Donald Trump won’t bring about doomsday

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The news, in brief …

• Zelenskyy: Trump considering US troop deployment in Ukraine

  The Ukrainian leader said Trump is weighing American troop involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war. Read more.

• Clooney: ABC, CBS should have told Trump “go f**k yourself”

  The "Good Night, and Good Luck" star worried about the future of the press in a new interview. Read more.

• The Oath Keepers are coming back

  Years after the arrest of the group's leader, the far-right militia is returning. Read more.

Make me smarter …

Trump’s latest attack on the Constitution — and Joe Biden

The president is trying to find a workaround to Biden's commutations — and the double jeopardy clause. Read more.

The end isn’t nigh …

Mother Ann Lee could not be more different from Donald Trump at first glance.

Lee was born half a world and two centuries away from Trump’s mid-century Queens, in the filthy and cramped slums of a rapidly industrializing Manchester, England. Where Trump was the silver-spooned son of a slumlord, Lee grew up surrounded by the squalor that was minting fortunes for a select few. A deeply religious woman, she came to the realization that capital was antithetical to Christianity. After an epiphany, she founded the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Setting out for the New World with her followers, she founded a series of communitarian villages throughout the wilderness of New England.

Unlike the selfish and lecherous Trump, Lee believed that the only way to find salvation was to eschew all wealth, familial ties and sex. Her followers did not believe in easy gratification and cut loose only in worship. Their ecstatic revivals gave her church the name by which it is best remembered: the Shakers.

If Lee had anything in common with Trump, it was the tenor of the times in which she lived. The colonies were being torn apart by sectarian divisions that required all Americans to declare which side they were on. (The pacifist Shakers were beaten and jailed for their staunch pacifism in the face of revolutionary fervor.) Old orders and empires were failing, without a clear vision of what was to replace them. Millenarian cultists peppered the countryside, believing in nothing so much as the at-hand end of days.

Trump feels, and Lee felt, that they had come in at the end of something. Lee, for her part, thought the thousand-year reign of Christ on Earth prophesied in the Bible’s Book of Revelation had already begun. Tidy Shaker settlements were meant to be a reflection of Heaven, where all men and women were equal in a neat and prosperous community.

Trump can read the writing on the wall, if not a clock. He saw the bloodbath of the 2025 elections and knows that worse is probably coming in 2026. Chunks of his base have eroded in the wake of revelations about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. His blatant self-dealing and criminality will have to come to an end, so he’s spent his second term handing out pardons, widening loopholes through which he can escape accountability and stealing anything that isn’t nailed down.

Outside of furniture auctions and early American histories, the most notable thing about Lee is that she was wrong. The end times didn’t come to pass in her lifetime and the Shaker sect has been winnowed down to three holdouts in Maine. Trump’s stubborn belief that the American experiment will end the second he’s no longer in control is equally incorrect. No trumpet will sound and bring the whole country down around our ears. A country that came back together after the burning of Atlanta will survive the demolition of the East Wing.

The upcoming second year of Trump’s second term will be bad. He’ll find newer and more obvious forms of graft as his window for blatant corruption starts to close. He’ll likely call for the death of a few more journalists and political opponents. He might start a war or three.

America in 2026 will be far from a New Jerusalem, with alabaster buildings gleaming along streets of gold, but it also won’t be Bedlam. As Trump tries to justify his attacks on the Constitution by ginning up existential crises, it’s worth remembering we’ve been through worse. And unlike the Shaker’s American Zion and Trump’s Atlantic City Taj Mahal, we’re still standing.

What do you think? Will Trump’s policies last as long as a Shaker chair? Does this country have a few more decades in the tank? Sound off in the comments by tapping the speech bubble icon.

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Before you go …

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