Destined to Haunt Us: Donald Trump reaches across time

In the year after Trump began his second term with an inaugural address assertion that he was “saved by God to make America great again,” one way to measure his influence is to cast the mind forward two years from now. In January 2028, Democrats will be in the thick of their contest not simply to be the presidential nominee but to carry out what they believe is an assignment from history: ending the Trump Moment.

It’s been a long journey. Assuming he serves out his full term (despite all kinds of stories about the supposed state of his health, the 47^th president appears at least externally healthy), by January 2029 Trump will have been the dominant figure in American politics in this century for longer (14 years) than the dominant political figure of the 20th century (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for 12 years). In fact, Trump is on track to change the character of American government and the hyperpower’s relationship with the world more profoundly than any predecessor in decades. At this historical point in time, it’s challenging to see if anyone can dispute that hypothesis.

So, what will – or can --Democrats — desperate to end a chapter they regard as a tragic historical accident — be talking about? What choice will they have: To talk about Trump. Or, alternately, to self-consciously and implausibly try not to talk about Trump.

The reach of Trump’s policies and his disruptive way of implementing them will almost inevitably dominate the campaign and first term of his successor — perhaps more so if that person happens to be a Democrat as opposed to a Republican. In this sense, Trump is getting a third term even if he doesn’t actually attempt to circumvent the Constitution, as his vociferous critics suspect he wants to, and attempt to remain in office.

Some Democrats will likely lean into the symbolic restoration of post-Trump normality. “I pledge here in New Hampshire, a state that neighbored JFK’s own, that I will restore the name and the honor of the Kennedy Center on Day One through executive order,” sounds like a progressive mantra. Fair enough. But the task of repairing what Democrats and many others believe is Trump’s reckless vandalism means that day one for that president will have to cast a backward-looking gaze — and likely so will month one and year one, depending on how far down the fix-it list a new chief executive would choose to go.

Will there be other executive orders demolishing the Triumphant Arch, the already nicknamed “Arc de Trump,” a structure critics regard as architectural pornography that the president is planning near the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery? What about military bases named for Confederates, erased in the Biden years but restored under Trump? Don’t forget the Gulf of America and the Department of War. Then there is the matter of the Trump-class battleships and the very real possibility that he will break precedent and name a super carrier after himself while still in office.

Surely some Democrats no doubt will choose to forego these symbolic battles and the kind of cultural scab-picking they represent. “With all respect to your question, I do not care about the White House ballroom and replanting grass in the Rose Garden. This election is about the future, not the past — about affordable houses, not the White House.” How many candidates would actually deign to say that? It’s much too tempting in this divisive political era to pass up an opportunity to issue vitriolic barbs and cheap rhetorical shots, thus gaining brownie points with the core voters (the ‘base’) who populate presidential primaries.

But these symbolic trifles only nod to the much more consequential substantive choices facing post-Trump politicians.

For a Democrat, pledging to end abusive practices by ICE officers is a no-brainer. Harder to answer is whether he or she will continue Trump’s border policies, which have had actual results, virtually halting undocumented crossings, or what specific modifications of those policies a new president would make.

Specificity might be similarly uncomfortable about what will happen to Trump-era tariffs for a Democratic candidate campaigning in Michigan, Ohio or other manufacturing states hard hit by globalization and the coming ill-planned-for AI wave. Protectionism, after all, is historically an idea that flowed from the labor wing of the Democratic Party. So is the essence of large swaths of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies — subordinating free markets to a centralized economic policy that has winners chosen expressly by Washington. Will a Democratic president wish to repeal that idea in full? More than one has flirted with populist rhetoric and it takes a great leader to cede power of any kind.

Will there be even one Democratic contender who cares so much about “restoring norms” that they would forsake in full Trump’s example of making tech titans and other billionaires tap dance and throw bouquets to win his favor? Nor would we expect that they would rush to reinvent all manner of post-Watergate checks on presidential power (though a reawakened Congress, sick of being ignored, or being reduced to nodding sycophants might just aim to impose those over a new president’s objections).

Probably even a Republican successor, if it were someone other than Vice President JD Vance (a Vance-Rubio ticket is a higher possibility than a direct competition between these two ambitious men), would be ready to rhapsodize about NATO and join Democrats in saying how much we respect and want to work with allies. But no successor would want to risk political exposure at home by conducting anything that could be caricatured as an apology tour or relaxing Trump’s insistence that Europeans pay much more for their own defense. Call it the Tea Party, or the MAGA movement or whatever else, but those voters would never stand for what they would inevitably see as ‘talking down’ the U.S.

It took Democrats and the Washington professional class, including the news media, a long time to understand something his acolytes perceived at the beginning: Trump’s success is not an anomaly, and his enduring power flows from the fact that he represents a generation-shaping political movement with the potential for realignment every bit as significant as the one Ronald Regan begat in 1980.

Historically, the way ideological and partisan opponents end a historical movement is to concede that certain questions have been settled and stop arguing. Eisenhower returned Republicans to power in the 1950s not by denouncing FDR’s New Deal but accepting large parts of it and simply moving on. A couple weeks after Tony Blair took power as prime minister in Britain in the spring of 1997, on a New Labour agenda that owed a lot to Bill Clinton’s New Democrat agenda, they were both asked at a Downing Street news conference about the commonalities of their success. Blair said it was in part because they both were next-generation leaders who didn’t want to argue about right-wing predecessors like Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan: “There were certain things the 1980s got right, an emphasis on enterprise, more flexible labor markets. Fine, accepted. They got it right.” The aim, he said, was to move on to the next wave of debates in which progressives had the better end of the argument.

Trump’s personality and actions are so incendiary — and the political culture he presided over is so infected — that it is hard to imagine this customary way of ending a historical movement by partially co-opting it happening in this case.

Above all, the Trump precedent that will matter most in the long term is not any specific policy but his broader theory of presidential power—the theory that presidents mostly get to do what they want and the only remedy for those who don’t like it is to impeach them or defeat them for re-election. Whatever tack a successor takes verbally — “I pledge to restore rule of law to the Oval Office” — it would defy historical precedent and common sense if they voluntarily surrendered what Trump has amassed. Theodore H. White’s imperial presidency is an ever-growing phenomenon without partisan favour.

Whatever power the Supreme Courts and public opinion leave Trump with at the end of his term is the same power that a president of either party who follows him will seek to preserve, protect, defend and use to full impact. It is hard to imagine that a Democratic successor, no matter how much she or he loathes Trump, would want to revert to the old custom of 10-year terms for independent FBI directors. The same can be said of agencies and commissions, like the FCC or SEC, that reside in the executive branch but are intended to make regulatory decisions insulated from presidential preference or whim.

While this may raise the ire of his detractors it may be time to admit that Donald Trump is a significant president. In an objective sense, that he is consequential, not in the normative sense, that the results are praiseworthy. In the year since, Trump has given his melange of ideas, grievances and vanities far more concrete programmatic expression than friends or foes anticipated. He’s been more radical and less inhibited at every turn. In the first term, his critics exclaimed, “This is not normal!” Except now it is. We are, as Mark Carney so aptly and eloquently paraphrased in his recent Davos speech, in the age of a new normal.

Ergo, the roiling arguments about Trumpism will long outlast Donald Trump himself.