In the early hours of Wednesday, November 6 an earthquake shook US and global politics. And let’s be clear, it was not a severe tremor, it was an earthquake of great magnitude. Donald Trump has grow to be the one person aside from Grover Cleveland (president 1885–89 and 1893–97) to serve non-consecutive presidential terms within the US.
However, the character of the one that has achieved this contemporary triumph makes it greater than only a constitutional oddity. This just isn’t just something for the footnotes in a future book on US political, cultural and constitutional history. This is because – whatever one feels in regards to the man in query – Trump and the MAGA movement are a phenomenon of striking character and large significance.
And let there be no mistake, opinions will differ sharply. Even the mass of court cases built up against Trump shall be assessed as either long-delayed justice catching up with the person or as a political witch hunt orchestrated by Democrats who’ve weaponised the justice system against him. As with all the things connected with Trump, there may be never one easy narrative. The plot lines are many, various and contradictory. Finding one’s way through them isn’t easy.
As the dust begins to settle a bit (and there is an extended method to go before the modified landscape becomes clear) we are able to begin to reflect slightly on why this election result’s so significant. We may begin to tentatively suggest a few of the possible future implications of this event. For, if this can be a ‘political earthquake,’ we are able to expect the ‘aftershocks’ to proceed for a while. Indeed, the entire US political landscape could have grow to be an energetic ‘earthquake’ zone. The Trump phenomenon vividly reminds us of the fault lines in modern US – and global – politics and culture. We live in historic times.
First, let’s remind ourselves why that is all so striking and controversial. Trump often deploys indignant and inflammatory language in a deeply polarised nation; he courts controversy and belittles opponents; he’s a convicted felon; he refused to simply accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and attempted to overturn it; his increasingly heated rhetoric preceded the unprecedented invasion of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021; and he was inches away from an assassin’s bullet in the summertime of 2024.
Now he’s on the cusp of returning to power. And this has occurred lower than 4 years because the apparent nadir of his political fortunes within the aftermath of January 6, when, for a moment, it appeared as if the Republican Party might move on from the Trump years and reinstate a more familiar form of US conservative politics. But those days of familiar politics are over. Indeed, one could argue convincingly that the GOP (the ‘Good Old Party’ because the Republican Party is often called) now not exists. Now it has been replaced by something crafted by Trump and his supporters within the MAGA movement. Had one written this because the plot to a political thriller it could have been returned from the editor with the recommendation to tone it down and make it more believable. But here life imitates art, even whether it is art of a really discordant and disturbing kind.
Which raises the reasonably obvious query of why this has occurred. The most evident answer is that US society within the age of globalisation has experienced rapid changes (accompanied by outsourcing of jobs to countries reminiscent of Mexico, China and elsewhere) that has left huge numbers of the population adrift in bewilderingly unfamiliar and threatening situations. Old jobs and economic ‘certainties’ now not exist. The ‘American Dream,’ which promised continued opportunities and improving living standards has apparently faltered. Citizens in a ‘Rust Belt’ town, situated in a ‘Flyover State’, feel that their aspirations are frustrated, while considering themselves marginalised by political elites who (allegedly) look down on them.
While this has occurred, deep divisions within the nation, which have roots within the troubled years of the Vietnam War, have grow to be wider and deeper within the era of recent culture wars. A deep unease has grow to be much more conflicted. Within this case, the racial tensions of a nation whose slave-owning past continues to haunt it in modern racial divisions and inequalities, adds one other painful component to the national scene. At the identical time, changing patterns of life related to facets of modernity have left those with a conventional faith and cultural outlook feeling increasingly ignored. Among the groups and labels which characterise modern society, they feel that their ‘group,’ their ‘label,’ their identity is shunned, mocked or dismissed. Finally, the turbulent nature of the world within the 2020s has unleashed unprecedented levels of migration, asylum in search of and undocumented incomers which has unsettled US society because it has societies across the western world.
This has occurred because the explosion of online sources of knowledge (and disinformation) is proving to be as radical and threatening towards the old ‘information order’ because the invention of printing within the fifteenth century was. Regarding that earlier historic phenomenon, it’s value noting that the explosion of the Sixteenth-century Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the ‘Wars of Religion,’ and the beginning of the ‘Great Witch hunts’ all occurred within the context of a latest method to easily disseminate information and polemics. We live in one other – now digital – information revolution. Parallels shouldn’t be ignored.
It is with this case that Trump and the MAGA movement have engaged. Whether one reads this as the real empathetic reference to the dispossessed, ignored and anxious (with a view to revitalise their hopes and communities), or the skilful and cynical fanning and manipulation of feelings of fear and dissatisfaction (for the final word advantage of ambitious latest leaders and the furtherance of their financial goals), what’s undeniable is that a latest cultural phenomenon has occurred. We reside through it.
Harris and the Democrats lost for a lot of reasons. The granular evaluation will include: failure to deal with the crisis on the southern border in a timely and resolute fashion; inability to recognise that a recovering economy was undermined by inflation; Biden’s refusal to face down until forced to; promotion of a vice-president who didn’t enjoy national name recognition or the validation that comes from winning within the party’s primary process; energetic celebration of many groups and identities but a failure to have interaction with more traditional faith and demographic groups; energetic promotion of ‘culture war’ issues (of sex and gender) which left many outside this sense disorientated; the belief that female commitment to reproductive freedom would translate into votes, no matter other aspects which dictate voting decisions.
In contrast, Trump was highly skilful in chatting with (some would add amplifying) these concerns. At the identical time his name-recognition meant that hundreds of thousands of voters simply ‘priced-in’ the wilder Trump excesses as a part of the ‘deal’ on offer (and dismissed the threatening rhetoric as mere ‘Trumpist’ noise) because he spoke to their anxieties about immigration and inflation in ways in which Harris did not do. January 6 and the alleged threats to US democratic norms were overshadowed by the concerns (and allegations) regarding ‘undocumented migrants’ and costs on the supermarket and gas station. Only time will tell if an actual threat to US democracy was allowed in, while these concerns were holding the headlines.
Many US evangelicals have hailed Trump as a contemporary Cyrus, a frontrunner doing the need of God, even when not of the household of religion (some claim he’s a member); even when rough around the perimeters. In a nation with a deep sense of its claimed exceptionalism the character of MAGA claims don’t jar as they do beyond the US. And in conservative Christian communities sceptical about climate change, with strong views on abortion, with very fixed views on the Middle East, and a growing antipathy towards globalisation and global politics, Trump guarantees to deliver.
The query is: does Trump represent that ‘Cyrus’ figure, or does he act as a mirror to a broken society while exaggerating its brokenness? Readers can have their very own opinions. Time will tell. But even then, the character of the Trump phenomenon suggests there’ll still be no agreement concerning what he represents. It’s going to be an interesting few years.
Martyn Whittock is a historian and a Licensed Lay Minister within the Church of England. The writer, or co-author, of fifty-six books, his work covers a wide selection of historical and theological themes. In addition, as a commentator and columnist, he has written for several print and online news platforms and been interviewed on TV and radio news and discussion programmes exploring the interaction of religion and politics. These have included being interviewed on news platforms in regards to the religious dimension to current US politics, Christianity and the Crown within the UK, and the war in Ukraine. His most up-to-date books include: The Secret History of Soviet Russia’s Police State (2020), Daughters of Eve (2021), Jesus the Unauthorized Biography (2021), The End Times, Again? (2021), The Story of the Cross (2021), Apocalyptic Politics (2022), and American Vikings (2023). His interest within the Seventeenth-century Puritans and their continuing impact on the fashionable world, especially within the USA, is explored in: When God was King: Rebels & Radicals of the Civil War & Mayflower Generation (2018), Mayflower Lives (2019) and Trump and the Puritans (2020).
