Last week, I intended to do a detailed list of my concerns about the upcoming second Donald Trump administration, but instead, I decided to a.) detail the many ways in which he is a bad person — it is always worthwhile to put that marker down again and again; and b.) grapple with what it means that so many loved ones, friends, and colleagues voted for the bad person. But let me now turn to what concerns me, and it’s probably apropos that I waited because Trump has begun offering his nominees for various cabinet positions.
I’m not sure I can necessarily list my concerns in a “worst of the worst to still bad” way, but I will offer three chief concerns I had if Trump was to win the 2024 presidential election as he now has.
The Erosion of Norms and Democracy Factor
For nine years since Trump came down the escalator to announce his run for president in the Republican primary field, he’s been pushing against the guardrails of normalcy, norms, the rule of law, and democracy. This obviously reached its zenith with Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump incited a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol and overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. None of his pushes against the guardrails — and again, it’s worth emphasizing how much of our system is built upon norms, like shame, for example, rather than the rule of law per se — would be possible without the capitulation of a great many others, primarily the Republican Party (and the Senate in particular and Mitch McConnell even more particularly), the U.S. Supreme Court and various judges underneath them, and of course, the millions of American voter who continue to support and validate his approach. Now that he’s been elected to a second term, I worry not only if the guardrails will hold, but if what Trump represents will be the “new norm” going forward for another generation or more. In other words, it was nice to hope that Trump was an aberration, a fluke, the last death throes of a movement whose time had come before we moved earnestly into the 21st century. Alas. What he represents is here to stay, and it’s just a matter of how long. More pointedly on the democracy concern, Trump is already making reference to a third term. Those who like to call people like me alarmist for even pointing that out were the same people who couldn’t possibly have envisioned Jan. 6 taking place. Finally, it’s also worth mentioning that a saving grace to people is that Trump and the people he surrounds himself with are so grossly incompetent that they can’t even effectively wield power and/or break those aforementioned guardrails. This is obviously true in some respect, as I’ll outline below, because so many of these people, including the erratic, unserious, and unintelligent Trump himself, lack an understanding of how government actually operates. But there are two reasons to not solely rely on that as a stop-gap measure. First, is that a lot of people can still be harmed by incompetence! Indeed, that’ll be a theme of my next concern. Second, this is the second Trump administration, i.e., they at least had some experience garnered through the prior administration and those who have tried to intellectualize the MAGA movement, like with Project 25, are clearly ready this time to try to capitalize on a second Trump administration. That is cause for concern. Worse still, Trump nominated a crony to be the Attorney General of the U.S., Matt Gaetz, who has been credibly accused of having sex with a minor, and yes, he’s unqualified for the job, but the concern is that he’s going to treat the Justice Department like a revenge tour for Trump, only further eroding those guardrails.
The Incompetence Factor
Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. Trump didn’t know what he was doing when a once-in-a-century pandemic occurred during his presidency. Counterfactuals are difficult, but under a less culturally corrosive leader and a more competent leader, I don’t think more than 1.2 million deaths would have occurred in the U.S. It’s telling that one of the few good things that happened under Trump, Operation Warp Speed to get a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus, he didn’t even campaign on and couldn’t campaign on because his coalition consists of so many virulent anti-vaxxers. Trump nominating RFK Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is so batty, it’s hard to even do justice to just how batty it is. In addition to being an anti-vaxxer who is linked to 83 deaths in Samoa after a measles outbreak, RFK Jr. also has wacky thoughts about AIDS, food, fluoride in our water system, and so on. To describe him as incompetent is to do incompetence to the word incompetent. So, yes, I worry about Trump’s incompetence leading to more deaths and carnage, whether that’s through another botched pandemic response, or especially through war. If Trump knows nothing about domestic policy and pandemic responses, he knows even less about foreign policy. But Trump’s incompetence will also be bad for the economy through his tariff and immigration policies. In his first administration, because of his tariff policies, we ended up having to bail out domestic farmers. That exact scenario is already looking like it’ll play out again.
The Elon Musk Factor
I’ve never been someone who has been particularly concerned about billionaires as a general issue, or billionaires and their Super PACs trying to influence public policy, politicians, and election outcomes. Billionaires, millionaires, and anyone else has a right to to their viewpoints and to donate to their pet causes and pet politicians. Just because the Koch brothers believed something and then spent millions to bolster that viewpoint, doesn’t mean I have to agree with it! Same with George Soros, the boogeyman of the right. It’s the same principle that means just because Coke spent $646 million on advertising in 2022 in the U.S., I’m going to buy a Coke. At the end of the day, they can’t make me buy a Coke, and a billionaire can’t make me vote a certain way, even the world’s richest man controlling a social media site. But there is something particularly pernicious and unseemly, to say the least, about how overtly Elon Musk (who, it’s worth saying, isn’t eligible to ever be the president) and Trump are working together. Yes, the stupid DOGE announcement, which isn’t even a real government agency, but what about Musk interfacing with Iranian leaders? Not to say anything, either, about the conflict of interest, given Musk’s contracts with the U.S. government through his businesses. The world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man working together in this way, it’s just bad, and as usual, is the unabashed and yet praised worst version of the right’s long-feared concerns with Soros. As mentioned, Musk also has Twitter to amplify all of it, again, a fear that he used to rail against.
All of this and much more are reasons to be concerned and vigilant the next four years. Why, though? Why bother? I know some on the left and such are exhausted and veering quickly from cynicism to downright nihilism. Nothing matters. This country is effed. It’s a lost cause and so on. I get that feeling, especially after an electoral defeat. The older I get though, the less I like to give into the cynical sensibility. Here are three reasons for optimism:
The Voters Are Fickle Factor
Jon Stewart explains it well in two minutes here, but it’s worth remembering that every time we think the country is set in one particular direction forever, it realigns and shifts yet again. Because voters are fickle. That’s why there are Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump voters. Or Bush to Kerry. Or whatever the case. No electoral defeat is ever set in stone. Moreover, the American voter is not just fickle, but prone to amnesia. I believe they’ve forgotten just how bad and unlikeable Trump was in his first term. They’ll soon be reminded, and that could be beneficial to Democrats in the 2026 midterms and then in 2028, the party-in-power bias is at play again.
The Incompetence Factor
I know, it may seem weird to argue for the incompetence factor as both a chief concern and a reason for optimism, but that’s how incompetence goes! It could either lead to a lot of unnecessary death, carnage, and economic ruin, or it could just be a clown show throughout that leaves us largely unscaved, as far as that goes. It’s hard to say. But what we can say is what Tom Nichols said in The Atlantic: “Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.” Indeed, which brings me to …
The Historical Factor
This is the hardest one to glean any sort of optimism from because it doesn’t help in the day-to-day present necessarily, but when taking the long-view of history, America has had similarly bad and worse inflection points where it could be argued our Constitutional form of government, our norms, and our rule of law were on shaky ground, all propelled by bad people and American voters putting their trust in those bad people. Obviously, for much of our history, for those who weren’t white male property owners, America did resemble an authoritarian state. Beyond that fact, the Civil War is the most obvious inflection point, but so is the 1960s. Then 1973 with Nixon. Trump presents different challenges than Nixon, to be sure, and we are in a different world than the one Nixon was in, but there’s a reason to think our Constitutional order will endure because we are a nation, largely, of good people and the good people will ensure it prevails, just as the good people ensured the 2020 and 2024 elections were free, fair, and secure, as always, for one example. We are a people, like all people on the historical record, who have given into authoritarian impulses throughout our own history, but we are also a people who have protested and fought back against injustice and the infringement of our rights time and time again. We will again.
Ultimately, as always, the people concern me and the people engender optimism. Thus is the beautiful paradox of the American experiment.
Milam's Musings 
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