Peter E. Gordon in Boston Review:
From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that events in history occur twice: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But today this slogan, memorable as it is, surely doesn’t apply, since Trump’s first term was already a farce, distinguished most of all as a spectacle of bluster and boasting that, despite his many plans, left the basic institutions of American democracy more or less intact. He said that he would build a wall across the full two thousand miles of the United States’ southern border and Mexico would pay for it. (His sadistic family separation policy destroyed the lives of thousands, but his administration built only about five hundred miles of the wall, much of it reinforcements to existing barriers, and American taxpayers bore the cost.) He said that he would dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better. (He didn’t, and the ACA remains among the most popular achievements of the Obama administration.) He said that he would impose a ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. (He tried, with fitful success, though the courts dogged his efforts.) These promises came to us wrapped in the vacuous slogan that he would “Make America Great Again.” (Great? Hardly. It would be more accurate to say that America became an object of great derision and concern. Especially among our European allies, the fear arose that democracy in America, technically among the oldest democracies in the world, was showing signs of backsliding into autocracy.)
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