This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.
Remember four years ago? We were all listening to “Drivers License.” Nomadland fever was sweeping the nation. Everyone was about to get vaccinated. (Remember how we’d call it “the jab”—“Did you get the jab yet?”) And Donald Trump was on his way out of the White House. He was a footnote, a one-term president, a hiccup in the arc of history—the guy people would remember, 50 years from now, with a collective chuckle and shake of the head. That sure was the last gasp of the 20th century, the future would say. They elected that fucking TV clown president!
Well, we were all wrong. (Maybe you weren’t wrong. Maybe you always knew he’d win again! I’ll stop using the royal we.) I was certainly wrong. I absolutely thought that cocky piece of shit was washed up: that the chickens were coming home to roost, and that his was a future of courtrooms, exorbitant fines, business failure, and maybe even—could I dare to dream?—a few months in a minimum-security prison.
At the very least, even when I acknowledged the many impediments to the former president’s facing tangible punishment, I thought Donald Trump was done having a good time. I thought the good times were over for him! I would no longer be forced to see that Trump grin, the little boy’s smirk he unleashes when he’s truly, actually happy, which is to say when he’s being naughty. Naughty as a term, of course, doesn’t capture the heights of malevolence he’s capable of reaching, on his own or through his various evil proxies within Trumpworld. But it does describe his physical response to his own behavior, his Ain’t-I-a-stinker mugging, that shit-eating grin.
The thing that had driven me most crazy about his four years as president—not the worst part of his presidency, but the thing I’d had to endure day in, day out—was what a good time he clearly was having. He really, sincerely loved leading rallies, and grousing about his enemies, and firing his various Scaramuccis, and tweeting. It made me so unhappy to see that guy so happy, a reverse schadenfreude of the sort I’d never before felt for a public figure. Times had been good for Donald Trump for years and years and years, in direct contravention of the notion that actions have consequences, and by 2021, after so long, I really thought that times would finally not be good. I positively quivered with delight at the idea of Donald Trump having a really, really bad time.
Now it is I who will be having the bad time, again. It’s us—Americans. He’s very excited about making sure we have a really terrible time. It’s not surprising that for many, the visceral response to this information is to try to think about something else instead. To stop reading the news, to refuse to discuss the coming administration, to—and this is just a hypothetical example—put off writing their article about Donald Trump until the very last minute. After all, the four years of Donald Trump’s first presidency were dangerous, they were deranged, and above all they were thoroughly exhausting. It was grueling to absorb some new outrage every week, to constantly fear for your children’s future, to feel ever at war with one’s own country. And now Trump’s back, because 49.79607 percent of American voters experienced those same gruesome four years along with me and thought: Sure, we can do that again. Or, really, thought: I liked the way Trump made all those other people feel.
And how will we respond? (How will I respond?) The resistance is teetering and, maybe even more terminally, totally embarrassed. How mortifying, to have invested time and emotional energy in marches and phone calls and angry memes and John Oliver monologues and coffee mugs featuring Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s ruffly lace collar—and then America elected the same asshole all over again. It did not matter that we strenuously dissented. It did not matter that we, nevertheless, persisted. Public anger at Donald Trump is now the near-exclusive domain of angry Facebook aunts. For many of the rest of us—for me—the response to the election seems to be primarily a grim watchfulness, the miserable anticipation of what fresh hell the news is about to bring.
Sometime in his first days or weeks as president, Donald Trump will do something unspeakable—send Navy SEALs into Jutland, or arrest the nation’s pasteurizers, or some other shit. Whatever he does will display that familiar Trumpian flair, that mixture of showmanship, stupidity, and malevolent glee that characterizes his every act. How you’ll respond to the first outrages of the second Trump administration will vary, depending on how totally exasperated you are at any given moment, and how much danger you and your loved ones are in, and whatever other bit of life you are navigating through. Sometimes you will feel the need to vent. Other times you’ll spend a day or two hiding from the news. Sometimes you’ll overcome your resistance cringe to spur yourself and others to action. Other times you might make a private contribution that feels as though it might make a difference. But it’s worth deciding now: What will be your bright line? What will actually get you out into the streets? A month from now, a year from now, Trump will probably cross that line; when he does, remember the decision you made today.
Because Donald Trump is happy again. He’s positively merry. He kind of can’t believe it either, after the four years he’s had. The bad times! He had to spend hours pretending to listen to judges. And now: “Everybody wants to be my friend,” he marveled at a press conference in December. The parade of notables to Mar-a-Lago suggests that his second term will be very different from his first. Donald Trump was once an unlikely weather event, a blip on the radar, a microburst that could do real damage but that, we believed—I believed—would soon pass. Yes, he represented some real, dangerous transformations in the American populace, but the guy himself? He was a storm we would be able to hunker down and wait out.
The tech moguls and cable news anchors and soda company CEOs are no longer viewing him that way, and neither should we. He is no longer a weather event. He is the climate we now live in, and like the actual climate, he is getting worse and worse, and his extreme volatility is liable to make everyday occurrences of the kinds of disasters that once seemed impossible. A 100-year flood of bullshit is about to begin. We’d better figure out how to be more than just embarrassed.
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