Trump’s Legacy is American Carnage
Trump Has Left America’s Three Major Social Groups Pitted Against Each Other
As he ascended to the Presidency, Donald Trump famously promised to put an end what he snarled was “American carnage.” It was a statement which left most baffled. Carnage? Where? What was he talking about? Today, as his Presidency ends, it’s clear to the whole world: Trump’s legacy is American carnage.
It’s easy to say: Trump radicalised part of white America. The poor, uneducated, left behind part. Even the aggressively upwardly mobile obviously racist part. That he gave license to them to hate, to laugh at cruelty, to value brutality, to idolise violence. That he put paramilitaries on standby, and then gave the order to go.
But I mean a much, much deeper kind of carnage than all that. I mean a kind of death that Americans don’t see yet: the death of their own goodness, decency, courage, humanity. And all those things are what really make a people capable of democracy in the long run. Are Americans? Or will Trumpism just recur — because the patient has been trying to forget they have cancer, and they need to excise the tumour?
American carnage. I don’t just mean the 400,000 dead of Covid and counting. I mean the carnage of the American mind, the breaking of the American heart, the…
