Trump Is The Status Quo
This is, unfortunately, normal now.
“This is not normal,” New Mexico representative Melanie Stansbury said in 2025, pointing to the DOGE dismantling of federal programs. “This is not who we are,” then presidential candidate Joe Biden said in 2018, referring to the separation of children from their families in immigrant detention during the first Trump administration.
Both of these phrases—“this is not normal,” “this is not who we are”—have become regularly repeated mantras among those who (rightly!) oppose the Trump regime and all its works. Both are meant to define Trump as a rupture and an aberration. The message is that Trump is an ugly detour on the road towards greater progress and enlightenment—a mistake, an accident, a misstep. The true America, the normal America, is not this, and if we can only pop this one, repulsive, orange boil, we will return to a status quo of health and democracy.
The rhetoric of normalcy is meant to be descriptive and strategic; the hope is that framing not-Trump as the true, normal America will define Trump as unAmerican and outside our traditions, isolate him and cauterize him.
And yet, the strategy has not worked; on the contrary, the investment in an idea of an abnormal Trump has led to both tactical disasters and electoral failures. Maybe it’s time to think about some other approaches.
After a decade, there’s a good case to be made that Trump is in fact who we are now. If we want to change that, we need to accept that we need to go forwards to a new and changed country, not back to the normal that gave us this.
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Trump yesterday and Trump today
The claim that Trump and Trumpism is not normal is based on a vision of America as a liberal, Constitutional democracy, which treats all people equal before the law, embraces democratic norms, and holds free and fair elections.
There’s no doubt that Trump is in many ways different than presidents who went before him, and that his time in office has been different than those of his predecessors. But that’s trivially true. Time goes forward, people, laws, norms, events change. I think there’s a strong argument that Trump is the worst president in our history by a fair margin. But that’s an impressive feat in no small part because we’ve had a lot of really, really horrible presidents, who have done a lot of really horrible things.
In fact, Trump is best understood not as a pioneer of awfulness, but as a shuffling orange gaseous bag, which synthesizes, in its churning odiferous innards the worst of all the evils that have gone before before emitting them in a pestitential fog. The rabid deportation of immigrants—and even of American citizens—is lifted from Eisenhower’s ugly racist attack on Mexicans in the US; Trump’s resegregation of the federal government is a replay of Woodrow Wilson; Trump’s attacks on free speech recall the Cold War Red Scare blacklists; the SAVE act and Trump’s voter suppression measures are inspired by Jim Crow poll taxes and tests; the Iran war is a somehow even stupider replay of the Iraq war; and on and on and on.
These repulsive undemocratic fascist policies and actions aren’t just random stumbles on the path to a better tomorrow. They are part of a deliberate, consistent, powerful fascist tradition in America, built on racism, backlash, and a dream of a unified Christian white nation in which dissent is criminalized and crushed.
That tradition has been very much alive and active in our lifetime. Republicans have been marinating in Reaganesque right-wing backlash and Fox-News rabid anti-policy posturing for the last thirty to forty years. Anti-immigrant nativism has been (and remains) a 21st century bipartisan consensus, as Daniel Denvir has explained. Bipartisan Zionism, and de facto support for apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Israel/Palestine, has also defined US policy in the Middle East for decades. Bipartisan mass incarceration and militarized policing made the US, in some ways, more fascist than it had ever been before in the run up to 2016.
Trump has pushed each of these right wing and/or bipartisan trends to their wicked, disastrous extremes. But does that make him abnormal? Or does it just make him the embodiment of a particular normality we don’t want to look at?
Maybe we need change
These aren’t questions with a single answer. You can see change and continuity in any historical moment or figure. Different historians and analysts emphasize different things depending on their perspectives and goals.
Obviously, the goal of the opposition to Trump has been to get rid of Trump. People like Biden believed that the best way to defeat Trumpism was to make an essentially conservative argument; Trump was a dangerous and aberrant change, and we should go back to a more stable, more just, more sunlit past.
The promise to return to normalcy helped Biden win the nomination in 2020. It also got him to a narrow win in the general election deep in the nightmarish Covid pandemic, which people desperately wanted to put behind them. “This is a blip and I will allow you to forget it” was a powerful message—or at least a powerful enough message—at that moment.
But there were downsides. The insistence that MAGA was a detour, not a bleak thoroughfare, led Biden and his somnolent AG Merrick Garland to treat Trump as a spent force, who would just fade away after January 6. At worst, they concluded, normal voters looking for normalcy could be safely left to reject fascism if it reared its ugly head again.
The same logic held for Senators and Congressmembers who supported the coup, and to the christofascist Supreme Court which Trump had installed. Biden made no effort to treat them as traitors; he didn’t treat the coup as an emergency. He insisted that with Trump gone, we had returned to the America which we are. The belated efforts to prosecute Trump—efforts which still failed to treat his movement as a existential threat—were too little too late.
More, the insistence that Trump was an aberration played into his hands in 2024, when he ran once more as an anti-establishment outsider, simultaneously referencing his presidency as a golden age and acting as if it had never happened. Democrats were so committed to the idea that Trump was not normal that they were never able to effectively communicate the real danger, which was that he was a manifestation and extension of the worst aspects of this country, from income inequality to racism to impunity for abusers and scam artists. Trump ran promising to be the change everyone wanted, and the Democrats ran saying he would be a change, but a bad one. That didn’t work.
Normal will leave us with MAGA
I don’t really think a change in Democratic messaging would have altered the outcome much in 2024—and in any case, Democrats aren’t having much trouble winning elections right at the moment. But we know that “normality” and “this is not who we are” led us to underestimate the momentum and the establishment power of MAGA.
If we want to end Trump and his legacy, we need to accept, first of all, that he and his various minions and avatars are not by nature transient. Trump has dominated American politics for eleven years and counting. His allies ooze beneath their robes on the Supreme Court; they occupy key positions in state Republican parties, they are in charge of the House and Senate, they stuff think tanks and have bought major media outlet after major media outlet. They are in control; they rule. We’re the outsiders now. We are the ones who aren’t normal.
Which means, if we want to win, we need to be willing to be a little desperate, and we need to be willing to change, not just the people running the institutions, but the institutions themselves. We need to expand the Supreme Court. We need to enfranchise DC and any other territory that wants to become a state. We need to maybe even think seriously about whether California should become multiple states. We need to put Trump and his henchmen behind bars as soon as he leaves office. We need to toss from Congress everyone who supported the coup or who pushes election lies. We need more vigorous antitrust enforcement than ever before. We need to tax billionaires till they weep. We need to make gerrymandering illegal. We need to have tribunals. We need to abolish ICE and dismantle DHS. We need to grant every immigrant targeted by Trump—which is every immigrant—citizenship immediately.
And that’s just the start. Middle class tax cuts aren’t going to cut it. Bowing down to the filibuster isn’t going to cut it. Donald Trump free on the streets isn’t going to cut it. Trump is the status quo; overthrowing the status quo is not easy. But if we don’t want to live like this, if we don’t want this to be normal, we need to change the institutions and the norms that have made it normal. Until we do, this is, unfortunately, who we are.