The Return of Trump—IV

Paisley Currah • Trevor Jackson • Kim Phillips-Fein • Ian Frazier • Adam Gaffney • Madeleine Schwartz

Paisley Currah

This is what Donald Trump could do to transgender people during his second presidency: discharge all trans service people from the military; impose a nationwide ban on medical care for trans youth; prevent Medicaid and Medicare from paying for transition-related care even for adults; permit private health providers to exclude transgender-related coverage; ban all trans girls from playing on any girls teams regardless of age, sport, or level of competition; deny federal funding to schools that support youth with gender dysphoria; end all programs at federal agencies that “promote” the concept of gender transition, at any age; and, generally, require all federal agencies to recognize only sex assigned at birth. Parents who support their child’s trans, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming identity would be prevented from doing so. The Trump campaign even promised to stop anyone under eighteen from “assuming” a gender identity—one’s internal sense of being male, female, neither, or in-between—to which their parents do not consent.

Those are the campaign’s stated promises. Project 2025, the anti-trans bills passed in Republican-run states in the last few years, and the anti-LGBT policies of Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán (both of whom Trump openly admires) all suggest that his administration could also, for instance, define any material that propagates “transgender ideology” as pornography. That would include anything that acknowledges the existence of people whose gender changes—from health research to novels to the spoken word.

Requiring agencies to define sex as birth sex might prevent trans and nonbinary people from changing their gender on their passports; those who have already done so may find their birth sex reappear when they renew. The nine states that have passed laws defining sex (and gender, if the word is allowed in state codes) as set at birth are likely to refuse gender changes to state-issued IDs. This will make it much harder for trans people to carry out what should be unremarkable aspects of daily life: proffering ID when applying for benefits and jobs, on college applications, to get into a bar, to pass through security checkpoints at airports. Unsurprisingly, those states also all have voter ID laws. A final indignity: trans people who live in those states may no longer, in practice, be able to use a federal document to exercise the franchise and vote against politicians who seek to define them out of existence.

During this election cycle, the Republican Party and its surrogates spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads targeting what Trump called “left-wing gender insanity.” These ads do not seem to have had much of a direct effect on election results. A randomized control trial carried out by the group Ground Media found that an ad showing Kamala Harris’s support for “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens” would not shift voters. Indeed, polls show that matters of transgender policy ranked near the bottom of the issues that concerned them.

But the ad campaign did have negative effects. Ground Media found that, even if voters rarely changed their choice because of trans issues, the ads significantly reduced “public acceptance of trans people across nearly all demographics,” at least temporarily. The ads also linger in another sense: they are fast becoming the just-so story that some Democrats are putting out to explain Harris’s loss. There is little evidence to support this charge: Harris lost on the economy, not on pronouns. Ironically, these Democrats are doing what they’ve long accused the Republicans of doing—turning on a vulnerable group to avoid confronting deeper problems in the country and in their own party. Given the avalanche of policy about to harm trans people, blaming them for being scapegoated by the right is especially reprehensible.

Trevor Jackson

The event itself was overdetermined. Inflation, the genocide in Gaza, a belated candidate without clear policies who had never won a competitive election, or the structures of American racism and misogyny: each alone could account for the outcome. But the meaning is up for grabs and will be disputed for years to come.

There are two good reasons to be skeptical of explanations that center on racism and misogyny. The first is that they struggle to explain why Trump has consistently increased his vote shares among all demographics, except affluent college-educated people, since 2016. The second is that Trump is synecdochal of a global shift that includes figures like Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and Narendra Modi. Provincializing Trumpism offers a better vista of the scale of the social crisis that should not be obscured by contingent electoral blame.

Impunity has paraded through the last decades, from the Iraq War to the 2008 financial crisis to police murders to Gaza to Trump’s own felonious litany. The austerity and inequality in the aftermath of the Great Recession, especially, generated a widespread crisis of political legitimacy, as the banking sector’s bailouts increased public sector debt, which was addressed through austerity cuts to state expenditure and employment. In many OECD countries, the centrist neoliberal party in power in 2008 was replaced by its centrist neoliberal rival in 2010. The same austerity policies continued, leading to a series of electoral collapses and popular uprisings. For a decade mass protests filled the streets, from Cairo to São Paolo to Minneapolis. Those movements were crushed, or coopted, or dismantled by bureaucratic inertia, often resulting in the opposite of their goals. A mix of right-wing political violence and centrist collaboration broke the left surge, and we are now living through the results the world over.

The epochal challenges of inequality and climate change have met their political response: a xenophobic, billionaire-friendly right wing. Billionaires have successfully defended their impunity, partly with support from the military and police who wish to defend their own impunity—to take only the American example, the Fraternal Order of Police and affiliated PACs provide Trump with money, volunteers, and social organization—and partly by blaming others for institutional failure: sneering elites, criminal foreigners, the undeserving.

This was a billionaire’s election, and Trumpism is a local vernacular of a global defense of billionaire power against movements for redistribution and equality. The phase of contestation has closed; this is the time of salvage.

Kim Phillips-Fein

Donald Trump made striking gains in New York City, especially in Queens and the Bronx. Kamala Harris won New York, but only by thirty-eight points. (Biden had won by fifty-three in 2020, Clinton by sixty in 2016.) It’s clear that Trump is gaining support not only among the city’s finance bros and older white ethnic voters but also among the immigrant working class—perhaps especially Latino and Asian communities, but likely across the board.  

This may be surprising, given how nastily Trump vilifies recent immigrants. But it has precedents in New York City’s history. People here a generation or two removed from their family’s arrival in this country have often turned against new immigrants, for many reasons. The Irish had little use for Jewish and Italian immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. When Puerto Rican immigration rose in the 1940s, columnists for the Hearst-owned tabloid Daily Mirror denounced the “locust plague” of new arrivals descending on Manhattan: these “crude farmers,” it claimed, would be “almost impossible to assimilate in an active city of stone and steel.”

On a more general level, New York has long been a city defined by its extremes of wealth and poverty, power and dispossession. The blunt swagger of populist conservatism, which Trump channels still more brutally for a new age, has a long history here. As the historian Steve Fraser has argued in The Limousine Liberal (2016), it was New York City politics that gave us the trope of the wealthy “limousine liberal” who prescribes policies without having to live with the consequences—advocating school busing, for example, while sending their own children to private school. That trope is closely connected to the image of the politician who values credentials and experts and views everyone outside the gilded inner circle as chaotic and disorderly, a threat precisely because they cannot easily be controlled or contained.

As Fraser shows, in 1969 the Democratic mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino came up with the idea of the limousine liberal to attack the city’s patrician liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay. Today Lindsay is perhaps best remembered for allying with the civil rights movement. But he also presided over the decline of local manufacturing and promoted a postindustrial future for New York, which he reimagined as a “Fun City” for corporate headquarters, white-collar workers, and tourists—a city that in those respects closely resembles what we have today.  

Fun for whom? The Procaccino campaign viewed New York through jaundiced eyes—as a city of inflation, rising rents, and rising crime, but most of all as a city that valorized a future in which working people would have no place but to serve the glittering elite. When critics mocked Procaccino’s tacky clothes and likened his constituents to “peasants,” he responded, “I am not one of the select few. I am not one of the beautiful people.”

Procaccino lost in 1969, but Mayor Ed Koch picked up on his political style—particularly his appeals to the brawny virtues of the outer boroughs against the pieties of Manhattan. Trump, too, would echo it as he entered politics in the 1980s. The specific targets would change, and the tone would grow crueler, but the idiom endured. Now, both in New York and across the country, we are watching him reap its rewards.

Ian Frazier

I am not unhappy with the election. One hundred forty-four million people voted for president in 2024—about six million fewer than voted in 2020, but still a lot. I think of all those voters from all those big and little and midsized places, and the tens of millions of mail-in ballots flowing through post offices and drop boxes and finding their way to where they were supposed to go, and the people standing in lines at thousands of polling places across six time zones, and I’m awed all over again at the heft and particularity of the country. As for efficiency, the election went well. Democracy worked and gave the nation and the world some real information in place of the ersatz scoops we’ve been starving on for months, all those polls saying “too close to call.” The margin turned out to be close but not that close. Pollsters had trouble reaching people to poll before the election, but after it, respondents were plentiful. They told the exit-pollsters, among many other things, that they were most worried about inflation and the economy. Thanks to our democracy the pollsters finally had abundant, easy-to-gather data only when there was nothing more for them to predict.

What I am unhappy about is the outcome of the election. That can happen in a democracy. Suddenly I’m remembering the Founding Fathers and imagining how this election’s result would have freaked out some of them (not all): snuff scattered around, shouting, red faces, dandruff-like powder from their wigs sprinkling their shoulders. Ben Franklin, who once said “[We’ve given you] a republic, if you can keep it,” is now yelling “They couldn’t keep it!” For almost a decade the country has been living with the solid 47 percent of American voters who love Trump no matter what. The immobility of that number, year in, year out, has been like a clog. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, when Miss Watson is giving Huck some tedious book learning, she tells him about hell, and he says he wishes he was there. He explains to the reader that he didn’t really mean it, he just wanted a change.

Now we are in hell, but at least it’s a change. Maybe it will somehow jolt the clog of the 47 percent and shake it loose. Or maybe the hell will prove to be the first sign of the Trump fever breaking, in the way that Nixon’s victory in 1972 began his end. For now, we must watch and pray.

Adam Gaffney

After taking office in 2017, Trump sought to turn the far right’s health care vision into reality—past that may soon be prologue. His unpopular bill, the American Health Care Act (one poll found that only 17 percent of Americans supported it), would have decimated the nation’s health care safety net, stripping Medicaid from millions and degrading protections for the sick. But it split Republicans and galvanized strident resistance—police yanked protesters in wheelchairs from Capitol Hill offices—and went down in defeat, leading Democrats to retake the House the following year. 

Whether the next Trump administration can or will make another go of it is uncertain, and so is whether such an action would rouse similar resistance. He’s been cautiously vague on the issue—“I have concepts of a plan,” he said at the last debate—and at the time of this writing it’s not clear whether Republicans will maintain House control. But that should give us little solace: this time Trump arrives prepared and organized. Project 2025, drafted by his allies, outlines a grim libertarian vision for American health care: some 18 million Americans could lose coverage were it implemented, to say nothing of the evisceration of abortion rights and the total privatization of Medicare. Meanwhile, last month, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that “massive reform” would be coming for health care in the wake of a Trump victory. Even a narrower law—say, one that “only” cut Medicaid funding to subsidize corporate tax cuts—would have deadly consequences for working-class people. 

His next administration will move to sicken us in other ways. The anti-vaccine, ivermectin-promoting conspiracy crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has emerged as the Trump’s transition team’s health guru. If Trump’s record in office is any guide, his next administration will pollute our air and water and erode workers’ health. An analysis by The New York Times found that Trump shredded nearly a hundred environmental rules in his first term. This deregulatory slash-and-burn agenda led to increases in air pollution and numerous deaths. To placate industry groups, Trump delayed enforcing an Obama-era rule for improving workplace protections against silica dust—a cause of lethal lung scarring—and undercut Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) leadership and inspections more broadly. For all the talk of populism, in other words, Trump governed like a plutocrat, stuffing the pockets of corporate allies at the cost of the health of ordinary people. This time will be no different. 

And therein might lie the key to resisting his agenda: quite simply, people just can’t stand it. An analysis of polling recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 81 percent of Americans (and 79 percent of Republicans) support Medicare, while 74 percent (and 65 percent of Republicans) support Medicaid. Overall, two thirds of Americans—and 40 percent of Republicans—believe that “it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage.” Such hopeful realities will help us resist Trump and his health agenda today, and, with any hope, change the political landscape so that we can move toward an egalitarian and universal system once he is, at long last, behind us.

Madeleine Schwartz

“I’m relieved,” a relative told me a day after the election. “I no longer have to think about politics. What’s the point?”

If Trump’s first victory galvanized wide, instant opposition, the response to his second so far seems more muted. The Resistance liberals and MSNBC Moms have in the past few days been relatively quiet, the kickoff event for a Women’s March “comeback tour” sparsely attended. The presidency hasn’t yet begun, and already it feels as if many Americans would rather not talk about it. 

In The Wall Street Journal a week before the vote, activists who organized between 2016 and 2020 described how, if Trump won, they were going to hunker down in the Hudson Valley or Joshua Tree to spend time with their pets or play music. “My own instinct—which conflicts with the demands of my job—is to retreat into my family, to look for solace in time with friends, in theater and in novels, to block out the humiliating truth about what my country has decided to become,” wrote Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. 

Many activists come to a second presidency already tired. Biden’s tenure didn’t give them rest and reprieve; on many of the crucial issues—notably reproductive rights and immigration—the situation didn’t get better and sometimes got worse. The past four years have hardly been lush for journalists and advocates. They have had to do more with less, fundraise constantly, and deal with burned-out staffs—all while being told to keep up the good work sustaining a healthy democracy. Movement politics from below changed little above. Setting guardrails for Trump in 2016 to 2020 didn’t prevent his return. For those attached to the value of protest, meanwhile, the violent reaction from police departments in blue cities to pro-Palestine demonstrations eroded confidence that Democrats will protect freedom of speech. 

Trump 2.0 is likely to be worse than the first administration in almost every way. The staff is emboldened and the think tanks more organized, set on getting rid of federal employees who might put up any resistance. Ineptitude and gaffes are cold comfort when a decaying government offers fewer and fewer public services and an aging man has the nuclear codes. Who will stop him this time?