Trump's new age of acquiesence

The first week has been dark stuff. In pardoning the Jan6th insurrectionists, Trump has achieved the ultimate victory: over history itself.

I’ve been in the United States for the immediate time after Trump’s two inaugurations. I cannot adequately describe the difference in tone, pitch and feeling between the two periods. I remember being at a Women’s rally in Philadelphia just as the “Muslim ban” was introduced, then delayed up by a judge, then introduced again. The charge and fizzle of sheer political indignation was heady, in its way. Despite the Dems’ defeat, I think they were excited, animated certainly. The contingency of the first Trump presidency was enabling- the lines between what was and what so nearly could have been, barely askew. It was Trump’s opponents, “the resistance” who felt like they had all the energy, despite having won, Trump’s early administration, by contrast, felt rudderless, illegitimate, alone.

Today, it is the opposite. Trump has turned a narrow but decisive win into a dominance not only of government, but for now, of all politics. As I wrote earlier in the week, part of this is what feels like a decisive cultural turn in conservatism’s direction. But there’s something else going on too. Trump understands one of the most important commodities in modern politics: the ability to exhaust.

Trump has now been at the top of American politics for over a decade. I always have to suppress a smile whenever I interview a member of the MAGA faithful and they repeat the old truism: “He’s not a politician, he’s a businessman.” The truth is his business has been politics for a long time now, and the most profitable bits of his business are now intimately linked to his politics and political profile (see this last week’s grotesque graft with the launch of the Trump digital coins). He is perhaps the most consistently commanding American politician since FDR, having dominated three elections and three presidencies, including the Biden interregnum. He has achieved this through remarkable force of personality and will to power. He has also done it through the possession of the energy required to dominate all forms of media, to be ubiquitous, omnipresent, everywhere, anywhere all at once. And that ubiquity predates his politics- his presence in the culture and zeitgeist stretches nearly half a century. In Chicago, for the DNC this summer, I reflected how deeply weird it is, that you can walk along the city’s main thoroughfare in one direction and simply not be able to escape the titanic lettering of ‘TRUMP’, whichever way you look, emblazoned across one of his flagship hotels. In America, for so long now, it’s been harder and harder to walk down the street, turn on the TV, look at your phone and now open an app without Trump, in some way, being projected on to your brain.

In other words, Trump has simply worn everybody down. He has vanquished his opponents, but even more importantly sapped their will. He did this first with the city authorities of New York, then he did it to the Republican Party, now the Democratic Party, and it feels almost as if from America itself. He just does not stop. He is a battering ram- never yielding, never ceasing, never accepting that he is wrong. His warped narratives pollute everything, but they become the political air we breathe. It becomes difficult to remember there’s an alternative read. In the end, it’s just easier to submit.

That is how Trumpism is best understood. It is about the free expression of power, without hindrance, even over our collective understanding. And this week, it reached a new apex: Trump wants the power to shape not only the present, but the past, history itself. That is how the pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists should be seen. There was much speculation that Trump might only pardon some, not all of those impriosned, to leave some of the most egregious offenders, including those literally caught on film violently assaulting police officers. But he is said to have told his team to “fuck it. Release them all.” This wasn’t just about rewarding his people, though it is truly chilling to consider that he has released his own de facto paramilitary force, loyal entirely to himself, highly armed, precisely at the moment he takes away the state security provided to a whole host of his enemies. It’s about something deeper: about history and how we understand it.

In releasing everyone, the message he sends is that his narrative of January 6th is the correct one- that these were minor incidents. That we did not see what we saw, that we cannot believe our own eyes. This coincides with the new Congress, at Trump’s behest, investigating not the Jan6th insurrectionists, but the Congressional committee which investigated them. He and his allies have been spreading conspiracies about what happened at the Capitol for years. The pardons are the final coup de grace: Nothing could have happened because no crimes occurred. It was all just a liberal, Democratic confection, like everything else. As Orwell said, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." In effect, Trump pardoned himself.

This marks the start of a new age not of resistance, but acquiescence. Because it’s been marked with barely a whimper, barely a murmur, certainly from the Republican Party- some of whom were in the Capitol and targeted that day. But even the Democrats, in a daze, seem unable to articulate their opposition. The result is an act of collective gaslighting, of Trump’s distorted narrative settling, which is quite unlike anything I can remember. It is part of the many ways Trump is rewiring the American state around his own distorted truths: there are reports of officials being asked loyalty tests, one of which includes the question of who won the 2020 election. The Big Lie is being internalised into the weft of the American state itself. None of this is normal, but through sheer political fatigue, it has become normalised.

In this environment, where Trump is dominating even the understanding of our realities without much contestation, with the kings of the American information network brought into his inner circle, and locked out of power, there are few tools Democrats have at their disposal. One though, would have been to properly exploit one of the few moments the American public would be looking at them in the next four years: the inauguration itself. It was yet another example of the old liberal Democratic elite not understanding the moment in which they find themselves, where they kept playing by old rules, observing the niceties of a constitutional order which Trump has basically killed. Obama was pictured laughing and joking with Trump at President Carter’s funeral. Joe Biden played nice with Trump on the day, welcoming him “back home.”

They knew what Trump was going to do. They sat in the Capitol rotunda knowing he would release the January 6th criminals who had marched through it, beating up police officers and hoping to execute Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence. They had spent months warning Americans that Trump represented a unique, perhaps fascistic threat to democracy- and yet when it came down to it, they played nice. This has the effect of not only further normalising Trump, but also to make themselves look utterly ridiculous: to send a message to the American public that they do not mean what they say, which is precisely what Trump wants everyone to think. The presidents past should have taken a leaf from Michelle Obama’s book, and not attended.

The second Trump presidency is barely a week old, but it is clear it will be a series of revolutionary acts. The left and “mainstream” media needs to wake up, catch up and summon some energy and think deeply about how to respond. History may have been re-written by Trump for now, but it won’t always. And acquiescence is rarely judged generously in a regime such as this right now threatens to be.