Trump’s Health Problems Won’t Save Us

The fascist movement will outlive him.

Last week social media was swamped with rumors that Trump had died. The 79 year old has had visible bruises on his hands and swelling in his feet, the result of chronic venous insufficiency, a common, non life-threatening circulatory condition. People started riffing on his illness, and then wildly extrapolated.

Part of the impetus for the extrapolation is simple and understandable vindictiveness. Trump’s policies in his second term have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands already and he’s terrorizing a range of communities—federal workers, LGBT people, Black people, blue city residents, immigrants, Latinos, and on and on. People have been praying for the end of the Trump era for a decade now. It’s not a surprise that they should fantasize a little about the era ending with his ignominious departure from the mortal coil.

I think it’s important to recognize, though, that at this point Trump’s legacy, and his hold on the Republican party, has essentially become greater than Trump’s own lifespan. Even if Trump dies, most of the evil of his administration will grind on unimpeded.

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It would have mattered once

The relationship between party leader and party is complicated. The two influence each other in a range of ways, and the sudden departure of the first can under the right circumstances have a major impact on the ideology and actions of the latter. There were definitely moments when Trump’s death would have changed the country’s trajectory substantially for the better.

One obvious inflection point was Trump’s hospitalization with Covid in October 2020, shortly before the election. Trump was very ill, according to those close to him at the time, and if he had in fact died, the presidency would have passed to Mike Pence.

It’s hard to know exactly how that would have affected the election; my guess is that Biden still would have won. More importantly, though, Trump would not have been around to claim that the election was stolen. Then-Vice President Mike Pence is horrible Christofascist ghoul, but he risked his life to defy election denial while Trump was alive; he certainly wouldn’t have pursued it after Trump’s death. That means no January 6. And it means the 2024 election would not have been run on an explicit fascist platform of election denial.

If Trump had been sidelined, we might well have a president DeSantis right now instead, which would be terrible in its own right. But we wouldn’t have the entire American elite, from the media to the Democratic party to the corporate world, convinced that the American people had essentially cosigned the end of elections and the death of democracy.

A different horrible Republican president would not have run on a platform of explicit authoritarianism and explicit revenge. Trump winning a second term after attempting a coup was about the worst possible outcome for American democracy. Even the ascendance of other extremely evil people—Vance, DeSantis, whoever—would ultimately be less damaging not because they’re less evil, but because they simply had not already personally committed an assault on the Constitution.

The worst has already happened

At this point, though, the US has already elected a man who embodies, symbolizes, and has dedicated his career to the destruction of American democracy. His victory has turned the GOP from an implicitly anti-Constitutional and anti-democratic fascist party into an explicit and open one. Republicans have decided there are no guardrails, and that the American people love white supremacy more than they love their neighbors, their children, and their own lives.

This isn’t to say that Trump’s sudden departure from the scene would change nothing. The ghouls, Nazis, megalomaniacs, and sycophants that Trump has gathered around him all have their own priorities, delusions, and hatreds. A president J.D. Vance would be unlikely to pursue Trump’s idiosyncratic hatred of windmills. He would probably also abandon, or greatly reduce, Trump’s tariffs—again an idiosyncratic obsession of this president’s which does not have much support in the rest of his coalition. Vance might even cut RFK loose as a pointless liability, choosing to pursue some more moderate form of vaccine denial.

But most of the core of Trumpism is set in stone now, and Trump’s successors aren’t going to undo it. Vance (who, remember, gleefully lied about and demonized Haitian immigrants) would continue the draconian ICE deportations; he’d probably continue trying to use the National Guard to invade blue cities. The Republicans would certainly continue to attack voting rights and reproductive rights, relying on the fascist Supreme Court to back them up. Vance is more of a true believer than Trump as far as subjugating women goes, and might well go further than Trump in attacks on abortion access. He might ramp up assaults on universities too.

The assault on the federal workforce, the election denial, the racism, the misogyny, the fascism—they’d all continue. There might be some strategic shuffling of priorities and personnel—maybe Stephen Miller is out and Peter Thiel is in. But in Trump’s decade long career in politics, he has solidified the broad contours of American fascism. Vance, and Trump’s GOP successors, are going to continue to follow that blueprint, absent some sort of seismic shift in the political landscape.

Trump’s death might have provided that shift at one point, but no longer. The end of MAGA will require some combination of massive popular resistance, sweeping electoral wins, and determined, substantial, unremitting accountability for those who have assaulted the Constitution—not least the Republicans on the Supreme Court. If we are going to defeat Trumpism, we have to do it ourselves. An act of God will not free us from this particular hell.