Littwin: It’s now Donald Trump’s America, and the only people left to blame is everyone

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Welcome to the United States of Trumpistan.

This is what we wanted. This is what we got.

There’s no one to blame but ourselves. This is us. Don’t bother blaming the efficacy of Kamala Harris’ closing argument or Joe Biden’s reluctance to give up the job or the Russians and their AI-generated bots or Stephen Miller and the MAGA cultists or even the hate-filled right-wing propaganda machine.

The post-mortems are flowing in. What the men’s vote did. What the women’s vote didn’t. How Latinos voted. How many so called low-information voters turned out. Why the fall of Roe didn’t stop the rise of Trump. What the fall of the Blue Wall portends. How the Obama coalition seems to be forever gone. How Fox News and social media have fried our brains. 

We can read all that. And parse through it. And draw yellow lines, using arrows where necessary. And suck our thumbs until they’re blue.

The question of why the Big Lie and all the attendant little lies were believed won’t be answered any time soon. Historians and psychologists will be working on that one for a hundred years.

The only thing that matters now is that nine years into the chaos and treachery and lies of the Trump era, Trump will likely win the popular vote for the first time in his sordid career. If he does, we can’t even blame the anachronistic Electoral College this time.

This is America, circa 2024. This is what has become of the America of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt.

You can blame those who voted for him. You can blame those who didn’t work hard enough to persuade them not to.

We can’t blame ignorance, unless you include willful ignorance. Trump told us what he would do. He told us his dark intentions. He showed us how he played on fear, on hatred, on grievances. He warned us not to trust democratic institutions. He embraced Putin and the other authoritarians and told us how much savvier they were than we are —  particularly “stupid,” “low IQ” Kamala Harris, who is so dumb, as Trump surely believes, that she called Trump to congratulate him on the victory.

Trump told us he believes in a kind of America that they never taught you about in school. Once, after the shock of the 2016 election, many wrote off his vision of America as an anomaly. No one can do that now. 

Half the country either approves of what he says or believes Trump’s speeches were so much bluster and that the bluster, no matter how ugly, shouldn’t be disqualifying. Not if there were taxes that could be cut.

The market roars its approval, even as Trump tells us he will impose what most economists say would be ruinous tariffs.

Some want to blame the media for not doing enough to help America see through Trump’s lies. I’m not here to say the media are perfect, and, as they say, mistakes were made. But ask yourself this: Is there anyone who, at this late juncture, doesn’t know what or who Donald Trump is? 

Did anyone miss his speeches describing migrants as “vermin” who would “poison the blood of the country”?

Maybe some people didn’t hear — or believe — that Trump had called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” But they all heard him say that John McCain wasn’t a hero because he was captured. And they might have heard him say that the Medal of Freedom is much better than the Medal of Honor because the Freedom medal winners are more likely to still be in one piece.

Trump convinced more than half of American voters that we truly live in a hellscape. Half of America believed Trump more than they believed their own eyes.

And with the dark magic that Trump somehow wields, he convinced more than half of American voters that he alone — the vulgar, narcissistic, felonious, sexual-assaulting, democracy-dismissing, enemies-list-making, veterans-demeaning, bigoted, misogynist, xenophobic treasonous clown of a demagogue — could fix it.

That’s on America. On America alone. On us, even those of us who would never in a million lifetimes vote for him, although Coloradans can rightfully claim to have resisted Trump’s, uh, charms. 

It’s on everyone who witnessed January 6 and didn’t say, “Enough!” On everyone who can see that democracy is fragile and that Trump intends to put one very large boot on its neck.

Trump saw a hellscape. And now that he has been elected again, I can see one, too, in which January 6 rioters are pardoned and Trump, avoiding all the felony charges against him, walks free.

We wanted a strongman. We got a cartoon version of one — a strongman who looks at migrants wishing to live in America, that land of promise and freedom and opportunity, and somehow sees Hannibal Lecter —  but it’s a dangerous cartoon.

Depending on what happens in the vote for who controls the House — and I think we can guess the likely answer by now — we’ve elected a cartoon strongman without restraints other than possibly the courts. Republicans in the Senate have won a large enough majority to give Trump every nomination he wants.

And should we somehow trust the pro-presidential-immunity, pro-gun, anti-women, anti-worker Supreme Court to rescue us? 

Trump has promised retribution, using a weaponized Department of Justice. He has promised to quash dissent, using the military if necessary.

He will come after the press, the enemy of the people, and all the others he calls “the enemy from within.”

He has promised to gut the bureaucracy and people it with MAGA true believers.

He has all but promised to abandon NATO. He will almost certainly abandon Ukraine. The world that Trump remakes may not be recognizable. But it’s the world that America has chosen.

Which promises will Trump keep? Who knows? But if I’m Liz Cheney, I’m on the lookout for nine barrels trained her way.

We can be pretty sure that the mass deportations will begin soon enough. That’s a promise Trump can keep, or at least begin to keep, even though it would tear families apart while tearing the heart out of what we used to think of as America.

We can assume — hope, anyway — that there would be demonstrations in opposition, that people take to the street, that people don’t accept the worst — whether it’s a need to smuggle babies into Canada or Mexico to get vaccinated or that women under 50, as one friend suggested, would need pregnancy tests to cross state lines.

But what does an untrammeled Trump do in times of mass protest? Can you guess?

Yes, I see the hellscape. I can see it from my house.

And friends now ask their friends — those whom historians, if there are still historians, might someday call the resistance — what they can do in this moment of darkness.

I don’t pretend to have the answer. But maybe we should, in this one instance anyway, borrow words from Donald Trump himself.

We can fight like hell. Not with American flags battering badly outnumbered Capitol cops. But with the promise of a resurrected American dream, called up from the ashes. And with the chance, as Ben Franklin might have said, that we can keep it.

Can we do that much? 

Or maybe a better question is this: How could we do any less?

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