Blackcap Blog

Published at 10:06 on 1 September 2025

Some U.S. presidents are what can be called transformational presidents. Lincoln (abolition), FDR (welfare state), LBJ (civil rights), etc.

All evidence points to Trump being in the same category, at least as transformative as LBJ and possibly as transformative as Lincoln. My reasoning is as follows:

1. What Trump did in his first term (significant expansion of presidential powers, coup attempt).
2. The comparatively very limited response to it, which cemented the legitimacy of what Trump did to expand presidential power, and set the precedent that coup attempts are now a mostly legitimate political tactic to be used as needed, at least by the Right.
3. What Trump is doing in his second term.
4. How muted the current response is in relation to what Trump is currently doing.

My initial wording was about the responses of the Democratic Party and the politicians who belong to it. Wording it as such is factually correct, but also factually incomplete, because it is not just the Democratic Party.

We could have the same old weak-willed Democratic Party we do in this timeline, but if we had a public that valued a free and open society more, there would have been massive public outrage at what Trump and the political parties (the Republicans, by enabling him, and the Democrats, by failing to vigorously oppose him) were doing. This would have prompted some combination of the Republican Party abandoning their president (like what happened to Nixon), and/or the Democratic Party pandering to the outrage and no longer being afraid to arrest, prosecute, and jail Trump and his top cronies.

Instead, we saw none of the above. Trump engaged in significant transition towards the principles of right-wing authoritarianism, and it was largely accepted by the vast preponderance of Americans. Oh, sure, there was a lot of grumbling, but in the end, the outcome was acceptance. Acceptance with grumbling is still acceptance. Acceptance with denial grounded in the mythology of American exceptionalism is still acceptance.

Sure, some inconsequential nobodies were prosecuted with much fanfare. So what. The ringleaders got off scot-free. That was the main lesson of the whole escapade.

And now we have his second term, in which Trump has ramped up his transformational initiatives, and the response has been amazingly acquiescent. A few protests here and there, more grumbling, but so far still business as usual. Trump is proposing dictatorship and Americans are generally accepting of the proposal.

Yes, yes, I know: opinion polls show Trump is underwater. Big deal. That is merely a form of grumbling. What matters is action, or lack thereof, and so far it has been primarily the latter.

If you want to see what a lack of acceptance looks like, look what happened in Greece when the Greeks decided not to accept the current state of their nation’s rail transport safety. Look what has happened in France when the French decided that reducing retirement benefits was unacceptable. Look at what South Korea and Brazil are doing in response to excesses by their chief executives.

Yes, yes: I know. There have been protests. A day of protest is planned for today. Some noises are being made about soft secession if Trump does stuff like deploying troops to Chicago. Vote blue no matter who and maybe Lucy won’t pull the football away this time. Colour me skeptical.

And yes, some are vigorously opposing it. The key word here is some. There is nowhere near the degree of opposition happening needed to stop the transformation. Focusing on the exceptions to a general trend is not the correct way to assess a situation.

This gets to why I reworded my list to remove explicit references to the Democratic Party. It’s not just the Democratic Party. Sure, it’s possible to blame a failure to lead on the Democrats. But it’s also the case that the Democrats have genuine reasons to believe that Americans by and large don’t want to be led to defend freedom. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation: the Democrats don’t lead because there’s not much sentiment from below for them to pander to, and there’s not much sentiment from below because the Democrats aren’t leading.

Ultimately, the Democrats’ institutional spinelessness wouldn’t matter if more was happening in the grassroots. Being filled with spineless panderers, the Democratic Party could in that case pander… to the resistance movement. It would be spineless pandering, but it wouldn’t matter: the necessary things would be getting done, and that, more than the mechanics of why they are being done, is what would really matter.

Advocates of revolution would point to the success of the popular mobilization. Advocates of electoral reformism would point to the big blue wave and how the Democrats delivered. The endless reform-versus-revolution arguments would continue without resolution, both camps having some facts with which to argue.

But that, sadly, is all hypothetical. The vast preponderance of currently-available evidence points to Trump being a transformational president.