Donald Trump’s voters made a deal with the devil. But he has handed them a get-out clause

An elective despotism, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785, “was not the government we fought for”. The great irony is that in the 250th anniversary of its foundation, this is what the United States has got. Today’s midterm elections could be a last chance to decide whether it’s what it wants.

Donald Trump was returned to the White House by people who knew exactly what he was like. There is no fool’s pardon for the majority who voted for him in 2024. The old saw – fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me – applies.

The corruption, the cruelty, the sexual predation, the frauds, the vulgarity, the egomania, the contempt for laws, institutions and truth, the environmental vandalism, the reverse Robin Hood economics of robbing the poor to give to the super rich, the coup-mongering when he lost the 2020 election – all of this was up in lights in his first term. And yet in 2024 he won fair and square.

If the antirevolutionary Tories of 1776 were still around, they’d be quivering with Schadenfreude: we told you so. US historian Gordon Wood, writing in Empire of Liberty, his great history of postrevolutionary United States, says that “in the 1770s the Revolutionaries had not conceived of the possibility of the people becoming tyrannical. When Tories had suggested in 1775 that the people might indeed abuse their power, good Whig patriots like John Adams had dismissed the notion as illogical: ‘a democratic despotism is a contradiction in terms’. The crown or executive authority was the only possible source of tyranny; the people could never tyrannise themselves.”

Oh, but they can. The history of the rise of authoritarianism in democracies is the history of self-tyrannisation. Enough of the people choose to surrender their democratic sovereignty to a strongman saviour.

Why? Because, in a sense, they’re tired of the virtue that the American revolutionaries saw as the essential fuel of a republic. The hard work of democracy – all that complexity of hammering out the common good in diverse societies – just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort any more. When the system seems fraudulent, you may as well hand it over to the most unapologetic fraudster. When it seems that they all lie, the most flagrant liar is the most authentic. When you don’t feel that many of your fellow citizens deserve to be your equals, you may as well go for the guy who grants you the relief of open contempt for them.

Of course, half the American electorate didn’t do this. But the other half did – and the question today is whether there’s a way back for enough of them to sound the death knell for the elective despotism they chose to bring into being.

This is a terrifying thought: we are all now dependent on voters who gave up on virtue. The midterms are not just about America. They’re about the future of democracy as a viable global norm. Or as Abraham Lincoln put it, the question is whether “government of the people, by the people, for the people” shall or “shall not perish from the earth.”

Of course, the people of Serbia and Brazil have given their own answers in recent days, and the US is not the only arena in which democracy’s fate is being determined. But, like it or not, it is the pivotal one.

And it in turn now pivots on that scary necessity: millions of people who voted for Trump just two years ago must today vote against him. That’s hard to do.

Voting for Trump in 2024 was a big deal, much bigger than in 2016 when you could tell yourself that, of course, he wasn’t really going to be as extreme as he looked. This time you had to choose the violence, the chaos, the corruption, the contempt. Some part of you had to revel in the degradation of America. Some part of you had to want “F**k, yeah!” to be your national anthem.

As Faust will tell you, getting out of a deal with the Devil is a lot harder than getting into it. When you’ve sold your soul, good luck with getting it back.

And yet, a leader has emerged who can release at least some Trump voters from this contract. It’s not any of the smart and interesting new Democrats who have emerged in the last two years. It’s Trump himself.

Trump has done two things to free his voters from the pact they made with him. The first is to try to recategorise the appalling Jeffrey Epstein scandal from a conspiracy to a hoax.

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the Epstein story gave Trump’s voters permission to give up on democracy and indeed on virtue. It confirmed that everything is rotten to the core, that there is no moral centre, that America is run by and for a satanic elite.

Then Trump told those voters that it was all baloney: there was nothing to see here after all. That big zero is a hole through which voters can escape from Trumpworld.

The second release clause Trump triggered is his war on Iran. Leave aside the abandonment of his promises not to start forever wars – the conflict itself scarcely impinges on the consciousness of most Americans. It is its intimate, local effects that really matter.

The daily grind of paying more for gas and diesel is inescapably real. The hub cap is also an escape hatch – you can tell yourself that you’re leaving Trump for this utterly mundane reason. It’s the equivalent of suing for divorce not because you don’t really love your partner any more, but because he’s driving you nuts by leaving the lights on in the basement.

The best guess must be that enough Trump voters will today follow these exit signs he has so thoughtfully erected for them. If they do, the next big task for the Democrats will be to convince them there is a future for a radically renewed republic beyond elective despotism.

How we’re covering the US midterms

Follow Irish Times Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan and video journalist Chris Maddaloni in the final week of the campaign as they report from key battlegrounds and gauge the mood of voters across the US.

More US midterm election coverage here.