Is Our President-Elect a Creepy Clown?

That's one theory. Malicious, mean-spirited, but at base just a clown, an entertainer who lives to arouse the crowd, lives to hear them chant his name. One of the few clues about the texture Trump's presidency will assume is his remark that he wants to have more rallies. That part was fun.

But no, after witnessing his iconoclastic but somehow superb electoral triumph, a person would be rash indeed to underrate Trump or write off his intelligence.  Let's try on another, more serious mask: the authoritarian hyper-president, the one who looks a bit like Mussolini. This Trump might really create that immigrant deportation strike force. He might push his attorney general to pursue Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization. He might dissolve alliances, abrogate treaties, instigate trade wars--all the crazy talk he indulged in at those rallies. Might that  be the real Trump?

Maybe, and those uncertain possibilities are what wake me up in the wee hours these days--Trump really could be that dangerous man with his finger too close to the nuclear codes, or more probably, too close to his Twitter account. And it's not just me--the leaders of our erstwhile allies are clearly waking up with the same anxieties, as Angela Merkel's admonitory letter to Trump makes all too clear.

But there's a third possibility, in its way more worrisome because the most plausible. As I look at the familiar faces of the Republican hierarchy lining up alongside the President-elect--Ryan and McConnell, Gingerich and Giuliani, the many rank-and-filers who came back to him despite all their misgivings--I realize that the control of both houses (and most State Houses), of judicial appointments including the swing vote on the Supreme Court, and most of all, the presidential signing pen will set in motion the biggest reversal of liberalism (and modernity) this country has ever experienced. Trump needs to do very little--there are already suggestions that he will delegate much of this legislative and deregulatory grunt work to Pence. He just has to remove the threat of veto, and the floodgates will open, sweeping away climate and energy measures, workplace protections, financial controls, 1st and 14th Amendment protections ... it's a long list. Angry voters wanted 'change' of a largely unspecified sort. They have put in place the most powerful reactionary assemblage of political power in anyone's living memory. It's not clear Trump intended anything of the sort, but it's pretty clear that the Republican leadership knew exactly what it was doing as it executed its valse hesitante with its nominee. Now the band will really play, and our heads, those of us living comfortably in metropolitan, coastal, post-modern America, will spin. Or roll.