TEN YEARS AGO TODAY, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood.
The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of working-class grievances. And he was quite good at it.
In the July 4, 2016, essay, Vance described the places from which the pain came—factories that downsized or ceased to exist, along with the jobs they had provided; the aesthetic decline in once beautiful and vibrant towns; families that were shattering or never forming in the first place; and anger and frustration with a government that had broken the trust with the people it was meant to serve. “During this election season,” Vance wrote, “it appears that many Americans have reached for a new pain reliever.” His name was Donald Trump.
In the midst of a social crisis, Vance observed, Trump offered “an easy escape from the pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution.” But, he argued, such promises were a cheap high. “He never offers details for how these plans will work, because he can’t. Trump’s promises are the needle in America’s collective vein.”
[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s anti-patriotic trap]
“Trump is cultural heroin,” Vance wrote. “He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.”
“One day” is today.
THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY, while still quite dangerous, is also collapsing, cracking under the weight of its own choices. The main driver is the economy, which he sold as his strong point. We’re seeing tariff-driven price increases, gas prices that spiked from less than $3 to more than $4 a gallon during a 100-day war against Iran that America lost, wages failing to keep pace with the cost of living, and inflation ticking back up. Manufacturing jobs, which Trump promised to bring roaring back, are still being lost. Health care has gotten much more expensive on his watch, and millions have lost coverage.
At the top of the nation’s health agencies sits Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who in a single year moved to cut the list of recommended childhood vaccines nearly in half, fired the government’s vaccine advisers and replaced them with skeptics, and presided over the worst measles outbreak in 30 years. The National Institutes of Health, the crown jewel of American biomedical science, has seen billions in research cut, clinical trials canceled, and labs closed, resulting in a “brain drain” that rival nations are racing to exploit. And the dismantling of USAID, along with the gutting of PEPFAR—the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the bipartisan AIDS-relief program credited with saving more than 25 million lives—has, by credible estimates, already cost the lives of hundreds of thousands, most of them children, with projections of as many as 14 million more by 2030 if the cuts hold.
Americans are deeply divided and intensely polarized, with pessimism at or near a multidecade high. Faith in nearly every major institution—government, the press, universities, religious leaders—sits at or near the bottom of the modern record.
It’s no surprise, then, that Trump’s approval rating is anemic. (In one recent poll, it’s down to 30 percent.) His remaining support is soft, while the unhappiness with him is intense. Republican members of Congress are beginning to break with him. His MAGA base is fracturing. Former stalwart supporters, such as Tucker Carlson, are openly mocking the president. (“Shut up, bitch! I don’t take you seriously,” Carlson said 10 days ago.) Trump looks weak and lost, a husk of a man still performing the same routine to a crowd that is drifting toward the exits. The country is finally waking to the comedown Vance predicted.
THIS IS THE CONTEXT in which Americans are celebrating the nation’s 250th birthday. It’s not simply that things are going badly; it’s that their view of the United States is darkening. Pride in being an American has hit a new low. Nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the Founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.
Some of that sentiment reflects the fact that the president and those around him subvert the rule of law, decency, and democratic restraints. Many Americans believe the country is, in its current incarnation, betraying its ideals. They feel at odds with the nation they love.
And this is true as well: Among more and more Americans there is a sickening recognition of what the United States, during the Trump era, has become. They see it as a pitiable farce, a verdict that is hard to dispute when a nation has twice elected a carnival barker as its leader. For a historically proud people, that is an indignity and a humiliation. We are in the bread-and-circuses phase of the American story, the point at which a great republic, having lost its sense of purpose, makes do with spectacle.
Which brings me back to J. D. Vance. Ten summers ago he understood, better than most, the threat Trump posed to America. Vance, who described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” thought Trump was an “idiot.” He admitted to a friend at the time that he goes “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.” But then ambition made its offer, and Vance, who had seen the danger so clearly, discovered he could see his way around it. The first stop was the Senate; the next was the vice presidency.
Along the way, the Vance of Hillbilly Elegy—a teller of hard truths, a morally serious person committed to honesty even when it cost him, beholden to no one—became a cynic, a partner in a cruel enterprise, a peddler of lies he is surely clever enough to recognize as such, a man whose only fixed commitment is to his own rise to power.
In his memoir, Vance wrote, “Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet.” It’s a poignant line, referring to a man raised amid the addiction and volatility he feared he might inherit. The monster Vance feared was a private one; the monster he became is a public one. His legacy turns out to be a much more destructive than the one he was afraid of inheriting.
AMERICA WILL OUTLAST TRUMP AND VANCE; the issue is whether they will be seen as a parenthesis the country closes or the opening of a different, dark chapter.
Abraham Lincoln, in his 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum on the subject of the perpetuation of our political institutions, warned, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” What Lincoln meant is that the threat America faced was not external conquest; it was internal decay. If destruction is to be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
[Ron Chernow: What would Mark Twain think of America at 250?]
Lincoln was responding to a wave of mob violence in the 1830s, including lynchings such as the murder of the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. The “props” that once supported a “political edifice of liberty and equal rights” were “decayed, and crumbled away.” Out of such decay might rise a demagogue, a future tyrant, feeding on what the Lincoln scholar Diana Schaub called “politically degenerative passions.”
The remedy, according to Lincoln, was a “political religion” based on reverence for the law and fidelity to America’s constitutional process. Lincoln was in turn relying on the wisdom of George Washington, and particularly Washington’s farewell address. America’s two greatest presidents shared an intense conviction: that a republic depends on some measure of virtue in its citizens and some measure of integrity in its leaders. Without them, the temple of liberty will fall.
The past decade in America has been a lost decade. Far too many Americans have cheered on the men tearing at the temple. But Americans can now see, later than they should have, the cost of the damage. It is within our power to make it whole. What remains is to find the will. There is a name for those who do: renewers of ruined cities, repairers of the breach, restorers of streets in which to dwell.
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