Donald Trump gave us the two most surreally enraging moments of his first presidential term on his way out the door. The first was on June 1, 2020. After Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd to spur nationwide protests over police brutality and structural racism, Trump left the White House on foot for St. John's Episcopal Church. Law enforcement violently charged, gassed, and shot with rubber bullets demonstrators in Lafayette Square so that Trump could peacefully walk to the front of the church. There, he awkwardly foisted a bible in the air with the reverence of a baboon considering its own turd. Then, after hardly uttering a word, he walked back to the White House.
It was a galling yet confounding display of autocratic force and vanity, pettily wielding agents of the state as a cudgel to serve no end except his own image. The image Trump chose for himself, meanwhile, was devoid of symbolic power or popular appeal, contributing to the perception that he was (and is) mentally deteriorating with age.
The second, of course, was on January 6, 2021. The culmination of two months of false claims he had won the 2020 election, the Trump cult descended on the Capitol to disrupt the certification of that election's results. While some were your run-of-the-mill suburban racists on a tour of imagined grievances, many rioters were legitimate extremists from militia groups such as the Proud Boys, carrying zip-ties meant for members of Congress and planting pipe bombs around D.C.
Trump held a rally at noon that day to incite the insurrection and call on Mike Pence to overturn the election. As the attack proceeded, Trump refused to intervene. In the previous days, he in fact had ordered the Department of Defense to protect the rioters.
For his action and willful inaction encouraging a coup, the House of Representatives impeached him, and the Department of Justice indicted Trump. He left office with a 34-percent approval rating, tied with those of George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, who departed during economic crises (which Trump, presiding over the COVID-19 pandemic, also oversaw), and only trailing corruption-allegation-plagued Harry Truman and post-Watergate Richard Nixon. Though Trump maintained a devout base, the public rejected him.
Yet here we are. The societal causes are numerous — and in some cases, even in the wake of Trump's initial defeat, were foreseeable. While people smarter than me are already interrogating that, I am taking this moment to rage at the American electorate itself.
When the problem of Trump was immediate, people appeared to understand its weight. He had not won the popular vote in 2016 or 2020, but in the latter case, he was booted from office. There are no shortage of largely apolitical Americans who loathe Trump for reasons beyond his actual policies and actions in office: his self-centered personality, his criminal record, his background as a celebrity and New York elite. To apparently forget the danger and despicability of Trump is unfathomable.