Douthat: Four years later, Trump remains same as he ever was

By Ross Douthat / The New York Times

In the years just before Donald Trump’s ascent, political commentary increasingly aspired to a quasi-scientific style of analysis, with data journalism in all its forms supplanting the old-fashioned emphasis on hunches, narratives and vibes.

In the Trump era, though, the mythic has had its revenge on the merely quantifiable. The data is still useful, in its place, but now even pollsters talk about their “art,” and like strange birds in the Roman Forum, the more unlikely outcomes have come home to roost. The roles of charisma and “fortuna” have been reasserted; Thomas Carlyle, Shakespeare and the Coen brothers have been surer guides than any science; and primal forces, from plague to war to presidential senescence, have played decisive parts.

So as we enter into the Trump restoration, any auguries about the next four years need to be adequate to this mythopoetic landscape, and dramatically fitting in the fate that they envision for the president and the United States.

The challenge for would-be entrail readers is that Trump’s first term already offered a seemingly complete dramatic arc. A presidency defined for a long time by black comedy tipped over into tragedy when Trump finally faced a threat he couldn’t overmaster: a deadly pandemic, originating in the communist country he had come to power promising to challenge and contain, that sent him to the hospital and his reelection campaign to defeat. Then, by reacting to his political downfall by descending into the conspiratorial labyrinths with Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, Trump gave the whole story a suitable denouement: hubris, nemesis, madness, good night.

Yet now he’s back again, resurrected politically via the very strategy of prosecution that sought to fully bury him, boosted by a miraculous-seeming escape from an assassin’s bullet, triumphant over all his enemies and elevated to greater heights of power and influence than at any point in his first term. So what does a mythically minded punditry suggest should happen next?

One possibility is that because we have already seen Trump at his lowest point, for a second term to be surprising, remarkable and aesthetically fitting, it needs to deliver him to glorious success. And not just low-unemployment and calm-in-the-Middle East success, but a true fulfillment of his original 2016 campaign promise: American greatness restored, on a scale that baffles his enemies and amazes even his supporters.

Think Elon Musk sending starships to Mars. Think fleets of dirigibles traveling to an American-held Greenland, the American West irrigated and lush, regime change in Iran and China, self-driving cars zipping down every highway and back road. In his first term, Trump was fatally flawed and justly crushed, but having persevered through crisis and defeat, now the drama requires his complete vindication.

That’s the future I’m rooting for. But the counterpoint is that history often deals unkindly with even the most remarkable political careers, which are more likely to be cut off in an untimely manner or descend into a tragic fall than to conclude with apotheosis.

So the fact that Trump has scraped the bottom and come back up doesn’t guarantee a happy ending; just ask Napoleon after his triumphant return from Elba. Yes, the 45th and now 47th president has endured and achieved and reached a peak of power and command, but he’s an old man who retains all the flaws that unmade his presidency once before, and he faces a world destabilized by the same tectonic forces that carried him in and out and now back into power. He has been vindicated in his ambitions but not converted to humility. He is still the same embodiment of all-American hubris as before.

In this reading, if the fates do their spinning and snipping appropriately, the Trumpian pageant can only really end in some final epic diminishment, some defeat more total than the last one. And that’s an unsettling prospect indeed, given that Trump’s last defeat involved a once-in-a-generation pandemic and smoke over the Capitol on Jan. 6.

How might history up that ante? With the constitutional crisis anticipated by so many of his critics? With a true world conflict? With the artificial intelligence doom scenario or some other apocalypse? With some shocking betrayal? (Et tu, Elon?)

“High variance” is the phrase I keep using for the Trump restoration. The range of possibilities is wider this time around; the world and history are more open, the potential victories clearer, the costs of failure starker. And after all we’ve seen so far, the only possibility for the next four years that would be fundamentally surprising is a return to comfortable stagnation.

For all other outcomes, all other endings to the Trump saga, the omens are out there, and we can’t say that we haven’t been prepared.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.