Anyone holding onto the hope that America’s political nightmare would end with the 2024 presidential election has already faced a moment of reckoning. If the caustic rhetoric of the campaign was a prelude, the actual horror show will begin on January 20, 2025, when Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office. He succeeds Joe Biden, whose presidency will be remembered for its slide into incoherence, marked by gaffes and a hastily expedited political end, driven by a party increasingly eager to move on. But the Democratic leadership delayed too long in pushing the aging president to pass the baton to his deputy, Kamala Harris.
That said, at least according to the polls, this was America’s closest presidential race since 2000 and the most fiercely contested on the ground, with both sides fighting tooth and nail until the end. Forecasting models showed a near 50/50 split right up until the day of the election. Throughout the campaign, the political temperature was anything but calm, with the Trump camp dominating the discourse through violent and charged rhetoric aimed at all political opponents.
This vitriol showed no sign of abating. Just before the election, in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump made more incendiary remarks. He branded Liz Cheney a war hawk, escalating his verbal attack by suggesting the prominent Republican critic should face gunfire in combat. “Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels aimed at her. Let’s see how she feels when the guns are trained on her face.” He continued, “They’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington, in a nice building, saying, Oh, gee, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.” This fiery language is all the more surprising coming from a man who himself narrowly escaped a bullet at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, not too long ago.
Yet, even after surviving a second assassination attempt, Trump did not temper his rhetoric. Instead, he upped the ante, accusing his political opponents of inciting violence against him with their words. However, the charge rings hollow. His own record, unparalleled among modern US presidents, is marked by a history of inciting and threatening violence—not just against political opponents but also journalists and anyone he considered an adversary.
But for those following the firebrand leader's meteoric rise, none of this comes as a surprise. In 2016, during a rally in Las Vegas, then-candidate Trump declared his desire to ‘punch’ a heckler who interrupted his speech. Later in the same campaign, he voiced support for reinstating waterboarding, a controversial and brutal interrogation technique. When asked about it, Trump responded, “They said to me, ‘What do you think of waterboarding?’ I said, ‘I think it’s great, but I don’t think we go far enough.’ It’s true, it’s true—right? We don’t go far enough.”
While the former president finds it convenient to blame his opponents and vilify almost anyone but himself for America’s problems, the reality is that the American political landscape has been shaped by the anger Trump has both stirred and attracted. To his followers, the republican leader has cast himself as their sole saviour: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he declared at last year’s Conservative Political Action Conference summit. Unwavering, his loyal voters refuse to entertain anything but the belief that he is their messiah. But that so-called ‘higher purpose’ is rooted in hostility, division, and disorder, both at home and abroad.
Since 2016, Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric has woven itself into the fabric of American politics, leaving an indelible mark. Recently, media outlets have documented the extent of this verbal assault. According to The Atlantic, so far, the president-elect has made at least 40 such provocative statements publicly, with countless more delivered behind closed doors to his inner circle of 'confidants'—individuals who, like him, share similar views on most matters.
This tendency to escalate rhetoric was evident as early as 2015, when then-candidate Trump, responding to a Fox News question about a protester at an Alabama rally, said: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.”
Such remarks, however, cannot be dismissed as isolated slips. Gradually, he escalated his vitriol, appealing to an audience eager for statements laced with hate. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, okay? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise,” he told a roaring crowd in Iowa during a campaign rally, just months before his first election victory. Such statements became emblematic of his approach – brash, unfiltered, and unabashedly courting the fervour of his supporters.
It was in 2016 that Donald Trump first issued a stark warning to America, predicting ‘riots’ if he were denied the Republican nomination at the party’s national convention. “I think you’d have riots,” he declared, signalling the kind of defiance that would come to define his political style. While the unrest Trump predicted did not materialise at the convention, the echoes of those words were unmistakable in the years that followed.
More recently, when a young woman was killed protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the former president, rather than offering sympathy to the victim’s family, stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan and made one of the most controversial statements of his presidency. “I think there is blame on both sides,” he told reporters, drawing a notorious equivalency that would resonate throughout his time in office.
In 2019, he claimed the backing of ‘tough people,’ warning in an interview with Breitbart, a right-wing outlet once run by his confidant Steve Bannon, that 'things could get bad' if they were pushed too far. “I have the support of the police, the military, the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people,” he said. “But they don’t play it tough until they reach a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
Almost every year of Trump’s political career is marked by remarks that incite or perpetuate violence in some form. In 2020, shortly after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, which sparked widespread protests across the country, he infamously declared: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” According to his former defence secretary, Mark Esper, the president also spoke about protesters outside the White House, asking if they could be shot. “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” he reportedly said.
After surviving an assassination attempt this year, many of his followers insisted on one thing: that God had chosen him for a ‘higher purpose.’ Aware of the intense faith his supporters place in him, the former president has always pushed them to ever-greater extremes. Four years ago, on January 6, after losing the election to Biden, the republican leader tested the limits of their loyalty by encouraging them to march to the US Capitol. What unfolded that day is now etched in American history as the most significant assault on its democracy. His supporters, some of whom appeared almost bloodthirsty, stormed the Capitol, shouting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of Trump’s political opponents, as they ransacked its halls and corridors.
It should not surprise any political observer familiar with the signals of his election campaign that a Trump presidency would be defined by discord and turmoil. Indeed, it fulfilled those expectations with methodical precision. Yet, while the former president's incendiary rhetoric and relentless partisanship set the stage, Democrats unwittingly played into his hands. When Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, dismissed Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” it alienated a critical swath of undecided voters. President Biden, this year followed with a similar ill-judged remark, calling Trump’s base “garbage”—words swiftly walked back by the White House, part of a pattern of statements from Biden that sometimes veer into incoherence or off-script rambling, generating more political strife than they resolve.
With America now bracing for a ‘peaceful’ transition to a new Trump era, the country appears set to struggle with healing the deep divisions and fractures that have long defined its political landscape. As The New York Times reports, more than 90 per cent of counties swung in Trump’s favour in 2024. His decisive victory was driven by red shifts across the nation, with gains among nearly every demographic. Moreover, the former president improved on his 2020 margin in 2,367 counties, while his margin decreased in just 240. Trump also strengthened his position in areas that had previously supported him, as well as in counties that have traditionally leaned Democratic.
None of this suggests that the dawn of Trump’s age will come to an end anytime soon. Let’s not forget the president-elect’s warning, made long before his latest electoral victory: “In four years, you don't have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote,” he told his Christian supporters in May.
If anything, it is now safe to say that the ‘morning in America’ that Ronald Reagan, the 40th president, optimistically declared in the 1980s has ended, and a long period of darkness and division now looms over the country—affecting both those who voted for Trump and those who opposed him.