America After Trump

It’s hard not to feel a spike of glee when you remember that one day Donald Trump will be gone, even if you aren’t JD Vance. 

America after Trump is the idea that animates the latest episode of NEXT COMES WHAT—Andrea Pitzer’s podcast that I produce. And when we posted it on Thursday, August 28th, we had no idea that the unconfirmed speculation about Trump’s demise would spike to levels of tittering that have not been seen since Trump had COVID. 

That speculation, of course, began to trend toward a red line thanks to JD Vance's interview with USA TODAY that afternoon. That's when he seemed to be measuring Trump for a coffin, bragging about his "200 days" and eight vacations as vice president, which, in addition to decades of being a sherpa for evil billionaires, had prepared him to succeed Trump.

It’s hard to assess why this cacophony of conjecture snowballed, given that Trump has resembled a bloated corpse for most of a decade. And the only explanations can be 1) someone knows something, or 2) people really need this.

I can only confirm the latter, unfortunately. People really need this. The video above is the most popular one we’ve released. In just two days, it has surpassed the views of our second most popular episode, the series opener that came out the week after the election, when people also needed... something.

As I woke Saturday morning, expecting the views to die down and return to the usual steady trickle we get for a podcast informed by the global history of concentration camps. This did not happen. For reasons that are murky at best, speculation escalated to quantum levels overnight.

Since we know nothing for sure, except that JD Vance has been groomed carefully by Peter Thiel and Manjaro for this exact moment, I’d like to linger in on the two undeniable insights I took from Andrea in this week’s episode:

1. Trump will be gone one day.
2. We should focus on the America we want to make and commit ourselves to what we personally can do to make that happen.

We should do number two, knowing our impact is limited, the damage is significant, and we weren’t in a great position at all, even before Trump came down the escalator to reside permanently in our frontal lobe.

In so many ways, seven months of Republicans shredding checks and balances to rip away anything our government does to protect workers that they could get their nails into has left us at a point of no return.

We know that’s literally true of the CDC. That’s what Dr. Demetre Daskalakis told The Advocate after he walked out of the office of the agency most directly charged with keeping Americans from dying of diseases, infectious and otherwise.

What we’ve done to our immigrant neighbors already has laid the groundwork for a “new social hierarchy that places the most predatory, bloody-fanged among us at the top and seeks to subordinate caution and compassion wherever they’re found,” as Alan Elrod wrote.

There’s also the carnage to science, our universities, and the environment, all of which are designed never to be reversed.

Again, none of this would be possible if not for the ways our country had been perverted by the demands of preserving hierarchies from the beginning. Those demands have coalesced and consolidated their power since the Powell Memo was written in response to the success of the civil rights and anti-war movements. And the groundwork laid by the right and made real by Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, creating an alternative reality through the Fox News ecosystem, was ready to go into overdrive when the insult of the first Black president activated Donald Trump and a lust for a white king. Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with JD Vance in a baby backpack carrier, then stepped up for the alleyoop.

Yet here we are. So what do we do? Andrea explains:

Every tyrant falls in the end. What do you want to do that will outlive him? What part of your vision of the world will you work to build? It can be as small as a project to document local history or as large as an effort to guarantee rights of a targeted group in your state. You might imagine a community program that would reach every elementary school-age child in your county or that fights for automatic voter registration and the removal of barriers to civic participation. What you choose might be an effort that you’ll start without ever seeing the end of, or it can be something with specific milestones that can be achieved along the way.

It might take a little time to figure out what to tackle, and that’s fine. In the meantime, there are still lots of opportunities to show up, learn more, and get involved. This Labor Day weekend, for instance, MaydayStrong.org has a map of events across the country you can attend, one of which is probably one not too far from you (zoom in to the local level and click on individual dots to see what’s available).

Many of us are still able to whine in public without fear of immediate reprisals. Many of us still have local power over our communities that is likely to be contested in somewhat fair elections. And we all have more power to communicate and connect—despite the billionaire control of our platforms and media—than any humans before us.

Trump, if we’re stuck with him, is deteriorating and increasingly repulsive with each failure and crime and the countless failures and lies that buttress them. 

And do I think JD Vance will be less good at assuming the powers of dictatorship? No, but he will always lack the sick charm and banal ubiquity of Trump.

We don’t know what we can do. Yet we know we can do something. We don’t know when we’ll be celebrating, but we know that we can today commit ourselves to making the community, country, and world we live in a bit better than it would be without us. And that will be the best revenge.

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