When Will the Trump Nightmare End? Have Too Many Thresholds Already Been Crossed?

Donald Trump continues to undermine the U.S. Constitution, reject democratic culture, violate international law, strain relationships with allies, and threaten adversaries with bombing them back to the Stone Age. The obvious question is: When will this end? Even as immediate issues are being raised about the reasons behind the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran and the exact nature of the ceasefire, we should keep asking: When will Trump’s nightmarish influence stop?

But the real question may not be when it ends. It may be whether the United States can ever return to what it was before Trump. Have too many thresholds already been crossed to return to a pre-Trump era? Have too many structures and relationships been damaged to imagine life as it was before January 2025?

To paraphrase Thomas Wolfe: You can’t go pre-Trump [home] again.

Consider one example: The New York Times recently announced that it will increase its coverage of the Supreme Court and the broader U.S. legal system. The “paper of record” said it would “assign a team of four reporters to cover the Court,” expanding from the previous single-reporter model.

Yet while the Times sees journalists and the courts as guardians of democracy, Trump’s ambitions raise doubts about whether journalists and institutions can safeguard the rule of law. At the same moment the Times enlarged its legal coverage, rumors spread that Trump is considering ways to alter the 2026 midterms and is “thinking about” an eventual third term or even never leaving the Oval Office. What will the Times correspondents and courts do if Trump ignores legal and historical precedent?

Both symbolic and structural damage matter in the short and long term. If Trump’s influence fades, will Trump-era names eventually be reversed? Will the Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace return to simply the U.S. Institute of Peace? Will the President Donald J. Trump International Airport in West Palm Beach revert to Palm Beach International Airport?

There are historical precedents. Institutions once named for Andrew Jackson,  the seventh president, have been renamed, reflecting changing attitudes toward his legacy of the Trail of Tears. The prestigious Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs was renamed in 2020 the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, removing the name of the former president of that university as well as the former president of the United States, because of concerns about his racist views and policies.

And what about physical changes? Some physical changes are reversible. Will a future president restore the East Wing and remove Trump’s golden ballroom? Will some future leader eliminate the gold fixtures he has displayed throughout the White House? Remember how First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy elegantly redecorated the White House.

But when the democratic culture that underpins democracy erodes, that damage may be irreversible in the long term. At some point, a threshold is crossed—and no amount of renaming or redecorating can restore the pre-Trump state of things.

The term “ratcheting up” is helpful here. A ratchet allows motion in one direction while preventing backward movement. Each click moves the mechanism forward, creating a new position that cannot easily return to the previous one. In politics, the metaphor describes changes that accumulate gradually but become structurally difficult to undo.

Over the past decade, American political life has increasingly taken on this ratchet-like quality. Norms once assumed to be stable—respect for election outcomes, limits on executive authority, the independence of courts, presidential demeanor—have been pushed forward, one notch at a time. Each step may appear reversible in theory, but in practice the system rarely moves back to where it once stood.

This expansion assumes that courts, as powerful institutions, can check executive overreach and preserve the rule of law. The Times expanding Supreme Court coverage is an example of that liberal thinking. But the ratchet metaphor warns us that even if reporters scrutinize every decision, norms that have been eroded—once crossed—may not snap back. Each step forward in institutional damage sets a new baseline, making a return to pre‑Trump norms ever more difficult.

The United States has rebuilt institutions before. Even catastrophic rulings like the 1857 Dred Scott decision—which denied Black Americans citizenship and struck down congressional limits on slavery—were eventually overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment.

But rebuilding democratic culture is far harder to reconstruct than repairing legal structures. Once political actors learn that norms can be broken without consequence, the incentive to respect them weakens permanently. This is the deeper meaning of a political ratchet. The system moves forward to a new baseline of behavior. The threshold, once crossed, becomes part of the accepted norms.

How else to understand President Trump’s pardoning of the January 6 invaders of the Capitol who attempted to disrupt a constitutional process?

The question, then, is not only when the current political storm will end chronologically, but whether the ratchet will click again—and what shape the next notch will take. Each shift reshapes expectations, modifies what is considered possible, and tests the resilience of the institutions and civic activities that hold a democracy together.

When democratic norms are sufficiently ignored, there may be no turning back. At some point, a threshold is crossed—and no renaming or redecorating can restore the pre-Trump situation. And the same question now looms over international institutions. Can NATO allies ever trust the United States to honor Article 5 after Trump dismissed the alliance as a “paper tiger”? Several multilateral bodies, the United Nations included, face the same uncertainty.

In the end, the survival of a true democracy depends less on laws than on the actions of the citizens who live within it. All civil societies must choose to defend norms, enforce limits, and demand accountability. If that vigilance fades, the ratchet will click forward, notch by notch, until the foundations of democratic governance are irreparably weakened. As Thomas Wolfe warned in another context, there may be no going back, and the Trump nightmare continues.

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