As I See It: Trump’s new America

Jon Huer

Jon Huer

By JON HUER

Published: 06-13-2025 2:51 PM

Liberals and Democrats are agitated out of their minds over Trump’s many transgressions. Virtually everything Trump does — so radically different from every presidential behavior we have ever known — aggravates them. They cry out: “Why isn’t he more like the other presidents?”

In their reckoning, Trump is planning to be America’s first king (hence “No Kings” protest Saturday). Jamie Raskin (D-NY) concludes that: “Gangsters are in charge of every [government] department.”

Obviously, Trump’s critics are exhausting themselves barking up the wrong tree: Donald Trump is not the 47th president of the United States, with 45 past role models to copy. He is the first president of a new nation — a “Newer World” — that bears his personalized imprint. In fact, Trump is the founding father of the UST, “the United States of Trump,” in substance if not in name.

All future presidents — JD Vance, Eric Trump, and so on — will inherit Trump’s political DNA because that’s the way of America’s political evolution. All future presidents (“next 50 years,” as MAGA predicts) will be Republican, chosen by proclamation, perfectly fit for Trumpsters’ ideas of a new political system.

Against such historical prognoses, unable to recognize the tectonic shift in America’s national character, liberal critics are still looking at him as the 47th man to occupy the White House who should resemble all those who went before him.

To understand Trump in this new light of history, we must recognize the simple fact that someone like him could have never been elected in Old America. Only an entirely new America could have elected somebody like him as president. Likewise, the American majority (mostly white) who chose him resembles no American generations who had ever lived before them. As Trump is different from any presidents before him, those who elected him are also different from the generations before them: A new president for a new nation as an historical fact. Trump’s own political existence is impossible without this completely “new” America. ”Trumpism” itself, although tried often, could have never succeeded in Old America on such a scale.

To liberals, the America that elected Trump is utterly incomprehensible as it conforms to none of their previous political knowledge or experience. If you are a conventional liberal person, you will not be able to talk to or understand a typical Trump supporter, whose mind and perspective are simply beyond your political imagination. You might as well say they are complete aliens. But, under Donald Trump’s skillful management, the unthinkable have become routine and the unimaginable just commonplace. That’s Orwellian politics at its best. No politician in modern times diagnosed the popular moods as astutely and used the insight for his political vision as adroitly as Trump.

Liberal Democrats continue to describe Trump’s presidency as “insane” (to them it is), but they refuse to describe the American electors (and American society itself) as insane. Their refusal makes no logical sense as an insane president can exist only in an insane society. Now, in this perspective, everything is normal and regular and sane. If Trump actually shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, and none of his supporters flinched, that’s perfectly normal for Trump’s newer world. Such changes for new America make no sense to the liberal critics who think that Trump is an insane president but that America is a sane nation.

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The trouble with liberal critics is that they insist Trump is insane but the electors who chose him are not. They are relentlessly critical of Trump’s insanity, but they are just as relentlessly quiet about America’s wholesale insanity that led to his election. If you asked them, How could sane electors choose an insane president? There would be no answer. Indeed, how could sane electors choose an insane president? On the other hand, when you believe the electors are also insane, then, everything makes sense. But that conclusion opens up a whole new Pandora’s box: What do you make of a whole nation gone crazy? (The last time it happened was in Germany’s Third Reich and Japan’s militarism prior to World War II).

The only alternative is that Trump is just a normal, sane leader chosen by an entirely new America that nobody (except Trump) had seen coming, which will continue as the new nation with a new founding father.

Trump believes everything inherited from liberal America is immoral and wrong-headed and, therefore, must be destroyed. The whole concepts of morality, justice, patriotism, whatever, are turned upside down in Trump’s New America. The Department of Justice is for political retribution (revenge), the Office of Civil Rights (DOE) is to suppress civil rights. Presidential powers are openly for sale.

Trump’s playbook comes straight from George Orwell’s “1984” where the Big Brother government insists that “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Two plus Two is Five,” and citizens accept the Newspeak as normal. The new, still-rising American majority, knowing all about Trump’s desires and plans, elected him and brought about the historic change. Indeed, he is an entirely new kind of politician in an entirely new kind of society only the post-liberal and post-human era in history could create. No wonder Democrats have trouble understanding such changes in their midst (although they, in cahoots with capitalists, took part in making America the way it is now).

Their known political vocabulary is inadequate to describe Trump or understand Trump’s new America, and for liberal Democrats new thinking is not easy. But, they must accept the simple fact that both Trump and America are entirely new historical creations, quite incomprehensible to them.

Now, everything is normal in America — like “1984.”

Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.