How America will recover from Trump

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on as he meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

We’ve endured 10 months of Trump’s mayhem so far. A question I’ve been asking various people is how long they believe it will take for America to recover from Trump — if the nation ever will recover?

It’s impossible to answer with any definitiveness. It depends on how long you believe he’ll remain in office, whether you think Democrats will prevail in the 2026 midterms, what role you believe the Supreme Court will play in constraining Trump, whether you think American voters will boot him (or his successor) out of office in 2028, and if you believe we’ll ever have free and fair elections again.

Here’s the range of responses I’ve been getting. I’d be very interested in yours.

1. We’ll recover quickly; all we need is one good president and a competent Congress. Americans are resilient. We’ve recovered from depression, war, economic calamities (such as the near meltdown of Wall Street), and political strife (think of 1968). We’re polarized at the moment, but we’ve been polarized before (think of the Civil Rights Movement, or the fight for marriage equality). The biggest underlying problems we face are economic — affordability and widening economic inequalities — which a good president and competent Congress can help rectify. I’m optimistic. We’re a practical people. Time and again, when we have to make changes, we roll up our collective sleeves and do so.

2. It will take at least a decade. Although we’re practical and resilient, Trump and his sycophants have done so much damage to the institutional and moral fabric of the nation that I don’t think we can expect to be back — even back to where we were before Trump first came to power — for at least a decade. We will recover, but that will require several terms of a good president and majorities in Congress who understand the importance of both rebuilding and reforming democratic institutions and making the economy work for all instead of a few at the top. This is doable; we’ve achieved these sorts of positive changes and reforms before. But we need to be steadfast and patient.

3. We won’t recover for at least a generation. The damage has been so profound — undermining not only our legal and political systems but also our economic system and even our culture — that I believe it will take several generations before we recover from this. We can do it: giving real hope to the non-college working class, overcoming the racial and ethnic divides that Trump has exacerbated, ensuring equal opportunity, ending the bullying and coarsening that Trump and his lapdogs have encouraged, and opening America back up to the rest of the world — all are possible, but all will require diligent and determined efforts that may not pay off until the end of the century.

4. Never. America will never recover from this. Trump has destroyed what was left of the nation’s capacity for self-government. His two terms — especially the last 10 months and what I expect to be the remainder of his term — have brought us so far from where we should be that we will never be able to get back on track. Trump himself is the consequence and culmination of decades of decay of our democratic institutions, decades of widening inequality, of inadequate responses to climate change, and of irresponsible world leadership. Much as I don’t want to be defeatist or pessimistic, the terrible reality is that there is no longer hope for America.

So, today’s Office Hours discussion question: How long will it take America to recover from Trump, if it ever will?

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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