welcome to america

I woke up this morning after getting four hours of sleep to the smell of cigarettes. For the first time in nearly a decade, I smoked half a pack of Dunhills in a night. When you're a former smoker, it's easy to forget how much the habit stinks — and how, back in the day, you used to just live like this, followed everywhere you go by the stench of stale tobacco. You never truly appreciate it until you quit. In the moment, you never notice.

There's a school of thought on this beat where one is encouraged to not show weakness in the face of the movement that we cover. I ascribe to this, in general. Petty authoritarians want you to be afraid of them. It feeds them and gives them power. They don't want you to see them as human, per se. Humans are flawed; humans make mistakes; humans get scared; humans stumble. The fear that authoritarianism seeks to instill only works if we let its adherents seem larger than they are.

But the truth of the matter is I'm filled with dread. A majority of Americans re-elected Donald Trump, a convicted felon and incorrigible tyrant, as president of the United States despite a campaign that threw together a barebones ground game and struggled to keep its proxies' racism veiled. In a plot to stay in office after losing the 2020 election, Trump led an attempted coup, encouraging his acolytes to storm the U.S. Capitol as they called to murder his vice president. His campaign was a bid, not just for the presidency, but for the ability to exact retribution on his long list of political enemies. Days voters went to the polls, he quipped about not minding if someone murdered reporters at his rally.

"This entire phony thing is getting swept out. Biden's getting swept out. Kamala Harris is getting swept out. MSNBC's getting swept out. The Justice Department's getting swept out. The FBI's getting swept out. You people suck. And now, you're going to pay the price for trying to destroy this country," Steve Bannon, a former White House official, said last night while awaiting Trump to speak at Mar-A-Lago.

"You deserve not retribution. Justice. Rough Roman justice. And we're prepared to give it to you," Bannon continued.

Only a quarter of Americans are happy with the direction the United States is going. In the same poll, taken before the November 2016 election, around 28 percent reported feeling the same.

In that climate, the former president's success should come as no surprise. To voters, Trump offered change, and Harris' campaign was too tethered to the Democratic legacy that they expressed frustrations with. The fact that he will spend more of his time propping up cronies and pandering to his sycophantic fans who stormed the Capitol on his behalf and bore the consequences of his actions, while Trump experienced none himself, rather than governing was lost on them. There's plenty of time for reassessing the failures of the Democrats to offer a vision counter to Trump's own revenge fantasy, but the truth of the matter is that this is just what America is.

For a long time, I've felt a deep frustration with some of the ways discussions of Trump's authoritarianism have carried on in more mainstream left-leaning circles. I agree with Robert Paxton, the historian of fascism, that the term hasn't been a useful concept in discussing Trump and his movement to a broader audience. The right, in particular, has had at least eight years to manipulate the term and muddle its meaning, depicting themselves — wrongly, of course — as the valiant defenders of the "real fascists" on the left. It may serve as a moral cudgel, but when no promising alternative is offered, or sticks, that's all it can be.

Yet a second Trump administration will empower the radical right just as it did the first, it not more so. Even some critics of the incoming president, such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes, couldn't contain their glee. While Fuentes refused to endorse Trump's 2024 campaign and repeatedly promised, albeit rather unconvincingly, to challenge him in swing states for not being sufficiently right-wing, during a livestream on election night he tweeted, "I can't believe we did it again." Other extremists celebrated online with rape threats and talks of violence. Still more threatened undocumented immigrants, whom Trump has said he will deport on his first day in office.

"Message to illegal aliens (incl. 'asylum-seekers', parole, TPS, DED, etc, etc): Use the next couple of months to get your affairs in order, pack up your belongings, and go home for Christmas on your own terms. It'll be easier for everyone, & more dignified than the alternative," wrote Mark Krikorian, the director of the anti-immigrant group Center for Immigration Studies, on "X," the website formerly known as Twitter.

The radical right's mission has long been to shift the political culture, moving what they call the "Overton Window" right. We have let them repeatedly succeed. Trumpism — a vacuous, churning pit of resentment and grievance — provides them a blank slate to indulge their own immature revenge fantasies. It is a political movement that cannot create, only destroy. Even after an electoral victory, its worldview, its Weltanschauung, cannot let go of its most dedicated adherents' insistence that they are the real victims in this country. Such emptiness should be easier to counter — it will do little to bolster voters' material conditions, for one. But instead we have let the grievances that drives Trumpism fester, welcoming its most dedicated adherents into the halls of power to let them carry out their crusade of ransacking America for their own benefit.

Whatever happens in 2025 and beyond will be uncharted territory for the right. This is a carte blanche for carrying their darkest visions to fruition. Yet this is not 2016. The right had four years to dream of and plan for vengeance.

And here we are.