The Shadow Of Illegitimacy In A New American Century
Mark Danner, Writer & Journalist, Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair, UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Perhaps it was the turn of the millennium that did it. Perhaps that grand reconfiguration of clocks and calendars was also our political Y2K. On November 7, 2000—the fifty-third presidential election in the Enlightenment-born United States of America—the flipped coin landed… precisely on its thin edge. The people had spoken and lo and behold it became a national nightmare to discover what, exactly, they had said, for their voices melded into what was damned near a perfect tie. And so our new millennium’s politics began not with clarity, but with a brutal thirty-seven days of political warfare, all carried live from Florida. And what grand theater it was: politicians politicking and lawyers lawyering and judges judging. Eventually when Florida’s courts finally moved to recount the ballots, the 800-pound gorilla in Washington—the Supreme Court—stepped in and ordered them to stop. In effect, the Court decreed that the winner would be the candidate backed by the majority of justices—a candidate who, notably, had received half a million fewer votes than his opponent. It was a simple formula, really: Five Republican justices equals one Republican president. And so it came to pass.
Bush v. Gore was a decision with legal force but little or no legitimacy, and it would loom over the next twenty-five years of chaos and catastrophe—years that will preoccupy future historians as a dark opening chapter of the new millennium. The election eventually took its place within an unprecedented pattern: seven Democratic popular-vote victories in eight presidential contests, during which Republicans twice captured the White House despite receiving fewer votes than their opponents.
Such an outcome—made possible by the anachronistic Electoral College system—had occurred only three times before in American history. It was yet another unmistakable sign that the political system in which Americans took such pride was badly broken.
The president elevated by the Supreme Court was keenly aware of this deficit of legitimacy and fiercely determined to overcome it. His opportunity came just nine months into his term, when Islamic fundamentalist fanatics hijacked four commercial jetliners and directed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly three thousand people.
To what extent the inexperienced president’s response was motivated by shame—by the guilty knowledge that had he given the attention to this threat his predecessor had urged, the attacks might have been thwarted—is something we’ll never know. What is indisputable is that President George W. Bush responded to 9/11 by launching a global “War on Terror,” a campaign that would become a debacle for the United States.
The War on Terror, so grand in its pronouncements, so unflinching in its ideological certainties, proved to be more than a defeat, though it included many of those. The United States lost the war in Iraq. The United States lost the war in Afghanistan. And it lost them in full color on the world’s television screens. But it was the manner of the defeat that proved historic. The wars shattered the “rules-based international order” the United States had so painstakingly built and long claimed to champion. During the War on Terror, the United States kidnapped civilians and detained them in secret “black site” prisons, tortured prisoners under color of law, and invaded Iraq against the expressed will of the United Nations. In doing so, it undermined—through its crimes, and even more through its failures—the claims of American exceptionalism as well as the presumed competence of the American elite. Which is to say, it further, and perhaps fatally, undermined its own legitimacy. As I write, in spring of 2026, the shreds of that legitimacy lay scattered all around me.
Contemplating this collapse, future historians will place alongside the War on Terror the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina of 2005 and the Great Recession of 2008-9, when the entire high-flying, deeply leveraged financial system that had made the United States the model of prosperity around the world came crashing down. It is difficult now to convey the appalled astonishment of those months, as the titans of mighty Wall Street crawled, one by one, to the national Treasury, seeking bailouts from taxpayers in the hundreds of billions. And the bailouts came—by the trillions.
What did not come with them was any sort of justice. No well-heeled bankers were led off in handcuffs. None went to trial. Few even lost their jobs. The result of the enormous scandal was simple: the government, under a Republican and then a Democratic president, stepped in to make the bankers and the investors whole. No one was forced to “take a haircut,” except the taxpayer. It was a high-profile lesson in contemporary American capitalism that no citizen could miss. Forget moral hazard. In the United States, now and henceforth, profit would remain privatized while risk was socialized. Whatever happened, the dumb-as-dirt public would be left holding the bag.
It is fair to say that the public noticed. The first clear sign was the rise of the Tea Party movement in the 2010 midterms—an early expression of the furious populism that would seize control of the United States government little more than half a decade later. Beneath the anger and the denunciation of elites of both parties, darker forces were gathering in a country now governed, for the first time in its history, by a Black man. Though moderate in most of his politics, the fact of Barack Obama was not moderate at all. It signified, unmistakably, that the country was changing—becoming what it had long had the potential to be since the Voting Rights Act of 1965: a multiracial democracy. Since the founding, American politics had turned on the poisoned fulcrum of race. The most retrograde of its political institutions—the counter-majoritarian Electoral College, the Senate, even the filibuster—stand as evidence. So too does the country’s more recent history: after passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democrats’ long-established “solid South” became the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy.” As newly enfranchised southern Black voters streamed into the Democratic Party, southern white voters streamed out. From Richard Nixon onward, Southern whites increasingly voted Republican. Blacks had finally been admitted into the political game but the game itself remained as racialized as ever. Meanwhile, during these years, tens of millions of immigrants poured into the country, most of them from Mexico and points further South, turning the United States of America ever more “brown.” The Democrats, the party of multiracial coalition, stood to benefit.
Thus came seven Democratic popular-vote victories in eight presidential elections—mitigated only by the perverse, counter-majoritarian workings of the Electoral College. Still, the Democrats would likely never have nominated for president a Black man with an African name without the disaster of the Iraq War. In 2003, young Barack Obama sat in the Illinois state senate free to denounce Iraq as a “dumb war” and thus avoid implicating himself in an undertaking that would taint Hillary Clinton and other senior Democrats. As president, he would govern as a moderate, adopting many of his predecessor’s War on Terror policies—including the expanded use of drone assassinations—and refusing to hold anyone accountable for torture and other excesses. Even his signature domestic accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, was an ungainly moderate compromise that fell far short of the “Medicare for All” long championed by the party’s progressives.
And yet it was the fact of him. The fact of a Black man in the White House was, in itself, undeniably radical. And the fact of him showed the radicalism of the Democrats as the face of a new emerging country. The old White power structure was being overtaken by something new and frightening and the president embodied that transformation. It was no accident that Birtherism—by which a New York businessman and reality television star named Donald Trump first gained political attention—denied the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by denying his very citizenship. It was not just that Republicans were focusing on so-called cultural issues. The legitimacy of a Black American president—his very place in the White House—was itself a cultural issue. His existence led to the nationalizing of a political complex that stretched back to George Wallace and before in the American South, gathered under the broad and enduring banner of white grievance.
Donald Trump proved himself a virtuoso of grievance. Did this skill come from his own experience as an outer-borough hick, never taken seriously in the lofty precincts of Manhattan real estate—forever circling a power structure that disdained him? Perhaps. But from the moment he descended the gilded escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy, Trump skillfully began to shape a politics of resentment and fear around the looming threat of that dark Other: the “illegal alien”. It didn’t matter that Obama had deported millions of undocumented immigrants, more than any president before him. “When Mexico sends its people,” the new candidate declared, “they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…” In a couple sentences, which he would repeat thousands of times, Trump compressed together decades of heavily racialized Republican politics on crime and drugs into a new highly threatening politics of immigration. In the tried and true Republican formula, Democrats’ dangerously lax “soft on crime” policies would lead to a Black man high on drugs raping and murdering your daughter. Now it would be the Democrats’ “open border” policies that would lead a dusky illegal immigrant to do the same—and afterward to take your job as well.
Trump wielded this new politics of fear brilliantly. Like the old politics of fear, its most effective target was what had been the most sought after voters in national elections since the late 1960s: white men without college degrees. For these voters—working class and lower middle class—Trump’s appeal on illegal immigration was both a cultural and an economic message. To vote against “open borders” was to vote against the changing racial face of the country and the globalizing economy that had “stolen” high-paying factory jobs and shipped them to Mexico and China. Trump’s populism decried the elites responsible for these policies—in both parties—as “idiots” and “suckers” in thrall to the corrupt “swamp” in Washington. He alone, he claimed, knew how to defeat them because he dealt with them every day as a masterful businessman. True, serious business leaders had long since dismissed Donald Trump as a tabloid-obsessed clown. But millions of American voters knew him only as the commanding impresario depicted in The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice. They knew he was a business genius because he had played one on TV.
Much was made of the fact that he would be the first man elected president with no government or military experience. More telling was that he was the first who was, in essence, a celebrity. The cameras loved him and rewarded him with incalculable amounts of free media. Not only did Fox run his rallies live; so did CNN. He dominated the news cycle and the editors and producers, however unsympathetic they might be to his politics, were his willing accomplices. He generated millions of eyeballs and eyeballs have become the currency of the age. “It may not be good for America,” the president of America’s premiere network famously proclaimed, “but it’s damn good for CBS.” Though the candidate himself initially treated his campaign as a “branding exercise”—he did not expect to win—he worked furiously, campaigning with particular intensity in the Upper Midwest: the Democrats’ famous “blue wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In the end, he narrowly carried those decisive states, filled as they were with underemployed white men. His opponent, the first woman to be nominated by a major party, won three million more votes. But Donald Trump ascended to the White House.
He denounced, in his first moments as president, “American carnage.” He insisted, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that he had drawn the largest inaugural crowd in history. It was only the opening salvo in his war on truth, expertise, competence. The Washington Post would eventually count more than thirty thousand falsehoods in his first term. He carried on a “love affair” with the North Korean dictator, threatened to withdraw the United States from NATO, and, during a pandemic that would kill more than a million Americans, urged people to inject bleach into their veins. But nothing would so exemplify his presidency than the manner of its ending. After losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, he denounced the result as “the Big Steal” and exhorted his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to prevent the counting of electoral votes. The result was the first attempted coup in American history—unfolding, like so much else, live on national television.
He had led an attack on the state and had done it in public, before everyone. And yet the state, confronted with this vital danger, refused to act. The Democratic House impeached him, but the Senate refused to convict, its Republican leader noting that there were laws and courts for such matters. But Joe Biden’s attorney general proved to be uninterested in bringing charges. By the time he finally appointed a special prosecutor, the next election was approaching and Trump was gaining strength. Though the special prosecutor attempted to bring charges, the case was effectively blocked by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court, which saw fit to craft out of whole cloth new doctrine of presidential immunity. For those with long memories, it was the most appalling decision since Bush v. Gore.
Trump correctly saw that the state’s belated attacks on him drove his supporters. These attacks reaffirmed, in each day’s news, the story of a vindictive, corrupt, incompetent and self-protective “swamp” dominating Washington, a swamp Trump vowed to drain. For nearly a decade, he had waged a sustained assault on truth, competence, and expertise, and tens of millions had come to believe him. The authority once exercised by a centralized press—three networks and a handful of major publications—had long since fractured into the decentralized chaos of the internet. In that landscape, Trump emerged as the country’s dominant troll, dismantling the institutions his supporters believed stood between them and the lives they had been promised. The elites, in this telling, had shipped good jobs overseas, entangled the country in costly foreign wars, and seized the spoils for themselves. It was time for a reckoning. “I am your retribution,” Trump vowed. “Burn it down!” they shouted in answer. He won every battleground state. He became the first president since Grover Cleveland to lose the presidency and then win it again. And at last, he won the popular vote.
His second term has proven far more radical than his first. He fired tens of thousands of government workers, dissolved institutions including the Agency for International Development and (mostly) the Department of Education, attacked universities and withdrew their funding, struck out at major law firms, seized control of the Kennedy Center and renamed it after himself, and launched a program of mass deportation that has seen various Democratic-run cities successively “occupied” by the National Guard and tens of thousands of ICE paramilitaries. He detained upward of seventy thousand and deported nearly seven hundred thousand, and counting. He killed hundreds in drone strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, invaded Caracas and seized Venezuela’s president, imposed a fuel embargo on Cuba and attacked Iran in a war that closed down the Strait of Hormuz—and continues as I write. He has bid a final goodbye to the “rules-based international order” and the custom by which presidents consulted Congress and the nation before taking the country into war. He may be completing his destruction of NATO. And his term is only a quarter complete.
What will the next three quarters bring? Will the system hold? Has it held up to now? The Republican-controlled Congress is supine. The courts have continued to function and have ruled against the administration hundreds of times. It has sometimes obeyed, but often ignored them, especially when it comes to deportations. Again and again, Trump in his unremitting aggression has exposed what seemed to be hallowed practices as nothing more than norms without legal force and has shattered them without looking back. Even now, the system is unable to cope with the extreme corruption that persists in the full glare of public scrutiny. Still, the country is gearing up for midterm elections that could restore a functioning Congress in the hands of the opposition party. If it does, would the administration pay it any more mind than it has the courts? For now, the shadow of illegitimacy—cast by that fateful decision in the fall of 2000—has left our supposedly exceptional nation with a hybrid system, a Constitutional Dictatorship, in historian Clinton Rossiter’s phrase, that resembles a once democratic nation disfigured by a permanent state of war.
Whatever that system is, it is not stable. Nothing Trump touches is. It must advance, progress, mutate, grow. And the president, by dominating the news and the news cycle, will push it erratically, inexorably forward. We have bid goodbye to the AID’s international good works, to the rules-based international order, to much of the Fourth Amendment. What next will be lost? No one can tell for sure. Post-Trump, of course, it is possible a Restoration will come, a period of renewal and institutional repair of the sort that followed Watergate. It is possible, if unlikely. But it remains unclear, at this perilous moment, how much will remain to restore.
