The Coming Post-Trump Reality

The Dispatch Editors

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

History has a way of surprising you.

 

When this publication launched in October 2019, we announced our intention to set a journalistic course distinct from that of our competitors, both in the so-called mainstream media and in the partisan and ideological press, regarding the biggest story of the day. Our animating spirit was to be neither perfervidly pro-Trump nor neurotically anti-Trump but cheerfully and soberly post-Trump, ready to focus on the many important facets of this American life not dominated by the eccentric principal resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, whose retirement then seemed incipient.

 

We were premature.

 

The country, of course, endured the shameful events of January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s risible attempts to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election, and, in 2024, his unlikely comeback from disgrace and exile—surely aided by both the excesses and incompetence of former President Joe Biden and his administration. But now, as we approach November’s midterm elections, we are cautiously hopeful that we are within spitting distance of the end of the Trump era.

 

If we are correct in that hope, the federal and state elections that take place eight weeks from today will signal the start of a transition to what could be a new era. Much can happen in two months of politics in this goldfish-memory era, and we have no illusions about the ugliness ahead. Partisan Republicans will spend their days insisting that the republic will end if the walking scandal that is Ken Paxton, a singular disgrace even among the rising class of profoundly dishonorable public servants, loses a GOP-held Senate seat in Texas and, with it, perhaps, the GOP majority in the upper chamber. Too many Democrats, meanwhile, will rally behind the radical anti-Americanism of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, shrugging off his persistent antisemitism and association with unapologetic terrorist sympathizers, just as they eagerly dismissed the Nazi tattoo and casual misogyny of Graham Platner in Maine until electoral, rather than moral, considerations ensured his defenestration.

 

At least from this temporal distance, it looks like much of the country seems prepared, finally, to reject the frivolity and depravity of Trumpism and its namesake. Democrats have opposed Trump from the beginning, of course. Many independents who once supported the president have turned on him. Most worrisome for the White House, and encouraging to us, are the Republicans who have had enough. To be sure, Trump still enjoys the backing of a substantial majority of his party and, as we’ve seen, his influence in GOP primaries remains. But his support among Republicans is slipping, in both breadth and intensity. Recent polling suggests that nearly half of the non-MAGA GOP, a substantial minority of the party, disapproves of his job performance. Even among Republicans who say they back the president, the number who strongly approve has been tanking. And yet Trump, obtuse and obstinate as ever, wants the midterms to be all about him.

 

Whatever the election brings, three things are true: Trump is broadly unpopular, he will soon be a lame duck, and, at some point, the Trump era will come to an end. So now is the time to contemplate in earnest what decisions Americans must face in that new era, and whose vision for confronting the existential problems these United States face will win out.

 

Consider: The federal government is headed for a fiscal crisis. Just last month the federal debt surpassed $40 trillion, and this year, interest payments on that debt will reach their highest shares of both GDP and federal tax revenue in the country’s history. Interest payments alone are a bigger expenditure than national defense. The debt has more than doubled since the end of the 2016 fiscal year, from $19 trillion. Out-of-control deficits and compounding entitlement liabilities drive that incomprehensible debt, and fixing this mess is not something the U.S. can simply “grow our way out of,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently claimed.  

 

Or consider how the U.S.’s position in the world is much diminished. This has come principally by Trump’s dishonorable attacks on NATO and other long-standing democratic allies, his aimless and dashed-off war in Iran, and by his destructive tariff war on low prices and flexible supply chains (attacks that have more than a little in common with the “economic patriotism” championed by Barack Obama and many contemporary progressives, whose ideas about national security and trade are nearly as wrongheaded as Trump’s).

 

Trump’s national security intellectuals—a term we use advisedly, given that some of his advisers are not intellectuals and some of his intellectuals seem shockingly unmotivated to bolster national security—insist that the administration is realistically adjusting to an era of great power, multipolar rivalries, and the need to maintain what some have called “spheres of influence.” This sophisticated theorizing has given us the “Donroe” Doctrine and “Lake America.” The truth is the theorizing is little more than gauzy window dressing on Trump’s impulses.

 

We would criticize the Democrats’ theories on national security too, but aside from reflexively opposing Trump and welcoming “anti-Zionists” into their tent, we have no idea what the Democratic understanding of foreign policy might be.

 

Regardless, for reasons partly attributable to Trump, but also for reasons long in the making, the world we face today is vastly more dangerous than the one America faced at the end of the Cold War. Ironically, that time of peace and prosperity, purchased with decades of perseverance and sacrifice, seems to arouse scorn from both left and right. It is apparently preferable to enjoy the luxury of denouncing an era of American “empire” in the rearview mirror than to ask how we might once again make the world safer for America, and more peaceful and prosperous in general, by providing global leadership.   

 

Addressing these crises—foreign and domestic—will require making difficult, unpopular decisions at a time when most politicians want easy sound bites instead. Some of those decisions, principally in foreign policy, will require more spending. Rearming our depleted armed forces and outfitting them to face the challenges presented by China, Russia, et al., is one such example. Other decisions, such as reforming the entitlements now bankrupting the country, demand real and painful fiscal discipline. Making these choices will require the kind of long-term, consensus-oriented program that Washington has shown no talent or appetite for in recent years, and any worthwhile program of reform will necessitate painful trade-offs that will leave precisely no one satisfied or unscathed.

 

But even less tractable than fiscal or foreign policy is the deeper cultural decay at the heart of our political dysfunction that has many Americans turning to a particularly ugly form of tribalistic politics as a kind of ersatz religion, a source of community and meaning. If we have a crisis of political leadership—and we do—we also have a terrifying crisis of American citizenship. Our decline is the product of countless choices at every level of society. Leaders of institutions surrender to the vibes and zeitgeist, dashing out of their lanes and roles to perform for their own aggrandizement or protect their own interests. Politicians, educators, public health officials, businessmen, clergy, philanthropists, and journalists certainly have particular responsibilities in all this, but so do we all. When the people do not demand better, they should not expect to get anything good.

 

These facts underscore the necessity of returning to a commitment to limiting the size and scope of the government’s influence in our daily lives. That principle is embedded in the gift the Founding Fathers left to us: a remarkably intelligent and adaptive constitutional architecture with which to organize our response to these challenges. That constitutional structure was designed to constrain power, to frustrate the ability of any one ideologue or iconoclast to wield the power and purse of the state like a foolish college student wields his father’s credit card and good name.

 

But there is no denying that the country no longer has a major political party devoted to limiting the size and scope of government. Broadly speaking, Republicans insist they care deeply about fiscal sanity and strong national defense. The message of the Democrats, meanwhile, is that budgetary discipline is unnecessary while national defense is a luxury we cannot afford. We are often chastised for our “both-sides-ism.” Well, we can at least say this much: The difference between these two messages is that the Republicans are right, but they are lying; the Democrats are at least honest, but they are wrong.

 

Democrats, of course, have long been the party of big government—from the New Deal through the Great Society—appealing to voters by promising government programs available to help at virtually every stage of our time on this earth. Remember, Barack Obama’s “Life of Julia?” Or Joe Biden’s shameless ploy to shift the burden of billions in student loans from those who took them out to American taxpayers? Now, while the Democratic Socialists of America and affiliated radicals enjoying a surging—but not unchallenged—ascendence in the Democratic Party, those same impulses live on in renewed pushes for Medicare for all, pledges to freeze rents, and promises of “free” universal childcare. Nothing new here.

 

For most of the past half-century, meanwhile, Republicans have promised voters they would be the party of limited government, through the Reagan presidency and the Gingrich and Tea Party congressional victories in 1994 and 2010, respectively. But in the decade since Trump was first elected, the country has seen an unmistakable trend toward expanding government.

 

Sure, there was DOGE, the ill-conceived and poorly executed Elon Musk effort to make the federal government more “efficient” at the beginning of Trump’s second term. But despite the administration’s absurd promises and Musk’s cringey showmanship, the actual savings of the effort were minimal. All the while, the president has declared that the entitlements driving our debt would largely be protected from cost-cutting reforms.

 

Instead, MAGA Republicans use government power to achieve their own preferred ends. While populist Republicans have warned of the creeping socialism among Democrats, they’ve cheered a president whose administration has taken stakes in 32 private companies, including a just-announced plan of dubious legality that would have taxpayers funding a Pentagon-led ownership of large swaths of the Venezuelan oil industry. Trump has also advocated public equity stakes in the technology companies driving American development of artificial intelligence—a proposal that in many respects mirrors one put forward by socialist Bernie Sanders.

 

Any talk among members of the Trump-era Republican Party of constraining government seems not to apply to the ones currently running the government.

 

All that is to say nothing of the rampant corruption within the Trump administration itself, which, on the matter of mere ordinary financial corruption alone, is without precedent in American history. Whether it’s the president cashing in on his cryptocurrency business to the tune of 11 figures, the way the aforementioned stakes in private companies benefit the president’s own family, or how the administration’s foreign policy seems to line the pockets of both Trump and his friends, this is an administration that manages to do three times a week something that would have resulted in an impeachment in more sober and self-respecting times.

 

So, in 20 years, will we look back on the Trump era as a parenthetical aberration or as the front-page headline announcing the arrival of something new, enduring, and ghastly—something alien to the best of our traditions and principles?

 

As our own Jonah Goldberg has observed, a two-party system cannot have a single sane political party: It will have two reasonably responsible and sober parties, or it will have two irresponsible and demagogic parties. At this moment, it may seem we are headed for the double-basketcase scenario rather than for a return to our senses.

 

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are sane and serious people in both parties. What the good people lack is either the incentives or the courage to take a stand. They tell themselves, not without reason, that it is better to work within the current dysfunction to make small improvements and prevent large disasters, biding their time like Christians in the catacombs of Rome for the opportunity to emerge and preach the secular gospel of political sanity.

 

Now is that time. The Trump era is ending, and that ending brings an appetite and a political opportunity.

 

We understand that even the best people find it difficult to work across the party line, to extend trust across that line, or even to see that authentic fellow Americans could even live on the other side of that line. But the contest now before us is not the extremists vs. the moderates so much as it is the grasping nihilists on either end of the political horseshoe against those exhausted and dispirited citizens in the horseshoe’s bend—those who still cling to decency, intelligence, prudence, good citizenship, neighborliness, and a rigorous commitment to dealing with the actual facts of the world, however inconvenient they may be.

 

As Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg made clear in this institution’s founding manifesto, The Dispatch has never attempted to force into existence a new great awakening of republican virtue. As journalists, our role in public life is simply to try to describe what is going on in the world and to host arguments about what to do about it. Nor do we pretend to a position of Olympian detachment and objectivity. We have seen some things, and we have reasoned judgments about what we have seen.

 

Nor is this a manifesto for some kind of No Labels-style centrism and bipartisanship. The times call for stronger stuff: If they mean only staying within the Venn overlap between MAGA and the DSA—and there is more overlap than you might think—then the cause will be lost even before the battle begins. What we need now are policies that call America back to fiscal discipline, advance faith in America’s ability to be a force for good around the globe, and that hold the rule of law and individual liberty as sacrosanct.

 

There are no ironclad laws of politics or history, but if there were one, it would be this: When responsible actors refuse to deal with legitimate issues responsibly, irresponsible actors will fill the vacuum and deal with them irresponsibly. Look to the last 10 years for proof of this. Why has the president felt so free to do the rampant self-dealing since returning to the White House last year? “Because I found out nobody cared,” he told New York Times reporters early this year.

 

So as reporters and commentators and publishers, as fathers and mothers, as voters and public officials, as members of religious congregations, as operators of businesses—as citizens participating in the glorious variety of American life—we have, to an extraordinary and often unappreciated degree, the power to make of our public life whatever we choose to make of it.

 

Whether we adorn our choices in blue or red, we can have more crises and convulsions, more rage and more monetization of rage, more ad-hocracy and mobbery and profligacy. Or we can have something better. We are not ready to entertain airy thoughts about national renewal or a renaissance of republican virtue, as happy as these things are to contemplate. We are talking about the grubby, difficult details of governance required of leaders in a republic: getting the deficit down to a manageable level, shoring up the rule of law against the forces of anarchy and predation, and talking to the American people like grown-ups rather than pandering to them like they’re angry, aggrieved teenagers.

 

That would be, at least, a start.

 

There is much that is good and admirable and inspiring and worth celebrating in America today. We have vast reserves of decency and ingenuity in this country that could be tapped if we could just clear the rust from the gears. We should be grateful for these resources and what they have accomplished, from the consistent improvements in material living conditions worldwide to wondrous technological and medical innovations led—for good reason—by American businesses, American workers, American scientists, American universities, American cities, and the capacious, audacious American spirit. We do not know what comes next, but we know that the power to decide what comes next is in the hands of the only people on this Earth who have ever raised their flag on the moon. In that, at least, we find reason for hope—sober hope—at the end of a long, vicious, squandered decade.