Around 6:00 p.m. every day, groups of mostly South and Central American people gather outside the Row NYC hotel on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. When the hotel opened in 1928, The New York Times described the new building, then called the Lincoln, as “high class” and built in an “Italian” style. Much of that grandeur still exists on the outside, with its limestone and terra-cotta flourishes.
Today, the Row is a migrant shelter, and the people standing outside it are hoping to secure a room for the night. I pass by them most evenings when I walk from my office near Central Park to Penn Station. Donald Trump and his allies have called migrants like them “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of America.
The people outside the Row are mostly multigenerational families: young parents, their small children, and often grandparents. The kids are usually in strollers, not a tablet in sight to distract them. The parents look desperate. They are the “huddled masses” described in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, only a few miles away.
These men, women, and children are mostly not Americans—not yet at least—but there is something uniquely American about them. They are courageous, having left their homes and traveled thousands of miles in search of a better life for themselves and their children. During the Great Depression, when the crops failed and the factories shuttered, thousands of U.S. citizens packed up their families and moved to California in search of a better life for themselves and their children. They possessed “qualities of…courage and inventiveness and energy,” John Steinbeck wrote in Esquire. “If we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it. With all the odds against them, their goodness and strength survived.”
A few blocks from where these migrants are seeking shelter, Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden on 27 October. Many of the speakers that night directed their ire at these stateless people. Conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg said, “The fucking illegals, they get whatever they want, don’t they?” Stephen Miller, a former Trump adviser, said, “America is for Americans, and Americans only,” echoing a slogan from Nazi Germany. The former president did not denounce those statements. It was just another night in the 2024 presidential election, which has felt like an outer circle of hell, an eternal shitshow. On Election Day, the race is a tossup.
We know what Donald Trump will do, or try to do, if he wins the 2024 presidential election. He has told us: prosecute his political enemies, deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens, punish states run by Democrats, seal the border, round up the people outside the Row hotel and deport them. If he follows through, it would be unlike anything Americans have experienced.
This essay is not an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Rather, it is an attempt to answer this question: What happens to America if she loses?
When Donald Trump won in 2016, most of the country was shocked, including Donald Trump himself. Once the shock subsided, it looked to many of the people who didn’t vote for him that this was some terrible mistake. An aberration. Tired of sending the same people to Washington, D.C., voters cast the die for an outlier—they fucked around and found out. After four years, they voted him out, and he did everything possible to remain in power, including whipping up a mob to attack the Capitol Building. On the evening of January 6, 2021, senators from both parties denounced Trump, and it seemed this chapter in American history had come to a dark conclusion.
The pragmatic view of Trump’s return is that politics is cyclical. The arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. once suggested. It is a seesaw that bounces between liberalism—it was only four years ago that people protested in the streets for the cause of social justice—and conservatism.
The other view of a second Trump presidency is that something has fundamentally changed in America. If Trump is elected again, it will not be a mistake. Voters have been confronted with Trump for the past eight years. They know exactly who he is. Instead, the election of Donald Trump will force everyone in this country to reconsider what we are as a nation.
What is America? Yes, it is a collection of states and territories bound together by a document, the Constitution. But more than anything else, America is an idea, a nation of men and women enshrined with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Americans have an idea about themselves.
We are a nation that built cities and railroads, defeated the Nazis and the Soviet Union, fought for and won voting and civil rights for women and people of colour. Many of us or our ancestors traveled thousands of miles from our homes in other lands in search of a new life for ourselves and our children. Our faults as a nation are plenty. We butchered Indigenous people to take their land and build our cities and railroads; we exploited the labor of enslaved people; we dropped an atomic bomb on Japanese cities to end World War II and stockpiled nuclear weapons to beat the Soviets; we continue to marginalise people of colour.
But the prevailing idea is that we are a fundamentally decent people.
If Trump is elected to a second term, it will anger and sadden tens of millions. Many will feel that their lives and livelihood are threatened. Recently, I was speaking to the mother of a friend. She is an elderly Hispanic woman who fears Trump will deport her. She is an American citizen. As a straight, white male citizen of this country, I probably have the least to lose under a Trump administration, though I would fear for my two young daughters. If he is elected again, I believe our fundamental decency as a nation will erode. Telling thousands of people inside an arena that the huddled masses a few blocks away are inhuman will not be gross misbehaviour; it will become normal. It will become policy. It will become part of our national fabric.
A second Trump presidency will dramatically and, perhaps, permanently alter the idea of America. Maybe that’s exactly what America wants. When Esquire profiled former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon last year, he said to the writer, Chris Heath: “You’re a reasonable man in the middle….You’re a kindhearted person, you think both sides are wrong. It’s like Ecclesiastes. It’s just not your time. I hate to say it: It’s just not your time. It’s us versus them. They hate us and we hate them. One side’s going to win here. And it’s going to get ugly. It’s going to get messy.”
That line has haunted me since I read it, because what if Bannon is right? What if we do live in a different time, in which Americans can’t find common ground, in which they are not kindhearted people; instead, we are a nation that both detests migrants and hates our fellow citizens, a nation that punishes its political enemies and deploys the military upon everyone else? Maybe those among us who want America to be decent are in the minority. Maybe America has already changed, and our politics are only catching up. But that’s not the idea Americans have held up about themselves during my lifetime.
After I walk through the scrum of people outside the Row hotel, and past Madison Square Garden, I board a train and travel sixteen miles to my home in suburban New Jersey. In my village of about four thousand people, the voter rolls are split about 50/50 Republican and Democrat. Some houses are adorned with enormous Trump flags; others have small yard signs bearing the names of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. At parties and soccer games, we rarely talk national politics, even though it’s on everyone’s mind.
On Halloween night, I walked around our neighbourhood with my wife and kids and our friends and their kids. One of the women in our group wore a Kamala Harris T-shirt. As we strolled through the streets buzzing with children dressed as monsters and princesses and the emotions from Inside Out 2, we bumped into neighbours wearing Trump T-shirts and hats. The woman with the Harris shirt and one of the guys with a Trump hat are old friends. They talked about their kids and their jobs. They laughed about the last party they attended together and promised to get together soon at another party. There was none of the hatred Bannon described.
This gives me hope.
So do the people outside the Row hotel. “With all the odds against them,” Steinbeck wrote in Esquire, “their goodness and strength survived.”
