Much will be studied, analyzed and written for years to come about why Americans voted an openly authoritarian leader back into power in apparently greater margins than they did eight years ago. What’s clearer and more important at this moment is what millions of our fellow citizens did by putting Donald Trump back in the White House.
Today we must reckon with the harsh reality that authoritarianism has arrived in America, that it’s broadly popular and that millions of our fellow citizens have given it their votes. We are entering a dark and dangerous time. But while this is a moment of reckoning that we must acknowledge, we should also refuse to give in to despair and continue to assert and rely on our rights and protections as Americans.
Over the next four years, the world’s most powerful office will be inhabited by a twice-impeached convicted felon with a history of flouting laws and norms — a narcissist who fomented the violent Jan. 6 insurrection and has promised to make decisions based on retribution and prejudice rather than what’s best for the country. Americans are right to be frightened and disillusioned by the resurgence of a man who ran on racism and sexism. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spent the closing days and weeks of their campaign spewing racist vitriol and calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “ b—.”
Though large swaths of the country, chief among them California, rejected Trump’s fearmongering, it was not enough to overcome his appeal across much of the nation. Huge segments of American voters, some concerned about immigration and the rising cost of living, preferred Trump, with all his glaring flaws and demonstrated incompetence, to a more qualified woman of color. His victory has us wrestling with the question of how two such starkly different visions of the United States coexist.
Trump’s agenda is poised to further erode many of our rights, especially those of women, LGBTQ+ Americans and immigrants. We can expect him to use the office in blatantly transactional ways and be easily manipulated by opportunistic actors, foreign and domestic. He has promised to abandon U.S. allies, including Ukraine, and give Israel free rein to, as he told Benjamin Netanyahu last month, “do what you have to do.”
We can also expect the weaponization of basic government services, including aid for disasters such as wildfires, which Trump has said he could withhold from California. He has always been eager to undo environmental and climate protections. There will be more attacks on science, as evidenced by his willingness to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. control of health policy. And he has threatened to round up millions of immigrants in deportation camps.
Thanks to a deferential Supreme Court, a subservient Republican Party that won a Senate majority and a determination to assemble a more pliant administration, there will be fewer checks on his power.
Many of Trump’s former staff members who have worked closest with him have warned that he is unfit for office and a grave threat to our democracy. His election does not change any of that. History has shown that dictators often come into power through democratic means.
Times like these test the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice” — even as modified by former President Obama, who added that “progress is bumpy. It always has been.”
But we still enjoy safeguards in the state and federal constitutions, the courts, the rule of law, the free press and democracy — even if they are tested like never before. We still have legions of elected officials, civil servants, advocates and journalists who will use their positions to resist the next administration’s excesses.
California will once again play an indispensable role in defending individual liberties and protecting vulnerable communities as well as defending environmental protections. We endured Trump’s tumultuous first term and we will get through the next one.