What Next?

With Trump getting indicted on charges of inciting a rebellion that led to a violent mob ransacking the US Capitol when he lost the last election, Andrew Sullivan presents a grim picture of what might follow.

 

Trump doesn’t lie the way normal politicians do, he says.

“It is not lying in the usual sense — which depends on a shared reality that the liar knowingly distorts.”

Rather:

“Trump’s lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality.. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission.”

Even worse:

“Because his whims oscillate, so do the non-facts he invents to satisfy them.”

 

What do you think has been Trump and the American right’s response to the formal charges? Well, the timing is suspicious, they argue. Why file the charges only now? Is it because Trump is campaigning to be President again? How come Biden’s son was acquitted of most charges against him, they ask – it shows the entire system is biased, and Trump will never get a fair trial.

 

Sullivan puts it well when he says:

“Because Trump has brilliantly tapped the deep wellspring of often justified contempt for the meritocratic elites, and sustained his delusions with the energy of the insane, he has half the country on his side.”

Imagine that – a politician who didn’t accept an election result, incited violence after his loss, still commands support of nearly half the country. Which is why Sullivan worries that neither Trump nor his supporters will accept a Guilty verdict (if it were to come). And if Trump loses the next election?

“If he loses, he will insist again that he won. The rhetoric he and his cohorts have used would justify mass violence in response.”

 

This is a time that needs great leaders:

“Maybe there was a time when we could have moved on, found a Republican who could channel justified resentments without destroying the entire system, or found a Democrat young and talented enough to change the atmosphere.”

Instead, the leaders are Biden and Trump. And so Sullivan worries.

“We are entering late-stage democratic collapse, where tribalism overwhelms reason, common trust evaporates, debate is gone, norms destroyed, and all that matters is the purity of the extremes, and who can win power by any means.”