When this country elected Donald Trump the first time, it was merely unbelievable, and a majority of Americans focused, laser-like, on defeating him in the next election, once and for all — or so we thought. When this country did the unconscionable and elected him a second time, it could no longer be dismissed as an aberration. So instead of focusing all my attention on “Sh*tstorm, the Sequel,” I’ve been trying to figure out what was wrong with this country well before Trump came along — the internal contradictions that made Trump, or someone like Trump, an inevitable outcome, the contradictions that must be addressed if we’re to have any chance of moving past all this.
Democracy was a noble aspiration, but Trump took a leaf blower to our house of cards, demonstrating how feeble, and/or corrupt, our so-called “guardrail” institutions really were. Now we’re left to pick up the debris and forge a different dream, one that can withstand the assault of two-bit tyrants. Are we up to that challenge? I have no idea and I doubt anyone else does either.
Since we can’t go back, the only path is forward to a new future — this time, hopefully, with no illusions. Few, I suspect, have any real faith in this country anymore. Trumpism didn’t sack a great nation. His brand of tyrrany simply exploited the flaws that the rest of us wishfully overlooked. The Trump presidency is merely the vile byproduct of those flaws.
Two and a half centuries ago, America was founded on two powerful contradictions. So it has always needed reinvention, never more than now.
Well, maybe once before … in the 1850s. Recently, I came across a fascinating re-examination of Abraham Lincoln — and the decades preceding his appearance on the national stage — written in 1955 by an unconventional but insightful historian named David Donald in a book-length series of essays titled, Lincoln Reconsidered (I picked it up cheap at a house sale).
Donald taught history at Columbia, Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities — and counted among his students Heather Cox Richardson, the chief chronicler of our current undoing.
In Lincoln Reconsidered, he demythologized our greatest president, shedding the hero worship, making him more human and, in unexpected ways, even more admirable. In the book’s final essay, “An Excess of Democracy: The American Civil War and the Social Process,” he traced how a divided nation became so susceptible to Civil War.
“It is no wonder,” Donald wrote, “that [Alexis de] Tocqueville, attempting to characterize nineteenth-century American society, was obliged to invent a new word, ‘individualism.’ … In a nation so new that … men felt under no obligation to respect the lessons of the past … every aspect of American life witnessed this desire to throw off precedent and to rebel against authority. … [But] nowhere was the American rejection of authority more complete than in the political sphere. … With declining powers, there went also declining respect. … The national government, moreover, was not being weakened in order to bolster the state governments, for they too were decreasing in power. … By the 1850s the authority of all government in America was at a low point; government to the American was, at most, merely an institution with a negative role, a guardian of fair play.”
Because they suffered from “an excess of liberty,” Americans of that era were unable to coalesce and address their most critical issue: slavery. In the leadership vacuum that ensued, Donald said, “Never was there a field so fertile before the propagandist, the agitator, the extremist.” And he could have added, “the con man.”
Sounds a lot like 2025, given Americans’ current contempt for government, on both sides of the political spectrum.
In the 1850s, the country fell apart with frightening ease, which is also what we’re experiencing today. We aren’t “divided” and “polarized” so much as fragmented, even atomized. The center we rallied around, which enabled us to defeat Trump in 2020, did not hold in 2024. It dissipated as our pandemic fears evaporated, leaving us in centerless chaos.
In 1860, enter Abraham Lincoln, who reinvented America as a dream of democracy — government of, by and for the people. He enabled us to resolve the contradiction of slavery. But the contradiction of racism remains.
In 2016 and 2024, enter Donald Trump, who is systematically disabling democracy, and replacing it with a bastardized government of, by and for people who hate government — which is the other potent contradiction we were founded on, the one that will be our undoing if we fail to resolve it.
Where is the transformative leader who can inspire us to come together? Oh so obviously, Donald Trump is not that leader.
But someday, hopefully, we can thank Trumpism for forcing us to solve our two great internal contradictions — racism and hatred of government — so that we can reinvent America one more time.
And maybe this time we’ll get it right.