Just as the Trumpification of America took decades, the de-Trumpification of America will not happen overnight. It might not happen at all because Trump is more representative of US history than his detractors would like to think.
The 47th president taps into a long tradition of presidential authoritarianism, which started with the second president, John Adams, trying to ban political opposition, and continued when Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and violated the First Amendment by silencing critical newspapers. There’s a deep history of American nativism and isolationism, though Trump is not an isolationist. Trump is as much a product of US history as Obama, Biden, Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy. It’s just the history we tend to downplay, forget, misremember, conceal or willfully ignore, because it contradicts the uplifting narrative, so often rendered glorious, of American enlightenment and progress.
“The path that this country has taken has never been a straight line,” Obama said, philosophically, in the White House Rose Garden the morning after Trump’s shock 2016 victory. “We zig and zag, and sometimes we move in ways that some people think is forward and others think is moving back. And that’s OK.” This was another way of articulating the cyclical nature of US history, where reversals commonly follow progress. Lasting change is more incremental and often takes repeated cycles of reform and reaction to achieve.
The American story, it is always worth remembering, is as much a narrative of continuity as change. Division has been the default. Angry contestation is the norm. Liberal and illiberal forces have always been at loggerheads: over race, guns, federalism, how far government should encroach into the lives of its citizens, who those citizens should be and what voting rights should they have.
The truth is that American history is an argument without end. Under Trump, those arguments have become worse-tempered, exaggerated, occasionally violent and perilous. But with or without him in the White House, this ceaseless conflict will go on. Will America dramatically change the instant he finally exits White House? More than two centuries of history suggests not.