Making sense of the Trumpian present
Plus, Panama!
My acerbic grammar teacher in parochial school would sarcastically ask, “Are you thinking?” To which my classmates and I would dutifully respond, “Yes, Mrs. Buzzanga.” Then her wry zinger (or buzzinger?): “I thought I smelled wood burning.”
We nervously, noisily laughed as Mrs. Buzzanga shook her head in frustration at the “ninnies” – one of her favorite barbs – who couldn’t keep up with her rigorous instruction. She was not the last person to confuse my cranium with a wood-burning stove.
The smell of embers must be wafting around my noggin these days, because I’ve been thinking, thinking, thinking about the crucible of American democracy and the historical path to Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration. Damon Linker has been mulling these ideas, too. The astute political journalist and University of Pennsylvania lecturer has dissected theories of historical movements – are there cycles? is progress linear? – and questioned every piety and assumption that seemingly underlay American politics from 1945.
Linker is the author of Notes From the Middleground newsletter on Substack (I subscribe for $7 per month), a source of sanity and sober analysis in our hyperbolic and unhinged times. History, structural forces, philosophy, ideology: these may seem the stuff of esoteric debates unrelated to the ordinary lives of ordinary people, but 1) ideas always matter and 2) my podcast exists to tackle sprawling subjects and big questions like how did we get here?
From “the end of history” to Trump 2.0
In Friday’s episode of History As It Happens, Linker does not claim to have figured it all out. Neither do I. Yet I don’t believe we’re overthinking it. That is, you might argue the election could have easily gone in Kamala Harris’ favor had she picked up a few more votes in a few swing states, had inflation been tamed a little earlier, or had President Biden not run for re-election.
Trump’s (49.9 percent) popular vote edge over Harris (48.4 percent), this argument goes, was too narrow to warrant a fundamental reevaluation of our political assumptions. Democrats will retake the House in two years, and a Democrat may return to the White House come Jan. 2029 should Trump’s second term proceed as chaotically as many expect.
Let’s avoid complacency. A better approach is to ask why millions of Americans take Donald Trump seriously at all. Why did 77 million voters subscribe to at least part of his dark vision? Trump may be a transformative political figure, but fertile soil awaited him: Americans’ destroyed confidence in institutions, even in our democracy itself. This cannot be wished away.
“Early in the Biden administration, it was possible to think that Trump was a weird, fluky, quirky thing. Maybe we were back to normal. But fairly quickly it became clear that Trump wasn’t going anywhere… and Republican voters were going to keep wanting him as their tribune,” Linker says.
“And now we all know how this ended up. The [2024] election was not a landslide… It was a pretty close election, and yet it was not a fluke. We all know this guy. We know what he wants to do. We know his behavior. And yet he’s gained slightly over 14 million votes from 2016 to today… You put it all together and you have to say this is what the Republican Party now is and it can win the election in that new form. That forces a lot of rethinking.”
Linker traces the transformation of the Republican Party (from a Reaganite, conservative party to a right-wing populist party) from the brief rise of Pat Buchanan in 1992 on through to the Tea Party rebellion against Obama to the failed candidacy of the decidedly non-populist Mitt Romney in 2012.
The Republicans’ populist lurch
Romney’s loss to Democrat Barack Obama “left that restive, ‘junior partner’ faction of people who are sort of the descendants of the pre-World War II conservative dispensation searching actively for someone to come on the scene who could champion their alternative. And it so happens that Donald Trump wandered in to do exactly that. Not intentionally, really. But he discerned that there was a hunger for something more like that kind of message,” says Linker. This Buchananite strain distrusts multilateralism and alliances, opposes immigration and free trade pacts such as NAFTA, questions climate science, and expresses anti-government, anti-establishment attitudes that far surpass Reaganism’s distrust.
“Conservatism in this country has always had this hard libertarian edge. And you can even tell a story of American history going all the way back to the… revolutionary period and then the early national period… Almost every faction was expressing one aspect of a conservative sensibility, whether it was assumptions about human nature, or skepticism about federal power, a kind of populist anger at ‘bigness’ – whether a central bank or the looming power of the federal government above the states. And then it intertwines with a Southern defense of slavery and states’ rights. We think of the United States as one of the first, if not the first liberal democracy in the world… [but] the country has always been deeply conservative if we define conservatism as a kind of reflexive skepticism of the [federal] government,” Linker says.
In this sense, Trumpism is not new. It is part of a long illiberal tradition in American society that has co-existed and conflicted with liberalism. The conflict has revolved around the question of what kind of republic do we want to have? Rights for whom? Freedom for whom? What feels new about this illiberal turn is that it follows (or has overturned!) the notion that history was moving in a more liberal direction.
The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union vanished. Central and East Europe embraced democracy. China economically liberalized. The world agreed to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. At home, we had a “new economy,” the personal computer and the internet, and a booming stock market. The United States was enjoying a “consensus moment” when Bush faced Gore in 2000. It did not last.
“Maybe it was the case that we were living in a period of anomalous consent with abnormally narrow disagreements, even though at times they seemed enormous,” Linker says. “It might be the case that for a long time – decades – we were in a period of relative placidity, whereas the American norm from the pre-Civil War period with Jackson and then the run-up to the war, and then of course the Civil War itself, Reconstruction, the post-Reconstruction period which was very tumultuous… a lot of violence, anti-union violence, violence against Blacks and Indians. It was a very rough period. And this to some extent continued into the early twentieth century.”
In sum, the post-1945 liberal consensus is hanging by a thread. The post-Cold War “unipolar moment” is over. We’re entering a new period. It’s not the dawn of American fascism. It’s a surge of illiberalism based on a misguided belief that high tariffs, nativist hostility to immigration, and, in foreign affairs, transactionalism rather than multilateralism will solve problems that show no regard for borders.
Moreover, Americans have entrusted the presidency to someone manifestly unfit for high office. Donald Trump has no regard for the law, the Constitution, or basic decency. He is ignorant and incompetent. To staff his administration, he has chosen a strange coterie of amateurs, cranks, plutocrats, and nationalist and religious ideologues. It will never make complete sense.
My negative views of Trump don’t obscure President Biden’s egregious failures — Gaza, to name one — as he departs the Oval Office. More on Biden later in this newsletter.
As for the crisis of American liberalism, historian Daniel Bessner discussed the subject on my podcast in November. It was the most listened-to episode of 2024.
Trump and the Panama Canal
In Tuesday’s episode of History As It Happens, historian Jonathan Brown mentioned something I never knew but was entirely unsurprising about the President-elect. Donald Trump’s hotel management company was accused of tax evasion in Panama.
Whether this is eating at Trump as he floats the idea of seizing the Panama Canal, I cannot say. It’s impossible to know whether Trump was merely blustering, negotiating, or actually believing what he said in his rambling news conference on Jan. 7.
In response to a reporter asking if he would rule out the use of military force against Panama and/or Greenland, Trump said:
“No, I can't assure you on either of those two, but I can say this. We need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military… The Panama Canal is vital to our country. It's being operated by China. China! We gave the Panama Canal to Panama. We didn't give it to China and they've abused it. They've abused that gift. It should have never been made, by the way. Giving the Panama Canal is why Jimmy Carter lost the election, in my opinion, more so maybe than the hostages. The hostages were a big deal but… nobody wants to talk about the Panama Canal now.”
China is not operating the Panama Canal. Panama isn’t charging U.S. cargo ships unfair rates relative to other national flags, as Trump falsely alleged among his litany of half-truths and inanities. China does have growing economic interests and infrastructure projects in Panama that have hawks musing about invoking the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
From imperialism to sovereignty
Jonathan Brown is professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Weak and the Powerful: Omar Torrijos, Panama, and the Non-Aligned World.
As Brown discussed in the podcast, Panamanians never accepted the legitimacy of the 1903 treaty that established U.S. rights over the canal. The U.S. occupation of the canal zone and the monopoly held by American workers over the most important jobs were sources of humiliation and resentment.
Riots broke out in the 1950s and ’60s over the right to fly the Panamanian flag in the canal zone. Diplomatic relations were briefly severed in 1964. Indeed, all of Latin America came to oppose U.S. control of the Panama Canal, Brown says.
“The rise of a movement within Panama to question the ancient treaty that had been foisted upon them by the Americans back in 1903. The trigger was the 1956 takeover of the Suez Canal by General Nasser. This is what gave rise to greater tensions. The second thing was that the presidents of Panama had been asking for an increase in the rent paid by the United States for the right to run the canal. The United States did not [want to pay more rent] because it wanted to keep freight rates low for cargo ships using the canal,” Brown said. But there was nothing Panama’s leaders could do. The U.S. had all the leverage.
It took an “unusual Latin American dictator,” Brown says, to peacefully wrest the canal from the hemispheric hegemon. Colonel Omar Torrijos seized power in a bloodless coup in 1968.
“He didn’t act like the other dictators. Torrijos was more of a social democrat than a dictator. He was only a dictator in order to force the United States to engage in a renegotiation of the 1903 treaty… As a military man, he wanted the occupation of the country by the U.S. Army to cease,” says Brown, who was an officer stationed in Panama during the Torrijos years.
Among the subjects covered in the podcast: the “invasion” of Panama in 1959; the canal treaty controversy in national politics - Ford, Carter, Reagan, and William F. Buckley; what the 1978 treaties stipulate; China’s interests in Panama today, and more.
What’s next?
On Tuesday, historian Jeremi Suri will return to discuss Joe Biden’s presidency. Biden took office as the stench of Jan. 6 lingered over the nation. He promised to reclaim the “soul of America” from Trumpian darkness. He pursued the most ambitious domestic agenda of any president since Lyndon Johnson. He backed Ukraine and Israel and pivoted to Asia. Did Joseph Biden succeed at the job he coveted his entire career? Is it too early to say?
Next Friday, historian and Eurasia Group analyst Gregory Brew, one of the sharpest minds today covering Iran and the Middle East, will discuss an overlooked aspect of Jimmy Carter’s presidency that holds valuable lessons for understanding “the tragedy” (to borrow from William Appleman Williams) of U.S. foreign policy and the hostile state of U.S.-Iran relations.
The Iran hostage crisis from Nov. 1979 dominates the memory of the Carter years. Less appreciated are the nearly two years of failed diplomacy that preceded it. We will begin our story on New Year’s Eve 1977. President Carter toasted the brutal Shah on a trip to Iran. The revolution started just weeks later.