God help us.
I can’t do better than those words, uttered last year by Donald Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, when he dolefully contemplated Trump returning to power.
This is not going to be a standard day-after reflection on how the election is over, the voters have spoken and now we can look forward to the next president’s leadership of our nation and hope for the best. That’s what I felt eight years ago, after Trump had upset another Democrat who would have been the first female president.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
In 2016, having covered presidents of both parties as they came and went, I naively believed that even the narcissist Trump would be humbled by the august power and responsibility of being the leader of the free world. That he would grow in the job.
He wasn’t, and he didn’t. We know that now — after his tens of thousands of lies in office, the near-daily chaos, his deadly botched response to the pandemic, undermining of Americans’ faith in elections, flirtations with autocrats, unprecedented refusal to accept loss and peacefully transfer power in 2020, and his absconding with the nation’s top secrets.
In 2017, it was possible to believe that Trump, the purported deal-maker, meant it when he said he wanted to compromise with Congress on both gun control and immigration. He did neither, vexing Democrats and Republicans alike by his deal-breaking. Not only that, Trump ever after demagogued immigration — right back to the White House, it seems.
And now, if he’s true to his dystopic words on the campaign trail about murderous migrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” we can look forward to “bloody” deportations of millions of people, starting on day one. Which, if carried out, would doom Trump’s other big promise: to further grow the economy. Nonpartisan economicanalyses suggest mass deportations of workers — because that’s what the undocumented residents are: tax-paying workers — would hit the economy harder than the last decade’s financial collapse.
Many years ago, a well-known Republican strategist first schooled me in the political truism that although Americans profess to want our candidates to embody hope and comity, fear and anger are by far the stronger vote-motivators. Trump never needed to be schooled. His superpower is his innate grasp of the power of fear and anger to build an aggrieved following, what he called in his victory declaration early Wednesday “the greatest political movement of all time.”
The now-vanquished Kamala Harris said at her final, hopeful rally in Philadelphia on Monday night: “We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that.”
No, sadly, we aren’t.
Harris envisioned a United States “where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor.” Trump, who began his campaign last year vowing “retribution,” couldn’t get through his 10-minute victory lap early Wednesday morning without referring to “the enemy camp.” He was talking about the TV networks, but for weeks in his closing campaign arguments he’d expansively — and ominously — defined an “enemy within” that included Democrats, journalists, his Republican critics and former advisors-turned-Cassandras, a la Kelly.
Democrats are “demonic,” Trump said on Sunday, and he repeatedly singled out Californians Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker (“an evil, sick, crazy, b-b-b … starts with a ‘b’ ”), and “pencil neck” Adam Schiff, now a senator-elect. Both are among the many Trump targets who’ve needed costly security as a consequence of his attacks.
Trump repeatedly demeaned Harris as stupid and worse. His running mate, Mini-Me JD Vance, called her “trash” at the campaign’s end. Trump’s former vice president would never have said such a thing, but Mike Pence also wouldn’t help Trump overturn the 2020 election, which is why Trump dumped him for someone who said he would have. So the 40-year-old Vance will be the MAGA heir apparent to the oldest person ever elected as U.S. president.
In victory, Teleprompter Trump mostly said the right things: “We’re going to try to help our country heal,” he read, eyes shifting left to right to scan prepared remarks. “This will truly be the golden age of America.” (Real Trump ad-libbed the “enemy camp” remarks.)
But we know Trump too well. We are entering not a golden age but a new dark age in America.
The Constitution-respecting advisors that acted as guardrails in his first term have been banished. The Supreme Court he packed has given presidents virtual immunity from criminal prosecution. He’s surrounded by sycophants who’ve compiled the extremist Project 2025 agenda and a database of vetted MAGAts for federal jobs. As president, he will escape legal accountability for the alleged federal crimes of his first term, and likely the sentencing for 34 felony convictions in New York that he faces in just three weeks.
Unlike Trump and his supporters who never accepted Joe Biden as their president, I will recognize Trump as mine. And I trust Biden and Harris will be at the west front of the Capitol — where Trump’s violent supporters first breached the building in their attempted coup — to witness his swearing–in on Jan. 20, despite his failure to do the same for them four years ago.
Eight years ago, it wasn’t completely nuts on the morning after election day to hope that Trump could be a president for all of us. Fool me once … well, you know the rest.