A most powerful presidency?

Dear reader,

As a famous baseball player once said, it’s deja vu all over again.

Eight years ago I stood in a hot and crowded hotel ballroom in New York, surrounded by Donald Trump supporters whose low expectations turned into disbelief and unbridled joy when their man won the US presidential election.

Last week I was back among the Make America Great Again (Maga) faithful at a convention centre in West Palm Beach, Florida, watching the election results roll in. This time the prevailing emotion in the crowd was not so much surprise as vindication. They felt they had just witnessed the rightful restoration of their Caesar.

But even as I witnessed young “bros” in Maga caps embracing and chanting “USA! USA!”, and even as I saw middle aged Trump fans dancing euphorically to Y.M.C.A., I was aware that millions of hearts were sinking across America and the world.

In a triumph of fear over hope, a former president branded a fascist by people who worked for him had defeated Kamala Harris, bidding to become the first woman in America’s 248-year political history to occupy the Oval Office.

In 2016 voters had rolled the dice on a relatively unknown quantity. In 2024 they knew exactly what they were getting: a man who was twice impeached and who tried to overturn an election. In choosing Trump they seemed to make a mockery of Harris’s closing assertion: “That is not who we are.”

Washington is now bracing for a second Trump term likely to be even more extreme and divisive than the first. Undocumented immigrants face the prospect of arrest and deportation. The rights of LGBTQ+ people are in jeopardy. Reproductive freedom is under siege. Military aid to Ukraine could soon be terminated. And with climate deniers back at the controls, environmental regulations will be slashed in the name of “drill, baby, drill”.

Democracy itself has rarely looked more fragile. “Imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris warned during the campaign. “If re-elected, he will claim unchecked and extreme power.” Now there is no need to imagine. Trump, who has said he would be a “dictator” only on “day one”, will return to a White House surrounded by lackeys and loyalists eager to indulge his dark impulses.

That includes retribution against his enemies, including the media. At a campaign rally Trump said he wouldn’t mind if someone tried to shoot through the media to assassinate him. As I stood among the crowd at his victory speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning, he referred to my trade as “the enemy camp”.

The imperial president will be aided by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and owner of the X social media platform, which increasingly resembles a rightwing propaganda machine. Robert Kennedy Jr, a vaccine conspiracy theorist, will apparently be working on health care, including women’s health.

The level of disinformation could therefore surpass even Trump’s first term, which began with the lie that his inauguration crowd was the biggest ever and culminated in the claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Fact-based journalism has therefore never been more essential. The Guardian is determined to navigate the second Trump era with a clear-eyed commitment to separating truth from lies, reality from fantasy.

We will hold the powerful to account and refuse to sanewash chaos or normalise authoritarianism. Importantly, we will also tell the stories of the men, women and children whose lives will be impacted by the potentially the most powerful US president of modern times.

If you are able to, please consider powering the Guardian’s coverage of this second Trump term. We are an independent news organisation, with no billionaire owner directing our coverage. You can support us on a monthly basis or from as little as a €1 one-off payment.

Thank you,
David

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