The recent primary election results from Indiana struck a chord with me as a portent of what the future holds beyond Trump. The majority of the Indiana state legislators who voted against redistricting were defeated for reelection by MAGA voters at the direction of Donald Trump. Clearly the president still has an iron grip on the Republican party that is willing to do his bidding.
I had thought that maybe the Hoosiers might show their mettle and back their legislators on principle. Their failure to do so tells me that while the legislators had acted in good faith to do the right thing, the majority of voters continue to support Trump and the MAGA vision for America.
Increasingly, I’ve come to believe that “Trump politics” will continue to live on after his presidency. After the election of Joe Biden in 2020, I wrote a piece for these pages entitled “Our National Nightmare is Over,” (November 9, 2020)* believing that the national ship would be righted and politics would return to a more salutary routine. I was wrong. After the passage of six more years, it appears that chaos and unprecedented corruption will prevail in the near future and may change politics permanently. No president or political party in my lifetime has ever endeavored to remake American culture and government as has the MAGA dominated Republican party of Donald Trump. Not a day goes by without news about the relentless reach of Trump’s ambitions to influence American culture; presently, Florida is pushing a new book** that seeks to reinterpret American history to better serve right-wing politics. Rewriting history is one of the first things that revolutionary governments do when taking power, something I observed first-hand in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Truth is replaced by fiction to serve the new masters.
An article in yesterday’s Economist*** entitled “America must hope Donald Trump is not a new Caligula,” issues the warning that the Trump phenomenon will persist beyond his presidency. It argues that America’s founders feared tyrannical leaders such as Caligula (Roman emperor, AD 37-41). Like Trump, Caligula renamed temples in his honor, erected golden statues of himself, organized military parades and humiliated former Roman elites, many of whom cowardly enabled his accession to power. While the Trump-Caligula comparison is almost too easy to make, given the similarities, it draws attention to how the president’s actions have changed the country and questions whether “the Trump era…can be reversed by an election or two.”
Ditto, I believe the impact of the Trump years is going to have a continuing influence on how our politics plays out in the immediate future and, perhaps, even in the long run. By the 2028 presidential elections we will have incessantly experienced all things-Trump for twelve years. During this time, we have not only engaged in the usual political differences about the role of government and economic issues but we have witnessed a continual assault on American culture including education, science, health, the rule of law and the very foundations of our democratic republic. Too much has happened to be upended simply by elections. Centrist politics and bipartisan compromise may be a thing of the past.
*Robert Fischer, ”Our National Nightmare is Over,” Potlatch Tertulia (potlatchga.com), Archives, 2020.
**”Florida Creates a More Conservative U.S. History Course to Rival AP,” New York Times, May 7, 2026. The suggested book is by Wilfred McClay, a professor at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian college in Michigan.
***The Economist, The Telegram, “America must hope Donald Trump is not a new Caligula,” May 6, 2026. The article includes a discussion of Barbara Tuchman’s book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam that catalogues self-destructive decisions nations have made from ancient to modern times.Tuchman was a Pulitzer prize winning historian and the author of .The Guns of August.
Great piece today. It depends on who is elected in 28 and by how much. If it’s e.g., Vance or someone else who is bent on following more or less in Trumps footsteps, you’re probably right. If someone like Kelly or any of several other Dems, win by a blowout and make a show of restoring the status quo ante — and governs well — it could be quite the opposite. The mantra could be: Thank God our republic withstood its most serious challenge. Let’s hope. Keep your fingers crossed and support strong, principled Democratic candidates.
Thanks David, I’m afraid you are more optimistic than I am. I’m not sure that the election of either a respectable Democrat or Republican will exorcise the malignancy that Trump has let grow. At best, it will take years to get back to “normal” governing. Our allies for sure are not going to trust us; things will be different.