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In the early 2010s, a historian proposed that the world was soon going to have a century-defining event take place, because such things seemed to always happen in the second decade of the century, ever since the Reformation.

If this theory is accurate, then the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016 — arguably alongside and certainly foreshadowed by Britain voting to leave the European Union earlier that year — was going to be the defining event for our age.

It’s been nearly ten years since the once-and-future president first made his way down the golden escalator at Trump Tower, but I suspect for most people (myself included), it feels like a lifetime ago. Where do you even begin to chart the ups and downs of Trump’s circular journey to the White House?

But the ferocity of those twists and turns has been, at times, enough to make one sick — or at least want to get off the ride for a while. The intensity with which society has been brought into this war over truth, goodness and beauty is impossible to overstate, and the Covid era was probably the apex of the journey. It is probably not a coincidence that many people do not want to revisit the wrong decisions that were made at that time, because it was all quite overwhelming,

But now: relief. The roller-coaster is slowing down. The world is no longer tilting on its axis, the adrenaline is no longer pumping. Why? Because the epicentre of this cultural vortex has been the United States, and Donald Trump has been walking through the eye of the storm. With this comprehensive election win, it is his side that is clearly the victor. He and his supporters and allies should now have the opportunity to decide the immediate future of their nation, and through them, the future of the world into the next century.

Yes, Mr President

The US has really been in a state of civil war for the past ten years, but much like the Cold War, it’s been without a shot fired directly between the two adversaries. Instead, it has been a war of entrenched sides using every cultural and political tool available to them to try and outmanoeuvre their opponents, enlisting voters as their soldiers by attempting to convince them of the moral superiority of their party’s position, and of the failings of the other side.

There would be few people in the United States who still don’t have an opinion on Donald Trump. Symbolically, though, this Cold War has been about the direction of the United States. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have all represented the liberal establishment that has directed the country for many decades now. Donald Trump has been the anti-establishment representative, the agent of change railing against a system that has clearly failed large swathes of the population.

It may be easy to forget now with everything that’s happened since then, but the first battle of the Cold Civil War wasn’t the 2016 election. It was the 2015 Republican primaries. Since the late 1980s, the Grand Old Party had followed the lead of the Bush family and their allies, creating and embracing their neoconservative worldview. Trump’s takedown of Jeb Bush, who had come into the campaign as the establishment favourite, was a sign of things to come.

Donors, lobby groups, special interests, party grandees and congressional Republicans and their staff were all largely opposed to Trump, but couldn’t stop him from winning because his platform was what voters had been crying out for. The same thing nearly happened to the Democratic Party, but their system for choosing a candidate allowed the party leadership to avoid running with Bernie Sanders.

The Democratic establishment, especially the media organisations that had treated Trump as an unserious candidate who nevertheless gave them great ratings, quickly had to shift towards treating him as a real threat. The Republican Party leadership of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, had to talk out of both sides of their mouth, technically supporting their candidate despite hating everything he stood for.

After his victory, both sides of the establishment doubled down and acted to obstruct Trump as much as possible, and after the 2020 election that turned from obstructing the Trump government, to obstructing Trump as a person from ever running for the presidency again.

But the world was shifting under their feet. For every battle they felt they were winning — blocking the wall, impeaching the president, sending him to trial after trial — there were thousands of smaller battles they were losing, without even noticing.

Every worker who lost their job during the Covid panic, every household struggling to put food on the table, every social media user banned for expressing a newly taboo opinion, they all needed somewhere to turn politically. And they came from all walks of life, as exemplified by not only Trump himself, but three of his newfound allies: Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

All four were once members of the Democratic Party, and all four felt rejected by the party because of their increasingly stringent requirements for ideological purity. Disagreement among the Democrats has been largely taboo since Trump first ran, and arguably even earlier.

Now Trump is the de facto head of the Republican Party, Gabbard is a member of that same party, Musk is using his money to fund Republican campaigns and Kennedy — part of the most famous Democratic political family of all — is an independent and soon to be part of the Trump cabinet.

And so, while the Bush Republicans tried to keep ‘their’ party the way it had been for decades, the millions of Americans who were looking to Trump and his allies to bring their country out of the quagmire it found itself in, were shifting the Republican Party to be remade in the image of the 45th President.

The humiliating primary defeat of Liz Cheney in Wyoming was the ultimate symbol of how the tide had turned in the GOP, and only now, with victory in the Electoral College, in the popular vote, in the House and in the Senate, it is clear to all that there is a new Republican Party, and the old guard have to get on board or they’ll suffer the same fate as Cheney.

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has been beaten thoroughly. They lost the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, because Trump won over a coalition of voters they thought would never leave them. They don’t hold any significant office federally. The ideological platform they zealously pursued has been tested and found wanting, and they appear confused as to how this could be the case. They have no real basis upon which to keep fighting.

Some in the media, like the hosts of Morning Joe on MSNBC, as well as the editors of The Washington Post and The L.A. Times, are suddenly singing from a different hymnbook, one of impartiality and openness. The Young Turks, who have been the forefront of pro-Democratic alternative media for over a decade, are happier with the Trump team than they are with the party they’re aligned with.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen and felt something like a fog being lifted over the past couple of weeks. It’s a reflection of a simple reality: the war is over.

But then again, maybe it isn’t.

The Never-Ending Struggle

Real life is not like a game, where the winner gets the prize and the loser gets nothing, and that’s the end of the matter.

Deeply held political convictions don’t change just because your side didn’t win an election. There might be a smattering of Democratic Congressmen who think that Trump will be a better president than Kamala Harris was, but there are likely far more Republican Congressmen who believe the opposite.

This is especially true in the Senate, where people tend to hang on to their seats for decades. Mitch McConnell was elected to the Senate in 1984. His hand-picked replacement as Republican leader in the chamber, John Thune, has been there since 2004, after being in the House of Representatives from the 1996 election until the 2002 midterms.

Thune, like McConnell, is deeply connected with the Washington establishment, just as he was with the South Dakota establishment when he first made his run for the House in 1996. He says he will support the Trump agenda wholeheartedly as Senate majority leader, but it wasn’t that long ago he was calling for Trump to step aside as a potential candidate for 2024, having done similarly in previous elections.

Thune’s worldview, like many Republicans in the Senate, does not align with voters who support Trump. With the exceptionally anti-establishment picks Trump is making for his cabinet, this may tempt those Senators to reject his nominees, or at least some of them. But those same Senators would surely be keeping an eye on their re-election bids, knowing that they may get Cheney’d if they appear to be blocking too much of Trump’s work. Many Republicans in that chamber are up for re-election in 2026, and if they spend the first two years of Trump’s second term blocking his work.

Not that this will stop all Republican Senators that way inclined. Susan Collins (from Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (from Alaska) were particularly opposed to Trump in his first term, and have already made similar noises this time around. The withdrawal of Matt Gaetz from being the nominee for Attorney-General after meeting with the Republican Senators may already indicate that a number of them will not be too open to working with Trump.

And if there are Congressional Republicans grumbling about Trump’s return to the Oval Office, you can bet that there will be Democrats in Congress who are apoplectic about the matter. They certainly aren’t just going to give in and allow Trump to do whatever he wants simply because he won. They still represent tens of millions of Americans. They will continue to use every level available to frustrate his presidency, as they did the first time around.

So, too, will their other allies, both at other levels of government and in other positions of power. A number of Governors and Mayors are already talking about preventing federal agents from deporting illegal immigrants from their jurisdictions. Other media organisations, journalists and university professors show no signs of understanding what has taken place and seem to want to double down even further, going so far as to leave X for BlueSky, a perceived social media safe space.

Ultimately, even if Congress were to approve of everything Trump wanted to do, and Trump’s other opponents made nice and never raised a fuss, something would change further down the line. Every government is only human, full of people with foibles and who often act in their own interest rather than the interest of others. On top of that, Trump’s alliance is full of humans who don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on a lot of matters. There’s every reason to think that this time of ‘peace’ won’t last for a long time, and it certainly won’t last forever.

Until the return of our Lord, governments across the world will continue to act in ways good and evil, and those of us in democratic systems will continue to be called upon at election time to correct those who have gone astray and approve those who do the right thing.

But for now, even if just for a moment, the world can breathe again. This part of the journey is over. For a time, we can have peace.

And for that, we can be thankful.

To understand more about why the US presidential election had the result it did, you may want to read Jordan’s prediction, which was written in the days prior to the election. You can do so here.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.