Taking Stock A Year In

One of the nice things about working in and adjacent to the news industry is that you don’t really have to read or watch “the news” to have a much better sense of ground truth than a typical news consumer.

That’s also a curse. The counterpoint is that you quickly realize how misinformed most people are, and not necessarily because they marinate in propaganda (though in many cases they do). It’s hard not to suspect that we’d live in a different, better country if only most people understood half of what’s common knowledge to those of us who specialize in U.S. politics. Yet you confront daily reminders that specializing in politics is weird, and helping critical numbers of people become just a little better informed is an immense challenge.

Donald Trump creates a unique sense of alienation between elites and laypeople for this reason. It's ironic, because he spews fog as a tactic, but his constant interventions into our lives, and the many ways people respond to them, make it easy to see the vastness of the chasm between ground truth and the beliefs of half the population.

He has core supporters, some of whom are completely deluded, others of whom are quite well informed, but think of themselves as servants to his lies, which promote shared hatreds.

He has garden variety supporters who’ve always voted Republican, and believe all kinds of nonsense about both Democrats per se, and the scoreboard of Democratic and Republican governing performance. Trump has swing-vote supporters who float in the wind or else convinced themselves that certain obvious lies were true.

And the curse is that through the cataclysm of the past year, all we could say is “we tried to warn you.” His first term was marked by extremely rash and poor governing decisions that didn’t yield catastrophe until he finally had to confront a global crisis. It ended in violent insurrection. Over the intervening four years, you could feel faithful memory of the first term dim. But between his open lust for revenge and poorly concealed secret governing agenda, we all had everything we needed to anticipate how his first year in office would play out, at least directionally.

Today things feel different. Sometime in the past couple months, Trump ran out of easily anticipatable moves. He isn’t completely unpredictable. His tendency toward aggression is undiminished, it just points in increasingly arbitrary directions, like a broken compass. A year ago, I had a pretty good sense of the autocracy he would try to build, because his loyalists wrote the plan down on paper. I knew he would try to replace our system of government with something reasonably familiar, and that he’d either succeed or fail.

Today, I feel increasingly confident that he has failed—too much of the country is against him, and too many of them are willing to resist in successful ways. I also feel decreasingly confident I know what comes next. Just in the past week it’s grown harder to imagine him serving out his term without us having to endure some collective calamity. The best I can offer at the moment is: be prepared for anything.

As a gut check this long weekend, I reread a few of the articles I published after the 2024 election. You can see the contours of what was to come. I want to dwell on this not in any kind of conceited way, or to pretend that watching Trump et al put the plan into action wasn’t breathtaking, but to establish a contrast with now, when the outlook is much murkier.

Here’s what I wrote the next day:

Reflections On America's New Autocracy

Brian Beutler · November 6, 2024

The United States and the world will soon be in the hands of mercurial, vindictive, greedy men with scores to settle and few checks on their power.

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