Tech titan Elon Musk—TNR’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year—has spent billions of dollars to turn Twitter into X, a misinformation machine aimed solely at pumping out janky right-wing propaganda, and hundreds of millions to make Trump president. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is intent on unwinding a century of medical and scientific progress. JD Vance, Trump’s vice president–elect, is the most successful of his craven imitators: He is simultaneously slavishly devoted to Trump and to pushing a Catholic spin on Christian nationalism that would return women to the home and LGBTQ people to the closet. Shameless, cynical, and extreme, he will unquestionably be one of the most dangerous men ever in his new role—especially when one considers the advanced age and ill health of the president.
But make no mistake: Trump is not just as bad as he’s ever been; he’s somehow worse. That’s why, after five years of denying him this ignominy, we have decided to finally award Trump our Scoundrel of the Year. (Well, Time magazine also gave us no choice.)
Much of Trump’s obvious decline is human. He is very old, does not exercise, and has what is likely the worst diet any president has had in a century at least. (Whatever William Howard Taft was eating, it wasn’t McDonald’s.) But much of it stems from having endured something unusual for him: accountability. In 2024, Trump faced multiple efforts to hold him criminally liable for his actions: for his widespread fraud as a real estate developer (and later as someone basically playing a businessman on television), for willfully retaining classified documents so he could feel important, for paying off an adult film star in 2016 so she couldn’t tell the voting public about their affair, and—most importantly—for trying to subvert an election he lost in 2020. He was found guilty of fraud in May and, soon after, ordered to pay nearly $500 million in penalties; he was similarly found guilty over the hush-money payment. The other cases have not yet gone to trial and likely never will. He will almost certainly face no consequences for any of that now that he has won back the presidency. But those cases all took a severe toll on him, leaving him angrier and more determined to achieve vengeance.
Much of Trump’s power comes from these like-minded loyalists and sycophants—such as Kash Patel, his nominee to weaponize the FBI against opponents, and returning immigrant-basher Stephen Miller—as well as those who see him as a tool for their own ends, like Musk and RFK Jr. But make no mistake: The growing extremism of Trump’s political project stems directly from its leader.
At the same time, Trump has never been less populist. There was a time when one could make the case—albeit credulously—that he represented a break from the economic policies that had defined the Republican Party for two generations. He was thought to represent the end of, or at least a challenge to, the GOP’s lockstep fealty to tax cuts and deregulation and commitment to the interests of the wealthy (typically the extremely wealthy) over those of workers. Trump’s movement theoretically tapped into the rage at that destructive economic ideology and would represent a new way forward, one built around protectionism and the interests of the tens of millions of (mostly white) working-class voters.
The second Trump term, in other words, will be a supercharged version of the first: both more authoritarian and more traditionally conservative. There will be mass deportations and drastic, perhaps even draconian, cuts to social spending. At the same time, new villains like Musk and Kennedy and Vance—who may very well become president before 2029—will be empowered. None of this would be possible without Trump. He orchestrated all of it. Trumpism has not only taken over the Republican Party; it has become our country’s ruling ideology. We all live in this elderly, orange-faced scoundrel’s world now.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Donald Trump Is The New Republic’s 2024 Scoundrel of the Year )
Also on site :