Trump didn’t create America’s political dysfunction. He didn’t invent corrupt institutions, bigotries of DEI programs, or the hollowing out of democratic norms. What he does is make visible things that existed for quite some time but were usually managed. If Trump feels like a rupture, it’s because he refuses to keep up the performance. Joker (2019), American Beauty (2000), The Running Man (1987), and hundreds of others were never about entertainment, despite being sold as such to make millions.
It’s also tempting to treat Trump’s supporters as an alien force, as if they represent a deviation from the “real” America. That, too, is a way of shifting blame. Trump didn’t hypnotize millions of people. He articulated grievances that had long been ignored, exploited, or patronized. He gave political voice to resentments that were already present and identities that were already hardened. He took advantage of a civic culture that had reduced democracy to spectacle and team affiliation rather than responsibility.
The story with a single villain serves to reassure institutions that they were healthy before he arrived and will return to normal once he leaves. And it allows many citizens, especially educated and professional ones, to see themselves as horrified spectators rather than participants in a system they benefited from and sustained. That narrative is soothing. It just isn’t true. The United States didn’t suddenly become exclusionary or violent in late 2016. It was founded through conquest, segregation, and dispossession, and then built institutions capable of denying those origins while continuing their effects. Imperial wars were administered through paperwork and committees, while economic cruelty was framed as efficiency. Surveillance expanded quietly. Inequality hardened.
What changed under Trump isn’t the substance of American power so much as its presentation. He has stripped away the language that long softened brutality and turned it into something ordinary. He didn’t introduce racism into American politics; he stopped bothering with euphemisms. He didn’t invent executive overreach or the coolness of insider information; he openly embraced them. He didn’t begin the erosion of democratic norms; he simply declined to pretend those norms were being honored consistently in the first place. That’s why MAGA didn’t seem too upset about the killing of George Floyd in 2020, nor does it call for an unbiased investigation into the killing of Renee Nicole Good in 2025. That’s why MAGA didn’t think twice before using the official White House website to rewrite the history of the January 6 riot, or to promote plaques that mock former Presidents Barack Obama (“one of the most divisive political figures in American History”) and Joe Biden (“sleepy,” “crooked,” and “the worst President in American History”).
The shock many have experienced isn’t moral collapse – it’s moral exposure. In that sense, Trump functions less like a wrecking ball and more like a stress test. He applies pressure to institutions that were assumed to be strong and reveals how fragile they actually are. Congress, long fond of speaking grandly about its authority, is quiet and self-undoing, leaving Trump to take what was already there. Courts, known for tolerating bad-faith arguments in the name of neutrality, are discovering that neutrality without shared norms equals surrender. Media organizations find themselves financially dependent on the figure they claimed to oppose. Political parties’ accountability mechanisms can’t simply be switched back on.
Trump was necessary, not morally admirable, but structurally clarifying. He’s revealed which constraints were real and which ones existed only because previous officeholders chose to respect them. He’s exposed how much of American democracy depended not on enforceable rules but on lobbying, informal agreements, and assumptions of good faith. Bibi, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, is a close friend, and Donald is Israel’s greatest friend in Washington. Hillary Clinton once said she’d nominate her 2016 presidential opponent for the Nobel Peace Prize (provided he ended the war in Ukraine without ceding any territory to Russia). The Donald is happy to cut tariffs on Swiss exports in exchange for a Rolex table clock and a personalized gold bar. He’s a big fan of planes, too. Tremendous.
Power, in Trump’s view, is about winning. He doesn’t discriminate between Greenland and Venezuela – or should he? Has anyone mentioned Israel’s genocide in Gaza – or does loyalty matter more than (international) law? Alliances are reduced to deals and capital accumulation. Institutions exist to be dominated. Morality is branding, and it is for sale, as neatly illustrated by the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to María Corina Machado and by her subsequent decision to transfer it to Trump. Let’s see who’ll give him an Olympic gold – or, why not, award Melania (2026) an Oscar? None of this is new. Part of the outrage Trump provokes comes from recognition; he forces Americans to confront the possibility that the system works largely as designed – and that many of its defenders have mistaken civility for virtue.
Trump’s rise also wasn’t a populist uprising against a unified establishment. It was enabled by elite complicity at nearly every level. Donors applauded him because he delivered tax cuts and deregulation. Party leaders convinced themselves they could manage him. Media executives discovered he was good for ratings. Tech platforms learned that outrage was profitable. Intellectuals mistook satire and clever commentary for actual resistance and assumed cultural influence could substitute for political power.
Everyone believed they could use Trump without being used by him. This kind of bargain didn’t start with him, and it won’t end with him. The American political system consistently rewards short-term advantage over long-term legitimacy. Trump has exploited that incentive more brazenly than most, but he didn’t design it. He inherited a system already optimized for irresponsibility. Thus, what makes him intolerable to many isn’t just his policies, but his transparency. He exposes the gap between how the country describes itself and how it actually operates. No example illustrates this more clearly than the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Blaming Trump alone lets everyone else off the hook. If he’s the disease, then everyone else gets to be a victim. But if he’s a symptom, then accountability becomes much more uncomfortable. One of the most common claims about his era is that it represents a descent into lawlessness. That claim doesn’t hold up very well. Much of what has shocked liberal observers during his presidency was legal, or at least acceptable, for years. Aggressive policing didn’t begin with Trump. Mass incarceration didn’t require his imagination. Family separation horrifies many people, but deterrence through cruelty has a long history in US policy. Emergency powers have characterized multiple administrations. Drone strikes continue with bipartisan support. What Trump has changed isn’t the machinery of power, but the moral alibi surrounding it. He’s never insisted that American power be benevolent or reluctant or tragic. He’s treated it as transactional.
Blaming Trump is, ultimately, a refusal to learn. Each time he returns to political relevance, he’s treated as an unprecedented shock rather than a predictable outcome of unresolved failures. Removing the man without addressing the conditions that produced him almost guarantees recurrence – if Trump isn’t enough, someone else will be. The real question, then, isn’t how to stop Trump. It’s why he continues to make sense to so many people – and why so many institutions, at home and abroad, continue to accommodate him while their mission statements oppose everything he represents. While often described as a Russian asset, why is he welcomed to the table and Vladimir Putin isn’t?
Consequently, stopping the reflex to blame Trump isn’t about absolving him. It’s about widening the frame of responsibility. It requires admitting that it wasn’t him who ambushed American democracy, that lawlessness had already operated through law, that brutality didn’t arrive suddenly. That norms survived only when they were convenient. Trump, or MAGA, didn’t make America worse by exposing its contradictions. They’ve made them harder to deny. The danger now isn’t that Americans saw the mirror. It’s that once it’s removed, they’ll pretend they never did.
