Donald Trump Is The New Republic’s 2024 Scoundrel of the Year
For the first time in what is now clearly the Trump era—a period stretching from the rise of “birtherism” to the present and, depressingly, beyond—one could make a reasonably strong case that someone other than Donald Trump is the greatest villain of the moment.
Tech titan Elon Musk—TNR’s 2023 Scoundrel of the Year—has spent billions of dollars to turn Twitter into X, a misinformation machine aimed solely at pumping out janky right-wing propaganda, and hundreds of millions to make Trump president. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, is intent on unwinding a century of medical and scientific progress. JD Vance, Trump’s vice president–elect, is the most successful of his craven imitators: He is simultaneously slavishly devoted to Trump and to pushing a Catholic spin on Christian nationalism that would return women to the home and LGBTQ people to the closet. Shameless, cynical, and extreme, he will unquestionably be one of the most dangerous men ever in his new role—especially when one considers the advanced age and ill health of the president.
As for Trump, one could argue that he has never been more liked. He didn’t just win the election this time—he also won the popular vote, thanks in part to Black and Latino voters who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020. A CNN poll earlier this month found that a majority of Americans broadly approved of his transition, despite Cabinet nominees accused of sexual misconduct allegations, corruption, and blatant authoritarianism. Even culturally, Trump is ascendant. Athletes across the country are celebrating by “dancing” like him, and some of the most popular podcasters in the country lionize him. A lot of people have always liked Trump, but liking him has never been more accepted or acceptable.
But make no mistake: Trump is not just as bad as he’s ever been; he’s somehow worse. That’s why, after five years of denying him this ignominy, we have decided to finally award Trump our Scoundrel of the Year. (Well, Time magazine also gave us no choice.)
The Trump who will be sworn into office on January 20 is diminished by age and a decade of political warfare. Nearly 80, he is often incoherent and increasingly unstable. Never one for complex ideas, he now often struggles to articulate simple thoughts and seemingly rattles between two modes: reminiscences about Broadway musicals and the penises of famous people he has met, and diatribes against his political enemies. It would be a mistake to say that this man was ever in possession of anything resembling good judgment. But he seemingly has no judgment at all anymore, and will soon hold incalculable power.
Much of Trump’s obvious decline is human. He is very old, does not exercise, and has what is likely the worst diet any president has had in a century at least. (Whatever William Howard Taft was eating, it wasn’t McDonald’s.) But much of it stems from having endured something unusual for him: accountability. In 2024, Trump faced multiple efforts to hold him criminally liable for his actions: for his widespread fraud as a real estate developer (and later as someone basically playing a businessman on television), for willfully retaining classified documents so he could feel important, for paying off an adult film star in 2016 so she couldn’t tell the voting public about their affair, and—most importantly—for trying to subvert an election he lost in 2020. He was found guilty of fraud in May and, soon after, ordered to pay nearly $500 million in penalties; he was similarly found guilty over the hush-money payment. The other cases have not yet gone to trial and likely never will. He will almost certainly face no consequences for any of that now that he has won back the presidency. But those cases all took a severe toll on him, leaving him angrier and more determined to achieve vengeance.
Some of the danger that Trump poses comes from this diminishment, but he has also calcified over the last decade. The Trump who won the presidency in 2016 was clueless about the federal government, and he had to rely on his party apparatus and the conservative establishment to staff much of his administration. Thus, he was largely surrounded by experienced Republicans—think Rex Tillerson and Jim Mattis and John Kelly, the so-called “adults in the room”—who buffered his increasing megalomania and budding authoritarianism. Over the last decade, however, Trump’s allies have built a sizable and terrifying network of loyalists and fellow travelers, so now he will enter the White House surrounded by people who are intent on remaking the federal government in his twisted image.
Much of Trump’s power comes from these like-minded loyalists and sycophants—such as Kash Patel, his nominee to weaponize the FBI against opponents, and returning immigrant-basher Stephen Miller—as well as those who see him as a tool for their own ends, like Musk and RFK Jr. But make no mistake: The growing extremism of Trump’s political project stems directly from its leader.
This project began with a pledge to build a wall on America’s southern border. It is now centered on a promise to deport tens of millions. In 2016, Trump campaigned by promising to lock up his opponent, Hillary Clinton; he now plans to wield the Justice Department against dozens, if not hundreds, of political rivals. He also has the beleaguered mainstream media in his sights, filing a spurious suit this month against The Des Moines Register over a preelection poll that showed Trump losing Iowa. He has become more openly authoritarian and fascistic.
At the same time, Trump has never been less populist. There was a time when one could make the case—albeit credulously—that he represented a break from the economic policies that had defined the Republican Party for two generations. He was thought to represent the end of, or at least a challenge to, the GOP’s lockstep fealty to tax cuts and deregulation and commitment to the interests of the wealthy (typically the extremely wealthy) over those of workers. Trump’s movement theoretically tapped into the rage at that destructive economic ideology and would represent a new way forward, one built around protectionism and the interests of the tens of millions of (mostly white) working-class voters.
No one can make that case credibly now. Yes, Trump may or may not push to levy high tariffs against America’s rivals and allies alike. But, as with his first term, the clear aim that has emerged from the first weeks of his transition is yet another sizable corporate tax cut. Musk and the other barnacles who have successfully attached themselves to Trump’s rusted hull, meanwhile, have openly resuscitated all of the worst parts of the Republican tradition that so many declared dead after 2016. Musk’s core project is DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency, a characteristically cringy and stupid reference to an outdated meme—whose aim is to dramatically cut government spending. Its targets are familiar: social welfare programs, health care, Medicaid, even Social Security. Musk openly parrots Grover Norquist, and congressional Republicans are eager to do his bidding.
The second Trump term, in other words, will be a supercharged version of the first: both more authoritarian and more traditionally conservative. There will be mass deportations and drastic, perhaps even draconian, cuts to social spending. At the same time, new villains like Musk and Kennedy and Vance—who may very well become president before 2029—will be empowered. None of this would be possible without Trump. He orchestrated all of it. Trumpism has not only taken over the Republican Party; it has become our country’s ruling ideology. We all live in this elderly, orange-faced scoundrel’s world now.