America's system of government, and the constitution on which it is built, was created in different times and for different circumstances and purposes, and it has changed very little since then.
Author
- Hugh White
Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University
Many of its components, such as the way elections are conducted, are battered and worn from centuries of use and abuse. So it would not be surprising if America faced a second revolution, 250 years after the first. This may be the best way to understand what is happening today.
Ever since that day in 2015 when Donald Trump announced his intention to run for president, he has been by far the most important figure in American politics. It is a remarkable record.
Since George Washington, no figure in American history has dominated US politics so completely for so long except Franklin D. Roosevelt. But FDR worked his political magic through artful manipulation of Washington's constitutional machinery and norms. Trump has dominated American politics by flagrantly and gleefully challenging and violating them.
That is what gives his ascendancy the feeling of a second American Revolution.
This revolution is also the product of discontent in the US electorate, fragility in key political institutions and turmoil in American conservative ideology.
But Trump is at the heart of it. His remarkable character is the catalyst that gives those other factors their power and effect. And character is what the Trump phenomenon is all about.
Taking Trump seriously
Trump's primary concern is not the policy outcomes that flow from his actions - their real-world consequences - but how they make him look.
It is, in a sense, all about performance, as was underlined by a revealing remark Trump made to a journalist early in the Iran war.
"I hope you are impressed," he said . "How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?"
It is hard to fathom the frank acknowledgement of irresponsibility implied by these remarks.
Over time, with endless repetition, Trump's transgressions become familiar and cease to shock. But if we are to understand the world we live in, it is important not to lose our sense of bewilderment and dismay that this person leads, inspires and controls - indeed constitutes - a political movement which has seized control of the key instruments of national power in America and to which the US political system has, it seems, no effective antidote or response.
He defies all we thought we knew about that system, and indeed about the whole way electoral democracies work around the world.
Is there any precedent at any time for a person like Trump being elected and re-elected anywhere in any functioning democracy? Perhaps the closest precedent is Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, but he pales beside Trump. Berlusconi proved to be little more than an ageing party animal. Trump is leading a revolution.
Plainly, Trump has some extraordinary talents. His capacity to intimidate and humiliate is obvious. His ability to charm and disarm those he meets is more surprising but perhaps just as important. Many people who meet him attest to it. Even Kamala Harris, his eventual Democratic rival in the 2024 presidential election, found herself susceptible to his flattery .
But while many politicians depend on the impact they have in person, Trump's political power seems to flow overwhelmingly from the image of himself he so relentlessly projects, through mass media and social media, to the public at large.
It is hard to imagine a politician who more completely, compellingly and convincingly projects his character and personality to his political audience. He does so with astonishing energy - and energy is always attractive in a public performance. And in a strange way he does it so honestly.
The most beguiling paradox of Trump's unique political persona is simply that the most brazen and transparent liar in the history of a famously dishonest profession has built his remarkable success on his capacity and willingness to display himself to the world with disconcerting honesty, exactly as he is.
His is perhaps the most exposed personality in history. It is a triumph of titanic self-belief, and a reflection of his sociopathology. He loves to show himself exactly as he is, because he cannot imagine that anyone else would not find him as appealing as he does himself.
Trump defies so completely our conventional ideas of what political leaders are and how they behave that even now it can be hard to take him seriously.
In his first term, his supporters sometimes criticised his opponents for taking him literally, but not seriously. They said the right way to take him was seriously, but not literally.
Now that advice seems out of date. We need to take him both literally and seriously.
Taking Trump literally means recognising that what he offers Americans is nothing less than a revolution in the way the United States is governed and the way it relates to the rest of the world.
Taking him seriously means recognising that he seems to be in a position to achieve that revolution. How can that be so?
A system failing Americans
The more Americans have gotten to know Trump, the more they have been willing to vote for him.
More people voted for him in the 2024 presidential election than in 2020 in over 89% of America's 3,112 counties . Those people surely knew whom and what they were voting for. They knew what he'd done in his first term, how he'd acted when he lost in 2020, and what he promised and threatened to do if re-elected.
Apparently, it does not matter to his voters that the revolution he offers has no coherent objective. It is conjured entirely from myths and prejudices, with his own personality the only credo. That this seems to appeal to so many Americans tells us how profoundly they are dissatisfied with the old American political order.
That can only mean deep forces are at work - economic and social trends that over decades have undermined Americans' confidence in and commitment to the old vision of America that long underpinned the policies of both parties.
The economic trends driving that dissatisfaction are clear enough. One is stagnating household income. From 1970 to 2000, median income increased by an average of 1.2% per year. From 2000 to 2018, growth slowed to an average of only 0.3% per year.
The other is growing inequality: between 1989 and 2022, US households in the top 1% gained at least 101 times more wealth than the median household, and at least 987 times more wealth than households in the bottom 20%.
Not surprisingly, this affects the way Americans see themselves. Over the past decade the proportion of Americans who describe themselves as middle class has dropped from 85% to 54%.
It also affects the way they see their country. Most Americans believe the United States is declining in global power and influence, and nearly two-thirds say China's power now equals or exceeds that of the US.
Trump and his supporters blame all this on the loss of good old-fashioned jobs in manufacturing to lower-cost countries like Mexico and China, which they blame on the old Washington political establishment. The reality is certainly more complex.
A shift in the global distribution of manufacturing jobs was to some degree inevitable as economic development in Asia brought massive new industrial workforces into the global market. But America's political system has plainly failed to manage the consequences of this and other shifts for most Americans.
Either way, a political system which for two centuries delivered real opportunity to a large majority of Americans now fails to do so. It is not surprising that a lot of them want big changes.
The social trends driving voter dissatisfaction are harder to pin down, but unease with immigration seems a big factor. Behind that lurk age-old anxieties of identity and race, which progressive identity politics, no matter how well-intentioned or morally valid, seems to have only exacerbated.
No doubt his adroit dog whistling to simple racism is part of Trump's appeal, but strong swings to him in 2024 among Black and Hispanic voters suggests that this is not the whole story. Perhaps the best one can say is that many Americans, for many different reasons, are not comfortable with the makeup of US society today. They blame Washington, and they vote for Trump.
These economic and social trends may coalesce in the long-term decline of Americans' trust in government. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of Americans who trust their governments to do the right thing all or most of the time has fallen from over 75% in the early 1960s to 17% today.
Most striking is the collapse in trust between 2001 and 2011, from 51% to 15%, with the numbers flat-lining since then.
That is reflected in possibly the most striking feature of Trump's political success. It is not just a result of the number of Americans who are willing to vote for him; it is also due to the number who cannot be bothered to vote against him in defence of the old political order.
This was clear in 2024, when the key to Trump's re-election was a huge drop in Democratic voter turnout. While Trump received 2.8 million more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, Harris received 6.8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020.
Of course, Trump is not immune to the tides of political fortune. Like almost all presidents, his standing in the electorate declined over the first year of his current term. But 18 months into his second term, after countless absurdities and disasters, close to 40% of Americans still approve of his presidency. That is only slightly below the approval rating of the ineffective but inoffensive Biden at the same point in his presidency.
And the evidence suggests that what drives negative sentiment about Trump is not his assault on American institutions and values but his failure to deal with bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.
A minority of American voters find Trump inherently repellent. A bigger minority seems to find him compellingly appealing. Between them lies a plurality that seems passively to accept him and his agenda, revolutionary though it is. That is perhaps the strangest thing of all about US politics today.
Return to normal?
Where does it all go from here? We do not know how resilient and robust the institutions of American government will prove to be in resisting and containing Trump's revolution. It is still possible they will deliver him a decisive check.
But the odds are against it. Ever since Trump's era began in 2015, most of us have overestimated the capacity of those institutions to contain him.
The Congress, the courts, the bureaucracy, the states and the media have at times been able to slow or deflect him, but they have been unable to stop his assault on the American state and its constitution and restore some semblance of normality to the conduct of American government.
It therefore seems prudent to expect that in some form or other Trump's revolution will continue.
We can glimpse what this means by looking ahead to the 2028 presidential election.
By keeping alive the myth that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Trump is preparing the ground to resist any future loss. We saw how far he and his supporters were willing to go in 2020 and 2021, and it is clear he was much better prepared to go even further had he lost in 2024. How much more prepared and more determined will he be in 2028? The stakes then will be much higher.
Republicans will be even more driven to prevent or overturn a loss for fear that a Democratic president will attack them just as Trump has attacked his adversaries. Trump's " revenge presidency " has set an example they fear victorious Democrats would follow, so they are even more motivated to do whatever it takes to keep them out of office.
What are the chances, then, that Trump's mysterious and momentous conquest of the American political system will be defeated at the ballot box? It is an extraordinary fate to befall what was one of the most robust and successful political systems the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, Americans suffer from a national government that is both cruel and incompetent.
For the rest of the world, all this implies that we cannot expect America to return to anything like normal - to the America we have known - for a long time, if ever.
This is an edited extract from Hugh White's new book, Hard New World: Australia's Post-American Future (Black Inc).
Hugh White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
