Eight years ago today, as Donald Trump declared that “American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” many Democrats were shell-shocked. It had been two and a half months since his surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, and he had just been sworn into office by Chief Justice John Roberts, but “President Trump” was still hard to fathom. In fact, many Democrats simply refused to believe it: They considered Trump an illegitimate president who should be rejected outright.
As Trump returns to the White House, it’s clear that this approach has failed miserably. Trump won not only the Electoral College but the popular vote too—the first Republican to do so since a wartime President George W. Bush in 2004. He is stronger than he has been at any point in his political career. That may change as his administration is beset by factional infighting and voters are reminded of just how insane life under his leadership is. But for now, he has expanded his base while running the most extreme presidential campaign since the advent of the Civil War. Far from ending “American carnage,” Trump is now promising to visit it upon his many imagined enemies.
It’s understandable that Trump’s second inauguration would be less shocking, if only because we have seen it once before. But it’s also more traumatic. Trump is both more experienced and more extreme than he was in 2017: He and his allies have learned from their failures the first time around and are pursuing a nakedly fascistic agenda. And the fact that he is once again taking the oath from Roberts proves the total failure of Democratic and Resistance efforts to banish Trump from public life. Now Democrats have to face a new reality: Not only is Trump here to stay, but they have to find a new way to defeat him—and, just as importantly, extinguish the growing movement he leads.
The so-called Resistance was right: Trump really was an authoritarian. (His presidency would end with a failed coup attempt, after all.) The Resistance was also remarkably successful. Trump’s first term was largely stymied by opponents both in public and within the government, and it persisted even after he left office. Reentering private life, Trump was charged with several crimes: fraud, the illegal retention of classified documents, and several charges related to his effort to overturn the 2020 election, among others. Some of it even stuck.
It helped that they had a case: There were legitimate questions about Russia’s influence in the 2016 election—not to mention Russia’s influence over Trump himself—that would soon blossom into a multiyear scandal that eventually culminated in his becoming the second president ever to be impeached. But there were myriad other motivations behind the anti-Trump movement that quickly emerged in 2017, such as his rampant misogyny (roughly a half-million people joined the Women’s March in D.C. the day after his inauguration) and extreme immigration policies (protests against the Muslim ban erupted at airports across the country).
Democrats fixated on Trump’s vulgarity, disdain for democracy, and general aura of chaos in part because it was hard to focus on anything else, given his singular ability to dictate the news cycle. But they also did this because they were clearly disgusted by him, as were many other Americans. His election challenged the premise of Barack Obama’s presidency—that we were an imperfect nation that was nevertheless bent on moral progress—and was an affront to many of America’s more high-minded founding principles. Trump was an abomination, and Democrats treated him that way from the jump.
