This is who we are now

This was never about the price of eggs.

The American people did not elevate a dangerous demagogue to the presidency because they thought he would lower the cost of gas at their local filling station.

If only “inflation” did explain the nation’s historic embrace of a wannabe dictator who stokes racial division and celebrates his contempt for the rule of law. Voters chose Donald J. Trump because of, not in spite of, his 34 felony convictions, his history of sexual assault and his ugly invective against undocumented immigrants. He tapped into a deep vein of racism and misogyny that has always flowed right under the surface of American life, exposing it to the open air and inviting his followers to revel in their basest instincts. The cruder his epithets for Vice President Kamala Harris, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the louder were the cheers from his enthusiastic rally-goers.

More than 71 million voters cast their ballots with no illusions about the vile duplicity of the craven narcissist who fomented a failed coup against American democracy four years ago. They chose him to be the 47th president of the United States for the very behavior — the brazen lying, the hateful speech, the criminal self-dealing — that would have been disqualifying at any other moment in the country’s history.

Harris was right, of course, when she described Trump as “an unserious man.” What she, and those Americans who voted for her, failed to fully appreciate was how unserious our culture and our country have become.

Trump’s voluble sense of grievance, persecution and victimhood endeared him to the followers he calls his “forgotten” Americans. They shared his anger at all those “others” that Trump scapegoated — the trans athlete, the brown migrant, the uppity women — and they declared this transparently manufactured former reality TV star “authentic.”

Trump’s disdain for the Constitution and for the rights of the minority in a liberal democracy presage a dark chapter to come. Look for him to make good on his threats to weaponize the U.S. Justice Department against his political opponents and the media, to replace civil servants with partisan hacks, to erect detention camps in which to pen the men, women and children he calls “vermin,” to evict public health professionals from the federal bureaucracy in favor of conspiracy theorists like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose lunatic rantings about the evils of everything from childhood vaccines to fluoridated water have no basis in science.

The rejection of science, of expertise itself, is central to Trump’s appeal. He is a man who revels in his own ignorance, sowing suspicion of individuals and institutions once considered foundational to this society — our universities, our military, our centers of research and development. His dismissal of those he calls “the elites” reflects a longstanding strain of anti-intellectualism in American life, but it does not bode well for the United States should this country confront a fresh pandemic or a cyberattack during a second Trump term.

Those fears are only amplified for our international allies. Trump will abandon Ukraine to the expansionist goals of Russian President Vladimir Putin, leaving our NATO partners in the lurch. He will encourage the ruinous war policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. His isolationist America First philosophy will ignore the realities of an interconnected world.

On matters great and small, Trump will have a Republican Senate, and perhaps even a Republican House, to do his bidding.

Harris was right, of course, when she described Trump as “an unserious man.” What she, and those Americans who voted for her, failed to fully appreciate was how unserious our culture and our country have become. The sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would not recognize the nation he once described as inherently hostile to the superficial in public life. “Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it,” Emerson wrote.

The boaster and buffoon will be inaugurated president of the United States in January. Cue the terror.

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