Doom personified
The gloves are off and the guardrails are gone — a peril of our own making.
Note: By the time you’ll be reading this, Donald Trump’s win will be even more solidified than it is right now, at 2:49 a.m., as UFC president Dana White thanks the podcasters Theo Von and Joe Rogan for their service in helping to elect Donald Trump. You can’t just kill democracy with one swing but you can suffocate it, slowly. I think that’s one of the places we’re headed. I’ll outline our other future destinations in the weeks, months and years to come. It’s important in this moment to support independent journalism — any journalism, actually — but especially those of us who are out here doing it on our own. You can support my work at American Doom here. Now, onto the news…
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The decision was both careless and planned. It was deeply selfish but done for reasons of misguided selflessness. It was perverse but carried out with a sense of piety. It was cynical and hopeful, incredibly, at the same time.
A great bargain has been made by tens of millions of Americans tonight who have once again chosen Donald Trump as president. Staring down the words and deeds of an obvious authoritarian, Americans chose the vague promise of cheaper things over the democratic ideals that have made us the greatest country in the world. They have gambled with this experiment because they believe that Trump can make their lives better, richer, and more avenged.
He will bring economic calamity with his promise of sweeping and immediate tariffs, hitting the poorest among his supporters the hardest. He will deteriorate our standing in the world, and with it, global stability, as tyrants rise in that path he has forged. He will divide us even more deeply as he enriches himself and his wealthiest supporters. His working class base will get culture war wins to satiate them, even if cheaper gas and groceries never materialize.
“This is an enormous victory for democracy, for freedom,” Trump said, sticking to his teleprompter remarks. He then claimed God saved him in order for Trump to “fulfill” his mission to “save the country.”
Tonight, Trump has once again shocked much of the political class and press who have been sharing anecdotes and filing stories for weeks about his dying campaign, his sluggish finish to his third bid for the White House, and his supporters’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for a candidate that has enjoyed near-universal support among his party for almost a decade now.
The sparsely-attended rallies didn’t matter, nor did the unhinged meanderings of an elderly man clearly in cognitive decline whose final days and weeks on the campaign trail were marked with often bizarre soliloquies into mentions of Arnold Palmer’s penis, his promise (or threat) to protect women “whether they like it or not,” and his mimicking of performing a sex act on a microphone. Americans chose him anyway, and they did so in sizable numbers. Maybe the silent majority really is a thing — although what, exactly, it is that the silent majority wants is a matter of debate.
We’re faced now with a dark future. Trump supporters don’t believe this. In fact, they believe the opposite. But they’ve made a devil’s bargain, one that many of them will likely regret. Trump has said his second term will be one of retribution — a campaign of vengeance carried out from the White House. More than forty people associated with his previous administration have said he will abuse the powers of the presidency to carry out an authoritarian — and fascist — vision.
“It’s nice to worry about democracy but if you can’t pay for your food?” conservative CNN commentator David Urban said before polls closed in a brief back-and-forth with former Obama advisor and Democratic strategist David Axelrod.
Doom on authoritarianism
Trump’s focus on the economy and immigration appear to have outpaced progressive concerns about his authoritarian tendencies. Americans who voted for Trump either aren’t concerned with Trump’s anti-democratic outlook and policies — or don’t care — and have instead chosen to send the nation down a troubling path that pro-democracy voices and experts on authoritarianism have warned about as Election Day neared, and as Trump’s rhetoric turned increasingly violent and chaotic.
For many, the choice to vote for Trump was careless. A young Puerto Rican woman in Florida who voted for Trump was asked by a reporter why she did so. Meh, was essentially her answer. She intoned, I don’t really know before saying something vague about how she wanted a better life for her and her family. For others, it was planned. There is a reason Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, wants Trump in office. And it ain’t because he wants to pay higher taxes and raise wages for the working class millions who, like they do Trump, bizarrely support Musk.
I guess they think if guys like Trump and Musk can get rich, they can too.
The decision to elect Trump was selfish for the pocketbook reasons of the rich as well as the culture war vengeance ones of racists, but for many others, they thought it was selfless: they truly believe Trump will help all Americans — whether they like it or not, as Trump said about “protecting” women. For the Christians and the Christian nationalists, the decision to support Trump was, as it’s always been, a perversion of Christ’s teachings. But it was made because many of them believe that sometimes you need a bad guy to do good things.
They elected Trump out of cynicism — fuck it, he’s funny lol and fuck the libs — as well as some hope. They hope that one day they’ll be as free from accountability as he is, a rich guy who does whatever he wants and never pays the consequences.
The depths of their mistake can’t be determined immediately, but the months and years to come will bear that out. Regardless of the specific results of a second Trump term, the broader effect will be historically detrimental for the nation, and the world.
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Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris thanks to victories in the battlegrounds of North Carolina, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Despite the chaos of the election, the count itself ran smoothly in places like Philadelphia.
The madness of the 2020 count there — where Trump and Biden supporters faced off against each other — was nowhere to be seen after it was moved from the downtown convention center to a nondescript warehouse on the Northeastern edge of the city.
This year, groups of 150 workers sat quietly doing seven-hour shifts in the facility, a former Bible factory, processing the 200,000 mail-in ballots in a way that even Republican observers admitted was “boring.”
Polling locations across Pennsylvania were the target of bomb threats, including 10 in Philadelphia with one being closed temporarily. In Georgia, too, polling locations in the Atlanta metro area were the target of bomb threats throughout the day and evening. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, said in an afternoon press conference that the morning’s bomb threats came from Russian sources. Russian and Iranian actors were also behind disinformation attacks that sought to sow distrust in the election, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other agencies in the intelligence community said Tuesday afternoon. Those disinformation efforts included a fake video of Haitian migrants claiming to have voted in Georgia, and another video supposedly showing mail-in ballots being opened and destroyed in late October in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
But the chaos of Election Night 2020 never materialized. Despite widespread misinformation around unfounded claims of election fraud, the American right didn’t need to weaponize those claims in order to claim victory for Trump. The votes were enough to do it all on their own.
Trump celebrated at Mar-a-Lago in front of a crowd of his faithful supporters, among them House Speaker Mike Johnson and a cadre of the wealthiest, most influential members of a corporatist-authoritarian class that will have a field day under a second Trump term. “It will be a bank heist,” a longtime political observer, editor and friend notes. Indeed it will.
Trump and his supporters have broad and detailed plans to dismantle the administrative state, enrich the wealthiest Americans, undo protections for minority classes and remake virtually every aspect of American life in their own, twisted vision.
Minorities and women will suffer the most, which means poor, minority women will suffer the most. Democrats might get a consolation prize in the House of Representatives. With Trump and his people controlling the executive branch — prepare yourself for DHS Secretary Stephen Miller — and a conservative majority holding the Supreme Court, little stands in Trump’s way to carry out the aggressively extremist agenda that his handlers at the Heritage Foundation have laid out with Project 2025.
“Democracy isn’t a light switch. You can’t just turn it off,” my friend and editor reminded me. We spoke before the race was called but when we both knew it was over. The lights are still on for the moment, but they’re flickering a bit.
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With reporting from Daniel Bates in Philadelphia, Bree Zender in Savannah, and all my past journalism colleagues in my heart.
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