However, the real perils of crying wolf lie on the other side. Trump said that America was a broken society and that he was coming to fix it. But it isn’t broken in the way he said, so he can’t fix it. It’s the inverse of the Pottery Barn rule: you didn’t break it, you don’t own it. Instead, Trump will have to become something much more like a conventional politician, reneging on his pledges, hiring experienced Washington hands to help him negotiate the swamp rather than drain it. It has already started happening. What’s so scary about this prospect is that Trump has no experience of how to do any of it: he isn’t a politician, and the chances are that it will be done badly, with lurching heavy-handedness and regular bouts of outright incompetence. These episodes will then be papered over by fresh waves of Trumpian bombast. That presumably is the job of Steve Bannon and his Breitbart colleagues, now duly installed in the West Wing: they are there to cover up the cock-ups with fresh conspiracy theories. But the incompetence will also be smothered by the functional capacity of the American state, which was designed to absorb large amounts of ineffective government in order to forestall the possibility of really bad people being able to govern effectively. In a country that has seen more bad presidents than good ones, Trump isn’t such an outlier. Not even if he is the nastiest of them all.
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His immediate agenda is to get a massive infrastructure bill through Congress, along with big tax cuts. There are few barriers in his way. He can rely on Republicans to deliver the tax cuts and Democrats to support the infrastructure projects. The short-term boost this stimulus gives the economy can then be used to buy him time while he fails to get to grips with his other campaign pledges, on immigration, on manufacturing jobs, on taking the fight to the terrorists, and on sharing the love at home. He may even be able to claim for a while that by offering something to each side of the partisan divide he is starting to bridge it. But all he will be doing is papering over the gaping cracks. Tax cuts coupled with unfunded government spending will fuel inflation and create the conditions for a future crash. It will also lead to a head-on collision with the Federal Reserve and Trump won’t find it so easy to get his way there. If he tries to replace Janet Yellen or stuff the board with his own nominees, partisanship will reassert itself with a vengeance. Reality will bite back at Trump eventually. When it does, he will be inclined to lash out. But by then it may be too late. He will be trapped.

Meanwhile, the real long-term threats faced by American society will continue unaddressed. By fixing on the risks of direct political violence, we set a low bar that Trump will be able to clear with relative ease. The truly destructive violence of American society takes place under the surface and often passes unnoticed by all except its victims. It is the violence of a prison system that incarcerates and disenfranchises significant segments of the adult population, especially young African-American men. It is the epidemic of white-on-white violence that is estimated to have cost the lives of nearly a hundred thousand Americans since 1999 and yet has remained more or less invisible, until noticed by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in a paper published in 2015. These deaths are the result of self-inflicted violence, either suicides or drug and alcohol overdoses (‘poisonings’ in the language of the report), particularly affecting white Americans living in the parts of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Trump – the South, the Appalachians, the Rust Belt. People in these communities are far more likely to kill themselves than they are to kill others, and they are dying younger than their parents did, a trend that is unique in a developed society. Trump’s victory might provide the victims of this epidemic with superficial respite – including the chance to direct some of their self-loathing outwards – but it will do little to address the causes of their underlying hopelessness. America is a society where many working-age people have given up and others have had their chance for a decent life taken from them by a violently punitive criminal justice system. If it is failing, it is failing here. When the Trump bubble bursts, there won’t have been a reckoning with this reality. But there will be an ever greater sense of betrayal.

A Trump administration will have no difficulty fulfilling its campaign pledges on climate change, since it promised to do nothing and doing nothing is relatively easy. It may find it harder work to undo the entire environmental agenda promoted under Obama, but given that Obama was forced to use executive orders to achieve much of this – for six years it has been impossible for him to get legislation through Congress – it will be much simpler for a new executive to overturn his predecessor’s work. In the field of foreign policy Trump will likewise be able to pick the low hanging fruit early on: undoing deals that are yet to be signed, withdrawing support from regimes that lack leverage, finding little people to bully. Trump has shown that he is happy to follow the path of least resistance, all the way to the White House. Why should he stop now? America will posture under his leadership and talk up its clout. But tough decisions will be shirked and enemies conciliated. Perhaps it is in the international arena that there will be a moment of truth, when one of those enemies decides to put the US to the test of an overt confrontation. But it seems unlikely. The American security state remains a formidable machine and no one would take it on lightly. The basic functioning of the American political establishment provides Trump with all the cover he needs to pretend to be dismantling it. What he will in fact be doing is continuing its steady erosion. Nothing too dramatic is likely to happen, which means the reckoning with reality can be put off for a while longer yet. That surely would be better than allowing something truly dramatic to happen on Trump’s watch. Who would want that? Probably not even the people who voted for him.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n23/david-runciman/is-this-how-democracy-ends