The Trump Era Has Been Four Percent of American History

The Trump era is now ten years old. This represents four percent of American history and should be understood in that context.

Monday marks the tenth anniversary of Donald Trump descending on that now famous escalator at Trump towers to announce his first presidential campaign. Since that day, Trump has been the central figure in American politics. He has been the person, even when out of office and not in the middle of a campaign, around whom, for better or worse-and almost always for worse-American politics has revolved.

As the Trump era enters its 11^th year, a few weeks before the country’s 249^th birthday, some quick math tells us that the Trump era has constituted just over 4% of the history of the US and slightly more than 12.5% of the post-war period. This is a sufficiently long period of time that we can no longer think of Trump and his fascist movement as an aberration. Moreover, it may be time to spin the how did this happen question slightly differently and instead ask whether the Trump era was always inevitable.

It is also probably time to recognize that despite how so many have insisted on describing Trump and his movement as unAmerican, there is something deeply American about Trump’s political appeal and particular brand of huckster-infused fascism.

Trump and the bigots around him, including Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Pete Hegseth and so many others, did not create American racism, but simply mined a rich political vein of fear, racism and xenophobia. Similarly, while the crypto-goniffs who have been so influential in this administration may have a new 21^st century vibe about them, financial chicanery, exploiting working people and using the government to make rich people richer have also been central to American political and economic life for well over a century.

The tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Trump era comes following a week in which the regime accelerated its efforts to strengthen its power and destroy democracy. They have done this by sending the military to Los Angeles, assaulting and handcuffing a US Senator for trying to ask an administration official a question and threatening anybody who dares to protest the president’s fascist birthday celebration.

It is now clear that a decade into the Trump era, the US is in a completely different political place, and facing a radically different political future, than many in the political class thought it was on June 14, 2015. Even in the past few weeks, it seems like increasing numbers of Americans who were believers in the cult of it can’t happen hereism are now recognizing that it can happen here, and indeed is happening here.

Therefore, the tenth anniversary of the dawn of the Trump era should lead us to rethink much of what many have been telling ourselves about the US and to confront other realities that we have collectively, particularly in white America, avoided confronting for a very long time.

On June 1, 2015, as the Obama administration entered its final 18 months the center-left consensus narrative of meta-American history would have included a recognition of the horrors of the genocide of indigenous people and of slavery, but would also have posited that in the broad swath of American history, particularly in the post-World War II era, rights and democracy had been steadily expanding and the curve had been moving in the right direction.

That feel good view can no longer be given nearly as much credence. Instead, we must ask the much tougher question of how Trump not only emerged but took over our political life for fully 4% of the country’s history. We can blame social media, Moscow, economic instability or whatever else we choose, but if we refuse to recognize the extent to which MAGA fascism grew out of broader realities of American history and what America is, we will never be able to stop it.

The deeply inconvenient truth here is that American democracy was always an unfinished project for many reasons, but one of them was that so many Americans never fully accepted the notion that all of us regardless of race, religion, family history or anything else are equal. That notion of equality was always aspirational, but a struggle because, with few exceptions, over the long course of American history, those with real economic and political power never fully believed it.

One reason that may be the case is because the founders clearly did not believe it and enshrined that inequality into the Constitution. Almost a century later, following a bloody Civil War, powerful forces from both the north and south redoubled their lack of commitment to equality by ending Reconstruction. Since then, even in the face of expanded civil rights and political gains for all groups, the notion that the US was a country for white Christians above all else was an unspoken belief that many Americans held.

The MAGA movement was the 21^st century expression of a deeply American idea about white nationalism. Trump updated and exploited it, but it was a deeply American vein of hatred that has fed his political movement for a decade now.

The era of Trump has led us to the point where it is appropriate and even necessary not only to note the ongoing crisis of democracy, but to raise genuine questions about the future of the polity. For most of American history, certainly since the beginning of the twentieth century, most Americans, and most people around the world, believed so strongly that the US was, if not eternal, then likely to be around for a very long time, that almost nobody even raised the question. During the Trump years, the question of whether the US can remain a single unified functioning polity in twenty, or even ten, years is one we cannot responsibly avoid or dismiss.

It is if not quite likely, then certainly possible, that the Trump era will be the last era in American history before instability and fracturing of the country further destroys the US. Given that, we may want to begin thinking of the Trump era not as aberration in American history, but as the culmination, as the last and tragic chapter of American experiment.