Denker: An American reckoning: Trump’s re-election and who we really are

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“This is not who we are.”

It’s a refrain I’ve heard a lot lately that I can’t stop thinking about as we continue to survey the American political landscape after the re-election of Donald Trump.

This is not who we are.

It’s a line that began, I think in some form, with Hillary Clinton grasping on to the remaining strands of Obama’s campaign for hope and change, facing off against the dark “American carnage” of Trump.

You’d think that eight years that included Trump’s first term, COVID-19 and the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer might lead to some reconsideration of a previously held vision of America. How could anyone think that America’s concept of herself had not changed in these years of near-constant upheaval?

Still, President Joe Biden presided over a nation in turmoil, a world beset by violent wars, like a man out of time whistling in the wind. He assured Americans that his foreign policy relationships at antiquated and impotent international organizations like the United Nations would prove powerful at a time when global corporations far outweighed national governments in terms of influence and power.

Biden insisted that America’s “soul” was inherently a good one, even as conservative Catholic bishops railed against his policies and started campaigns to deny Biden, a longtime faithful Catholic and mass attendee, access to communion.

This is not who we are.

It became almost an incantation for the Biden campaign, as the hot-summer climate-change sun bore down on us in June, when Biden stood dumbfounded on the debate stage, and Trump smiled his Machiavellian grin. Could he believe his good fortune? Trump might not quite know how to cast a hopeful vision for America’s future, but he could accurately tap into the terror and rage of a post-pandemic, inflation-ridden, suppressed-Gaza-protest summer of discontent.

Up to the last minute, in response, Biden’s campaign issued vacuous statements of reassurance: Don’t believe your own eyes. This is not who Biden is. He’s not aging. He’s not decrepit. He’s fine! Watch Joe jog down the tarmac!

And then on a Sunday morning, when my family and I drove to rural Wisconsin to pick up our youngest son from Bible camp, I sat in a rudimentary camp lavatory and read the news that Biden was stepping down as a candidate. He could only whistle into the wind so long until it threatened to blow him over.

Moments later, Biden, via Elon Musk’s X, passed on the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris. To an electorate desperate for newness and change, a Black woman candidate of South Asian descent who was not a white man older than 77 seemed a welcome, even inspiring, development, despite the lack of electoral input.

On that hot Sunday morning in July, I was ripe for hope.

Then Minnesota joined the ticket with Gov. Tim Walz in the ways only Minnesota can do, with a certain sort of embarrassed exuberance that comes with a society that promises everyone is above average, as long as we don’t brag about it too much. America loved Walz when he first hit the airwaves in his beige T-shirt and camo hat, but then for some reason he couldn’t remember which month he visited Tiananmen Square in 1989. And even though Trump had spewed “alternative facts” at Americans for eight years, that and questions about Walz’s specific military rank (again, in contrast to a president-elect who avoided the Vietnam War due to bone spurs) for some reason meant Walz’s initial fire was quickly tempered, making him Teleprompter Tim, silenced and chastened for the final decisive months of a celebrity-laden, Republican-lite campaign featuring people like Liz Cheney.

This is not who we are?

By 10 p.m. on election night, it was clear that the picture of America that had been painted by old-school pols like Biden and Democratic pundits on CNN like David Axelrod, and overconfident Never-Trumpers in the pages of the New York Times, needed to be filed away on the dusty shelves of the never-to-be-repeated past.

I’ve been researching Trumpism, especially among Christian voters, since I wrote my first book, in 2018. And I spent much of the past year focusing specifically on the young white men and boys drawn to radicalization, violence and right-wing politics for my new book. If I had to point to one reason why Trump won re-election in 2024 despite an unhinged campaign and rapidly advancing age, I’d say it was this:

Trump knew who we are better than Democrats did.

For better or worse, he knew his most devoted and faithful voters. He played directly to their worst fears: of replacement by recent immigrants and “uppity” career women. To their deepest desires: to stand atop the American social hierarchy surrounded by their guns and their portraits of Scandinavian Jesus.

He knew also that if you’re going to lie to Americans, you’ve gotta go big. If you’re going to lie, find out what they already believe about themselves, for better or worse, and tell them that.

You could argue, too, that Biden and the Democrats were following the same playbook when they lied to Americans that “this is not who we are,” in a country built on enslavement of Africans and pillaging of Indigenous people and land. The thing is, though, the evidence to the contrary is all around us at this point. You can’t win an election on American exceptionalism in an age of COVID, police violence, inflation and rising income inequality, where billionaires play games with American lives and data.

I think at this point, the vast majority of Americans are pretty clear about who we are. The hegemony of post-World War II America has been ruptured and changed, never to return again. China rises in the East, and Russia meddles, attacking us from within with bots on social media. We are beset by anxiety and depression and unresolved grief, suspicious of our neighbors and constantly shamed by online influencers who tell us that everything we’ve been doing is wrong. We’re constantly chasing our tails, falling into bed again each night exhausted.

As a faith leader as well as a journalist and researcher, I’m struck by the truth no one dared to utter in this election cycle: that the American god of constant economic progress might be leading us all straight to hell on earth. You can see it in the popularity of tradwife accounts and constant attempts by everyone to somehow “unplug,” though it seems impossible. We have a crisis of spirituality, hastened along by a crisis of abuse, hypocrisy and grift, from faith leaders of every stripe, many of them the same who stood alongside politicians of both parties, but especially Trump, anointing political leaders as each election cycle’s new savior.

While Trump’s electorate surely had its share of voters anxious to reset the American hierarchy with white Christian men at the top again, as well as those who saw him as some kind of demigod, I think his re-election most accurately represents a desperate recoil of a nation twisting in the wind every four years, placing its bets on superficial change while knowing that the real substantive and needed change lies underneath elections, in a severing of our institutions and leaders from the corrosive influence of unbridled billionaires’ cash.

In the meantime, what do we do? What can we do?

The Lutheran pastor in me says pray. Martin Luther suggested that in face of apocalypse, you should plant a tree.

The parent in me says hug the ones you love.

The Minnesotan in me says jump in: Work together with your neighbors to push that car out of the snow!

The Minnesotan who left for Missouri and Florida and California and Las Vegas and Chicago and then moved back says, not just that, but you might even also invite your neighbor into your house!

And the journalist in me?

Says none of it matters unless we tell the truth about who we are, and then go from there.