Yes, We Did Tell You How Bad This Would Be

The Trump disaster wasn’t unforeseeable. It was inevitable—and we said so, over and over again.

Photo: Getty images

by Ben Cohen

Richard Hanania is one of the more provocative figures to emerge from the intellectual corners of the post-Trump right. A political scientist with Ivy League credentials and a growing following, Hanania has positioned himself as a sharp contrarian critic of liberal orthodoxy and an influential voice in conservative circles. But his ascent has been shadowed by controversy—not least his early pseudonymous writings for white nationalist publications (which he later disavowed).

More recently, Hanania has styled himself as a heterodox thinker, challenging identity politics and championing civil rights rollback through a wonky, technocratic lens. Yet for all his supposed foresight, Hanania got one of the biggest calls of the last decade disastrously wrong: Donald Trump.

In a recent article titled “Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism,” Hanania offers a belated mea culpa for his support—an admission that rings hollow for those of us who, from the beginning, tried to warn him exactly how bad it would be:

Here’s what Hanania wrote in his essay:

When I said I would vote Trump in 2024, I was clear eyed about the human capital problem on the right. I just thought that the basic ideological basis of conservatism – free markets, individual rights, tough on crime and foreign adversaries – was sound and enough of it was left over to make even a Republican president this personally flawed a better option.

Yet I was expecting something of a repeat of the first administration, with Trump restrained by traditional conservative ideas, personnel, and institutions. As it turned out, the old Reagan coalition was becoming increasingly hollow, replaced by Trump worship, online edgelordism, and late arriving scammers like crypto bros and MAHA. The signs were there, and I talked extensively about how Trump was becoming something of a cult leader with few checks on his whims and desires. But I must’ve thought that maybe Jared Kushner would just wait until he fell asleep around noon and then start making all the right calls. Or that it would be Elon, but that Elon was a smart guy with libertarian views instead of someone whose brain had been completely melted by right-wing internet slop.

The problem in the end though wasn’t just Trump as an individual, even though he is quite awful, but the entire idea of anti-establishment politics. We now have a great deal of empirical evidence showing that populism simply does not work, whether in its right or left-wing form.

The piece is worth reading in full, but the crux of his argument is that populist movements, by prioritizing loyalty over competence, inherently lead to governance by the least qualified individuals—a condition known as ‘kakistocracy’ (or “a government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state”).

Hanania apparently didn’t see this coming, but has been appalled by the Trump's administration’s actions over the past three months.

“The results are being seen in the collapse of the stock market, and the harm being done to the rule of law and our scientific institutions,” concludes Hanania in his piece. “Let this be a warning to other countries that might be tempted to take a similar path, and provide lessons for how we decide to move forward once the Trump era ends.”

I don’t want to be too harsh on Hanania here — his public admission that he was wrong is commendable. But “nobody knew how bad” this would get? Really?

There are hundreds of publications, thousands of public figures, and an entire political party that has spent almost a decade trying to tell America how insane Donald Trump is, and why voting him into power could very well precipitate the end of democracy in America. The man tried to overthrow the goddamn government when he lost a free and fair election. And yet Hanania tossed all of that aside and decided Trump was a better bet than Kamala Harris—a scandal-free, eminently qualified, non-fascist public servant.

How much evidence did Hanania need?

What about the time when Trump almost killed himself and his entire White House after hosting a Covid super spreader event? What about the time he suggested injecting bleach into people’s veins as a treatment? Or when he repeatedly downplayed the virus despite knowing how deadly it was, discouraged mask-wearing, attacked his own public health officials, and then politicized his pandemic response so that it contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? Trump held indoor rallies in the middle of a highly contagious pandemic, tried to sabotage mail-in voting designed to protect lives, and turned science into a partisan culture war.

Or what about when Trump stood in front of a church holding a Bible like a prop after tear-gassing peaceful protesters? Or when he extorted a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political rival? What about the second impeachment for inciting a violent insurrection against the U.S. Capitol and refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power? Or the dozens of judges he appointed who were rated “not qualified”? Or the family separation policy at the border, where children were literally ripped from their parents’ arms and lost in the system?

What about the nonstop lies—over 30,000 documented false or misleading claims while in office? Or the time he cozied up to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and took Russia’s side over America’s own intelligence agencies on the world stage? Or when he called soldiers who died in war “suckers” and “losers”? Or when he tried to cancel the 2020 election results by pressuring secretaries of state, filing 60+ bogus lawsuits, and ultimately encouraging a coup?

How about his personal grift—using the presidency to enrich himself through his hotels, golf courses, and businesses? Or the time he suggested nuking hurricanes? Or when he kept classified documents in his goddamn bathroom? Or the 91 felony counts across four jurisdictions?

Hanania bet that because Trump was a conservative, his policies would outweigh the obvious, screaming risk he posed to the entire democratic system.

Again, this isn’t to single out Hanania for missing the blinding-fucking-obvious—but seriously, what does Donald Trump have to do to prove he shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House?

Apparently, it all comes down to the economy. Conservatives are just fine with fascism as long as the tax cuts flow and brown people get deported. But mess with the stock market? Now you’ve gone too far.

Bizarrely, Hanania placed his bet with full awareness of the risks. In his 2024 piece, he made it crystal clear why:

In this election, one side threatens democracy and the other threatens capitalism. My sympathy towards Republicans is based on my belief that capitalism is simply much more important, and also a lot more fragile. Advanced democracies practically never morph into dictatorships, while all of them are plagued by policies that are much too statist. Moreover, the threat to democracy is unique to Trump, while hatred of markets is deeply embedded in the left. When Trump appoints Republican judges, they won’t be harming democracy thirty years down the line, while Democrat judges will continue finding bad reasons to restrict individual liberty and make society poorer for the rest of their lives. We don’t live in a country that is clearly divided along the pro-/anti-freedom axis. Given that reality, in my judgement Republicans’ theocratic leanings, bias against foreigners, and cult of personality do not make them worse than the side that is more consistently hostile to economic liberty.

In the end, Hanania is trying to intellectualize his way out of an appalling error in judgment. He insists that because Trump once cut taxes and appointed some Federalist Society judges, he was a safer bet than a center-left liberal with no authoritarian tendencies. That because the left occasionally overreaches on economic regulation, we should risk handing nuclear codes to a wannabe dictator.

This is not just bad analysis, it’s a profound moral failure. Hanania’s belief that markets matter more than democracy says less about Trump than it does about the hollowness at the heart of conservative intellectualism. If protecting capitalism means tolerating corruption, racism, authoritarianism, and chaos, then what exactly is it we are conserving?