During the night of November 8, 2016 and well into the following morning after the election victory of Donald J. Trump one of the many painful thoughts that kept me awake was this: the Enlightenment is now over.

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Born in 1957, one of the last of the Baby Boomer generation I had grown up in an age that firmly believed in the idea of progress, of a rational, knowable world in which with each passing decade the world became richer, its prosperity more widely shared throughout society. Knowledge and science gradually replaced superstition and prejudice. As more people became educated, the narrative went, our society became more tolerant and inclusive. Traditional barriers that excluded black people, women, Hispanics, gay people fell away. Diseases such as small pox, polio and the bubonic plague had been virtually eradicated in the 20th century. This was possible – so the narrative of progress explained – because we lived in a rational, positivistic world in which it was possible to ascertain the truth, to separate fact from falsehood, a world of cause and effect.

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It was one of the axioms of this narrative of progress known as modernization theory that the rise of democracy would go hand in hand with growing wealth and prosperity. And this appeared to have happened during my and my parents’ lifetimes. Democracies were a small minority of the world’s nations in the early 20th century and most of them, excluding women and other groups, would hardly qualify as democracies by today’s standards. Countries that had been governed by fascism and other authoritarian regimes – Germany, Italy and Japan – became solid democracies after World War II. And the number of democracies in the world had more than doubled again between the 1980’s and the early 2000’s in democracy’s “Third Wave.” The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union had brought out a huge wave of democratization, not just in Eastern Europe. The racist apartheid regime of South Africa had fallen and Nelson Mandela, former leader of the Africa National Congress, was now leading what he and others called “The Rainbow Nation” in a spirit of reconciliation rather than revenge and racial conflict. Military dictatorships in South America – Brazil, Chile and Argentina – had collapsed and were growing rapidly and becoming solidly-established democracies a couple of decades earlier much as the “Asian Tigers” had become in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Increased and freer international trade – globalization – helped cut extreme poverty by more than half: those living on less than $1.90 a day went from 1.9 billion people in 1990 (36 percent of the population) to 734 billion people (10 percent of world population) in 2015, according to the World Bank.

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In the United States the election of Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother, represented the seeming triumph of a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural society. Almost unthinkable for Americans who remember police beating up civil rights demonstrators and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Obama’s election suggested the promise of moving toward a post-racial world.

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The candidacy of Donald Trump seemed a challenge to this basic world view, an appeal to a kind of primitive racial tribalism, a rejection of the era of international cooperation represented by institutions like the United Nations, NATO, trade organizations like the World Trade Organization. A return to the kind of crude “blood and soil” nationalism that had characterized the early 20th century. He demonstrated contempt for science and expertise, dismissing global warming as a “hoax” which had been “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He built his national political profile by promoting the “birther” controversy, the false claim that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than in the United States, which would mean that he was not the legitimate president of the United States. (The U.S. Constitution stipulates that the president must be born in the country.) He had seemed to support the anti-vaccination movement in the United States – the conspiracy theory that vaccinations rather than eradicating disease were actually causing far more serious disorders such as autism.

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In his presidential bid, Trump seemed to violate all the traditional norms of political life. He had insulted almost every possible group on which his election might depend. He had begun by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “criminals,” seeming to alienate an important and growing part of our electorate. He routinely insulted women, making sexist comments and demeaning a female television news anchor by appearing to refer to her menstrual cycle: "You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” He called for a ban on Muslim immigration and insulted many military families when he attacked the Pakistani-American parents of a soldier, an Army captain, who had died in Iraq trying to save other troops. He ridiculed a journalist who was disabled by imitating the movements of someone suffering from cerebral palsy. Surely, one thought, you can’t become president by systematically alienating so many different groups: women, Hispanics, blacks, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled. There can’t be that many angry white men in the country. Even conservative Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham were appalled: “He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

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Along with being a frontal assault on tolerance and an attempt to return to a traditional appeal to race and nation Trump’s candidacy was something more: an assault on the Enlightenment values of reason, science and truth. His seemed to represent a weirdly post-modern notion that there is no truth and that all that matters is the appearance of truth, what you can make people believe. Trump ran as a brilliant, super-successful billionaire businessman but in fact much of his personal story was a lie. He claimed to be a self-made businessman who had “only” received a million-dollar loan from his father when in fact he had inherited an estimated $300 million. It emerged that he had repeatedly lied about and exaggerated his personal wealth to get himself listed on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest people. He claimed to be the world’s greatest deal maker when many of his most important deals had gone disastrously badly: he had endured six different bankruptcies and had survived because he owed the banks so much money they were afraid to let him fail completely. By the 1990’s, no American bank would lend him money and only the German bank Deutsche Bank, desperate to win over American clients, would lend to him. He promptly failed to pay them back and they loaned him more. He created a phony “Trump University” that took millions of dollars from unsuspecting people who were promised qualified business training from executives hand-picked by Trump. It turned out to be a scam: the “university” misled its students in virtually every regard and in the middle of the 2016 campaign Trump was ordered to repay his former “students” some $25 million for having defrauded them. A month before the November, 2016 election, the Washington Post published a video in which Trump was bragging about sexually assaulting women, grabbing them by their genitals. Many traditional Republicans were appalled and suggested he drop out of the race but Trump persisted and the scandal passed. Surely, the public could not be convinced to ignore such an appalling record.

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And yet throughout the campaign, Trump would say something and then deny a few days later that he had said it, even news channels would show him saying exactly what he denied having said. It was as if the basic laws of perception and rules of logic had been suspended. Trump bragged on live television that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

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Incredibly, he appeared to be correct. Although he lost the national popular vote, he won several crucial American states – such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – that had traditionally voted Democrat and that gave him the presidency thanks to the United State’s unusual electoral system.

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Of course, political propaganda did not begin with Trump. Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were systematic in pumping out an alternative reality and attempting to brainwash their citizens. But the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century were police states that suppressed all critical views conceding through censorship that they would have serious difficulty in competing with the truth. Totalitarians needed to jail dissenters, shut down newspapers and ban books because they knew their lies could not survive long in a genuinely free society. We were still in the Enlightenment paradigm in which it was possible to distinguish truth from falsehood.

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Trump, instead, operates in a post-modern digital world in which rather than censorship there IS an over-abundance of information. The world of the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, blogs was a kind of wilderness of mirrors in which ordinary citizens were so overwhelmed by the amount of information – good and bad – with which they were being bombarded that they could no longer make sense of things, or knew what to believe. In the 20th century world there were respected gatekeepers of truth – major newspapers, national broadcasters – that were legally bound to respect basic norms of factual accuracy, balance and fairness. At the end of each nightly newscaster, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite – the most trusted man in America -- would say “and that’s the way it was.” In the digital era, the gatekeepers were swept away and on social media such as Facebook and Twitter people could publish virtually anything – no matter how false and defamatory – without anyone being held responsible. The webified world became a mosquito swamp of conspiracy theories and unverified fantasies. George Orwell wrote that in the dystopian society of his novel “1984”, the party would announce that two and two equaled five and people would believe it. It now appeared to have come true – but not in a totalitarian police state – but in an unregulated media free-for-all.

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Media studies of the 2016 election showed that the most outrageous and often totally fabricated stories were the most widely shared in the final weeks of the presidential race. Tweets and Facebook posts that evoked anger and fear went viral while those were more factual and balanced evoked little interest. Trump was the perfect candidate for a media environment that encouraged polarization, divisive anger, demonization of others and the creation of news bubbles in which people were isolated from contrary information. In 1927, U.S. Supreme Justice Louis Brandeis had articulated the Enlightenment notion that the remedy for “falsehood and fallacies” is “more speech, not enforced silence.” In the 21st century social media world had turned this idea on its head: more speech had become the perfect vehicle for the spreading of lies and disinformation.

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2.) The other thought that haunted me on the night of Trump’s election was that I had missed something very important. I was convinced that given the relative success of the eight years of President Barak Obama the American electorate would vote for substantial continuity rather than make a leap into the unknown with a reckless adventurer like Donald Trump. Obama, after all had inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and had returned the country to financial stability and growth. He had reduced unemployment from 10 percent to below five percent. He had accomplished something his predecessors had all failed to do: introduce substantial health care reform, extending health insurance to some 23 million people. It stopped well short of universal coverage but was a major advance and also was a move in the direction of economic fairness. Obama could have accomplished more but he also faced relentless opposition and obstructionism from the Republicans who won back a majority in Congress in 2010 and were determined to prevent Obama from doing anything, particularly any stimulus that would help the economy or address income inequality. Given this, I assumed that the country as a whole would not want to jeopardize the economic recovery. I and many others underestimated the amount of pain caused both by the financial crisis of 2008-9 but also by the larger transformation of our economy during the previous generation that went under the general heading of “globalization.” Economic deregulation, international trade agreements, automation, the rise of China, the outsourcing of jobs had brought about a fundamental reorganization of the American economy. Looked at from the point of view of a macro-economist, the change might have seemed, on balance, positive, but between 2000 and 2010 nearly six million American factory workers lost their jobs. The manufacturing employment sector shrunk by one-third. Coastal elites mostly experienced the upside of this transformation: cheaper international travel, a flood of inexpensive Chinese goods available through Amazon with the click of a computer stroke but in the middle of the country, in the industrial heartland, there was an epidemic of permanent unemployment, an opioid epidemic, an increase in divorce, domestic violence and “deaths of despair.”

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Trump had spoken to the pain and anger of that part of the population – working class whites without a university education – more effectively than Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Clinton’s husband, President Bill Clinton, had signed NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) that had led an increase in overall trade with Mexico but also a loss of factory jobs to Mexico. He had continued the Republican program of de-regulating the financial industry which had more than doubled as a percentage of the American Gross Domestic Product. The average salary at the New York investment bank Goldman Sachs by 2010 was $544,000 a year – and that number includes secretaries and office clerks who are paid much less. Meanwhile, the average salary for workers without a university education actually declined between 1980 and 2016. The chief executives of large corporations made only twenty times the salary of their average employee in 1965. Now top executives make 278 times as much. The share of the top one percent of income earners has increased from nine percent in 1978 – after years of relatively progressive taxation policy – to 24 percent before the financial crisis of 2007. The top 1 percent now possesses more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. The United States which had long been one of the more egalitarian societies in the world had become one of the most unequal.

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The white working-class people who helped elect Trump were not wrong to be angry although Trump’s analysis and solution to the problem was mostly demagoguery. They were not wrong in believing that the system was “rigged” against them. He blamed Mexican immigrants, Blacks on food stamps, international trade. He ignored the fact that the Republican Party had done more than any other force to rig the system in favor of the wealthy: weakening and destroying workers’ unions, massive tax cuts for the very wealthy, -- the Reagan and Bush tax cuts were enormous transfers of wealth toward the already affluent – weakening of protections for workers, of pension systems, the reduction of social services for the less affluent. What was true was the Democrats had failed to protect the working class against these trends and in some instances made matters worse and hence the sense of betrayal among its working-class voters. Trump’s own proposed program would almost certainly not end up helping working class Americans: he promised another huge tax cut, the cutting of corporate taxes, more deregulation. But he also promised a big infrastructure program, protecting social security and replacing Obama’s health care program with one that was bigger and better.

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3.) After Trump was elected one question that many people asked was whether the person we saw on the campaign trail for real or was this an act that Trump, star of his own reality TV show (The Apprentice) was playing for public consumption? Some conservatives insisted that the liberal press simply didn’t understand Trump. “The media has always taken Trump literally but it never takes him seriously,” said billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, “A lot of the voters who vote for Trump take Trump seriously but not literally.” By this Thiel meant that some of Trump’s more provocative positions – building the wall on the border with Mexico, banning Muslims – were more to be understood as metaphors for a tougher immigration policy rather than actual concrete intentions. Some speculated that he would grow in the office and moderate his office to expand his political base.

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But as Trump actually took power, it soon became apparent that there was very little difference between Trump the candidate and Trump the president, that the erratic, impulsive, immature, poorly-informed, narcissistic person that Trump appeared to be is actually who he really is. What some dismissed as mere campaign provocations turned out to be real policy proposals. He quickly proclaimed a Muslim ban but it was so hastily and poorly-conceived that it was thrown out by the courts as discriminatory. (He later revised it and banned immigration from several Muslim countries, presented as an anti-terrorism measure.) He passed a $1.8 trillion tax cut that would go -- over a ten year period -- overwhelmingly to the very rich. In the short term, someone making $1 million a year would get an average tax cut of $69,660, while a middle income family earning between $50,000 and $75,000 would get a modest tax cut of $870. For this modest benefit, the American tax payer would be left with an added $1.8 trillion to the deficit. Trump never even bothered to present his promised infrastructure bill that would have potentially added many thousands of jobs for less-skilled workers while improving the country’s ageing roads and bridges. Trump tried and ultimately failed to repeal Obama’s health care reform but never proposed any alternative. But thanks to weakening the existing health system, the number of Americans without insurance increased by a few million. Trump started a series of trade wars not only with China but with many of our longtime allies, and had to use taxpayer money to make up for the billions of dollars being lost by American farmers. The large corporations that saw their taxes drastically cut back did not use them the extra money to hire new workers, they used them to pay dividends to their stockholders or buy back their own stock, in order to lift their stock price – as well as the stock options of the company’s executives. The economic populism promised to the American working class never materialized.

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In foreign policy, very much the province of the president in the U.S. system, Trump seemed like an out-of-control child. He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. He backed out of the international coalition that had reached an agreement on limiting Iran’s nuclear program. He threatened to pull out of NATO. He engaged in trade disputes – and often quite public personal disagreements -- with our principal allies in Europe and Canada while appearing much more comfortable dealing with dictators from Putin, Erdogan and even the leader of North Korea first threatened North Korea with “fire and fury” and then says he “fell in love” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, insisting that the two had reached an agreement for a de-nuclearized Korea – an agreement that turned out to be nothing but hot air. He brought the U.S. to the brink of war with Iran. He praised and embraced many of the world’s bloodiest dictators from Kim Jong-Un, Egypt’s Al-Sisi and Vladimir Putin to Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, while offending and alienating most of our democratic allies.

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To an alarming degree, Trump undermined rule of law and independent institutions in the U.S. He fired the director of the FBI when he refused to drop the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016. Despite running on the slogan “Drain the Swamp,” he appointed countless lobbyists to regulate the industries they were paid to promote. He attacked judges who ruled against him, insisted, without evidence, that millions of illegal immigrants had voted illegally in the 2016. Ignoring official recommendation Trump awarded the contract to host the 2020 G7 summit to his own golf resort in Florida, a hotel resort that has been struggling financially. He tried to strong arm the newly-elected president of Ukraine into providing damaging evidence against a political opponent, Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden – a breach of protocol so severe that it earned him a vote of impeachment in the House of Representatives. Trump responded by firing everyone who had agreed to testify against him.

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Rather than moderate his behavior, Trump seemed in every area to “double-down” and become more extreme: by July 2020, he surpassed the mark of 20,000 false or misleading statements, a record kept by the Washington Post. Early in his administration, he told an average of five lies a day; he averaged 12 a day during the next two years of his presidency but was averaging 23 a day during the last year of his presidency.

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One of the clearest lessons of the Trump era is that it is very much possible for a well-established democracy to “de-democratize.” When I was writing about Silvio Berlusconi during the 1990’s and early 2000’s I frequently said, ‘This could never happen in the United States” referring to the gross conflicts-of-interest, the cronyism, the undermining of independent institutions and the constant lying that characterized the Berlusconi years. Instead we learned that many of the chief features of American democracy depended on socially-accepted but informal norms rather than on laws and clear rules. National institutions traditionally insulated from politics – the bedrock of American democracy – the judiciary, the FBI, the Federal Reserve, the Centers for Disease Control, the State Department, the Census Bureau, even the Post Office – were systematically undermined and bent to President Trump’s political will. Those refusing to go along were fired. At the same time, Trump did not divest himself of any of his business interests and continued openly to promote them: foreign leaders and business executives routinely stay at Trump hotels when they visit, putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in the president’s pocket each time. Trump went back on his often-repeated promise to disclose his tax returns – as a result we do not even know the extent to which he has profited from his own governmental decisions or the extent of his business dealings and debt in foreign countries with whom he deals regularly as president. The United States has come to resemble some South American countries – perhaps unfairly called “banana republics” – in which the strong man of the moment rewrites the rules of governance to benefit himself and remain in power. It no longer seems fanciful to talk about the United States “de-democratizing.”

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Trump, curiously, made no little or no effort to win over the parts of the electorate who might have increased his level of support: independent voters, moderate republicans, conservative Democrats who may not have voted for him but might be open to voting for a Republican president. Instead, he doubled down on a strategy of polarization: defending white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, picking fights with black leaders, attacking immigrants, opposing efforts to remove flags and monuments honoring the Confederacy, the slave-holding states that seceded from the United States in 1861.

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But Trump had one enormous strength that provided him with a great deal of support. He inherited an exceptionally strong economy that was in the middle of a robust recovery. Despite fierce opposition from the Republicans to any economic stimulus, President Barak Obama had brought unemployment down from about 10 percent to about 4.8 percent. It continued on this course during Trump’s first three years arriving at the enviable 3.5 percent. This gave Trump a kind of automatic credibility and allowed his supporters to ignore his obvious mistakes and flaws. Many would openly say: “I don’t like his manners or his tweets but he’s done a great job with the economy.” While a majority of Americans did not approve of Trump generally, they approved of his handling of the economy.

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Thus, in February, 2020 63 percent of Americans approved of his handling of the economy even though about 51 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump overall with only 44.4 percent approving of his presidency. Given the importance of the economy for an incumbent president, betting markets were giving Trump a better-than-even chance at re-election.

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Then, the COVID-19 crisis happened. It would frankly be difficult to find another example of the leader of an advanced democracy who has so badly mishandled a major crisis with such disastrous consequences that compare to Trump’s disastrous response to the coronavirus. He at first dismissed it as no more dangerous than the common flu, claiming it would go away “just like that.” He lost nearly two months in which the United States could have been preparing for a major outbreak. But other countries also underestimated the impact of the virus and were caught badly unprepared: Italy and the United Kingdom were in worse shape than the U.S. in March. But their leaders recovered from their early mistakes, adopted rigorous policies of social distancing, brought infection rates way down and were in a position to re-open their economies by summer. Trump briefly tried this and appeared to take the crisis seriously – and his approval numbers benefitted – declaring himself a “war time president” – but he seemed to lose interest and began worrying more about that the state the economy rather than about bringing the infection rate down. Ignoring the advice of virtually all the scientists, Trump urged various states – “Liberate Michigan!” “Liberate Minnesota!” – to re-open their economies hoping to create a populist anti-lockdown movement that might help him replicate his 2016 election victory. This – and the complete lack of any centralized federal policy to combat the virus – ended up backfiring catastrophically as the virus began to quickly spread to the states – almost all “red states” led by Republican governors – that followed Trump’s orders. Thus, the United States soon accounted for one-quarter of the world’s COVID cases as well as COVID deaths while representing only four percent of the world’s population. In late July, the U.S. was registering more than 60,000 new cases a day while, Italy, which had been even harder hit early in the crisis, was down to below 200 cases a day and reopening its society. The economy that Trump had thought he was protecting was in free fall: 22 million people had filed for unemployment creating the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

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Not only did more than 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, a majority now also disapproved of his handling of the economy – he had badly weakened his strongest argument for re-election.

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What is perhaps most devastating about the crisis for Trump is that his most obnoxious traits -- his compulsion to brag, exaggerate, lie, his refusal to admit mistakes, his extreme arrogance and contempt for experts, his lack of human empathy – could no longer be dismissed as purely personal failings but could be seen driving public policy right before our eyes with disastrous consequences, costing 150,000 American lives, wrecking the American economy and tearing at the fabric of our society.

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In the midst of this Coronavirus crisis, there was also the explosion of nation-wide protests in the wake of the police killing of another unarmed black man, George Floyd. Trump mishandled this, too, with the same almost surreal self-destructive ineptitude. With the entire nation waiting for words and gestures of healing and unity, Trump chose to attack the protestors and deny any legitimacy to their grievances, badly misreading the public mood. Again, central aspects of his character – his total lack of empathy or contrition, his unwillingness to admit error, to reach out to those who disagree with him – made him uniquely unfit to handle this crisis. In its most emblematic moment, the Trump administration used tear gas and violence to clear away peaceful demonstrators so that Trump could walk from the White House to a nearby church to pose for a photo opportunity holding a bible for the cameras. It was a typical Trump move to create the appearance of a strong Christian leader restoring law and order while it was so much at odds with reality in which Trump was aggravating tensions, using violence and acting in a way that was hardly Christian.

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In late July, German chancellor Angela Merkel, although herself a conservative, appeared to deliver a devastating negative verdict of Trump. "As we are experiencing firsthand, you cannot fight the pandemic with lies and disinformation any more than you can fight it with hate or incitement to hatred," Merkel said. "The limits of populism and denial of basic truths are being laid bare."

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Trump’s entire career – in business as in politics – has been based on the premise that what matters is not reality but the appearance of reality. He claimed to be a self-made millionaire despite having inherited a substantial fortune from his father. He had greatly exaggerated his wealth but that illusion convinced banks to lend him vast sums of money, making him genuinely rich. His businesses had failed disastrously but he got himself cast as the uber-successful star of the reality TV show The Apprentice: the show’s success increased the value of the Trump brand and helped restore his personal fortune. In politics, he had dared the world that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still retain the loyalty of his supporters who would believe whatever bizarre explanation he came up with rather than the evidence of their own eyes. The coronavirus represented a reality that Trump could not lie his way out of. Trump tried to manipulate the numbers and decrease testing arguing that the U.S.’s high number of cases was purely the result of the great job he was doing testing people but eventually the reality of the pandemic caught up with him: the hospital beds filling up, the rising number of dead, the reluctance of tens of millions of American to return to work in unsafe conditions. Trump’s failure with the corona virus – making his re-election in November unlikely – would seem to be the reassertion of the Enlightenment principle that reality matters. The pandemic seemed to reaffirm the basic laws of cause and effect – it was hard not to see that Trump’s inadequate response was responsible for why the United States led the world in COVID-19 deaths and why we failed to bring the virus under control as so many other countries had done. And yet, the fact that more than 41 percent of the American people still approve of Trump despite this catastrophe is testament to how badly polarized American society has become and the degree to which Trump and right-wing media have successfully created an alternative reality with “alternative facts,” the world that Orwell imagined where 2+2=5. Past crises – the Vietnam War and Watergate – had greatly reduced the president’s support both among his supporters as well as the general public suggesting that the entire society was living in the same universe of accepted facts. Trump’s remarkably solid base of support – never dipping below 40 percent seemingly impervious to overwhelming reality – combined with the peculiarities of the American electoral system make it entirely possible that Trump could win re-election – even though he will almost certainly lose the popular vote.

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If he does win it will be the third time the Republican Party wins the presidency despite losing the popular vote by a substantial margin (2000, 2016, 2020) deepening the sense of an increasingly fragile and dysfunctional democracy and the protests of this summer may look small and peaceful by comparison.