An Uncertain New Era Begins

The election of Donald Trump as the 45^th president of the United States feels to some like the end of the world. It’s not. It’s the beginning of a new era. And it’s time to take some deep yoga breaths. Uncertainty always triggers anxiety, but it’s important for the anxious not to catastrophize.

“Catastrophizing relies on an overestimation of the odds of a bad outcome as well as an underestimation of your ability to cope with it should it befall you.” Those are some serious words of wisdom right there, not just for politics, but for life in general. They were written by Dr. Edmund Bourne in his book, Coping With Anxiety.

Nobody really has a clue what’s going to happen next, including Donald Trump and his team. The polling and forecasting industry has been gut-punched. Even the GOP thought he would lose. I wouldn’t dare predict anything specific in public right now. The odds that I’d be wrong approach 100 percent. I’m not even making any private predictions in my own head. Radical uncertainty makes a lot of people uneasy, but look on the bright side. At least the next couple of years will be interesting. 

The first step to calming down at least a little is understanding what actually happened and why. Trump supporters chose him over Hillary Clinton and his Republican establishment opponents because they’re fed-up with business-as-usual and the Washington “swamp.” Who isn’t fed up with Washington at this point? If Trump had been less divisive and more even-tempered, he probably would have won in a landslide.

And let’s dispense, please, with the notion that everybody who voted for Trump is a deplorable racist. Some of them are. No question about it. But a black man named Tim Scott was just elected senator in a state-wide race in South Carolina, and he’s a Republican. The majority of voters in South Carolina voted for Donald Trump and a black man on the same ballot.

Virtually nobody voted for Trump because they want the apocalypse. They took a gamble on an outsider because they want things to get better. Aside from the worst people on the fringes like white supremacist David Duke, they aren’t yearning for a political nightmare. If everyday voters find themselves in a political nightmare anyway, they will vote very differently next time. They’ll start by bringing reinforcements two years from now and will give Trump his walking papers in four years.

If the truly worst case scenario materializes—if Trump tries to govern like an outright dictator—Congress can and will remove him from power. The thing about worst-case scenarios, though, is that they rarely actually happen. They are the worst out of a range of possibilities. If worst-case scenarios were always the most likely to come true, we’d be living in a hellscape like The Walking Dead.

Sure, there is plenty to worry about. Donald Trump is a reality TV star with no government or military experience whatsoever. He has rattled nerves and induced near-panic attacks with the proposal on his website for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” his promise to deport eleven million people, peddling one conspiracy theory after another, acting like an Internet troll on Twitter and floating alt-right enabler Steve Bannon as his top advisor. American allies from Europe to East Asia are breathing into paper bags right now after he trash-talked NATO, threatened to pull out of trade deals, and said he wants to renegotiate defense agreements in the Pacific Rim.

But Trump has moderated his tone and his policy proposals substantially. The worst-case scenario is off the table already, and he hasn’t even started yet.

Outgoing President Barack Obama reassured Americans and the world at a press conference on Monday that President-elect Trump is committed to NATO. “He’s going to be the next president,” he added, “and regardless of what experience or assumptions he brought to the office. This office has a way of waking you up.”

According to Trump surrogate and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, the Muslim ban has evaporated. Trump himself says he will keep the good parts of Obamacare so that people with pre-existing conditions can still get health insurance. He also says he wants to deport two-to-three million people rather than eleven million. For a sense of perspective, the Obama administration deported two million.

He ran the most bombastic political campaign most of us have ever seen, but his tone has been much better, and more presidential, since the campaign ended, and he looked straight into the camera and told his most cretinous supporters who have been acting like bigoted bullies to stop it.

Trump has been yelling “Drain the swamp!” on the campaign trail, and even some Democratic voters who would rather chew off their own legs than vote for him felt a private thrill when he said that. Almost everybody hates the Washington swamp, including lots of people who live there. Of all American institutions, Congress has the lowest approval rating, less than 10 percent, and the military has the highest at 73 percent. In the Middle East and Latin America, numbers like these would portend a military coup. But we don’t live in the Middle East or Latin America. We live here. So instead of a military coup, we got Donald Trump.

Count your blessings.

You know what else, though? The swamp has a role. The swamp is bipartisan, but it acts as a conservative anchor. It prevents a political revolution from hurtling the country off the rails into an abyss. As President Obama put it at his press conference this week, “The federal government and our democracy is not a speedboat. It’s an ocean liner.” So if the next four years turn out to be as terrible as many fear, the swamp might actually save us.

Donald Trump isn’t actually going to drain it. He is not going to purge tens of thousands of people like Turkey’s autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did earlier this year after a botched military coup. He will not replace everybody in government with his real estate and casino friends. I am confident of that much, at least. That would be preposterous even by the standards of the last 15 months. He is hiring one establishment pol after another because, with a handful of exceptions, there’s no one else he can hire.

“Modern governing is immensely complicated,” Eli Lake writes in Bloomberg. “There is an old chestnut that says politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. This year that’s an understatement. Donald Trump campaigned in tweets and he will govern in risk assessments and annotated omnibus appropriations bills.”

The United States—and the world—has been through much worse than anything Donald Trump is going to throw at us. The incoming era may indeed turn out to be terrible, but if we all sat down and wrote out four or eight years of specific predictions, every single one of us would be wrong. And if we’re wrong about almost everything, that includes most of the scary stuff.