CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

When Will the Trump Nightmare End? Have Too Many Thresholds Already Been Crossed?

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Donald Trump continues to undermine the U.S. Constitution, reject democratic culture, violate international law, strain relationships with allies, and threaten adversaries with bombing them back to the Stone Age. The obvious question is: When will this end? Even as immediate issues are being raised about the reasons behind the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran and the exact nature of the ceasefire, we should keep asking: When will Trump’s nightmarish influence stop?

But the real question may not be when it ends. It may be whether the United States can ever return to what it was before Trump. Have too many thresholds already been crossed to return to a pre-Trump era? Have too many structures and relationships been damaged to imagine life as it was before January 2025?

To paraphrase Thomas Wolfe: You can’t go pre-Trump [home] again.

Consider one example: The New York Times recently announced that it will increase its coverage of the Supreme Court and the broader U.S. legal system. The “paper of record” said it would “assign a team of four reporters to cover the Court,” expanding from the previous single-reporter model.

Yet while the Times sees journalists and the courts as guardians of democracy, Trump’s ambitions raise doubts about whether journalists and institutions can safeguard the rule of law. At the same moment the Times enlarged its legal coverage, rumors spread that Trump is considering ways to alter the 2026 midterms and is “thinking about” an eventual third term or even never leaving the Oval Office. What will the Times correspondents and courts do if Trump ignores legal and historical precedent?

Both symbolic........

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