Bryan Cox
Many voters—especially Republicans but many Democrats as well—did not take seriously the enormity of what Trump was proposing.
For Democrats who are old enough to remember, the aftereffects of the 2024 election are turning out to be like the aftereffects of 1968 and 2000. In 1968, as a protest against the Vietnam War, many Democrats stayed home rather than vote for Hubert Humphrey. Richard Nixon then not only continued the war but expanded it into Laos and Cambodia. His election also had long-run domestic consequences. He put four justices on the Supreme Court, whereas Humphrey would have nominated liberals who likely would have extended the gains made in the Warren Court.
In 2000, some progressives thought Al Gore wasn’t progressive enough. Tired of voting for “the lesser of two evils” (as a friend of mine put it at the time), they voted instead for Ralph Nader. George W. Bush then gave us the Iraq War and ushered in a more conservative Court by making John Roberts chief justice and replacing Sandra Day O’Connor with Samuel Alito.
In each case, the specific aftereffects may not have been foreseeable in advance. But the general consequences were foreseeable, and many just refused to see them.
Remember the distinction between the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” that George W. Bush’s secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld made about Iraq’s weapons in 2002? Today, we need a similar distinction between the foreseeable unforeseens and the unforeseeable unforeseens about Donald Trump’s second term.
Trump’s opening blitzkrieg has been a shock, but he had said he planned to be a dictator on day one, and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 laid out a general strategy for taking political control of the civil service. The attack on governmental institutions now unfolding was a foreseeable unforeseen—unforeseen, that is, by many voters who paid little attention to Trump’s announced intentions or thought they shouldn’t be taken literally.
What do the Arab Americans in Michigan who supported Trump think about their vote now that he’s declared that Palestinians should be permanently expelled from Gaza and the United States should take it over and turn it into a resort? That specific insanity was an unforeseeable unforeseen. It led the group Arab Americans for Trump to rebrand itself as Arab Americans for Peace. But shouldn’t they have known about Trump’s sympathies and impulses from all that he has said and done? How did they manage to forget his vilification of Muslims from his first campaign? That Trump would betray them was a foreseeable unforeseen.
And what about the Hispanic immigrants who voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all, expecting that his mass deportations wouldn’t affect them? During the campaign, several polls reported considerable support among Hispanics for mass deportations. But the polls themselves had evidence that a significant portion of that support was coming from people who just weren’t paying attention.
For example, in an October New York Times/Siena poll, 44 percent of likely Hispanic voters said they favored deportations—but 67 percent also favored “a pathway to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States” (emphasis added). People who supported such a broad pathway to citizenship could not have understood Trump to be intending to deport long-settled unauthorized Hispanic immigrants. But that’s coming, it will tear many families and communities apart, and it was a foreseeable unforeseen.
That failure to pay attention to what Trump was calling for reflected a broader problem. As surveys at the time of the election showed, many voters—especially Republicans but many Democrats as well—did not take seriously the enormity of what Trump was proposing, whether about immigration, tariffs, the federal civil service, America’s alliances, or other matters. During the campaign, Democrats who did ring the alarms were criticized as hysterical or misguided because they should just have been talking about everyday economic issues like the price of eggs.
Democrats are back on their heels just now. They are the opposition party, but they have no leadership and little power to stop Trump. Day by day, however, Trump is clarifying things. As the picture comes more clearly into focus, the opposition will grow. It’s worth remembering how the presidencies of Nixon and Bush ended—Nixon in Watergate, Bush in the financial crisis and Great Recession. Trump’s presidency will end no better than theirs.
