Max Burns

Max Burns is a Democratic strategist and the founder of Third Degree Strategies, a progressive communications firm. His writing has appeared in outlets including the New York Daily News, Business Insider, NBC News and Buzzfeed. 

"The Trump who will walk into the White House on Jan. 20 is a man steeped in unsettled vendettas, who came within a hair’s breadth of a string of federal felony convictions that he is now empowered to wipe away with a self-pardon — as if those offenses and so many others had never even happened. Trump will see his priorities as he has always seen them: party over country and self over all.

A man with 34 felony convictions can’t win the presidency in a nation where trust in institutions is high. It’s only in a culture where the justice system has long since lost its legitimacy that a man with such a thick criminal record as Trump glides by relatively unremarked. 

That one man can so effortlessly game American institutions to his own benefit says as much about the decrepit state of America’s institutions as it does about the moral decrepitude of the crook. The nine years of the Trump era have taken a bat to our democracy, and Trump’s MAGA movement has exploited the nation’s systemic weakness at every turn. 

Political misinformation flooded social media networks owned by Trump’s key allies, or by Trump personally. Meanwhile, Trump and compliant Republican lawmakers torched public trust in the courts — first by appointing an ethically vacant Supreme Court, and later by urging his followers to hate and distrust not only the judges who tried him but the entire “rigged” justice system. 

Trump is now set to return to the White House, and he’s made no secret of his lofty goals for a second term: gutting the civil service, destroying the independence of the Justice Department and seeking political and legal revenge on his lengthy list of personal enemies. 

Judging by yesterday’s election returns, a majority of Americans are eager to see Trump do exactly that. The former and future president now inherits a nation deeply weakened by his own toxic brand of politics. Our divided and exhausted nation will now need to fend off the constant extralegal whims of a president who is also, thanks to the Supreme Court, functionally immune from prosecution for any act he undertakes. 

If Trump’s first term was any indication, we won’t need to wait long for our next constitutional crisis. It matters that Trump won his office in a free and fair election. It matters that free people voluntarily chose to cloak Trump in power he will almost certainly abuse in far-reaching and destructive ways. 

Our country made the choice to walk down the dark path of Trump’s resentments and conspiracies. 

We will come to regret it."