O Retorno de Trump — V

Sobre acessos de raiva, domínio, a Estratégia do Sul, anúncios alarmistas, os ricos e os pobres de Nova York e o candidato Fain.

Astra Taylor, Michael Greenberg, Coco Fusco, Verlyn Klinkenborg, Thomas Powers, e Anne Enright

The New York Review of Books

Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ilustração de José Guadalupe Posada

Estas são as vigésima quinta a trigésima entradas em um simpósio em andamento sobre a reeleição de Donald Trump.

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Astra Taylor

Na noite da eleição, antes da derrota de Harris, algumas pesquisas de boca de urna mostraram que "democracia" era uma das principais preocupações dos eleitores. Muitos liberais consideraram o resultado um sinal auspicioso. Mas o que é democracia?

Esse foi o título de um documentário que fiz durante a campanha presidencial de 2016. Ao conduzir dezenas de entrevistas nos Estados Unidos ao longo de muitos meses, aprendi que dificilmente havia um consenso sobre o significado da palavra. Pessoas comuns lutavam para defini-la; um recém-formado na faculdade me perguntou se democracia era quando "eles dizem o que fazer". Outros, geralmente homens, zombavam que na verdade vivemos em uma república, não em uma democracia, como se isso resolvesse o problema. Outros ainda — muitos deles — achavam o sistema político americano exasperantemente corrupto: manipulado por interesses especiais, permeado por racismo e quase ou já irredimível. Também falei com jovens conservadores e participei dos comícios de Donald Trump, onde ele protestou contra a Guerra ao Terror, a ganância de Wall Street, os imigrantes assassinos e as elites presunçosas, ao mesmo tempo em que assegurava à multidão que o adorava que eles seriam "governados pelo povo" quando ele vencesse.

E ele venceu, no penúltimo dia de filmagem. Passei a última manhã miserável com minha equipe em uma fábrica têxtil administrada cooperativamente no oeste da Carolina do Norte. Eu queria perguntar aos imigrantes guatemaltecos que eram donos e administravam o negócio sobre estender a democracia ao local de trabalho. Mas não havia como ignorar seus medos de retaliação e deportação, e como a democracia americana havia falhado com eles.

Oito anos depois, as coisas só ficaram mais confusas e angustiadas. Parte do que condenou os democratas pela segunda vez, eu acho, foi que eles tomaram o significado de democracia como algo estabelecido e autoevidente. Harris prometeu aos eleitores pouco mais do que acesso garantido às urnas (embora em termos ligeiramente expandidos, como registro no mesmo dia ou acesso mais amplo à votação antecipada ou pelo correio), nenhuma interferência nas contagens de votos e um futuro onde os segundos colocados graciosamente admitem a derrota. Os liberais ficaram compreensivelmente em pé de guerra quando Trump se recusou a admitir que perdeu a eleição de 2020 e sobre a confusão conhecida como 6 de janeiro. Harris e seus substitutos, no entanto, muitas vezes pareciam tratar essas ofensas como as principais, ou mesmo exclusivas, ameaças enfrentadas pela democracia americana — como se derrotar Trump por si só garantiria a república.

No processo, eles idealizaram o status quo político pré-Trump — as novas condições da Era Dourada, pós-Citizens United que produziram uma onda de descontentamento populista tanto na esquerda quanto na direita. Alguns democratas, como Jamie Raskin e Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, ocasionalmente falam sobre problemas estruturais: o Colégio Eleitoral, a obstrução, o Senado mal distribuído, a manipulação eleitoral em nível estadual. Mas nenhum desses assuntos surgiu de forma significativa durante o curto mandato de Harris. Nem se falou da influência corruptora do dinheiro: Harris orgulhosamente buscou a aprovação dos magnatas de Wall Street, se aconchegou a investidores de criptomoedas e, segundo consta, apoiou-se no conselho de seu cunhado, o executivo da Uber Tony West, que afundou a campanha.

Eu testemunhei a desarticulação de perto na Convenção Nacional Democrata em agosto passado. Fui com Nathan Hornes, um membro do Debt Collective, o sindicato de devedores que ajudei a fundar. Nathan falou na noite final, algumas horas antes de Harris subir ao palco. Ele relatou brevemente como foi enganado pela corporação educacional com fins lucrativos Corinthian Colleges e nosso esforço de organização de oito anos para ganhar bilhões de dólares em alívio de empréstimos estudantis para mais de meio milhão de estudantes cujas vidas estavam quase arruinadas. (Essa campanha lançou as bases para a promessa de Biden de cancelar a dívida estudantil de forma mais ampla — embora ele tenha implementado a política de uma forma que a deixou vulnerável a desafios legais de direita e uma Suprema Corte hostil.) Ao investigar a Corinthian durante seu mandato como procuradora-geral da Califórnia, Harris trouxe os abusos da empresa à tona e, assim, inadvertidamente ajudou nossa causa. Agora ela estava se gabando dessa pequena conquista para polir sua boa-fé como uma promotora que era dura com "predadores". E, no entanto, naquela noite, não um, mas dois ex-membros do conselho da Corinthian falaram no mesmo palco. Essa foi a campanha de Harris: ampla o suficiente para incluir o fraudado e o fraudador, predador e presa.

Se nada mais, a noite da eleição nos ensinou que uma parcela não insignificante de eleitores que disseram aos pesquisadores que estavam preocupados com a "democracia" significava algo bem diferente do que reforçar a governança liberal, os freios e contrapesos ou o estado de direito. Em um episódio alegre de seu podcast lançado após a derrota de Harris, o homem da propaganda do MAGA, Steve Bannon, alardeou que Trump forçou os democratas a se tornarem defensores do que ele chama de "podridão institucional" e "oligarquia", de sistemas de governo e mercado que milhões de pessoas veem como quebrados ou mesmo corruptos e prejudiciais. As pesquisas há muito mostram que a maioria do público americano gostaria de ver o dinheiro fora da política. Na ausência de tais reformas, uma grande parte do eleitorado se contentou com um cara rico que insiste que seu amplo saldo bancário significa que ele não pode ser comprado.

Claro, Trump irá corroer ainda mais a democracia como a conhecemos — esmagar e privatizar as partes do estado administrativo que fornecem saúde e bem-estar, fortalecer as partes que punem e reprimem, desregulamentar a indústria e cortar impostos no topo, corroer ainda mais os direitos de voto e aumentar o fluxo de dinheiro corporativo, cercar-se de um grupo de bilionários ofendidos e seguir a direção da Heritage Foundation. A triste ironia é que, à medida que o governo se torna cada vez mais cruel e incompetente, à medida que a desigualdade aumenta e à medida que se torna mais difícil para liberais e progressistas vencerem eleições e governarem efetivamente, as frustrações das pessoas comuns só aumentarão — um ciclo de feedback que serve muito bem aos vigaristas conservadores.

Curto-circuitar essa dinâmica exigirá mais do que pontificar hipócritamente sobre "nossa democracia" e mais até do que promulgar políticas populistas que apelam às preocupações de bolso dos eleitores da classe trabalhadora — embora isso seja um passo bem-vindo. Também requer falar sobre a desconfiança e a raiva das pessoas e fornecer soluções confiáveis ​​para transformar os sistemas nos quais elas perderam a fé.

Aristóteles observou que a democracia é o governo dos pobres, já que pessoas sem meios sempre superarão os ricos em número. O que será necessário para tirar o dinheiro da política para que os pobres possam governar? Alguns podem se preocupar que não haverá uma eleição presidencial em quatro anos, mas acho que precisamos nos planejar para essa possibilidade e dar nosso apoio a uma figura genuinamente insurgente nas primárias democratas. Meu voto é para Shawn Fain, o atual presidente do United Auto Workers, cujo mantra é solidariedade e que se recusa a jogar qualquer grupo — mulheres, imigrantes, gays ou pessoas trans — debaixo do ônibus enquanto ele promove os interesses da classe trabalhadora.

Fain insistiu que os sindicatos americanos precisam trabalhar em direção a uma greve geral, atualmente marcada para o 1º de maio de 2028, para "reivindicar a história do nosso país de sindicatos militantes que uniram trabalhadores de todas as raças, gêneros e nacionalidades". De fato, os sindicatos têm alinhado suas negociações contratuais com essa data em antecipação a uma ação coletiva histórica. O candidato Fain poderia usar as primárias democratas como um púlpito de intimidação para promover esse objetivo. Imagine uma demonstração massiva de desobediência econômica para abalar a plutocracia que está estrangulando a democracia americana, e os democratas venais e incompetentes que atualmente a permitem. Sei que parece inacreditável, mas eu estava na estrada documentando a América em 2016. Coisas mais loucas já aconteceram.

Instituto de Arte de Chicago
Ilustração de José Guadalupe Posada

Michael Greenberg

What happened in New York City, one of the staunchest Democratic strongholds in America? Harris carried the city but every borough moved toward Trump, and the biggest moves were in the Bronx, Queens, and South Brooklyn. In the Bronx Trump’s vote count jumped thirty-five points from 2020. Overall, in New York City Harris received almost 600,000 fewer votes than Biden did four years ago.

Trump’s biggest gains were among Latino, South Asian, and Chinese voters, many of whom arrived here relatively recently and have young American-born children. Part of the reason is the chasm between the city’s haves and have-nots, which has widened over the past twenty years to a despairing degree for people who have to work almost around the clock to survive. Trump, we know, is a spectacular liar, but Democrats have done some gaslighting of their own, insisting that the economy is great, that the GDP is growing and inflation slowing—all strictly true, but not for New Yorkers who pay half their income on rent, with no hope of owning a place of their own.

New immigrants to the city get no more than a bed for thirty days (families get sixty days), often crammed into damp and substandard church basements, and a little spending money for a short while. But established newcomers, coughing up their taxes and struggling to make ends meet, clearly resent that still more recent arrivals are getting even those meager provisions. Uber drivers, e-bike delivery workers, non-union construction workers, restaurant bussers, housekeepers, janitors, and home nursing aides are not “natural” Democrats. Many of them have no reason to embrace the Great American Experiment, as the rhetoric goes, when their chances of upward socioeconomic mobility—America’s main promise to the world—have dwindled to almost nothing.

“The mood changed,” as John Liu, a Democratic state senator from Queens, summed it up to The New York Times. New York, it seems, can succumb to a populist authoritarian as quickly as, say, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, which flipped dramatically in Trump’s favor. New Yorkers who feel partially shielded from the worst ravages of Trump by liberal local officials would do well to take heed.
Coco Fusco

I sensed that Trump would win long before election night. No revelation of wrongdoing, no racist or sexist diatribe, and no display of offensive behavior diminished his popularity. That alone filled me with sadness, but once the election was over I began to ask myself what I should do with that emotion. Join the irate progressives who declare him a fascist and insist that his voters are all bigots? Side with the moderates who argue that the despotic convicted criminal’s supporters are good people simply fed up with ineffectual institutions and identity politics? Democrats may well be paying the price for not offering working people a solution beyond platitudes about joy, but that doesn’t explain why so many Americans believe that Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, his border wall, or his tariffs will reduce inflation, increase wages, or make them safer. Something else made them believe that he would solve their problems.

Trump may be unhinged, but his campaign managers are ruthless and shrewd. His team devised a frighteningly effective media blitz that relied on xenophobic messaging. Between January and September of this year, the Republican and Democratic parties and PACS spent more than $389 million on immigration ads. Democrats accounted for only 17 percent of that sum; 83 percent of it, according to the Immigration Hub, “was spent on anti-immigrant TV ads by the GOP and right-wing groups.” Between September and November, Republican candidates, PACs, and others spent $243 million on 450 anti-immigrant TV ads that aired mostly in battleground states with small immigrant populations. In the last two months alone, right-wing anti-immigrant ads aired over 250,000 times in battleground states and were viewed over 6.5 billion times.

In total, the Republicans produced over seven hundred immigration-related ads while the Democrats made less than fifty. Republican ads claimed that American cities were being flooded with criminals. Migrants were described as illegals, aliens, invaders, traffickers, rapists, and murderers. According to an analysis by The Washington Post, almost a fifth of the ads incorporated stock footage as well as outdated images and videos, some dating back to Trump’s first presidency. The inaccuracies didn’t matter. This large-scale effort to shape public opinion galvanized support for mass deportation.

The ridiculous claims about Haitians eating cats in Ohio made for many anti-Trump roasts on late-night TV, but the reality is that for months Americans had been fed a steady diet of fearmongering ads about immigrants. The saddest part of this for me was hearing Latin American immigrants in news interviews say that they felt OK about voting for Trump because he only wanted to deport “the criminals,” i.e., not them.

Forty-five percent of Latinos chose Trump last week, including a sizable number of Puerto Ricans who weren’t moved to reject him after the reference to their country as a floating island of garbage, plus millions of residents of border towns who had supported Democrats in the past. They may not be aware that during the Great Depression, when the US deported over a million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of them were American citizens. “Operation Wetback” in 1954, which involved more than a million deportations, also resulted in US citizens ending up in Mexico. Once he gets the mass deportations up and running, Trump’s next move may be to eliminate birthright citizenship. If he does, people like me—the child of an immigrant who overstayed her visa, used my American birth to obtain residency here, and then sponsored her extended family’s immigration—could end up with nowhere to go.
Verlyn Klinkenborg

What do we believe or know or feel that allows us to care about the other forms of life? Is our concern innate, part of our inheritance as biological beings and fellow organisms? Do we feel the deep genetic kinship we share with all life? Or is our concern mostly a product of culture—of education and experience and scientific insight?

There are no simple answers to these questions. Nor are the answers unchanging. A couple of centuries ago whales were regarded as monsters. Now they’re beloved creatures, singers of slow grace and immeasurable dignity. The change is in us, not them. We’re only now beginning to learn—again—the depth of our connection to nature and the importance of what we feel for it. However these feelings arise in us, they must be cherished. If we know only human life, we know almost nothing about life on Earth.

It’s obvious, I think, that there is nothing resembling respect—never mind affection—for nonhuman life in Donald Trump’s mind (though he thinks with his ego) or in the minds of his MAGA faithful. It doesn’t exist. Nature is there to be plundered. That will be the environmental message of this incoming administration. And that piratical approach is justified—in the appallingly literal understanding of Trump’s evangelical supporters—by the word “dominion,” as it appears in the first chapter of Genesis: dominion over all God’s creatures.


Metropolitan Museum of Art

Illustration by José Guadalupe Posada

In the Bible, the word “dominion”—God’s gift to Adam—refers early on to man’s domination of nonhuman organisms. But after that, the word nearly always means power over other humans. For a while, Trump will possess dominion of a sort. As we’ve seen so vividly these past few months, one of the ways he sustains his dominion is by dividing humans into groups—the acceptable and the unacceptable. The latter include people of color, immigrants and refugees, childless women, and the LGBTQ+ community, which has done so much to expand our ideas of gender and how we inhabit our bodies. Trump’s dominion over them is far more than dominion. It’s oppression in the belief that their lives have no value. As for the actual genetic “kinship” we share with all living things, Trump would rather point to what he calls, in a eugenic fantasy, the bad genes in this country. He’s just the latest to use this coded phrase.

If you’re determined to loathe anyone who doesn’t resemble you, what are the chances you’ll have any regard for nature? Trump’s approach to nature is extractive, and, to be fair, that’s his approach to everything. Billions of life-forms on this planet didn’t vote for Trump—and they will suffer immensely because of him. You might argue that one source of our feel for nature is the empathy we feel for other humans. Which helps us understand why Trump will do nothing to protect the nonhuman lives we share this planet with.
Thomas Powers

The shock of Trump’s victory ought to be warning enough. It was as close to a landslide as we’ve seen in recent decades. The thoroughness of the win, still emerging, is telling us to go slow. Many of the first efforts to explain it snap off a score of reasons why it was bound to happen. They all make sense, they are crisply argued, and they urge the Democrats still standing to make prompt changes of course.

But a lost election is not a train wreck that can be traced back to a truck on a crossing, stranded there when the driver fell asleep full of drink, at the close of the day he had to put his dog down. A lost election is more like a storm that is worse than expected, the result of a million local weather facts suddenly colliding when the moon is full and the tide is high—predictable, sort of, but only after it has happened.

Rather than listing a score of reasons why Trump won, I would start with one: the Republican strategy beginning fifty years ago to replace the Democratic Party in the eleven states of the old Confederacy. Their success is obvious in the map of the 2024 presidential election, two swathes of red states marking the two great divisions in American history and politics—the North–South separation of slave and free states, and the inland corridor of farmers facing bankers and cultural arbiters on the two coasts. When the count is complete this year the likely result will be eighteen blue states versus thirty-two red states.

With every national election the right–left, red–blue division in American political argument confirms the success of the Old South in taking over the Republican Party. Positions on all the big issues reflect the Old South agenda of single-party rule, white and male supremacy, social and moral issues as determined by evangelical Protestant churches, a big military plus the Second Amendment. Republican presidential candidates all make their peace with those.

That leaves Trump himself, who was the architect and builder of his own victory. He colors outside the lines, makes violent threats, counts on women forgiving him, encourages men to be like him, never apologizes, rejects all criticism as unfair, tells lies and sticks to them, never reads or pretends to read, thumbs his nose at the law, insists losers are suckers, stands defiant, and manages somehow to get away with all of it. The Founding Fathers lived in fear of demagogues. They had no idea.
Anne Enright

At about 3:00 AM Irish time last Wednesday (10:00 PM in New York), I picked up the news that Trump had gone out to speak to supporters accompanied by Elon Musk and RFK Jr., and I went to bed. It was over. The anti-vaxxer with the brain worm, who may or may not be put in charge of the American health care system, the giggling misogynist who destroyed Twitter and who is now set, if he can fit it into his schedule, to destroy American public service structures: it was like something out of a Marvel comic, so psychically unloosed and extreme.

More than half of America voted for a man who is not an ordinary liar but someone who asserts the opposite of the truth—is the best word for his cartoon chaos a “tantrum”? The gleefulness of Musk, in particular, made me think how infantile these men are, not just in their exhibitions of power but in their rage for categorization. Musk moved an industry from California to Texas, it is rumored, because one of his children is trans. She is, he told Jordan Peterson, “dead, killed by the woke mind virus.” It is very upsetting to such people when reality won’t stay the way they have, perhaps with some difficulty, figured it out to be. These men’s interest in fakeness (usually female fakeness), and in lies and conspiracy seems part of this problem: the world has gone funny, they say, and they cannot trust what they do not control.

I did not sleep well. Donald, Elon, and poor mad Bobby: it was as though the Internet had broken out of the screen, the world’s info-Id; the place where any fact is available, even if it is the wrong fact, where men especially can get what they want, when they want it; a place of complete personal authority and complete childishness, where you can know everything, say anything, be lost and in charge all day long.

I reminded myself that America has had other presidents who were corrupt, lecherous, and hate-mongering, even as their rhetoric was about honor, virtue, and freedom for all. But that rhetoric felt like authority even when it was hypocritical, and I miss it now that it is gone. There is something so dreamlike about Trump’s opposites game, but the money is real, and the sadism in his unfunny jokes is also real and about to be unleashed.
I woke. I remembered the goonshow apocalypse, and I reminded myself that Trump will shaft his fellow goons before too long. I wondered why, if Americans are so angry, the Democrats could not own that anger and redirect it at, for example, the super-rich like Elon Musk. The day after the American election was, for me, like the start of the pandemic. The world is different in a way I could not have foreseen and I am full of dread, but I know this feeling of disaster and the same small rules apply: look after your own head, work, tend to the people you love. Fresh air, grit, and affection. Then do the same tomorrow.