When Trump is gone

You might have noticed that a lot of bad things are happening. On the streets of DC, law enforcement officers are reportedly doing random bag searches. People at bus stops are being asked to show their papers. Donald Trump is trying to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, despite a prior U.S. Supreme Court ruling that seemed to limit his powers on this front.

In its Groundhog Day approach to border enforcement, the government arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia again just after he was released, and is still trying to deport him permanently, now to Uganda. On Monday, this action led to a hearing, with Maryland U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis saying to the Department of Justice attorney that for now “your clients are absolutely forbidden“ from removing Mr. Abrego from the continental United States.

Day after day it’s the same thing. Except that, unfortunately, we get a lot of new drama to go with the repeating parts. It’s easy to get caught up in each new fire-alarm emergency. And you should be taking action right now. But reading the news can feel overwhelming and panicky, like you have to get up an respond. But then you’re just running from crisis to crisis.

So today I want to remind you that one day Trump will be gone. I want to address not just skittering from crisis to crisis but instead planning for the long run. And at the end of the episode, I’ll consider ways to take action that don’t just feel like using a thimble of water to put out a forest fire.

Trump is sick

Our current president has long embraced some of the most atrocious world leaders he would count as his peers. And he’s likewise styled himself after some of history’s worst dead tyrants. Remember his defending tweeting Mussolini’s words by saying “it’s a very good quote”?

Trump, who lately talked about a possible third term, has lately suggesting “a lot” of people in the U.S. want a dictator these days. It’s worth looking at him through the framework he wants to apply—that dictators and dictatorship—to talk about how the coming months or years might go.

First off, at 79, our president is an old man. His hands have bruises on them, his ankles are swollen and it’s a reasonable thing to think that he’s not in good health and might die soon.

His absence will offer a window to reject so many harmful policies that have already led to death around the globe and are likely to do tremendous damage at home. But how much advance knowledge will we have, and what signs should we be looking for? What other times have powerful leaders been ill and concealed the truth?

This is a dynamic that happens to a certain degree with any older or infirm leader, in part because most cultures have absorbed at least a whiff of a fascist ethos, in which weakness is seen as shameful. Think of FDR hiding his disability, Kennedy’s pain pills for his back, or the degree to which Biden was presented as perfectly on his game, though his daily acuity had clearly declined.

But the dictator faces even greater pressure to lie about his health. Fascism is a fleeting attempt by a leader to eradicate time and pretend he has the power to inflict a permanent present set in the historical moment of his choosing.

In the dictatorial ruling party’s vision, the leader himself actually embodies the country, so that sense of immortality has to be preserved through constant deception. Meanwhile, a vicious jockeying for power takes place, as rivals strive to become the next immortal leader of the authoritarian state.

So when someone who has embraced dictatorship gets sick, it’s a next-level phenomenon entirely. The whole political project is built on the illusion that the dictator will live forever. Which necessarily leads to a long tradition of hiding the dear leader’s illness.

A few dead autocrats

In a medical crisis that would not only change the Middle East but reshape the U.S. relations in the region to the present day, Reza Pahlavi, the brutal Shah of Iran, developed cancer in the 1970s. Rather than acknowledge his illness when it was found in 1974, he hid the diagnosis across the next five years, in some cases misleading even doctors who were treating him. The fury of Iranian students over the Shah being admitted to the U.S. for medical treatment shaped the emerging dynamic between the two countries and seeded the hostage crisis that defined the end of the Carter administration and set the stage Ronald Reagan’s ascent.

The illusion of wellness may be so universally broadcast that doctors sometimes participate in it and reflect it back to their patient—and may even shape the leader’s belief about his own health. After a 1976 stroke and secret reports of significant heart issues, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev developed a hand tremor and had slurred speech, often dozing off in meetings. At the time, he wrote in his diary “[They] checked [my] brain cells, said everything was good, you should be envied and congratulated[,] you’re strong and healthy.”

Well into his dotage, Brezhnev was celebrated by the Politburo as a hero and given a special World War II medal decades after the conflict. When he finally died, Brezhnev was replaced by Yuri Andropov, who managed to live only fifteen months in office. Andropov was followed by Konstantin Chernenko, who made it just over a year before dying, as the Washington Post would note, just one month after Communist Party officials congratulated him on claiming victory with 100 percent of the vote.

But perhaps the most famous example of the decline and death of an autocrat is the death of Stalin in 1953, immortalized in the film of the same name. The obsequiousness of the rivals who might succeed him as they publicly furthered the cult of personality they’d been subservient to for decades was outdone only by their viciousness as they tried to eliminate one another.

We’ve already had a taste of part of this dynamic in Trump’s first term, during the pandemic. The president’s medical staff had long been misrepresenting everything from his height to his weight and insisting that he had “incredibly good genes.” But his coterie’s praises of him when he was clearly very ill with Covid went even further. In a photo op during his hospital stay at Walter Reed military hospital, he signed what turned out to be a blank sheet of paper in a staged attempt to prove that he was still on the job, while his daughter Ivanka claimed that “nothing can stop him from working for the American people.”

When Trump goes

How sick is Trump today? He seems both mentally and physically unsteady, but we have little more than outward signs of illness and his incoherent public statements to go on. The administration is currently bent on lying to the American people about nearly every aspect of governance. And leaders in the Republican Party who denounced him a few years ago are now given to Soviet-style encomiums about his physical prowess and intellectual health.

Nevertheless, Trump is far from immortal. He’s an old man in serious decline. The day after he dies, or when he leaves office—if the two aren’t simultaneous—the past can offer some perspective about what the situation will look like on the ground. One key point that we might hope for and work toward is that his end doesn’t mirror that of Vladimir Lenin, whose role as the founding leader of the U.S.S.R. was followed not by liberation but by three decades of rule by Stalin.

I talked last week about defeat in war as one way that concentration camps end. That situation is also a chance for a national political reset. After loss of a war, whole governments are removed, parties obliterated, and constitutions may even be rewritten. But outside of that dramatic scenario—one very far removed from the current situation in the U.S.—after the death of a demagogue, countries struggle to eliminate authoritarian power structures built around personal relationships to the dictator and his circle.

More often, particularly when the society involved has had a societal polarization driven by an extremist party, a deep divide remains, a culturally-induced fissure that becomes difficult to cross and which prevents the country from healing. We see these in many places around the world, including in South America in the wake of late twentieth-century dictatorships. My sense is that this is the long-term political divide most likely to frame national elections in the coming decade in the United States: there will be two narratives about the country, and they will be completely divergent.

Undoing the fascist project

To move forward, societies need some clean break or a fresh start. Though it had its flaws, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in the wake of apartheid offered a powerful example of how this might be done. Other countries have held mega-trials or brought their authoritarian leaders and collaborators to justice.

Given the human rights abuses underway currently in the U.S., legal and political accountability projects should have a place in any future American efforts at Reconstruction. Such projects have a long history in America and could be framed as the setting for another attempt at more fully entrenching democracy in the United States.

Fascism is little more than an attempt to turn the present into a past that never existed, and Trump has been busy trying to do exactly that. He’s been working to remove people of color from public spaces and high-ranking positions. He’s been ordering the restoration of a confederate statue to its former location in DC. He’s been trying to roll the clock back as far as 1798 in his treatment of aliens in the country, and trying to ignore the U.S.’s own history of extending protections and rights to the vulnerable as he does so.

Trump has been openly racist for decades, so small wonder that he has happily handed over leadership of the detention and deportation project to sadistic imp Stephen Miller, who is devoted to the same agenda. Other Trump apparatchiks seem to be acting out power fantasies—like Russell Vought, the Project 2025 guru who is now deliberately inflicting trauma on the federal employees and government programs designed to help Americans (and which have, in fact, benefited his own family in the past). But the success of fascism is always dependent on the tyrant, who sits at the center of an insular world and becomes the manifestation of the backward-looking project.

The Newsom problem

This centrality is in part why I’m worried about Gavin Newsom’s approach to dealing with Trump. On the one hand, his social media staff does brilliant sendups of Trump’s unhinged communication blasts, and Newsom, in aping the president’s exaggerations, insults, and outright lies, shows how ridiculous it all is.

But my concern with the language of Trumpism is that the more we adopt it, the smaller our responses, and our world becomes—and the more dependent it remains on Trump himself. It keeps him at the center of everything.

Newsom, to borrow the words of the Onion, may be watching porn ironically, taking on the trappings of Trump to mock him, only to wind up as sincerely caught up in the show as any non-ironic fan. Newsom is willing to fight, which shows more spirit than many Democratic leaders have demonstrated, but his dramatic social media policy, simultaneous willingness to throw whole communities under the bus, and actions with his podcast raise the question of what, beyond himself and his own power, he stands for.

A post-fascist America

It’s a question we might each ask ourselves. It’s not necessary to be on constant high alert over Trump’s cankles, waiting for him to die. Trump’s health is something over which we have no control.

In terms of what to do instead, I’ve been thinking about the Miccosukee tribe of Florida, which recently saw a judge rule in favor of its argument that the Everglades detention camp the government has named “Alligator Alcatraz” is a threat to their land and their way of life.

There’s no doubt that some Miccosukee are repelled by the project that Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis have inflicted on their community. One of them compared the Everglades concentration camp to some haven of dark tourism, saying, “They put people in cages, in tents, and then they put up a sign on the highway with this clever, funny, stupid name. Then people come, taking photos like it’s Disneyland.”

But the Miccosukee fight isn’t some simple battle that completely shifts direction day to day. They’ve drawn a circle around what matters to them, and they work at the world they want to live in across decades, across generations. It’s a greater cause and a bigger fight than any one tribe member or any single outside leader threatening their way of life. It’s a fight they’ve been in for a very long time.

That battle was forced on them. But at the same time, it’s critical to understand your personal beliefs and to think about what matters most deeply to you. Use that as a guiding star to navigate your actions. You don’t have to be reactive and switch gears with every new crisis. It’s possible to instead picture what part of existing culture or community you want to preserve, or look to what future traditions and protections you want to build. Your involvements can follow from that.

The long view

Every tyrant falls in the end. What do you want to do that will outlive him? What part of your vision of the world will you work to build? It can be as small as a project to document local history or as large as an effort to guarantee rights of a targeted group in your state. You might imagine a community program that would reach every elementary school-age child in your county or that fights for automatic voter registration and the removal of barriers to civic participation. What you choose might be an effort that you’ll start without ever seeing the end of, or it can be something with specific milestones that can be achieved along the way.

It might take a little time to figure out what to tackle, and that’s fine. In the meantime, there are still lots of opportunities to show up, learn more, and get involved. This Labor Day weekend, for instance, MaydayStrong.org has a map of events across the country you can attend, one of which is probably one not too far from you (zoom in to the local level and click on individual dots to see what’s available).

But if you’re struggling with the day-to-day whirlwind, take a step back and pick what you want to see in America when Trump is gone, something bigger than just a personal fight against him. You may be waiting for the day he’ll exist only in the past tense, but you can begin to build a better world—one that will absolutely outlast him—right now.

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