We must start urgently talking about the dangers of a second Trump presidency
Margaret Sullivan
With New Hampshire behind, the question isn’t who’s running but whether US democracy will endure
With Trump’s victory in New Hampshire, the battle lines are drawn for November. Unless something very weird happens, we’re looking at a Joe Biden and Donald Trump rematch.
It’s time – past time, really – to sweep away any remaining delusions about the viability of a more moderate Republican challenger or what a second Trump term would bring.
Now the question isn’t who’s running but whether American democracy will endure.
To put it bluntly, not if Trump is elected.
He’s already told us, many times over – and in abundantly clear terms – what he will do with a second term:
He’ll prosecute his perceived enemies with the full power of the government. He’ll call out the military to put down citizen protest. He’ll never allow a fair election again.
“Twelve more years” is no longer just a joke to pander to the raucous and red-capped faithful.
“The serious scholars of fascism are now saying that the ‘F-word’ is merited,” Jeff Sharlet, a Dartmouth professor and author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, told me in an interview on Wednesday.
Do Americans really want to live in a fascist or authoritarian nation? Some may believe it will work out just fine – that the loss of freedom may hurt others, but not them – but most of us don’t want that. Or we wouldn’t if we were fully aware of the consequences.
I talked with Sharlet about the actions that the mainstream press and regular citizens can take now that we know what we know.
Newsrooms big and small, he believes, need to educate their staffs about the dangers of fascism.
“There needs to be a pause,” he said, in coverage as as usual, and an internal reckoning. Sharlet suggests that media leaders bring in scholars – for example, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, who wrote On Tyranny – to lead newsroom discussions, based on clear historical precedent. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, would be another excellent choice.
After the New York Times wrote that Trump’s New Hampshire win “raises questions” about Nikki Haley’s path forward, Sharlet scoffed, noting that such questions have been settled for some time “but a press built for the horse race keeps touting a path that never existed when it should be retooling itself to cover a rapidly mutating fascism”.
Is such a retooling really possible? Of course it is.
The fact that many newsrooms now have democracy teams or democracy reporters suggests that they understand the problem to some extent. But they need to get much more urgent about it.
That kind of change takes clear leadership from the top.
The New York Times – now more influential than ever, as other news organizations shrink and fade by the day – should set an example. Its top editor, Joseph Kahn, with his background as a foreign correspondent in China, is extremely well positioned to take the lead.
As NYU professor Jay Rosen so memorably put it, coverage must refocus: “Not the odds but the stakes.” We do see “stakes” stories, of course, including on the Times front page, but it’s inarguable that horserace coverage still dominates.
What, exactly, we are racing toward is a question worth asking in every day’s politics coverage.
What about regular citizens?
Perhaps most importantly, they need to stop tuning out. They shouldn’t throw up their hands and decide not to care about politics or the future of the country.
“People need to pay attention to the exhaustion they feel and know that it is a symptom of acquiescence and adaptation,” Sharlet told me.
As Ben-Ghiat told me on my American Crisis podcast, that exhaustion is part of the strongman’s playbook.
Trump creates chaos, and we grow tired of it. Weary of the relentless flow of bad news, the dire warnings, the anxiety, we retreat into our personal lives or our political bubbles.
More advice from Sharlet for citizens: Form a “boring book club” and read – for example – Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, the shocking (and nearly 1,000-page) rightwing plan to dismantle the federal government and install political allies after a Trump election.
As the Associated Press wrote: “Trump-era conservatives want to gut the ‘administrative state’ from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.”
Neither politics reporters nor regular citizens need to become full-blown scholars of authoritarianism over the next nine months.
But failing to understand and act upon what’s at stake – either out of ennui or because “we’ve always done it that way” – is dangerous.
Now, with the clarity of the New Hampshire primary behind us, it’s high time to take things seriously.
