People like to pretend that objectivity has no place in politics. In today’s especially polarized environment, it’s as if reality has an “alternative”—every fact pruned, twisted, attacked into a palatable lie. But truth exists within politics and each party does not have an equal claim to it.
Just because Donald Trump has, out of necessity, run a campaign counter to accepted facts does not render those facts invalid. Just because a large percentage of Americans buy into his blatant lies does not make those lies any more true.
Objectivity exists within politics whether people accept facts or not; likewise, politicians can be objectively adjudicated apart from their affiliated party.
Donald Trump is not only an objectively bad politician, legislator, person—he is objectively bankrupt. It is near impossible to find any real redeeming traits. He is inept and self-obsessed, obscene and violent, he is a convicted felon, he has been accused of sexual assault at least 27 times, he has undermined our electoral systems with unfounded lies, he has led an attack on our government, he has been impeached twice.
He has been elected again to the highest office in the country and, this time, he will be at greater liberty to do what he wants.
It’s easy to point to his first term, from which the U.S. emerged. A worse country? Yes. (Depleted financial reserves because of tax cuts that overwhelmingly favored top American earners, a cabinet chock-full of unqualified people, unethical and anti-human family separation policies at the border, a botched Covid-19 response that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, rabid election denialism that culminated in a Trump-incited mob attacking the democratic system: Trump’s impact on the U.S. was objectively negative, no matter parties’ skewering.)
A worse country, but still functional—U.S. institutions, while battered, weathered his first term. And it seems logical to ask: If we emerged from the first term, why will the second be any different?
Because he knows what to do this time. He knows how to enact his objectively fascist agenda. (As per John Kelly, who worked extremely closely with Trump for over a year and a half as White House chief of staff.) He’s been given Project 2025, an 887-page document detailing how to do just that. (And while he has repeatedly disavowed the document because of how unpopular its contained ideas are—such as abolishing the Department of Education, replacing apolitical civil servants with loyalists, and rolling back civil service protections, to name a few—it was authored by so many people he works and has worked closely with that it will almost certainly have an impact on how he governs.)
Trump knows with whom he needs to surround himself, he knows how to respond when his whims are denied. He has a comfortably Republican Senate. He’ll, in all likelihood, have a more-than-friendly House. He’s been essentially exonerated of wrongdoing by the Supreme Court.
We are approaching an era where many of Trump’s impulses—no matter how irrational, no matter how hateful, no matter how out-of-touch with the American public—will crystallize into cold, hard law.
Donald Trump will be worse than you can imagine.
And many who just voted for him don’t understand that. They don’t believe he will do what he says because they don’t want it. They don’t want him to weaponize the Department of Justice, as he says he will; they don’t want him to deport millions of immigrants, as he says he will; they don’t want him to abandon the Ukraine war, as he very well may.
His agenda is largely unwanted. What many voted for are vague, often-incorrect ideas about his strengths as a politician and legislator. People incorrectly think the economy (voters’ most important issue) was stronger under Trump than it is now, they are unaware (or don’t care) that his “tough on immigration” policies are also blatantly unethical, and many who are willing to admit he has faults only admit he is “not a good person.”
It is not that Donald Trump is “not a good person,” it is that he is a patently, extremely bad one. A person who can only be rationally voted for if his promises, his personality, his entire platform, are all simply ignored.
And the American public has just decided that a future in which we must every day wake up dreading what new horrific things our president has done in the night, a future filled with unchecked hate and racism and vitriol that spews thick and fast, a future in which every single action our president takes serves in some way to discredit our global standing—that future is preferable to a future that a more qualified Black woman sits at the helm of.
This is not to dampen hope. Political resistance can and must take place in order to oppose Trump’s worst instincts; there will always be great strength in the power of protest. But it is impossible to effectively resist a force you fundamentally underestimate, and Trump’s upcoming term will be far more serious than his first.
What Donald Trump represents is distilled hatred, plain and simple. The four looming years of his second administration will be more than enough vindication for these words that, now, may read as alarmist.
But don’t take my word for it. Take his.
Disclaimer: This is an opinion article. The Student Movement is open to perspectives from the Andrews community, so please feel free to reach out to the AUSM team (Editor-in-Chief: stefanescu@andrews.edu, Faculty Advisor: kharris@andrews.edu).
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.