Trump tried once to break American democracy. Watch him do it again

Comment: In a sane world, Donald Trump would not only have lost the US presidential election, he wouldn’t even have been a candidate.
Trump is the least fit major party candidate for the presidency in at least 160 years. When he last ran, and lost, he incited an insurrection to try to hold onto power. He still refuses to admit that he fairly lost the 2020 election.
To Trump, the United States constitution and democracy itself are nice-to-haves when they work in his favour and optional when they don’t.
That Trump has nonetheless prevailed, and seems on track to win not only the requisite 270 votes in the electoral college but a majority of the popular vote as well, illustrates the degree to which America’s democracy is fundamentally broken.
Four more years in power will give him the opportunity to break it further, too.
On the day an armed mob stormed the United States Capitol to attempt to stop the formal certification of the election results, German diplomat Andreas Michaelis reflected: “After our catastrophic failure in the 20th Century, we Germans were taught by the US to develop strong democratic institutions. We also learnt that democracy is not just about institutions. It is about political culture, too. All democratic nations need to constantly defend it.”
American institutions attempted to hold Trump in check once. They nearly failed when a political culture flourished that undermined them.
Those institutions have weakened further in the four years since and the political culture of commitment to democracy has been supplanted by one that is agnostic on it.
The cause of this faltering of American democracy is twofold.
First, the political leaders and staffers who incited the attack on the Capitol faced no repercussions for their actions. January 6 was the result of the crime of sedition and a bipartisan Congressional investigation into the insurrection found Trump himself was the chief seditionist.
Over eight hearings, the panel proved Trump knew he had lost the election; attempted to convince the public otherwise; cooked up plans to replace civil servants and pressure the Vice President and election officials into stealing the election for him; encouraged violent protestors and extremist groups to come to Washington; and took no action to prevent the insurrection for hours after it became apparent what was happening.
A harrowing video produced by the committee shows how January 6 unfolded, almost minute-by-minute, while Trump did nothing. It ends with a recording of Trump just six months later, in a media appearance: “These were peaceful people. These were great people. The crowd was unbelievable and I mentioned the word love – the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Trump did not orchestrate this attempted coup alone. Staffers, members of Congress and state and local government officials egged him on and carried out his wishes.
Many of the elected officials involved in this effort have been rewarded, not punished, by the electorate. More than half of the state attorneys-general who sought Supreme Court intervention in 2020 like Texas’ Ken Paxton have kept their jobs or been elected to new roles. Governors who backed them, like Texas’ Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis, have won reelection as well.
In Congress, prominent election deniers have been reelected, including Missouri Senator Josh Hawley as part of this year’s ballot.
That these individuals have been able to maintain their political roles, commenting on immigration policy or debt ceilings after attempting to overthrow the lawfully elected Government of the United States, demonstrates to the electorate that democracy is not sacrosanct. Their political survival has contributed to the weakening of America’s commitment to democracy.
It is aided, in turn, by the second cause of the erosion of the United States’ institutions and culture. That is America’s fractured information ecosystem and polarised political environment.
The evolution of a right-wing media system, spearheaded by Fox News, that is completely siloed from the rest of the country and often from reality is a problem that has been a long time coming. In the past four years, this has accelerated with the spinning off of more extreme and fringe outlets and a whole new type of information distribution system.
New or newly popular alternative outlets like Newsmax and the One America News Network split with Fox News over the 2020 election denial. These outlets gained a loyal following by spreading Trump’s unfiltered lies, forcing Fox into a race to the bottom and offering sizeable platforms to ever more extreme talking heads.
Completely novel, politicised information networks have also sprung up since the 2020 election. Powerhouse influencers like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate have fomented conspiracism and misogyny in a generation of young men. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and conversion of it into a haven for Nazism and disinformation that was once confined to the dark corners of the internet has intensified this trend.
The core supporters for the two presidential candidates live in alternate realities. Harris voters live in roughly the same world as the vast bulk of New Zealanders. They’re concerned about the economy, about conflicts around the globe, about immigration and climate change and crime rates.
Trump voters have tacked onto this a feverish nightmare world where immigrants in regional America are stealing and eating peoples’ pets, where the government is spending all its money giving sex change operations to undocumented imprisoned migrants and where Democrats control the weather and weaponised hurricanes to depress Republication election turnout.
It’s hard to imagine, but in living memory there were American elections where the results were total routs. In 1964, Lyndon B Johnson won 44 states and a 20-point margin in the popular vote in a repudiation of Republican George Wallace’s segregationist policies and flirtation with extremists. Two decades later, Ronald Reagan won all but one of the 50 states against a candidate whose greatest gaffe was to pledge to raise taxes. That election was the last time there was a double digit margin in the popular vote.
Four more decades on from that, we find ourselves in a situation where an attempted insurrectionist has not only won the votes of 70 million Americans but also at least 27 and possibly as many as 31 states, not to mention the presidency.
This election should have been a complete rejection of Trumpism, but the siloing of the American electorate has created two realities with two polities. The balance of power lies now in the hands of a comparatively small number of voters who can either straddle these realities through immense feats of cognitive dissonance and honestly consider voting for either candidate or who are completely checked out from the political process – due in part to the fracturing of the media.
Or at least, that’s where the balance of power did lie. It is hard to say with ironclad certainty that elections will be the path to power in the United States going forward.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, dire predictions of fascism ran rampant. While Trump’s presidency was immensely harmful, it did not quite fall to these depths. That is, until January 6, when Trump validated his critics worst fears with his attempted putsch.
During this campaign, Trump vowed to punish his political enemies, by military force if necessary. His former chief of staff warned Trump would rule America like a dictator and said he fit the definition of a fascist.
Trump is now no longer hindered by the need to be reelected. Constitutionally, this must be his last term. But, constitutionally, Trump lost the 2020 election and that did not stop him from trying to seize power. Whatever voices of moderation or reason may have once existed in the first Trump administration have now been definitively purged.
The new president has already surrounded himself with lackeys and yes-men. Anyone who serves Trump now, after his attack on democracy, cannot be counted on to protect democracy in four years’ time.
Even if Trump does follow the law and step down, he has taught the Republican Party a crucial lesson: Democracy truly is optional. Try to win an election, but if you lose that, there’s always a second path you can attempt. If it doesn’t work out, there are no consequences anyways.
I don’t know how America comes back from this. A Democratic victory in four years’ time will not nullify Trump’s ultimate lesson. Sedition is now a permanent part of the Republican Party’s toolbox.
Perhaps the best model is how the United States handled the aftermath of the American Civil War. There, too, elected officials had engaged in sedition and insurrection. Unlike at the Capitol in 2021, the Confederacy was temporarily successful, sparking the country’s bloodiest-ever war.
When the South finally surrendered in 1865, the Union faced a similar dilemma. What to do with those who had seceded from the United States and taken up arms against it? This was a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional act. If there were no consequences, what would prevent a second Confederacy from having another go?
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution set out the rules: Anyone “who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” was ineligible to serve in state or federal government.
At a local level, some states went further. Virginia attempted to ban anyone who had served even as a private in the Confederate military from holding office. This would have barred nearly the entire adult white male population.
Seven years after the war’s end, the Amnesty Act restored the rights of all but the top 500 former Confederates. But in this time, the United States had sought to find a new path forward, demonstrating that a democratic and republican government which operated on the consent of the governed was preferable to bloodshed and rebellion.
The Reconstruction Era in the United States lasted just 12 years in total. A close presidential election in 1876 led to the repeal of most measures and the reinstatement of white supremacy in the South in the guise of Jim Crow and segregation.
Still, it offers a model for how a country on the brink of losing its democracy can at least partially restore it. Reconstruction shows that insurrection is not Pandora’s Box – once pulled out, it can in fact still be put away, for a while at least.
The opportunity for the implementation of such a model is far away. It came once, after January 6, but was squandered as Democrats and moderate Republicans alike sought not to fan the flames.
I worry the next opportunity to secure American democracy will only arise after it has once again been grievously, violently imperilled.