In 2016 I wrote in a World cover story that Donald Trump was unfit to be president. Still, much of his cruelty and crassness seemed a television-taught, attention-getting act. Turned out it wasn’t an act.
In 2020 I wanted Trump to lose but not in a landslide that would put Congress completely in Democratic hands. I underestimated what he would do following a close election. At World we accurately identified the January 2021 Capitol crime as an “insurrectionist heresy.” I thought other Christians would also see it as such. Not most.
In the first half of 2023 I wrote the last chapters of Moral Vision, a book published four months ago that looks at key American leaders of the past 250 years. Those chapters are critical of Joe Biden, more critical of Donald Trump, but their sky-is-not-falling tone arose from my sense that either Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley would beat Trump in 2024. Once again, I underestimated him.
During the past decade I’ve often recommended Jose Gironella’s The Cypresses Believe in God, a wonderful novel about how Spain barreled to civil year during the 1930s. Now the hit movie Civil War (on which Current ran a series of reviews by John Haas, David Head, and Jeffrey Overstreet) is available via video-on-demand and we may be heading toward a terrible reality show in the 2030s.
I don’t want to make too much of that dire prospect, but also not too little of it. My past underestimations keep me from solely blaming others for Trump’s rise. They-a-culpa, sure, but mea culpa as well. ###