Prevost is that he embodies the hybrid nature of American identity. While Donald Trump has mobilized Nazi rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” Prevost’s blood is Afro-Creole, French, Italian, and Spanish. His maternal grandparents were people of color from New Orleans. He is also a Peruvian citizen who has spent much of his life ministering to the kind of people Trump characterizes as “vermin.” When Vice President J.D. Vance suggested to Fox News in January that Christianity prioritizes love for one’s own family and neighbors over love for strangers and foreigners, an X account apparently belonging to Prevost posted a rebuke: “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”

Before the idea of an American pope became real, Trump had played with the notion that it could be him. He declared on April 29 that his “number one choice” for the succession to Pope Francis would be himself. On May 2, less than a week after he attended Francis’s funeral, Trump posted on Truth Social (and the official White House account reposted on X) an AI-generated image of himself enthroned on a gilded chair, sporting a gold-embroidered miter, and dressed in a white papal cassock with an elaborate pectoral cross. His right hand is raised in a gesture of both blessing and command. Trump was tapping into many centuries of papal portraiture, bringing to mind Annalyn Swan and Mark Stevens’s description of Diego Velázquez’s celebrated Portrait of Innocent X as “an authoritative vision of an authoritarian.” Trump called the post a “little fun,” but as in so much of Trump’s humor, the comedy of the AI image did not conceal its authoritarian intent.

These games were the shadowboxing preparatory to the real fight. Trumpism contains a deep seam of reactionary Catholicism, represented not just by Vance and Steve Bannon but by Trump’s three picks for the Supreme Court, all of whom were raised Catholic. This nexus was hostile to Francis’s version of the faith, which it regarded as weak and woke. Open opposition to Francis at the top of the Church hierarchy was led by the American cardinal Raymond Burke, who was for a time a patron of Bannon’s Dignitatis Humanae Institute. Trump’s presentation of himself as pope was wish fulfillment for those of his Catholic fans who were hoping for a Trump-friendly successor to Francis. (Trump suggested the sycophantic New York cardinal Timothy Dolan as a “very good” option.)

In this light, the choice of Prevost can be seen as somewhat analogous to the recent victories of Mark Carney in Canada and Anthony Albanese in Australia: being the un-Trump candidate is an electoral advantage. Prevost was that candidate, not merely in offering continuity with Francis but in his personality as a quiet, thoughtful, and thoroughly cosmopolitan kind of American. As Leo XIV he will stand against Trump’s demonization of immigrants, attacks on international institutions, and denial of the climate crisis; in November he told a Vatican conference that the “dominion over nature” given to humanity by God should not become “tyrannical.”

There is, however, a more awkward question for Leo and the cardinals who chose him. Can an imperial papacy really present an alternative to an imperial presidency? Or can the Church itself evolve into a kind of dominion that is not tyrannical? Francis clearly believed that it must, and there is every reason to think that Leo understands this imperative. But acting on it will not be easy.

Here an important text is a speech Francis gave to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 2014. He spoke of “growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful.” He was talking, ostensibly, about the European Union itself and more broadly about democratic governments. But he must have been aware that no institution had spent as many centuries aloofly laying down rules as the one he himself governed. His words were almost a definition of the traditional papacy.

Francis was implying a parallel between the way a pope ought to behave and the standards he might be setting for politicians: the Church cannot stand for humility and sensitivity if it remains institutionally arrogant and dictatorial. His successor is surely no less conscious of the contradiction between his historic calling to be a counterweight to tyrannical politics on the one side and, on the other, the structure of exclusive male hierarchy at whose pinnacle he now stands.

Hobbes was not wrong about the imperial heritage of the papacy. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, as Diarmaid MacCulloch notes in his monumental A History of Christianity (2009),

frequently bishops of the Catholic Church were the only form of Latin authority left, since the imperial civil service had collapsed. One suspects that capable and energetic men who would previously have entered imperial service, or who had indeed started out as officials in it, now entered the Church as the main career option available to them.

The tension between the Church’s origins as a community of outsiders and its evolution as the inheritor of the Roman Empire’s bureaucratic systems of command and control remains radically unresolved.

For most of its history the papacy combined the spiritual authority of religious leadership with the raw power of earthly monarchy. Until 1978 and the accession of the short-lived John Paul I, the new pope was crowned with a triple tiara whose layers symbolized his position as (in the modest formulation of the coronation ceremony) “the father of princes and kings, the ruler of the world, the vicar of our Savior Jesus Christ on earth.” By the time this incantation was dropped, the first two of these claims had become patently absurd, but their authoritarian absolutism was—at least in principle—undiminished.

The papacy finally lost its position as a temporal monarchy when the armed forces of a resurgent and unified Italy entered Rome in September 1870. But Pius IX anticipated this loss by doubling down on spiritual imperialism. He decreed “the duty of hierarchical subordination and true obedience” to the “power of the Roman pontiff.” He assumed for the papacy “that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.” These doctrines, once declared, were “irreformable.”

The pope thus became a new kind of emperor, one who rules not over space but over time. Armed with these special powers of infallibility and immutability, he could defy history and social change. Until 1967 “all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors, and professors in philosophical-theological seminaries” had to swear the “Oath Against Modernism” decreed by Pius X in 1910:

I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another.

This language—hierarchy, subordination, obedience, immutability—made the Church a natural ally of authoritarian regimes, especially in the forms they took in Catholic countries. The Vatican made a comfortable deal with Benito Mussolini in the Lateran Pacts of 1929. The Church declared Francisco Franco’s coup against the Spanish Republic a “national crusade” and subsequently helped to prop up his dictatorship. The Church also rallied around Marshal Pétain in Vichy France and António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Many Catholics (individually and collectively) acted heroically to resist fascism and oppose its atrocities, but they had to go against the grain of the institutional Church’s doctrine of submission to one-man rule. The spiritual dictatorship of the pope provided a model for its temporal equivalents—which is why, with the resurgence of fascism worldwide, the conduct of the pope has a resonance far beyond the bounds of his own church.

In principle the imperial Church was dismantled by the Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962. It reimagined authority in the way the secular revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had—as derived from the people. Its great innovation was the redefinition of the Church as the “People of God,” an effective declaration of popular spiritual sovereignty. The 1965 encyclical “Gaudium et Spes” (the title an almost rapturous evocation of Joy and Hope) declared:

The People of God believes that it is led by the Lord’s Spirit, Who fills the earth. Motivated by this faith, it labors to decipher authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose in the happenings, needs and desires in which this People has a part along with other men of our age.

The radicalism of this formulation is twofold. First, there is that simple word “led.” Leadership is implicitly democratized—it is rooted not in the “power of the Roman pontiff” but in the workings of a universal Spirit. And even more profoundly, the meaning of the divine is not clear, absolute, timeless, or uniquely unveiled to the pope. It is a set of mysterious signs that the people must work collectively to decipher. They seek those clues not only in Church doctrine but in their own bodies and minds and in the events unfolding in a history they share with fellow humans of all faiths and none.

This vision, however, was not shared by all participants in Vatican II. Wojtyła, who was elevated to archbishop of Kraków during this time, voted against the final version of the encyclical. One of the leading German theologians at the council, Professor Joseph Ratzinger, expressed (as MacCulloch records) his “private disapproval of what he saw as the facile sunniness of Gaudium et Spes.” In 1978 Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II. After his death in 2005 he was succeeded by Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict XVI. Between them these two counterrevolutionary popes ruled the Church for thirty-five years before Francis’s accession. They reimposed the authoritarian style.

John Paul’s superstar magnetism restored the luster of papal supremacy, and the much duller Benedict was still able to bask in his reflected glory. But their papacies were darkened by an ever-deepening shadow. Absolutism is absolutely corrupt. A culture of submission, obedience, and hierarchy breeds abuse, cover-ups, and impunity. The Vatican protected clergymen who abused children and young people. It operated a worldwide system in which victims were silenced and perpetrators were shielded from criminal sanctions, often moved from parish to parish, or even country to country, to evade the law.

The unraveling of this impunity has had catastrophic consequences for the institutional Church, not least in my own country. I grew up in an Ireland that was characterized not only by its overwhelming Catholic majority but by the ubiquitous visibility of, and deep respect for, its clergy. Yet in 2014 the American Catholic writer Donald Cozzens, addressing his fellow priests who had gathered at Ireland’s once mighty seminary in Maynooth to celebrate the jubilee of their ordinations, was brutally frank:

The respect and trust of past years has been mostly shattered. Good people look at us with a wary eye. We want to say, “You can trust me. I won’t hurt you nor will I hurt your children.” But trust has been broken.

He posed an existential question: “Could you men gathered here at the seminary that formed you possibly be the last priests in Ireland?” The suggestion was not ridiculous: last November the Dublin Catholic archdiocese acknowledged, “No priest was ordained for the archdiocese this year and only two priests have been ordained for the archdiocese since 2020.”

This loss of trust has accelerated the loss of papal power, especially in Europe and North America. Arguably popes now have no more than a marginal influence on the opinions and behavior of the faithful. The patriarchal Church has not been able to prevent Catholic women from claiming their personal and bodily autonomy. Most sexually active Catholics use contraceptives, even though banning them became one of the Church’s signature teachings after the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” was issued in 1968. Most support the use of in vitro fertilization, which is also banned. In the US only about 10 percent of Catholics agree with the Church’s insistence that abortion should be illegal in all cases. In Western Europe and the US, a majority of Catholics support the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples. American Catholics do tend to be less likely to divorce than Protestants, but they also believe that divorced people should be admitted to the sacraments. Conversely, right-wing Catholics feel free to ignore papal teaching on the climate crisis, poverty, and migration. Essentially, in societies where they are free to make choices on these matters, many Catholics like it when the pope agrees with them but are not too bothered if he doesn’t.

What matters most in democracies, therefore, is not the pope’s teaching. It is his mode of leadership. Shorn of its temporal power and its ability to command obedience, the papacy is a display of manners. The pope acts out an idea of what good authority looks like. This is what Francis was presumably chosen to do by his fellow cardinals in 2013. His papacy was revolutionary, not in its content but in its conduct—and the assumption is that Leo has been picked to consolidate that revolution.

Following Francis does not, then, imply an open embrace of doctrinal or organizational reform. Conceptually, Francis returned to the idea of the People of God that was proclaimed in 1965 and then effectively annulled by John Paul and Benedict. But he did little to change conservative doctrine on reproductive rights, divorce, or homosexuality. He made limited progress toward ending the overwhelming dominance of a male and (in principle at least) celibate clergy. He did appoint several women to senior positions in the Roman Curia, though the conclave that followed his death displayed the reality that 133 largely elderly men were still in control of the Church.

The final report of the Synod on Synodality—a worldwide process of consultation with the faithful—was issued last October, and it forms both the last will and testament of Francis’s papacy and the agreed agenda for Leo’s. It acknowledges those who “continued to express the pain of feeling excluded or judged because of their marital status, identity or sexuality” and recognizes that “a desire emerged to expand possibilities for participation and for the exercise of differentiated co-responsibility by all the Baptised, men and women.” But short of allowing women to become priests, the most obvious way to shift the gender balance within the Church would be to revive the ancient Christian practice, which persisted through the Church’s first millennium, of allowing women to be ordained as deacons. The report leaves this demand hanging in the air: “The question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open. This discernment needs to continue.” The evidence suggests that Prevost has little enthusiasm for the idea. In October 2023 he said that “‘clericalizing women’ doesn’t necessarily solve a problem, it might make a new problem.”

Francis’s transformation of the papacy, therefore, was one of style rather than substance. This is not to diminish its importance—with strongman rulers on the rise, the adoption by a pope of a democratic style of leadership counts. His biographer Austen Ivereigh noted the importance of one of Francis’s first acts as pope—his choice of residence: “Francis went to live not in the Apostolic Palace, but in the Casa Santa Marta guesthouse because he didn’t think of himself as Rome’s emperor, but [as] the Church’s pastor-in-chief.”

In this comedy of manners, the importance of style could be quite literal. Francis kept his old black shoes, in contrast to his predecessor Benedict’s handcrafted red ones. He sported a cheap silver-plated pectoral cross and plastic watch and dressed in a plain white cassock. By way of flagrant contrast, his would-be nemesis Cardinal Burke epitomized what Francis mockingly called the “peacock priest.” Burke, as described by Frédéric Martel in his best-selling In the Closet of the Vatican (2019), brings to mind the satiric ecclesiastical fashion show in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972):

He can stroll about in full sail, in his cappa magna, in an unthinkably long robe, in a forest of white lace or dressed in a long coat shaped like a dressing gown, while at the same time, in the course of an interview, denouncing in the name of tradition a “Church that has become too feminized.”

Francis understood the importance of these signifiers to the opponents of change. “They criticize me,” he said in 2017, “first, because I don’t speak like a pope, and second, because I don’t act like a king.” By declining to act the emperor, he took the enormous risk of demystifying an office that after all rests on its claim of unique personal access to the divine mystery. In a famous passage on the British royal family, the Victorian writer Walter Bagehot warned, “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced…. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Francis let in the daylight upon the magic of the papacy, and it seems clear that Leo has no intention of closing those curtains again.

For many Catholics this deflation of the papal persona has been a joy. The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who was a fervent Catholic in her youth in Nigeria, wrote an essay for The Atlantic capturing the way Francis allowed those who had been alienated by the Church’s arrogance to reconnect with it. She noted that as a young woman she had “recoiled at how quick the Church was to ostracize and humiliate, how the threat of punishment always hovered, like a hard fist, ready to strike.” But she also warmed to Francis, a pope who

seems to value the person as much as the institution. He seems to acknowledge that human beings are flawed. He seems able to say that most un-Catholic of things: “I don’t know.” “I don’t know” suggests flexibility, room for knowing and growing and changing.

Not long after his election, in an impromptu press conference on a plane from Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Francis asked a startling rhetorical question: “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Those last five words must surely rank among the least imperious ever spoken by a pope. Francis also did another remarkably unpapal thing: he admitted that he was wrong. His clumsy and defensive handling of a clerical sexual abuse scandal in Chile was rightly condemned, yet he confessed his own sins not to God (though he presumably did that as well) but to the victims. In meeting each of them individually, he admitted, “I was part of the problem! I caused this. I am very sorry, and I ask your forgiveness.”

Is there any way back from a pope who tries not to judge and who acknowledges that he has been part of the problem? The election of Prevost suggests that the Church hierarchy knows that there is not. The new pope’s manner may not be as emphatically unpretentious as Francis’s, but he is surely not seeking a return to the imperial style. In his first speech from the balcony of St. Peter’s he declared, “I am a son of Saint Augustine, an Augustinian. He said, ‘With you I am a Christian, for you a bishop.’” The message was clear: he is first and foremost a fellow member of the People of God, and in his office his duty is to serve rather than to command. In a more subtle signifier, Leo said his first Mass in the Sistine Chapel wearing black shoes like Francis, not the red ones that adorned the feet of the imperial popes. He is not going to be a peacock priest.

He may, more seriously, find himself asking the victims of clerical sexual abuse for forgiveness, just as Francis did. The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests alleges that as the bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, “Prevost failed to open an investigation [and] sent inadequate information to Rome” regarding allegations of misconduct by two priests in his diocese. Those allegations will acquire much greater prominence now that the bishop is the pope. He may have to repeat Francis’s acts of personal contrition. Humility, in that case, must not be merely preached but painfully practiced. And it must be institutionalized: the ultimate apology to the victims of clerical abuse would be the creation of a Church in which it would be impossible for perpetrators to enjoy impunity—which is to say, a Church in which priesthood is no longer a function of patriarchal power.

Leo will find that walking in Francis’s shoes is one thing, but knowing the destination of the journey is quite another. Francis raised the difficult question—not just for the Church but for the world—of how to act authoritatively in a contemporary culture where good authority is assailed by blowhard despotism on the one side and on the other by the fragmentation of the media that used to project it. Alongside his religious faith, Francis placed his faith in the possibility of a form of leadership that is stripped of power, magic, and enforced obedience and that relies instead on the expression of shared respect and mutual love. But he was unable—and perhaps unwilling—to give that faith an adequate institutional form, one that truly recognizes the equality of the female half of humanity and that does not in reality continue to judge LGBTQ+ people harshly.

Leo will be a good pope if he succeeds, in his own quieter and more cerebral way, in sustaining the decency, compassion, and openness of his predecessor. He will be a great one if he manages to translate that benign comportment into the kind of change that does not ultimately depend on the personality of a pope. Such change is structural and permanent: the complete transformation of a monarchical male dictatorship into a living embodiment of the spirit of democracy. Only when that is accomplished will the ghost of empire have been laid to rest at last.

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My grandfather loved the company and knew every make and model of car built from Armco steel. Even after most American car companies transitioned away from steel-bodied cars, Papaw would stop at used-car dealerships whenever he saw an old Ford or Chevy. “Armco made this steel,” he’d tell me. It was one of the few times that he ever betrayed a sense of genuine pride.

Yet the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy, coming to consciousness toward the end of the twentieth century, knows very well that the world of Papaw’s pride is gone. Indeed, Papaw himself knows it. He has no interest in seeing his grandson follow him into the steel plant:

“Your generation will make its living with their minds, not their hands,” he once told me. The only acceptable career at Armco was as an engineer, not as a laborer in the weld shop. A lot of other Middletown parents and grandparents must have felt similarly: To them, the American Dream required forward momentum. Manual labor was honorable work, but it was their generation’s work—we had to do something different. To move up was to move on.

What both Vance and his grandfather understood back then was the ruthlessly dynamic nature of capitalism. Vance was born into Ronald Reagan’s America, when neoliberalism—the belief that market forces must be liberated from regulation, high taxes, overactive government, and any real sense of social obligation—was reshaping the “commonsense” understanding of the economy and society. In the 1980s this ideology was pulling off the great trick of credibly presenting itself as a set not of ideas or value judgments but of undeniable facts that everyone had to accept. As Gary Gerstle writes in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), “A key attribute of a political order is the ability of its ideologically dominant party to bend the opposition party to its will.” Neoliberalism became a political order in exactly that sense. Both Republicans and Democrats effectively told the industrial working class that its life of manual labor was over. Market forces had to be obeyed, and what they demanded was precisely what Papaw told J.D.: America had to do something different.

Papaw’s wisdom is most potently dramatized in a pivotal scene in the 1998 movie Primary Colors. The film, based on Joe Klein’s roman à clef, is a thinly disguised account of Bill Clinton’s dramatic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992. John Travolta’s Jack Stanton is an obvious proxy for Clinton in his Comeback Kid phase, when he overcame lurid revelations about his sexual promiscuity to open a path to the presidency.

The critical moment in the movie comes when the embattled Stanton addresses a meeting of workers in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It is based on a speech Clinton gave in the city in February 1992, but in the movie the location is the cavernous shop floor of a factory that has already closed. As Travolta speaks, the camera cuts away frequently to men in hard hats and women with hard faces, most of them white—anxious representatives of the declining American working class. The candidate lays on his good old boy southern charm. But then he becomes deeply serious:

I’m gonna do something really outrageous. I’m gonna tell the truth…. No politician can reopen this factory or bring back the shipyard jobs or make your union strong again. No politician can make it be the way it used to be, because we’re living in a new world now, a world without economic borders…. And in that world muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap—and that is not here. So if you wanna compete, you’re gonna have to exercise a different set of muscles—the one between your ears.

The workers are really listening to him now, precisely because he’s not just another politician telling them what he thinks they want to hear. He delivers both a warning and a promise:

Now this whole country’s gonna have to go back to school…. And I will make you this deal: I will work hard for you. I will wake up every morning thinking about you. I will fight and sweat and bleed to get the money to make education a lifetime thing in this country, to give you the support you need to move up. But you have got to do the heavy lifting your own selves.

The proletarians cheer Stanton to the very rafters of their hollowed-out industrial space.

The idea of “moving up” echoes from Primary Colors to Hillbilly Elegy. It is the program for those who toiled in Portsmouth’s shipyard and Middletown’s steelworks. But as Vance voices the message through Papaw, in order to move up, these communities must first move on. Moving on means getting over it—“it” being history, identity, belonging. It means swallowing their pride. What industrial workers have to get over is not just the sense of self-esteem that comes from looking at a great ship or a handsome car and knowing that you had a hand in making it. It is also faith in America’s innate superiority, both industrial and military, over the rest of the world.

In 1989—around the time that Donald Trump was railing against Japan for “taking advantage of the United States”—Middletown’s steel company was partially acquired by the Japanese industrial conglomerate Kawasaki and would soon be renamed Armco Kawasaki. As Vance records in Hillbilly Elegy, “Kawasaki was a Japanese company, and in a town full of World War II vets and their families, you’d have thought that General Tojo himself had decided to set up shop in southwest Ohio when the merger was announced.” In order to survive in the America Reagan had made, the workers of Middletown had to forget Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

It is striking that 1989 was also the year that Francis Fukuyama published, in the neoconservative journal The National Interest, one of the defining political essays of the period, entitled “The End of History?” He postulated:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

The end of history was not an abstract academic concept. It was happening in Middletown. And the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy is OK with it. He dismisses the anti-Japanese sentiment in the city as “mostly a bunch of noise.” He and Papaw are equally realistic about the necessity of adapting to the relentless “forward momentum” of capital:

The Kawasaki merger represented an inconvenient truth: Manufacturing in America was a tough business in the post-globalization world. If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance, and Middletown’s flagship company probably would not have survived without it.

In Vance’s telling the industrial working class realizes that economic nationalism is a temptation it must resist. Globalization is an established fact. If the money and the technology are coming from a country that many of Middletown’s older residents fought a war against, such is life. Papaw, who used to threaten to disown his children if they bought a Japanese car, shrugs and says, “The Japanese are our friends now.” He presumably ignores the “bunch of noise” that came from the TV, where Trump, contemplating a run for the presidency in 1988, told Oprah Winfrey that the Japanese “think the United States is made up of a bunch of fools. They’re laughing at us.”

Here are not just two different stories but two conflicting ways of understanding American capitalism, rooted in sharply divergent conceptions of history. In the Vance version, time moves in a straight line: both the glory days of all-American steel and the bitter conflict with Japan are over. Move up and move on—if the Japanese know how to run industries more profitably, it is best to embrace their investment and learn from their know-how. Wallowing in a warm bath of past American greatness is a luxury neither workers nor bosses can afford.

In the Trump version, history is circular. The default condition of American capitalism is global superiority—if it has been lost, it can be restored by sheer political will. As the historian Jennifer M. Miller summarizes Trump’s position in an illuminating essay on his obsession with Japan:

If Japanese businesses were booming while American ones were declining, this was not because they designed superior products or because their workers had better education and training. The fault lay squarely with incompetent leadership; Japan’s success only could come from gaming the system. Rather than long-term investments in American education or a focus on growing economic inequality, the United States needed assertive leaders, who could confront Japan, return it to its “natural” place as the junior economic partner, and thus lead the United States to an economic revival.²

Neither of these stories has much to say about inequality, exploitation, or the rapacity that drives environmental destruction and climate breakdown. The Vance of 2016 could write affectingly about the symptoms of these diseases—poverty, drug dependency, alienation—but was no more interested than Trump was in their structural economic causes. Neither man presented any real critique of the Reaganite neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. Yet their visions of the nature of American capitalism itself were radically distinct.

Vance’s was orthodox conservatism: market forces are inexorable, and the wise course is to adapt to them as best one can. The burden of this adaptation must be borne by workers themselves. Just as Stanton/Clinton tells the proletarians that they must do the heavy lifting, Vance concludes in Hillbilly Elegy that the denizens of the Appalachian Rust Belt need to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.” Government is impotent and essentially irrelevant: “No politician can make it be the way it used to be.”

For Trump, on the other hand, everything was political. The Rust Belt could be resurrected, and the time could return when men like Papaw might look through the skin of a Ford or a Chevy and see the solid skeleton of Middletown steel inside—but only if America had a leader mighty enough to bring the Japanese and all the other foreigners to heel. What was not yet expressly articulated in this early Trump messaging was that while no democratic politician could return things to the way they used to be, an uninhibited strongman could do so by forcing foreigners to obey the natural law of American supremacy.

There was no doubt about which of these ways of thinking appealed most to the very rich—and it was not Trump’s. Depoliticizing economics in the way the Clinton character does in Primary Colors and Vance does in Hillbilly Elegy was a recipe for the accumulation of vast wealth by a tiny minority of Americans. If government is powerless to control the operation of market forces, its real job is to get out of their way. Most of the fruits of the new economy would naturally appear at the top of the tree.

Adjusted for inflation, the wealth held by families in the United States almost quadrupled between 1989 and 2022, but the share of it held by the bottom half of the population remained static at just 6 percent. Last year alone the nineteen richest households added $1 trillion to their accumulated assets, and the top 0.00001 percent now control a larger share of America’s wealth than ever before. The story Vance told in 2016 was a very good one for the richest Americans: it suited their purposes that the Middletown folk should understand capitalism as essentially impersonal and apolitical and accept that the best they could do was to “make things better” for themselves without blaming either government or “faceless companies” for their struggles.

Now, however, the vice-president has ditched, along with most of his other political positions, his moral tale of realistic adaptation to the relentless change inherent in capitalism. It has been replaced by the president’s fable of a politically driven restoration of the past. Trump’s economic agenda is doubly recursive: it repeats almost exactly his messaging from the 1980s, which in turn imagines a recovery of the heroic age of American industrial might. The end of history has ended. Trump has built an imaginary time machine in which “the way it used to be” is also the way it must and will be. And in this radical revision of the ideology of American capitalism, Fukuyama’s “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” is not merely obsolete; it must be confronted. Universalism, liberalism, and democracy are the enemies of American exceptionalism, of national greatness, and above all of the triumph of the will that must be embodied in the leader who declares, “I alone can fix it.”

As it happens, this replacement of one hegemonic idea with another is now playing out in a particularly ironic way in Middletown itself. In Hillbilly Elegy the steel plant is saved because Kawasaki comes in to “retool” its machinery. But more recently another kind of retooling was envisaged. Cleveland-Cliffs, the company that owns the plant now, declares on its website an intention to shift “away from manufacturing commodity steel in favor of higher-margin, specialty products.” To this end the Biden administration had allotted a $500 million grant to help the Middletown plant upgrade its aging blast furnaces, powered by coal, to ones fueled by hydrogen and electricity. But according to CNN the Trump–Vance administration—under the influence of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—intends to ax that grant.

This is OK because adaptation to economic change is out and political will is in. The future does not have to be planned for or funded because the past is returning. The Middletown plant does not need to shift to the production of high-value sustainable steel because Trump will use tariffs to ensure that it does not have to compete with cutting-edge global companies. King Coal will reign again, and the good old dirty jobs will be filled by men doing men’s work, all thanks to the great leader who made the foreigners bend the knee.

Leaving aside for the moment the viability of this new way of imagining American capitalism, we must ask why most of the oligarchy thought, when it swung behind Trump’s bid for reelection in 2024, that it could do without the old ideological model. The myth of a depoliticized and impersonal economy, in which essentially the same assumptions would apply whether the president was a Clinton or a Bush, served the superrich extremely well. Not only was wealth redistributed upward, but new forms of lucrative exploitation—the appropriation on a staggering scale of personal data for private profit—were allowed to flourish virtually unimpeded. Information technology, too, was construed as an unstoppable force to which everyone would have to adapt.

The problem for the very rich, however, is that as a political project neoliberalism hit the buffers in 2008. The great banking collapse exposed the idea that market forces operate outside politics as a convenient and no longer credible fiction. It became unavoidably obvious that the system of finance capitalism that replaced the old industrial complex is entirely dependent on public institutions. The moral basis for neoliberalism’s radically unequal distribution of the spoils of the new globalized economy had been a sense of rough justice: those who took the risks deserved the rewards. Yet it turned out that these were not the rules after all—the risks were socialized, but the rewards were privatized. For the rich, the bet had always been “heads I win, tails you lose.”

It also became obvious that “moving up,” the working class’s recompense for “moving on,” was not so easy. Both Vance’s Papaw and Clinton/Stanton had pledged that muscle jobs would be replaced by brain jobs. This was not just a political proposition; it was what most manual workers wanted for their children. But for far too many families it was a false promise. Democratic and Republican administrations did invest in training schemes, and many workers were indeed enabled to transition to new kinds of work. Overall, though, the social mobility that was supposed to be boosted in fact diminished. Ninety percent of the children of the New Deal order—those born in 1940—went on to earn more than their parents did. But the children of the neoliberal order—those born in 1980—had a fifty-fifty chance of earning less than their parents. Instead of receiving the lifelong reeducation that working families were promised, many of them were excluded by ever-rising college fees or cheated by scams like Trump University.

Yet as Gary Gerstle puts it, “A reigning political order does not release its grip easily…. Its decline is marked by contradiction, contestation, and even chaos.” During Trump’s first term those forces were at play almost as much within the regime as in American society as a whole. The old ideological order was still represented by figures like Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who came from one of the great temples of neoliberal globalization, Goldman Sachs. Tax cuts for the rich and deregulation for businesses sustained a Reaganite economic agenda. But that old order could not fully impose itself—Cohn resigned in March 2018 when Trump moved to impose tariffs on foreign steel. Neither, however, could Trump himself, with his freedom of action limited by the Covid-19 pandemic, quite follow his own impulses. In the contest of economic ideologies, the result of Trump’s first term was inconclusive.

Where Trump had nonetheless succeeded, though, was in creating a mass base for an idea of capitalism that is entirely at odds with the neoliberal imagination. Against the insistence that no politician could reopen a Rust Belt factory, he established the notion that this was true only of the weak and foolish leaders that democracy had foisted on the American people. And against the image of inhuman market forces, anonymous as the weather, he made capitalism personal again.

Under neoliberalism, industrial workers had been told they must learn not to take capitalism personally. Successful adaptation required self-suppression. One must not allow oneself to feel humiliated when the vanquished of World War II turn up as the co-owners of the steel plant. One must relinquish the pride of having one’s own labor infused in powerful and beautiful machines. One must forget the generations of struggle embodied in the local histories of labor unions. One must, indeed, disremember the whole New Deal order and its transformative benefits for working people, their families, and their communities. Market forces cannot accommodate those emotions. This is tough, but it’s nothing personal.

Trump, however, personifies American capitalism. He performed in fourteen seasons of The Apprentice as a figure deeply embedded in its mindset—the magnate, the mogul, the tycoon, the titan of commerce. His act was, of course, more impersonation than personification. But this made it all the more effective: for mass consumption, an invented and exaggerated character sends a clearer signal than a real person.

No less importantly, Trump allows his fans to take possession (albeit in phony forms) of all the feelings that they were not supposed to express or indulge while their world was being taken from them. He presses hard on the raw nerve that Vance was so careful to avoid in Hillbilly Elegy: exploitation. In the neoliberal order, it was the vice that dared not speak its name. In his economic discourse, Trump speaks no other language.

But he also displaces exploitation from economic reality—instead of labor being taken advantage of by capital, America as a whole is continually abused and despoiled by foreign countries that laugh at the weakness of its leaders. Instead of moving on, as the steelworkers of Middletown had to do when they accepted their former Japanese enemies as saviors, there can be endless return to grievance, humiliation, and outrage. In place of forced amnesia, Trump offers a seductive dream time in which American history is sanitized into nostalgia. (The dark sides of the pre-Reagan industrial past are either suppressed—in the case of racism—or, in the case of its organized sexism, effectively celebrated as a golden age of manliness.)

For the superrich, this personalization of capitalism has two superficial upsides. One is that it seems to provide some kind of answer to the knotty question of what comes after the fall of the neoliberal order. The working class can be given the political agency it was previously denied; its pent-up emotions are unleashed and turned against all those who insist on a regulated and redistributive form of capitalism. The other is that it appears much easier to deal with political power when the complexity of democracy is reduced to a single individual.

These delusions are possible only because so many of the rich believe their own propaganda. As Gerstle puts it, “Cultivating ‘entrepreneurs’ of the self has long been a cardinal feature of the neoliberal order, and it shows no sign of waning” in the continuing half-life of that era. The tech oligarchs who facilitated Trump’s second coming know very well that he is a fake tycoon. But they can see and admire his astounding abilities as an entrepreneur of the self. He is not just an exploiter of social media technologies—he is one of the great exemplars of their governing ethic of endless self-invention.

The built-in flaw of this cult of the self-made man is that it leads those who have created vast fortunes to believe that they did it all themselves. They are subject to the same amnesia that neoliberalism demanded of the working class. They lose touch with all the things that made liberal democracy so essential to the development of capitalism: the rule of law; the relative stability that comes from allowing different sections of society to feel they have a share of power; public investment in education, health care, and science; the creation and maintenance of physical and digital infrastructures; predictable government informed by an expert bureaucracy. They build their own rockets and go into orbit far above the social and political conditions that have made their wealth possible.

In ditching democracy for autocracy, they also underestimated the autocrat. If you’ve created a trillion-dollar business, you might naturally think of Trump the serial bankrupt as merely a cartoon capitalist. You can recognize, and bow down to, Trump’s political genius while imagining that it is merely an exercise in branding, a big Trump sign placed over the door of a tower that’s actually owned by you and your confreres. Since everything else about Trump is an act, you can assume that he doesn’t really believe that he alone can will into existence a radically reshaped American capitalism. Surely he does not imagine that a single crude weapon—a blunderbuss of tariffs on all imports—will undo the effects of decades of economic globalization?

But he does. He has been absolutely consistent over nearly five decades in his conviction that American capitalism is an ideal system that will work perfectly once there is a leader strong enough to stop foreigners from rigging it. That leader, of course, is his indispensable self. America’s destiny will unfold from his instincts and impulses, so long as they are unchecked by democratic processes or the petty rationalism of evidence-based decision-making.

If capitalism is to be made personal, it would be a good idea to begin by understanding the person who is going to embody it. There is a reason Western capitalism ditched absolute monarchy: personal rule is rule by whim, prejudice, grudge, and tantrum. There are always opportunists who make money from chaos, and they will batten on the spoils of Trump’s bedlam. But capitalism as a system abhors uncertainty. Its beneficiaries are now ruefully remembering, far too late, that science, intellectual freedom, international cooperation, and social stability create wealth—and that giving untrammeled power to an autocrat bent on obliterating all of those things is a very efficient way to squander it.

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Starlinks for Ukraine are paid for by the Polish Digitization Ministry at the cost of about $50 million per year. The ethics of threatening the victim of aggression apart, if SpaceX proves to be an unreliable provider we will be forced to look for other suppliers.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio weighed in to admonish Sikorski: “Say thank you because without Starlink Ukraine would have lost this war long ago and Russians would be on the border with Poland right now.” (He is presumably unaware that Poland already shares a border with Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave.) Musk posted his own reply to Sikorski: “Be quiet, small man.”

Such boorishness had by then ceased to be shocking. Imitation is the tawdriest form of flattery: Donald Trump’s courtiers signal their devotion by inflicting his mode of puerile bullying on allied governments. Rubio’s “Say thank you” was an obvious attempt to curry favor with Trump by emulating Vice President J.D. Vance’s haranguing of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28: “Have you said thank you once?” Musk’s “small man” mimicked Trump’s familiar mode of insult—once aimed at “Little Marco” himself. The infantilization of America’s domestic politics has spread to its international relations. In Trump’s boys’ club, disdain for Europe is an important signifier of belonging: as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth assured Vance in a Signal message of March 14, inadvertently leaked to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

What was nonetheless remarkable in this instance was the target. Poland is arguably the most pro-American foreign country on earth. In a Pew survey conducted in thirty-four countries across six continents last year, 86 percent of Poles said they held a favorable view of the US—higher than anywhere else, including Israel, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Trump’s demand that European members of NATO should spend more on defense has already been met by Poland—its military expenditure as a proportion of GDP is now more than twice as high as NATO’s official target of 2 percent and very close to the 5 percent that Trump proposed in January. Much of that outlay is on American arms and missile defense systems. In 2022 and 2023 Poland signed deals to buy more than $6 billion worth of Abrams tanks, and it has become the first European country to deploy them.

This love of America has deep roots in large-scale Polish immigration to the United States, in Woodrow Wilson’s support for the renaissance of an independent Polish state at the end of World War I, and in Ronald Reagan’s backing of the dissident Solidarity movement in the 1980s. The Polish sense of obligation helps explain the country’s steadfast political and military participation even in this century’s greatest American folly, George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. Though most Americans have probably forgotten this, after the fall of Saddam Hussein one of the four occupation zones into which Iraq was divided was under Polish control. Among other motives, this was Poland’s way of reciprocating a century of American friendship.

In Trump’s first term, it was he who was saying thank you to Poland. In July 2017 Trump addressed a large and audibly adoring crowd in Warsaw’s Krasiński Square:

We salute the Polish people for being one of the NATO countries that has actually achieved the benchmark for investment in our common defense. Thank you. Thank you, Poland. I must tell you, the example you set is truly magnificent, and we applaud Poland. Thank you.

Trump also assured the crowd that their country was at the heart of a transatlantic alliance for which he seemed to have boundless enthusiasm:

A strong Poland is a blessing to the nations of Europe, and they know that. A strong Europe is a blessing to the West and to the world. One hundred years after the entry of American forces into World War I, the transatlantic bond between the United States and Europe is as strong as ever and maybe, in many ways, even stronger.

How did we get from there to here? How did Trump’s fulsome praise for Poland as the best-behaved child in the European family transform into his sidekicks’ open contempt? How did Trump himself get from desire for “a strong Europe,” identification with “the West,” and commitment to “the transatlantic bond” to a historic sundering of that bond? Trump has shocked America’s European partners by betraying Ukraine and openly siding with Russia. There has been, as Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, put it on March 7, a “profound change of American geopolitics,” and Europeans are having to come to terms with what it means for themselves and the world.

In trying to understand Trump, mere ignorance must always be given its due. His sense of grievance about NATO and the European Union is at once deep and vague. He thinks, as he told the London Times in January 2017, that the EU is just a German front: “You look at the European Union and it’s Germany. Basically a vehicle for Germany.” He seems to believe that NATO and the EU are effectively the same organization. John Bolton, who served as his national security adviser in 2018 and 2019, recalls in The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir:

Trump criticized Jean Claude Juncker [then president of the European Commission] as a vicious man who hated the United States desperately. Juncker, said Trump, sets the NATO budget, although he did not describe how that was accomplished.

More startlingly, Trump seems to confuse the percentage of GDP that NATO members spend on their own defense with what he persistently calls their “contributions” to NATO. Bolton recalls Trump threatening that the US would lower its “contributions” to the same level as Germany’s. He was referring to Germany’s failure to live up to its commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense. But, as Bolton puzzled, this commitment

is not about “contributions” to NATO, but about aggregate defense spending. Whether Trump ever understood this, and simply misused the word “contribution,” I could never tell. But saying he would reduce the US “contribution” to Germany’s level implied the US would drop its defense expenditures from over 4 percent of GDP by some 75 percent, which I don’t think he meant.

Yet the haziness of Trump’s knowledge of Europe and of the transatlantic alliance offers a false comfort—if Trump doesn’t really know what he’s doing, he may just as easily stumble back into the arms of “the West.” While Trump’s grasp on reality may be unsteady, he has fixed ideas and unchanging instincts. It is those obsessions and impulses that are now reshaping relations between Europe and the US more dramatically than at any time since the end of World War II.

It should be acknowledged that the underlying tensions in those relations long predate Trump’s political ascendancy. While the cold war endured, Europe remained the primary locus of America’s confrontation with the Soviet Union, and US power provided Europe’s bulwark against a Soviet invasion. Paradoxically, however, the end of the cold war, which might have been expected to weaken US engagement with European security, actually deepened it. NATO has gradually doubled its membership from sixteen countries in 1990 to thirty-two now. The US thus accumulated commitments in principle to go to war with anyone who attacked Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, Albania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Montenegro, even North Macedonia.

There is an underlying contradiction here: the threat receded, but American deterrence expanded. One might go so far as to say that NATO grew precisely because the threat it was intended to counter had apparently vanished—the US could make promises of protection to all and sundry because those assurances seemed increasingly abstract. Would Americans have committed themselves to defend North Macedonia if they believed there was the remotest possibility of its actually being invaded? A broad seam of fiction runs beneath the surface of this landscape. Europeans were, for the most part, happy to keep it buried and hope for the best. They were living, quite literally, with a false sense of security.

Equally, everyone in Europe knew that the US could go rogue. It did so in 2003 when it illegally invaded Iraq. The neoconservatives who dominated the Bush administration openly repudiated the idea that the US should be bound by international laws and institutions. Fundamental to this view is the belief, articulated most clearly by Robert Kagan in a seminal 2002 essay called “Power and Weakness,” that only puny nations have to subscribe to multilateral processes or norms. The Europeans love those organizations and conventions because they are weak. The US, as an exceptionally powerful force, has no need of them. This creed is entirely ahistorical—after victories in World Wars I and II and then again in the cold war, the extremely powerful US was actively involved in the creation of much of the nexus of global governance. But the intellectual and emotional grip of that idea is strong—not even Democratic presidents have sought, for example, to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Neoconservatives embraced the idea of American global hegemony, even of America as an empire, but they tempered it with one crucial qualification: as Kagan and William Kristol put it in Foreign Affairs in 1996, “It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.” This claim is innately absurd—the old European empires, particularly the British and the French, also presented themselves as moral missionaries rather than predatory conquerors. But even on its own terms, the claim depends entirely on the goodwill and decency of American presidents. It should not have taken Trump to disabuse Europeans of the notion that those presidents would always be essentially benevolent. But he has ripped away this cloak of morality. That fiction, too, has been exposed for what it is.

In these respects, Trump can be said to have forced Europeans into a belated confrontation with reality. In 2018, when Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal that the US and the EU had jointly made with Iran, Tusk, who was then president of the EU’s council, tweeted, “Looking at latest decisions of @realDonaldTrump someone could even think: with friends like that who needs enemies. But frankly, EU should be grateful. Thanks to him we got rid of all illusions.” Yet some illusions die hard, and the arrival in the Oval Office of the old Atlanticist Joe Biden resuscitated the fantasy of the ever-stronger “transatlantic bond.”

If Trump did no more than walk away—as he often threatened to do in his first term—from America’s commitments to Europe, he could even claim to have delivered a salutary dose of shock treatment. But he is not walking away from Europe; he is trampling all over it. His regime has not lost interest in Europe; it has developed a malevolent interest in destroying the EU.

Trump’s antipathy toward Europe’s institutions is not just one of his whims. It is intertwined with another part of his mentality: distorted ideas of masculinity. At least since 2003 and the American right’s furious reaction to French and German criticism of the invasion of Iraq, antagonism toward Europe has been shaped by a highly sexualized binary opposition of American masculine potency to European feminine feebleness. Kagan, in “Power and Weakness,” wrote that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”—echoing the title of John Gray’s best-selling book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. In 2003 in these pages, Timothy Garton Ash noted a reliance by American anti-Europeans on similar stereotypes:

The American is a virile, heterosexual male; the European is female, impotent, or castrated. Militarily, Europeans can’t get it up. (After all, they have fewer than twenty “heavy lift” transport planes, compared with the United States’ more than two hundred.)… The word “eunuchs” is, I discovered, used in the form “EU-nuchs.”^*

It should be no surprise that Trump, Musk, and Vance view Europe through this same lens, as emasculated and therefore easily bullied.

Yet as is the way of fragile hypermasculinity, there is also the ultimate fear: How humiliating is it to be screwed by those whom you are destined to screw? Europeans were shocked in late February when Trump declared that “the European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it.” He was merely repeating what he has said before. In 2020 Bob Woodward reported in his book Rage on a conversation with Trump: “The president brought up the European Union, which he felt had also been ‘ripping us off for years’ and been ‘formed to screw the United States.’”

In this darkly masochistic fantasy, the EU is no less threatening than China. Bolton recalls that, in a meeting with German chancellor Angela Merkel, “Trump also used a line I later heard countless times, that ‘the EU is worse than China except smaller,’ adding that the EU was set up to take advantage of the US.” In an interview on Fox News in July 2018, Trump said something similar. Maria Bartiromo asked him, “Would it be better to actually have our allies together to go against China instead of pushing back on our allies?” Trump replied, “Excuse me—the European Union is possibly as bad as China, just smaller. OK? It’s terrible what they do to us.” Thus swaggering virility morphs into a Victorian melodrama of feminine vulnerability—America is the naif taken advantage of by a predatory EU that has had its wicked way with her.

This anxiety goes so deep that when Trump has to list America’s enemies, it is the EU that first comes to mind. In 2018, before traveling to an infamously sycophantic summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump was asked by CBS News to name his “biggest foe globally right now.” “Well,” he said, “I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.” As so often with Trump, it is hard to distinguish petty personal grievances from epoch-making political decisions. In the 2017 interview with the London Times, he claimed that the EU had prevented him from developing his golf course in Ireland:

I own a big property in Ireland, magnificent property called Doonbeg, what happened is I went for an approval to do this massive, beautiful expansion…but I learnt a lot because I got the approvals very quickly from Ireland and then Ireland and my people went to the EU to get the approval—it was going to take years—that was a very bad thing for Ireland….

I found it to be a very unpleasant experience.

This isn’t what happened, but in Trump’s mind there is little distinction between real and perceived slights. And this imaginary unpleasantness still weighs on him—in a press conference with the Irish taoiseach, Micheál Martin, in the White House on March 12, he spent two minutes repeating his tale of woe about the EU and Doonbeg.

Politically, Trump’s hostility toward the EU first manifested in his enthusiastic support for Brexit. During his 2016 campaign he was anxious to identify himself personally with Britain’s decision to leave the EU. “Many people,” he tweeted just after the British referendum of June 23 that year, “are equating BREXIT, and what is going on in Great Britain, with what is happening in the US. People want their country back!” In August he doubled down: “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT!” At that time right-wingers in both Europe and the US hoped that Brexit was a harbinger of the collapse of the EU itself. Trump expressed this in the Times interview: “I think people want, people want their own identity, so if you ask me, others, I believe others will leave.”

In Trump’s first term his belief that the EU is a “foe” on a par with China (and far below Russia) bubbled up from time to time but largely remained latent. It could even—as in his Warsaw speech—be completely buried under Atlanticist boilerplate. But with Trump, nothing goes away. In his second term, his anti-Europeanism is not merely free from restraint by remnants of the old military and foreign policy establishments—it is egged on by those around him.

To answer the question of what happened to turn Trump’s lavish praise for Poland in 2017 into his henchmen’s supercilious sneering of 2025: three things have changed. They are Trump’s impeachment in 2019 over his attempted shakedown of Zelensky (as well as the Mueller report earlier that year into Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election); a much more aggressive desire to interfere in European domestic politics in support of far-right and neofascist parties; and Trump’s new alliance with Big Tech.

Trump’s admiration for Putin may be of long standing, but by his own account he now sees the Russian president as a brother-in-arms with whom he fought side by side against common enemies. “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” he said on February 28. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, ever hear of that deal?” On the principle that my friend’s enemy is my enemy too, Poland (for obvious reasons one of the European countries most fearful of Russia) is cherished no longer. Ironically, the same military buildup that made Poland a darling for Trump in 2017 now makes it an unwelcome obstacle to Putin’s revived imperialism.

Secondly, Poland made the mistake of ditching a hard-right Catholic nationalist government (which was in office during Trump’s visit in 2017) for Tusk’s centrist coalition. The new Trump administration, far from disengaging from Europe, is much more interested in reshaping it in its own image. Musk and Vance are openly interfering in European democracies to support far-right nationalist parties and to undermine the EU from within. In a speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 14, Vance acted out a pretend slip of the tongue: “I look to Brussels, where EU commiss—commissars…” This flip from “commissioners” to “commissars” gave oily utterance to a message that cannot yet be fully articulated: the transfer of American enmity from Russia to the present equivalent of the Communist menace—the EU. Somewhat more subtly, Vance quoted Pope John Paul II: “Do not be afraid.” The Polish pope used this phrase at his inauguration in 1978, and it was understood at the time to be a challenge to Soviet hegemony over his homeland. Vance was again twisting words to substitute one tyrannical regime for another: the EU as the new Soviet Union.

Trump and his allies have clearly decided that the best way to destroy this new enemy is to subvert it by throwing America’s weight behind far-right movements within its member states. On the day of his speech in Munich, and just nine days before Germany’s federal election, Vance held a meeting at his hotel with Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, whose very name references a Nazi slogan (“Alles für Deutschland”). Meanwhile he refused to meet with Germany’s elected chancellor, Olaf Scholz. In his speech he called for an end to the so-called firewall, the refusal of Germany’s democratic parties to make deals with the AfD: “There’s no room for firewalls.” The instruction was clear: not only should Germans “not be afraid” to vote for the AfD, but the far right should be invited into government after the election.

This open subversion of the EU is closely related to the third big change: Trump’s partnership with the American tech and social media giants. Much of Vance’s speech in Munich was made up of lies about and wild exaggerations of European attempts to protect democracy and social freedoms from disinformation and abuse. In another world, his claims would be risible: that Scotland has threatened to prosecute people for “even private prayer within their own homes,” that the EU supported the annulling of elections in Romania and might do the same in Germany, that the EU intends to shut down social media “the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be, quote, ‘hateful content,’” and that German police “have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online.” None of these assertions is remotely true, but they all have a political point: the EU is a tyranny because it wants to impose some regulation on America’s social media companies. The commercial interest of those companies in being allowed to disseminate toxic material dovetails perfectly with the Trump administration’s interest in supporting the far-right and pro-Russian movements that spread hatred and disinformation.

What, though, will all of this achieve? The administration’s assault on the EU is clumsily counterproductive. This time Trump really has “got rid of all illusions” in Europe about America’s intentions. Whatever happens in Ukraine and however changeable Trump’s whims prove to be, the designation of the EU as an enemy power has created an irreversible logic. It is not just that Europe can no longer assume that the US is benign—it must reckon with the possibility that it will be actively malign. By so openly seeking to destroy the EU, Trump is forcing it to prove that what does not kill it will make it stronger.

The misogynistic imagery essential to the anti-European mentality of the American right is not marginal to this miscalculation. It supports the default assumption that the EU, being effeminate, is innately weak and that it will break under pressure from manly America. But the world does not conform to such idiotic prejudices. The EU has all the problems of a complex, rules-based, and highly consensual multilateral organization. Yet it is also inherently dynamic, growing as it has from a small club of six Western nations to a conglomeration of twenty-seven countries with a combined population much larger than that of the US.

There is an obvious precedent for Trump getting Europe wrong. Instead of being a harbinger of doom for the EU, his beloved Brexit is such an obvious mess that it has had the effect of consolidating the EU; even the far-right parties in France and Italy that flirted with Frexit and Italexit no longer do so. It is amusing that the notorious Project 2025 agenda for the second Trump administration laments that “in the wake of Brexit, EU foreign policy now takes place without UK input, which disadvantages the United States, given that the UK has historically been aligned with many US positions.” Almost a decade on from Brexit, the current, much more concerted attempt to undermine the EU will have far greater repercussions for the US.

Those consequences were immediately apparent in the response of the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, to Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and open alliance with Putin: “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” He warned that those who put “America First” risk making their motto “America Alone.” Merz is a conservative and is—or was until last month—an Atlanticist. But he knows, as almost all European leaders do, that the postwar period of European history has now definitively ended.

In the short term the effective withdrawal of American security leaves the EU’s eastern flank (especially the small Baltic states) dangerously vulnerable to Putin’s aggression, and the trade war that Trump seems determined to start will weaken both the American and the European economies. Yet in Europe’s reaction to those threats, the future shape of its independence is already becoming discernible. Britain will move back toward Europe. EU countries will rapidly increase their spending on armaments—but they will also ensure that those weapons are made in Europe rather than America. The EU as a whole will borrow large amounts of money to fund collective military spending—the European Commission has already decided to raise up to €150 billion to boost the EU’s defense industries.

This in turn has potentially profound long-term economic implications. As Gideon Rachman has suggested in the Financial Times:

The issuance of common European debt is not just a way of raising money for defence. It also offers the chance to build up the euro as an alternative to the dollar as a global reserve currency. The capriciousness of the Trump administration means that there is a considerable global appetite for an alternative to US Treasuries as a safe asset.

Trump and his circle are taking a huge gamble—that they can bring down the EU and replace it with a refurbished Russian sphere of domination in the East and a patchwork of authoritarian nationalist states in Western and Central Europe. It is far more likely that they are creating a more unified and independent EU over which America will have increasingly diminished influence. America Alone will find that isolation is not so splendid.

—March 26, 2025

The post Shredding the Postwar Order appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

A nine-mile-wide fragment larger than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs will destroy most of Europe upon impact, causing seismic events that will generate one-thousand-foot-high tsunamis and nine-hundred-degree surface winds traveling faster than the speed of sound. Within hours, all of the continents will be on fire as the impact’s molten debris rains down from the upper atmosphere.

The family manages to get on a small plane heading for Greenland. As they fly, Garrity dreams of a verdant homeland of lush groves and sprinklers watering the lawn where his wife and child are playing—the lost America from which they are now refugees. He wakes to the sun shining through the window. Then, like Noah on the ark, he spies land: “Look, see it!” An ice-mottled peninsula, its shoreline washed by a glittering sea, comes into view. A glacier gleams on a craggy, snow-topped mountain. There is more drama with hurtling meteoric fireballs and a crash landing. The family runs to an American air base and, with the military personnel and the other survivors from the plane, finds shelter in a huge underground bunker just as the asteroid is about to obliterate Europe.

The screen fades to black. Then we see scenes from the incinerated world: the white of the Sydney Opera House turned a sickly gray by its coat of ash; a twisted and decapitated Eiffel Tower leaning precariously over the dusty traces of Paris; streetscapes that look like the recent drone footage of Gaza or Los Angeles. After what we understand to be the passage of nine months, the doors of the bunker open and the Americans shield their eyes from the dazzling sunlight. Chirping birds fly over the sublime landscape. The survivors emerge into their new New World: Greenland. The next American century begins here.

On January 15, five days before his inauguration for his second term as president, Donald Trump initiated a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, that was, perhaps aptly, described by the Financial Times as “fiery” and by The New York Times as “icy.” The Financial Times said that Trump “insisted he was serious in his determination to take over Greenland” and quoted a European official describing the call as “horrendous.” A former Danish official said, “It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs” if it did not agree to sell the vast Arctic island to the US. The Danes—long-standing and loyal allies of the US—are, according to another source, “utterly freaked out by this.”

Just over a week earlier, in a show of monarchical and dynastic power, Trump’s princeling Donald Jr. had landed in his father’s plane emblazoned with the TRUMP logo in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. He claimed that he and his party were “just here as tourists.” But his father undercut this denial of greater ambitions, posting on Truth Social:

Don Jr. and my Reps landing in Greenland. The reception has been great. They, and the Free World, need safety, security, strength, and PEACE! This is a deal that must happen. MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!

He later told reporters that he would not rule out using military force to seize Greenland.

These events shed some light on the nature of Trump’s second coming. For a start, they mark a transition of Trumpian modes from comedy to brutality. According to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser in The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021, buying Greenland was an idea Trump acquired from the cosmetics mogul Ronald Lauder. But it was not regarded within his first administration as anything other than a flight of fancy:

After an early Oval Office meeting where Trump expounded on buying Greenland, one mystified cabinet member was struck by the delusional nature of the president’s speech on the matter. “You’d just sit there and be like, ‘Well, this isn’t real.’”

At that time Frederiksen dismissed Trump’s Greenland proposition as “absurd.” And even though Trump was plainly furious at her rebuff, he also played it for laughs. He tweeted a Photoshop mock-up of a mammoth Trump Tower looming over some scattered huts in what looks like an Arctic seaside village: “I promise not to do this to Greenland!”

In response the right-wing podcaster Graham Allen tweeted, “MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN,” the joke Trump has now repeated not as an absurdist gag but as an American strategic imperative. Trump is signaling that the first term’s outlandish gestures are the second term’s savage demands. “This isn’t real” is a get-out clause for his enablers that has now been canceled.

Don Jr. landed in Greenland on the day that devastating wildfires began to destroy the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. Scenes from a disaster movie were playing out in real life as Sunset Boulevard was choked with people trying to flee. The drone footage on the news bulletins was hard to distinguish from the simulated urban wastelands of Hollywood Armageddons. The conjunction makes a kind of sense: at some level, Greenland functions for Trump as a terrestrial version of Mars, as that planet appears in the imagination of his sidekick, Elon Musk—a place where an elite can find refuge when climate change extinguishes the common herd of humanity.

Greenland has an evil double: Puerto Rico. We know from Baker and Glasser that after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, killing more than three thousand people in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the US in a century, Trump asked his national security adviser, John Bolton, “How much hurricane disaster relief are we giving to Puerto Rico?” and added, “Can we just take that and use it for [the purchase of] Greenland?” Likewise, Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, later told MSNBC that in 2018, before a flight to Puerto Rico to inspect the damage, Trump asked him and other officials whether the US could swap the Caribbean island for Greenland. Thus the cataclysmic consequences of climate chaos—and the people who have to live with them—would become Denmark’s problem, while the US would gain a clean, cool new frontier.

The same warped logic was at work in Trump’s expression in early February of his opinion that the United States should annex the Gaza Strip: “I do see a long-term ownership position…. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.” (It is telling that, in a Fox News interview six days later, the possession of Gaza had become personal: “I would own this.”) Greenland is largely uninhabited; with 56,000 people living in an area of over 800,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country on earth. Gaza has been rendered almost uninhabitable for its current population, and in Trump’s imagination those people can be made to disappear. Greenland is a postapocalyptic refuge; Gaza looks like the apocalypse has already happened. Each can be envisaged in this twisted thought process as a tabula rasa.

In this extreme version of disaster capitalism, horror creates opportunity not only for the expansion of the United States but for the ruling family’s property development business. Speaking of Greenland after the end of his first term, Trump recalled, “I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different.” On his flying visit to Greenland in January, Don Jr. may have claimed to be there to see the sights, but he was also no doubt eyeing the sites. Likewise, Trump’s démarche on Gaza follows the rationale of his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s public musing in March 2024 that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable…. It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”

The template for Gaza is a building in New York City called 100 Central Park South. Trump bought it in 1981. The tenants had enjoyed controlled rents. Trump wanted, as he recalled in The Art of the Deal, “to vacate and raze the building.” “It happens to be very easy to vacate a building if, like so many landlords, you don’t mind being a bad guy.” He hired a company that “specialized in relocating tenants.” As CNN has reported, according to lawsuits filed by those tenants, “Trump had cut off their hot water and heat during New York’s freezing winters and stopped all building repairs.” He was also, for once in his life, overcome with compassion for the destitute and took out newspaper advertisements offering to shelter homeless people at 100 Central Park South. In the end Trump’s plan to demolish the building was thwarted, but the idea has not gone away: force the existing residents out, raze everything to the ground, and you have a site fronting on Central Park or the Mediterranean ready for its lucrative new life.

Catastrophes are opportunities. Climate change has an upside: as the ice sheet that covers three quarters of Greenland melts, enormous mineral and carbon reserves become available for exploitation, and vacant expanses become not just habitable but desirable as northerly refuges from intolerable heat. Israel’s pulverization of Gaza is merely the unfortunate prelude to the creation of what Trump calls “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Refugees will make way for resorts. The only question, as David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, recently mused on social media, would be whether to call this new US territory “Mar-a-Gaza or Gaz-a-Lago?”

Trump’s imperialist ambitions are in some respects familiar from US history. Building new paradises on land whose indigenous population has been exterminated, displaced to reservations, or otherwise “cleansed” was America’s foundational act. Trump’s recent suggestion that Canada be subsumed into the US as “the 51st state” harks back to John Quincy Adams’s claim that “our proper domain [is] the continent of North America.” His grandson Henry Adams described the expectation that “the whole continent of North America and all its adjacent islands must at last fall under the control of the United States” as “a conviction absolutely ingrained in our people.” In Democratic Vistas (1871), Walt Whitman wrote that “long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba.” At the end of World War II, Harry Truman approved efforts (conducted quietly and diplomatically and gently rejected) to persuade Denmark to sell Greenland to the US.

What is new, however, is the fusion of different apocalyptic visions, one religious, the other techno-utopian. The annexation of Gaza by a Christian America appeals to the belief among some fundamentalist Christians that the conversion of the Jews in Israel will set in motion the end times and therefore hasten the Rapture, in which they themselves will ascend to Heaven. The acquisition and development of Greenland dovetails with Musk’s Martian fantasia: Trump, in his inaugural address, pledged that “we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” Thus is Musk’s infantile obsession launched into orbit around Trump’s own colonial reveries.

This Martian mission in turn shares a genealogy with Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which the title character is a caricature of Wernher von Braun, the Nazis’ leading rocket scientist, who went on to work on the American ballistic missile program and on NASA’s space missions. According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, his unusual first name was inspired by Project Mars, a novel Braun wrote in the immediate postwar years. Braun describes the political system of the colony:

The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled “Elon.” Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.

In the novel, the colonization of the red planet is part of God’s plan to create the Übermensch, whose development was cut short by the defeat of the Thousand-Year Reich. It is “a mission whose ultimate object was planned by God Himself” to bring together “the germ plasms of rational creation in our solar system that they may thrive and grow into a higher and more noble organism.”

The DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Isaacson that during a visit to the SpaceX factory after the two men met in 2012, Musk explained that “his reason for building rockets that could go to Mars was that it might be a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilization collapse.” The preserved consciousness would, of course, be that of elite men like himself—as Strangelove explains of the underground world to which the US president and his highest officials, along with civilians selected for their “necessary skills,” will escape when nuclear war begins. “Naturally, they would breed prodigiously,” aided by the provision of ten women (selected for their sexual attractiveness) for every man. As a bonus, “there would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!”

All of this may be insane, but it is a necessary insanity. How else is it possible for Trump and his followers to reconcile his seeming determination to speed up climate collapse with his declaration of a new golden age? In his inaugural address, Trump evoked climate-driven disasters in North Carolina and Los Angeles, showing special sympathy for members of the elite who had been victims of fires “raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don’t have a home any longer. That’s interesting.” Yet he simultaneously promised to extract “the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on earth” and stop the transition to a carbon-free economy.

Nonetheless, “the future is ours, and our golden age has just begun.” The last time we heard this was in Boris Johnson’s inaugural speech as British prime minister in July 2019: “We will look back on this period, this extraordinary period, as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.” That prophecy has not worn well, and even at the time it seemed ludicrous. But it is an obligatory form of nonsense in contemporary reactionary discourse. It offers the escapist promise of a future that does not match any imaginable version of the burning world we actually inhabit.

The golden age is described by Ovid in his Metamorphoses as an impossible past in which there was no need for laws because everyone behaved sweetly and no need for work because the earth, bathed in a perpetual springtime, was so abundant. What happened to this paradise in the Christian tradition is that it was transported from earth to Heaven. It became a posthumous location—you have to expire before you get to inhabit it. As a political promise about the future, the golden age is a lightly secularized version of pie in the sky when you die.

And this afterlife is best lived in after-places. In the Trump/Musk phantasmagoria, colonization is temporal as well as spatial. It is the “post” in postapocalyptic. New spaces—a warming Greenland or Gaz-a-Lago or Mars ruled by the Elon—will be new beginnings where, as Strangelove guarantees, there will be “no shocking memories” of the horrors in which the old world died screaming. That is why these places must be unpopulated, scarcely populated, or depopulated. The slate must be clean.

This insanity runs deep, but it is important to understand that there is also method in the madness: imperial fantasies create the conditions for an imperial presidency. This latter phrase—coined by the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker—gained wide currency in the dying days of Richard Nixon’s deranged second term, when it served as the title of Arthur Schlesinger’s best-selling book of 1973. The imperial presidency whose history he traces is one that leverages supposed foreign dangers to justify domestic tyranny. In 1793 James Madison warned that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” International adventures, he wrote, inflate the persona of the president and unleash the “strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity.” Five years later Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

Schlesinger noted, in a new preface to the 2004 edition of The Imperial Presidency, that Nixon had “carried the Imperial Presidency still further by using against his political opponents at home—‘enemies,’ he called them—powers that the presidency had accumulated to save the republic from foreign foes.” He also wrote that “it was hard to reconcile the separation of powers with a foreign policy animated by an indignant ideology and marked by a readiness to intervene speedily and unilaterally…everywhere on earth.” “Indignant ideology” is a phrase that demands revival.

It is striking, though, that American historians have tended to take comfort in the notion of the imperial presidency as a temporary aberration. Schlesinger was able to conclude that “Nixon’s attempt to institutionalize the imperial Presidency failed.” By December 2000 Michael Beschloss could publish an op-ed in The New York Times under the headline “The End of the Imperial Presidency,” in which he hailed the then-incoming George W. Bush as “the first truly post-imperial president.” In the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America of September 11, 2001, that turned out to be very wide of the mark.

Yet even after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Schlesinger could express a quiet confidence in the capacity of the American republic to reassert itself:

As a world empire, the United States is undone by its own domestic politics and its own humane, pluralistic, and tolerant ideals. The premises of our national existence undermine our imperial aspirations. So the Imperial Presidency redux is likely to continue messing things up, as we are doing so successfully in Iraq, the needless war. Then democracy’s singular virtue—its capacity for self-correction—will one day swing into action.

Oddly, though he would not have used the terms, Trump, in his first manifestation as a presidential candidate in 2015 and 2016, was quite in tune with Schlesinger’s belief that America’s “national existence” was incompatible with “imperial aspirations.” Part of his appeal—particularly in contrast to the perceived hawkishness of Hillary Clinton—was his promise to end the forever wars. In his first big foreign policy speech, delivered in April 2016, he condemned the “foolishness and arrogance” of America’s post–cold war military interventions in Asia and the Middle East:

It all began with a dangerous idea that we could make western democracies out of countries that had no experience or interests in becoming a western democracy. We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed. Civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of American [lives] horribly wasted. Many trillions of dollars were lost as a result.

Even as president, Trump presented himself as a devotee not just of the sovereignty but of the sanctity of nation-states. “The free world,” he told the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, “must embrace its national foundations. It must not attempt to erase them or replace them.” The great enemy then was globalism: “The future does not belong to the globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”

Trump has never been coherent or consistent, but the flagrantly imperialist turn of his second term demands an explanation. How does he go from decrying the results of American meddling in the Middle East to imagining the creation of an American colony in Gaza? How does he go from the absolute insistence that one must “not attempt to erase” national “foundations” to wanting to absorb Canada, force Panama to cede its sovereignty over the canal, coerce Denmark into handing over Greenland, and annex part of Palestine?

Some of the answer may lie in the waning influence over Trump of Steve Bannon’s brand of nationalist ideology and the increasing sway of Musk’s global—and indeed extraterrestrial—ambitions. It may also rest in Trump’s egomaniacal desire to turn the map of the world into a mirror that reflects his own glory. (Having renamed North America’s highest mountain after one of his predecessors, he may well fancy the designation of the highest in the Arctic, Greenland’s Gunnbjørn Fjeld, as Mount Trump.)

But the deeper answer is that imperialism is the inseparable twin of the imperial presidency. Schlesinger’s article of faith that attempts to make the US a world empire would always be undone by its “own humane, pluralistic, and tolerant ideals” is now null and void. Trump flaunted his contempt for those ideals, and a majority of American voters endorsed that disdain. The “domestic politics” that Schlesinger thought would always act to correct the excesses of Madison’s “executive aggrandizement” collapsed when the Republican Party entered its post-democratic afterlife. Nixon’s once infamous claim that “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal” is now in essence an official doctrine of Trump’s Supreme Court. There is no effective restraint on Trump’s open emergence as (to borrow the title of Iggy Pop’s startlingly prescient album of 1993) the American Caesar.

Trump almost certainly does not want to start a war with Denmark or Canada. The speed with which his claim that he might send US troops to occupy Gaza (“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he said on February 4) melted away (“No soldiers by the US would be needed!” he posted on Truth Social on February 6) suggests that he remains uncomfortable with direct military intervention. The excruciating attempts by his officials and supporters to water down or explain away his statements do not point to the existence of any serious plan to colonize Gaza. At least for the moment, his expansionist swagger can be thought of as a kind of meta-imperialism—the language and gestures of international aggression without the physical force. But this does not mean the posturing is empty. As Madison pointed out to Jefferson, the foreign entanglement a president uses to usurp power at home can be “real or pretended.” With Trump the line between those conditions is always blurred. What matters is, to borrow a phrase from Raymond Williams, the “structure of feeling” he is able to generate.

The structure of feeling that shapes the colonial mindset is what Caroline Elkins in her recent history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence, calls “legalized lawlessness.” This paradox stretches across the abyss between supposedly law-bound and civilized democracies and the unfortunate things they have to do to keep their unenlightened (usually dark-skinned) foreign subjects in order. Actions that would not otherwise be either legal or decent become so when they are seen as serving imperial ends. Anarchic state violence can then be understood as the rigor needed to uphold law and order among unruly peoples.

Legalized lawlessness is a good fit for the hybrid nature of Trumpism’s second coming. The MAGA movement has to manage a contradiction between the libertarian, antigovernment ideology of its Big Tech wing and the despotism of the fascist traditions on which it draws. The solvent is a kind of anarcho-authoritarianism that divides Americans in the same way that Western empires divided humanity into citizens of the motherland (who have rights) and subjects of the empire (who do not). For now “real Americans” are the citizens and migrants are the subjects.

This is why one of Trump’s first acts, on the night of his inauguration, was to sign an executive order that seeks to uproot the fundamental concept of American citizenship by ending the automatic entitlement to it of all those born on US soil. In doing this he is forging his own paradox—the American foreigner, the nonnational native. “Colonial subjects,” writes Elkins, “were effectively stateless people,” and that is exactly the condition to which Trump intends to reduce millions of Americans. And as Hannah Arendt showed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, once people are rendered stateless they are also “rightless”—“the scum of the earth” to whom anything can be done.

The immediate victims of legalized lawlessness in Trump’s America will be migrants. This is where the imperial presidency will first exercise its unrestrained authority. Trump has internalized the foreign danger that Madison warned could be used to make a president a monarch—the enemy is already fully within. And thus there must be, alongside the fantasy of postapocalyptic colonies, a shadow empire of extraterritorial camps into which migrants can be decanted: Guantánamo Bay, El Salvador, and what Trump says are “numerous, many” other countries. One of the minor outgrowths of European imperialism—the penal colony—is to be the main event of Trump’s revived version. Clearing a postapocalyptic Gaza of millions of people may be, at least for the moment, as The New York Times put it, “little beyond an idea inside the president’s head,” but it sits in that head alongside a much more intimate form of ethnic cleansing in America itself. Imagining Americans fleeing a global catastrophe to Greenland helps prepare the way for a forced exodus of other Americans to bleak and barren futures.

—February 13, 2025

The post From Comedy to Brutality appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

It has turned out that the drama that best encapsulates this momentous period is, after all, the shadow play of death and resurrection that unfolded in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. As Trump was grazed by a fragment of a bullet fired by Thomas Matthew Crooks, he dropped to the ground, then rose again, fist in the air, triumphant and defiantly alive. Distilled into this moment and lit by a glow of heroism was the whole story of what had happened since Trump’s apparent political death on January 6, 2021, and of what was to come in the 2024 election: that which does not kill him makes him stronger.

There has been, in recent times, something of a pattern here: the strongman gets elected, is thrown out of office, and then makes a triumphant return. This is what happened with one of Trump’s political models, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. It happened with Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. And what this pattern suggests is not just that the strongman comes back—he returns as a more radically authoritarian ruler. The second time he is infused with the swagger of impunity. The man they couldn’t kill is also the man they cannot inhibit.

“Disinhibition” is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump’s increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American government: with allies on the Supreme Court and with control over the Senate and (most probably, at the time of writing) the House of Representatives, Trump will have no one to regulate his urges.

And perhaps it applies to American society too; this is a disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses. Up to now it has been possible to take some comfort in Trump’s failure to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020, and in the fact that not once during his time in the Oval Office did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing. (This was true of no previous president in the era of polling.) It could be said with some justice that he did not really embody America.

But now he does. The comprehensive nature of his victory suggests that alongside the very large core of voters who are thrilled by his misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and mendacity, there are many more who are at the very least not repelled by his ever more extreme indulgence in those sadistic pleasures. They know what he’s like and don’t much mind.

This is hard for Democrats (and just plain democrats) to get their heads around. Both inside and outside the US, liberals and progressives have had a default assumption that, even if their government sometimes does terrible things, Americans themselves are essentially decent and benign. The Harris campaign, with its messages of joy and hope and its (bleakly fruitless) pursuit of an imagined reservoir of Republicans too well-mannered to vote for Trump, rested on the same supposition.

In retrospect, one of the most telling moments of the election campaign came on September 14 in Superior, Wisconsin. Toward the end of a barnstorming speech, Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, told his audience: “I’ll go to my grave not understanding why, but I know it’s a fact that this is going to be a margin-of-error race.” The second part of this sentence was entirely unsurprising, but in the first part Walz surely said more than he meant to. He expressed a sense of incomprehension that went far beyond his own bafflement. Hovering over his words was the dread that the American republic might go to its grave with its defenders still wondering why.

Part of what made the election so strange was that everyone was flying blind. The instruments that are supposed to peer through the darkness—the polls—merely thickened the great cloud of unknowing. They are, of course, often wrong, but they usually conjure at least a mirage of what awaits on the horizon. When all the results are within the margin of error they leave us stranded in that liminal space where there is, as W.B. Yeats put it at a different time of murky anxiety, “no clear fact to be discerned.”

The actual vote came down not to the margin of error but to the margin for error. Half of Americans seem to think that their country has none, the other half that it has plenty. One tribe fears that, after almost a decade of Trump bombarding its laws, institutions, and civic life with verbal and physical assaults, another four years of him in the White House will kill them off for good. Harris appealed to those fears.

But the other tribe thinks the US can afford to gamble its future on a carnival barker, a wild improviser, a reckless disrupter. It has, paradoxically, a deep confidence in the America that Trump disparages with such dark relish, believing that a good shaking-up will not break the country but bring it back to its true self. Trump is a confidence man in both senses—he may be conning much of his own electorate, but they give him the benefit of their nonchalant belief that he is not destroying American norms, merely restoring an imagined American normalcy.

This is something else that made the campaign hard to comprehend. Trump drew a picture of an America on the brink of extinction—but many of his voters trust in an idea of an America that is so fundamentally resilient that it can afford to take breathtaking risks. Harris offered hope in the promise of America—but many of her voters see the country as too fragile to survive another disordered presidency.

Without taking this contradiction into account, it would be quite rational to struggle to understand Trump’s astonishing political potency. He is surely the most known candidate ever to face an electorate anywhere. It is not just that he has been a national celebrity since The Apprentice first aired twenty years ago. Or that he has dominated American politics for almost a decade, sucking in most of the attention that citizens give to public life. Or even that he has—unlike in 2016—actually been president for four years of malign incompetence, ruling over an administration whose inner workings have been amply revealed by his own closest advisers. (The description of him as “a person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law” comes not from one of his enemies but from his longest-serving chief of staff, John Kelly.)

Beyond all of that, there is the knowledge that Trump illegally paid hush money to a porn star, that he has boasted of grabbing women’s genitals, that his businesses engaged in large-scale fraud, that he kept government secrets in boxes stored in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, that he tried to steal the last presidential election by any means necessary, up to and including a violent invasion of the Capitol. And even though, in the suit E. Jean Carroll brought against Trump, a New York jury convicted him of sexual abuse rather than rape—which in the state’s legal definition means forcible vaginal penetration with a penis—“that does not mean,” as the judge in the case later clarified, “that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

And in this campaign, he let everything (from Arnold Palmer’s penis to the greatness of the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter) hang out more than ever. Trump presented to the electorate not just his Ego but his Id. His public utterances were increasingly like a version of Ulysses written by someone on a bad acid trip. His stream of consciousness was more like a meander of unconsciousness. Random thoughts surfaced like the sharks with which he was so weirdly obsessed:

A lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that?… I watched some guys justifying it today: “Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.” These people are crazy.

This supersaturation of knowledge about Trump is what was discombobulating for the Democrats. In the old normality they still inhabit, it was natural to think, “If only people knew…” In the old politics, it was sensible to ask (with T.S. Eliot), “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” But voters did know, and they were, on the whole, willing to offer not just forgiveness but trust and approbation. In this new era the New Age creed that letting it all hang out is a sign of honesty and authenticity has become the great asset of the right. The more unfiltered Trump became, the more real and sincere he seemed to a majority of voters.

If on Trump’s side of the great divide there was a crazy overload of knowledge, on Harris’s there was a dearth. The fundamental problem was not just that Harris was relatively unknown to most voters—a problem compounded by Biden’s disastrous reluctance to honor his pledge to be a bridge to a new generation and step aside after his first term. Also unknown were, to a remarkable extent, the actual achievements of the Biden administration, of which Harris was part.

Biden has been very good at doing what Trump claims to be capable of but isn’t: getting big things done. The president had tangible successes in overseeing the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, reducing unemployment to its lowest level in fifty years, extending access to health care, beginning the transition of American industry to a post-carbon economy, and tackling the dreadful state of much of the country’s infrastructure.

Yet he was terrible at communicating those achievements to the general public. This was partly because of his wan and increasingly frail presence. But it was also because many Americans saw his presidency as a truck stop rather than a highway, a hiatus rather than a trajectory. Biden got elected by offering quiet and healing. Perhaps Americans got bored with quietness.

His administration’s objectively significant accomplishments could not break through to swing voters, many of whom had chosen Biden because they wanted to get politics (which had become, in effect, Trump’s tantrums and frenzies) out of their heads for a while. And in this Biden succeeded all too well. Biden allowed people not to have to think about Trump. His administration was understood as a form of convalescence, a respite from all the craziness and chaos of Trump’s feverish presidency. But it’s hard to make voters think of a nursing home as a source of energy.

The very existence of a competent federal government, going about the ordinary business of trying to make people’s lives better, allowed for a creeping amnesia. It became possible to forget what it felt like to live under a Trump presidency, to wipe away all the reasons Trump left the Oval Office with an abysmal approval rating of 34 percent. The paroxysms of rage, the sulks of self-pity, the murderous ineptitude of his handling of the pandemic, the relentless lies and untethered violence of his attempted coup—all of this receded into the past with extraordinary rapidity.

Something odd has happened with American memory. With the “Again” in MAGA, Trump appeals to a notion of a better past to which he will allow the US to return. This certainly works: CNN’s exit polls suggest that two thirds of those who believe that “America’s best days are in the past” voted for Trump. But “the past” now seems to include at least the first three quarters of the Trump presidency, before the arrival of Covid. A glow of nostalgia surrounds a period that ought to be too recent for wistful longing.

This strange twist in time helped to shape a contradiction Harris struggled—and ultimately failed—to resolve. Was she running as a guarantor of continuity or a force for change? Perhaps, if there could be said to be a moment that she lost the election, it was her answer on ABC’s The View on October 8 to the question “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” She was trying, not unreasonably, to claim a share of the credit for Biden’s considerable achievements. Her problem was that there was precious little credit to go around. Half of a small dish of public approval makes for pretty meager fare.

Harris embodied radical change in who she is—Black and female. But she struggled to represent change in what she would do. Her signature issues—access to abortion and the defense of democracy—necessarily involved her defending rights and institutions that had seemed stable before Trump and his movement revolted against them. However just these causes, they meant that she was standing up for what was (at least until very recently) the status quo. The bold vision for progressive change embodied in her persona was blurred.

While Harris was trying for uplift, Trump’s method was overkill. In a TV ad that a group allied with his campaign aired nearly six thousand times in just six days in late October (at a cost of almost $20 million), a voice like something from a trailer for a horror movie intoned, over mug shots of dark-skinned men and pictures of female victims, that these women were “bludgeoned, raped, strangled, stabbed, shot, and murdered.” It was as though each of them had been killed several times—and slaughtered by Harris herself. The primary message that Trump hammered home, over and over, was that Harris personally unleashed this frenzy of violence by opening the southern border to the hordes of madmen and murderers loosed from the hellish asylums and prisons of foreign countries.

The strength of this terroristic messaging was that it fused racism and misogyny to produce the sum of all fears. Its apparent weakness was that the misogyny seemed too generalized. It was intended to appeal not just to sexist men but to women frightened of the kind of violence that sexist men inflict. But Trump would not keep it on target. His statement in Wisconsin on October 30 that he was going to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not” was too blatant a tell. It encapsulated the sick paradox of the grabber of women posturing as their guard.

Trump’s constant personal denigration of Harris’s intellect, career, and sexuality was, on any ordinary view of political utility, the wrong kind of misogyny. It laced his potent cocktail of race- and gender-based phobias with raw rotgut chauvinism. It seemed reasonable to think that Trump was going too far and provoking a backlash from women. As Nikki Haley put it, “This bromance and masculinity stuff, it borders on edgy to the point that it’s going to make women uncomfortable.”

But not, it seems, uncomfortable enough. Trump’s bet was that this parade of misogyny would attract disgruntled young men to vote for him more than it would animate otherwise undecided women to vote against him. His instincts turned out to be right. A majority of white suburban women seem to have voted for Trump. According to exit polls, the gender gap was perfectly balanced, with Harris ten points ahead among women and Trump ten points ahead among men.

The gender divide partly accounts too for Trump’s increased popularity with men of color. This trend was already evident in 2020, but this time he seems to have made even deeper inroads. CNN’s exit poll suggests that 21 percent of Black men and a clear majority (55 percent) of Latino men voted for Trump. In such a profoundly gendered election, being male mattered more for many voters than any assumptions about racial or ethnic solidarity.

On the other side of that divide, even while pro-choice referendums passed in seven states (though they were defeated in Florida, South Dakota, and Nebraska), it may well be that the prospect of passing these measures gave many women a degree of comfort that they could protect their reproductive rights at the state level. Or it may simply be that garish misogyny is now so normalized that many women had already priced it in.

In a disinhibited America, a lot of women may now be expecting nothing better from men. Perhaps, like Haley, they rolled their eyes at the spectacle of Trump’s big Madison Square Garden rally being “overly masculine,” and then voted for him anyway because men being boorish is just the way of the world. Whatever this means for the future of gender relations in America, it is not likely to be pleasant.

It’s tempting, in some ways, to do the same for the election result as a whole—to normalize it by putting it down to prosaic explanations like the impact of inflation and the anti-incumbency mood that has swept through most of the democratic world. Those factors are of course very real. Inflation, in particular, acts as a cipher for a much wider range of perceptions, not only of immediate hardship but of unfairness and powerlessness. But we must not lose sight of the much larger consequence of Trump’s victory: it decisively shifts the idea of who is a normal American.

It was not wrong to see this election as pivotal, and what America has pivoted toward is a knowing and deliberate transfer of power to a nexus of interest groups whose interests are inimical to pluralist democracy. One of them is of course Trump and his family. He will have free rein for personal vengeance against his enemies and for untrammeled self-enrichment.

Another is made up of fundamentalist Christians who will gain control of federal education and health care policies and of federal court appointments and use that control to further roll back the gains made over many decades for the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people who just believe that they should be able to live their lives as they see fit. A third is the oligarchs who will be allowed to do as they see fit, whether in a free-for-all of oil and gas drilling or in already dangerous areas like social media disinformation, AI, and cryptocurrencies.

Trump’s second coming may not quite herald the end of the world, but it will hand the ship of state over to a motley crew of libertines and libertarians, control freaks and fanatics. It will stage its own spectacles of mass roundups and treason trials for the amusement of the many millions who are, it now seems abundantly clear, entertained by exhibitions of cruelty. It will be a nonstop show, its cacophonous soundtrack amplified by Elon Musk and the thriving denizens of the digital manosphere.

For those who are now defeated, there is the task of creating a story and a movement that can provide an alternative clear and coherent enough to break through the coming bedlam. Blaming Harris or retreating into the old orthodoxy that only white men can hope to win will not be useful. Neither will an insistence on chasing a supposed centrism that avoids the conflicts that have to be faced and the choices that have to be made.

Arguably, Harris had both too many messages—abortion rights, the protection of democracy, an industrial revival, support for Ukraine and NATO, prescription drug prices, housing, simultaneous loyalty to Israel and sympathy for Palestinian suffering, the creation of an “opportunity economy”—and too few. The Democrats played down two very big things: the climate crisis and the income inequality that is sure to rise as new technologies further enrich existing elites. The result was an offering that was broad but shallow, based as it was on a decision not to address issues that are shaping the lives of Americans now and will continue to shape them in the coming decades.

Harris’s defeat showed that grace, good humor, intelligence, and energy—all of which she demonstrated amply—will not be enough. There has to be a capacity to tap into and redirect the discontent that Trump has been able to channel into hatred and fear. Trump has moved American politics away from parties and toward movements, away from process and toward performance. Those who oppose him will have to be better at playing on this new stage. Harris showed that the Democrats can summon crowds, that they too have the potential to create and sustain the kind of permanent campaign that has allowed Trump to ride out every setback.

Such a campaign must start from the recognition that the people who can form it now constitute the official “enemy from within,” a minority at risk of becoming, unless they can find an effective voice, the erroneous margin of the newly dominant America.

—November 7, 2024

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