US politics in 2023: A year of ambiguous endings and ominous beginnings

As Henry James once reportedly said, America is “more like a world than a country”, and summing up its various contradictions over the past year is even more challenging than usual. The narratives, the endings and the beginnings, are all clouded with ambiguity.

To start with the least ambiguous ending: on the last day of November, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger died. The bipartisan grandee and one of the most prolific mass murderers in history made it to triple figures. Among other things, he was emblematic of one of the more defensible motivations one can sincerely ascribe to Donald Trump’s voters: that they were voting against a chummy, hollow, power-preserving elite, nigh indistinguishable from one party to another, writing blurbs for each other’s books and accepting vast sums to address one another behind closed doors.

No matter, in Kissinger’s case, the tens of thousands of Americans (and millions upon millions overseas) who are dead because of him. Trump, the America-first isolationist that he is, liked the “madman doctrine” just fine when it came to rhetoric, but was more restrained on foreign policy than Kissinger ever was. The near certainty that Trump will be the next Republican candidate for president marks the ongoing death of one idea of what America is among conservative voters. That Trump’s lavish lifestyle is more and more clearly based on fraud, or that he met with Kissinger several times in office, is among the many, many things his voters are able to overlook.

In December, Republican Kevin McCarthy quit politics, having been ousted in October by his colleagues as House speaker, the first to suffer such a fate. McCarthy, who, as Guy Rundle put it in these pages, is “of the right by Republican standards, of the very right on the US spectrum, and off the scale entirely by ours”, had previously ordered an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. But he was apparently insufficiently right-wing or anti-Democrat for fewer than a dozen rebel Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz, who ousted him for doing a deal with the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. The Democrats decided to not intervene to save him, and he was gone. It is unclear what, if anything, this expulsion has achieved for the Republicans since.

Also in December, George Santos became only the sixth person in the history of the United States Congress to be expelled from the House by his peers. Santos spent his 11 months in office spitting out demonstrable lies like fistfuls of confetti: he has falsely claimed to be Jewish and a descendant of Holocaust victims; lied about his mother being in the World Trade Center during 9/11; and was found to have scammed the Amish dog-owning community in Pennsylvania.

Inevitably, felony charges found their way into the mix, 23 of them in October, including wire fraud, money laundering and theft of public funds. This was followed in November by a House ethics committee that found he had exploited “every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit”, with campaign money allegedly blown on Botox treatments, credit card debt, and OnlyFans subscriptions.

He denies all charges and awaits trial. Between them, Santos and McCarthy give a fairly terse summary of the current state of the Republican Party.

Then there are the tragicomic debates for the Republican presidential nomination, rolling on like some kind of haunted music hall, the performers all surely knowing in their hearts that the audience left long ago.

The person this is all for, or at least on account of, is Trump, who regarded it all with the same blank indifference as Damien from The Omen watching his nanny’s death. He was, of course, busy spending the year slouching and mumbling like a stroppy teenager in various courtrooms as one brick and then another was yanked from the shuddering tower of his projected image.

The year kicked off with Trump taking the informal title of the presumptive party nominee, while simultaneously becoming the first former president in US history to be indicted on federal charges. He ended the year with three further indictments, and several of his former allies agreeing to provide evidence against him, as Trump continued to slur incoherently through rallies.

Trump and his team spoke of their plans for his second term — things like purging the government of his enemies and turning the army on citizens. Yet his status as the next Republican candidate for the White House remained completely unaffected. He will spend the early part of next year, during the cluster of primaries where local Republicans will vote on their preferred candidate, embroiled in yet more court cases, still using them for campaign material, and still miles ahead of any likely competitor.

But despite all this, and the increasingly understandable worries voters hold about his age and the attendant bafflement that the Democrats haven’t come up with any kind of plan B for 2024, Joe Biden can claim to have had a decent year. The mammoth Inflation Reduction Act, though passed in 2022, began to take proper effect this year, and in November’s flurry of gubernatorial, state legislature, mayoral and other local office elections, the Democrats greatly outperformed expectations.

Two related interpretations of this will comfort Biden and his backers.

First, the most energising voter issue — anger and fear at the restriction of reproductive rights — only arose because of one of Trump’s greatest successes in office, the stacking of courts with conservative judges, which culminated in the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade.

Second, there’s the hope that the Democrats will be clinging on to for dear life until November 2024: the bet that enough Americans, having felt the personal effects of Trump’s approach to government, will decide Biden is a compromise they are still willing to make.