WASHINGTON: American presidential elections are a moment when the nation holds up a mirror to look at itself. They are a reflection of values and dreams, of grievances and scores to be settled.
The results say much about a country’s character, future and core beliefs. On Tuesday, America looked into that mirror gave Donald Trump a far-reaching victory in the most contested states.
He won for many reasons. One of them was that a formidable number of Americans, from different angles, said the state of democracy was a prime concern.
The candidate they chose had campaigned through a lens of darkness, calling the country “garbage” and his opponent “stupid,” a “communist” and “the b-word.”
Even as Trump prevailed, most voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that electing Trump would bring the US closer to being an authoritarian country, according to the AP VoteCast survey. Still, 1 in 10 of those voters backed him anyway. Nearly 4 in 10 Trump voters said they wanted complete upheaval in how the country is run.
In Trump’s telling, the economy was in shambles, even when almost every measure said otherwise, and the border was an open sore leeching murderous migrants, when the actual number of crossings had dropped precipitously. All this came wrapped in his signature language of catastrophism.
Trump’s win demonstrated his keen ear for what stirs emotions, especially the sense of millions of voters of being left out — whether because someone else cheated or got special treatment or otherwise fell to the ravages of the enemy within.
So the centuries-old democracy delivered power to the presidential candidate who gave voters fair warning he might take core elements of that democracy apart.
After already having tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after his 2020 loss, Trump mused that he would be justified if he decided to pursue “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
One rough measure of whether Trump means what he says is how many times he says it. His direct threat to try to end or suspend the Constitution was largely a one-off.
But the 2024 campaign was thick with his vows that, if realized, would upend democracy’s basic practices, protections and institutions as Americans have known them.
And now, he says after his win, “I will govern by a simple motto: promises made, promises kept.”
Through the campaign, to lusty cheers, Trump promised to use presidential power over the justice system to go after his personal political adversaries. He then raised the stakes further by threatening to enlist military force against such domestic foes — “the enemy from within.”
Doing so would shatter any semblance of Justice Department independence and turn soldiers against citizens in ways not seen in modern times.
He’s promised to track down and deport immigrants in massive numbers, raising the prospect of using military or military-style assets for that as well.
Spurred by his fury and denialism over his 2020 defeat, Trump’s supporters in some state governments have already engineered changes in voting procedures, an effort centered on the false notion that the last election was rigged against him.
Yet another pillar of the system is also in his sights — the non-political civil service and its political masters, whom Trump together calls the deep state.
He means the generals who didn’t always heed him last time, but this time shall.
He means the Justice Department people who refused to indulge his desperate effort to cook up votes he didn’t get in 2020. He means the bureaucrats who dragged their heels on parts of his first-term agenda and whom Trump now wants purged.
But if some or all of these tenets of modern democracy are to fall, it will be through the most democratic of means. Voters chose him — and by extension, this — not Democrat Kamala Harris, the vice president.
And by early measures, it was a clean election, just like 2020.
Eric Dezenhall, a scandal-management expert who has followed Trump’s business and political career, said it’s not always easy to suss out what Trump truly intends to do and what might be bluster. “There are certain things that he says because they cross his brain at a certain moment,” Dezenhall said. “I don’t put stock in that. I put stock in themes, and there is a theme of vengeance.”
The voters also gave Trump’s Republicans clear control of the Senate, and therefore majority say in whether to confirm the loyalists Trump will nominate for top jobs in government. Trump controls his party in ways he didn’t in his first term, when major figures in his administration repeatedly frustrated his most outlier ambitions.
“The fact that a once proud people chose, twice, to demean itself with a leader like Donald Trump will be one of history’s great cautionary tales,” said Cal Jillson, a constitutional and presidential scholar at Southern Methodist University whose new book, “Race, Ethnicity, and American Decline,” anticipated some of the existential issues of the election.
From the political left, any threats to democracy were not on the mind of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont when he offered a blistering critique of the Democratic campaign.
“It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said in a statement. “Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?”
He concluded: “Probably not.”
Guardrails remain. One is the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority loosened the leash on presidential behavior in its ruling expanding their immunity from prosecution. The court has not been fully tested on how far it will go to accommodate Trump’s actions and agenda. And which party will control the House is not yet known.
Among voters under 30, just under half went for Trump, an improvement from his 2020 performance, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters. Roughly one-third of those voters said they wanted total upheaval in how the country is run.
By Trump’s words, at least, that’s what they’ll get.