Sometime early in Donald Trump’s second term – after he had emptied prisons of rioters and begun a campaign of terror against federal workers, but well before he demolished the East Wing – A distant memory popped into my head.
It was 1992, and I was a young reporter in a divided Liberia, traveling the deserted road from the dusty town of Gbanga, where Charles Taylor and his rebel army ruled, to the capital, Monrovia.
On the outskirts of town, I passed the ruins of a water treatment plant that Taylor’s teenage rebels had shot to pieces with obvious glee.
“The Law of the Jungle”
These rural revolutionaries had never seen water or electricity plants and had no idea how they worked. All they knew was that everything that had been built by the ruling elite had to be destroyed before Liberia could finally – as Taylor put it, looking me straight in the face and surrounded by armed men just before I hastily left Gbanga – be left to the “law of the jungle” again.
I keep returning to this image because, for me, it goes to the heart of what 2025 brought to Washington. It will be remembered as the year Trump’s frightening revolution came to the capital – and ultimately the year it was lost.
During his first term, Trump delegated governing to a series of colorless advisers who saw themselves as human guardrails tasked with keeping him somewhat within the white lines of conservative thought. This second term, however, is an excursion into the terrain. Visibly more tired and erratic as he approaches 80, Trump now leans on a circle of like-minded advisers—Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, Vice President JD Vance—who openly embrace authoritarianism and white nationalist identity, whatever they want to call it.
Trump’s anti-intellectuals are not interested in old conservative platitudes like returning power to the states or expanding global markets. What they seek is nothing less than a radical reorganization of society – and increasingly of the international order – starting with the humiliation of the educated elite and the delegitimization of all social progress of the last half of the 20th century. At its core, Trump’s movement is a war against modernity.
War against modernity
This is new for America, but less so for the rest of the world. So perhaps the movement can be better understood by comparing Trump not to tyrants or former presidents, but to some of the most notorious anti-intellectual uprisings of the past century: the Maoists in China, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, Taylor’s youthful rebellion.
Of course, this is an exaggeration in the literal sense. Whatever Trump may be, he is certainly not a mass murderer, and even our escalating political violence – the worst since the 1960s – is minor compared to what these countries have suffered.
In purely ideological terms, however, MAGA is essentially the refined cousin of these cruder, more violent uprisings. Does anyone really think Trump wants to get rid of electric cars because he cares so much about oil? If that were the case, he wouldn’t have turned the White House driveway into a Tesla showroom for a day. No, national energy policy is now completely determined by tribalism and revenge. Trump wiping out billions of dollars in wind projects with the stroke of a pen is no different than Taylor’s soldiers shutting down water plants – a satisfying “fuck you” to the intelligentsia, even if it sets the country back years.
Uprisings of ignorance always share certain characteristics: a campaign of retaliation against the educated classes, ethnic isolation and scapegoating of the Other, the official rewriting of established history. (Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge famously declared the beginning of their brutal rule in Cambodia “Year Zero,” claiming to bury modern history entirely.) Inevitably, the moment comes when national identity is replaced by a single cult figure.
Year zero
Trump could hardly check these boxes better, even if it were one of those memory tests that he says he passes with flying colors. Wage an icy campaign against universities, law firms, media and judges: Check. Adopting national culture and cleaning up official historical images: Check. Calling immigrants “trash” and declaring that America belongs primarily to white Christians: Check.
Then there are the Trump coins and Trump bonds, the Trump Kennedy Center and the Donald J. Trump Institute for Peace, the celebration of Trump’s birthday (instead of Martin Luther King Jr.’s) with free entry to national parks, the giant banners of a scowling Trump on ministry buildings – remarkably similar to the Saddam Hussein banners I once saw in Ba’athist Iraq. Check, check and check.
The legendary Hunter S. Thompson, while covering the campaign for this magazine in 1972, said of Richard Nixon that he embodied “that dark, greedy and incurably violent side of the American character that every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.” If so, then Trump’s movement represents something else: the resentful, anger-driven side of humanity that most countries now recognize as the enemy of the Enlightenment.
But here’s the good news: America is not an underdeveloped country trying to shake off centuries of colonialism. And despite what some alarmists claim, our faltering institutions have not yet collapsed. People are still allowed to vote here – for the most part, anyway – which is why Trump’s radical revolution has most likely already passed its peak. Year Zero in Washington brought exactly the kind of retribution Trump had promised. Year One looks to be a different story.
The reckoning begins
It used to be a joke when Trump predicted we would win so much that we would get tired of winning. For most of the past year, however, it seemed like he was actually making good on that promise.
Trump won in Congress, the Supreme Court, and the law firms and media companies that paid him what in effect amounted to outright bribes. It was indeed unpleasant, and every Democrat I spoke to asked the same perplexed question: Where was the outrage? How could so many Americans have voted for this?
The answer is complicated. They did – and they didn’t.
Trump, remember, was still politically toxic in 2022. Had he not faced both prison and financial ruin as a private citizen, I am not sure he would have even attempted to run for the presidency for a third time.
What revived him more than anything was the Democrats’ insistence on launching a violent cultural revolution of their own. After Joe Biden won the presidency on a promise to return to some sort of normality, he watched as left-wing activists and academics began tearing down the pillars of 20th-century liberalism — deriding free speech as a tool of the oppressor, getting lost in personalized pronouns and silly language regulations, talking about abolishing the police, and dividing the country into a series of identity-based slights.
Exhausted voters
It’s not that most white voters haven’t acknowledged problems like racial injustice, trans rights or excessive police violence. They just didn’t want to be blamed for these problems and shied away from radical solutions. Voters worried about the skyrocketing cost of living, and Democrats always seemed to worry about someone else.
Those were the two cornerstones of Trump’s appeal, particularly to many white independents – that he was the only one standing between them and a truth and reconciliation regime, and that he would actually focus on things that affected working people in America. All the insanity surrounding election denial and retaliation just seemed like Trump being Trump – the price to pay to get the country running again.
But what did Trump and his party do after their victory? They made exactly the same mistake, misinterpreting the meaning of a modest election victory and starting an anti-intellectual purge instead of actually reforming anything. In some ways, Trump’s cultural insurrection is the dark reflection of what preceded it. His version of thought police targets foreign-born citizens and vaccine scientists. His understanding of identity-based hurt revolves around the persecution of white America.
The uprising may be effective, but it was never popular. According to Gallup, Trump’s approval rating was 47 percent when he took office in January – decidedly disappointing for a newly elected president. From there the trend line resembles a beginner ski slope. In December, Trump fell to about 36 percent approval, which is probably about the low end given his unwavering support from 25 to 30 percent of the electorate.
Political reality
When voters were able to judge Trump’s first year in November’s special election for the first time, the results were astonishing and clear. Republicans lost not only the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, but also secondary races in Mississippi and Georgia. There is nothing to indicate an imminent trend reversal. Trump is not becoming more popular, while his imperialist foreign policy increasingly resembles an adolescent game of risk (“You take Greenland; I attack Kamchatka.”). And he won’t doze off in public any less often as the months go by.
If the Republicans are punished in the midterm elections, Trump can continue issuing executive orders and harassing prosecutors, but his radical program would already have failed. Considerations about an illegal third term in office would be the stuff of satire. The banners would be quietly taken down. And the conversation that begins immediately after November — about the next election — would put Trump where he least likes it: on the sidelines.
Of course there is no guarantee of this; At this time four years ago, Biden was barely more popular than Trump, and his party was outperforming expectations in the midterm elections. But the fact that we find ourselves in a similar political climate – with the ruling party’s lofty social agenda meeting head-on economic reality – should tell us something.
No market for a sequel
For at least a decade, we have been stuck in a cycle of dueling cultural programs driven by identity-based ideas to reshape society. And we know this: Americans are simply exhausted by this. For all the polarization that my industry loves to talk about, for all the viral tweets and demonstrative virtue, we remain a more pragmatic country than our parties or media believe.
Next year, America will celebrate its own radical and violent remaking of society 250 years ago. What voters keep trying to tell us is that there is little demand for a sequel.