As students, we were told that America is a champion of democracy, liberty and equality. In the post-World War II era, America stood for the cause of a "free world". However, this belief was shattered when America supported dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in its pursuit of power to remain the dominant economic and military superpower. The emergence of Donald Trump is an indication that the old American value system is on retreat, giving rise to extreme right-wing politics while remaining a democracy.

In America, like in the rest of the democratic world, including India, democracy doesn't necessarily mean a plural, inclusive, tolerant, and accommodating society devoid of fear, intimidation, hatred, divisiveness, and disruption. For Americans, like any other people, survival instinct and material comfort are more important than ethics and morals in public life. Consequently, the land of immigrants is facing a crisis of identity, with the nation divided on racial and ethnic lines like never before. It deviated from the ideals of the founding fathers of the USA.

Trump married thrice. His first wife was late model Marie, married in 1977 and divorced in 1992. He had three children from this marriage – Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka, and Eric. He married his second wife, singer-model Maria Maples, in 1993 and divorced her in 1999. He has a daughter from this marriage, Tiffany. His third and present wife, Melania, was also a model, and the couple has one child, Barron William. A real estate mogul, Trump's family is worth 850 billion dollars. As President, he broke the tradition of releasing tax returns. New York Times reported in 2020 that Trump had paid just 750 dollars in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and none in 10 of the 15 previous years.

Having lost the presidential race in 2020, Trump succeeded in getting re-elected as the President of America, securing a majority of both electoral and popular votes: 312 out of 538 electoral votes and 50.5 % popular vote. In the Senate, Republicans secured 52 seats out of 100, while in the House of Representatives, they managed to scrape through a razor-thin majority by winning 218 out of 435 seats. The elections to the one-third of Senate members and the House of Representatives were held simultaneously during the presidential election. That gave Trump the advantage of a 'trifecta' – holding on to both the Houses of Congress and capturing the White House. Holding all three, along with a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court, where the judges hold office for life, places him in a position of fundamentally reshaping America, which may never be the same again.

A man of moral turpitude, Trump is the first President with a felony conviction. Electing the same person facing several criminal charges – four criminal indictments, two impeachments, three expensive lawsuits, 34 felony counts and endless reckless utterances - again after four years is a colossal disaster. A porn actor Stormy Daniels claimed she had sex with Trump in 2006 and that she was paid money to stay quiet about it in the run-up to the 2016 elections. A New York Judge, Juan Merchan, convicted him of paying hush money of 130,000 US dollars to her to buy her silence. Many women came forward and made charges of sexual abuse against Trump. And yet all this outrageous immoral conduct of Trump did not matter to Americans. It speaks volumes about the culture of American society.

He was first impeached in 2019 on the charge that he had abused his office and tried to influence Ukraine President Zelensky into launching an investigation against Joe Biden and his son Hunter. While the House of Representatives impeached him, the Republican-controlled Senate acquitted him. The second impeachment was linked to the insurrection of January 6, 2020, in which Republican supporters stormed the US Capital complex in a bid to overturn the result of the 2020 Presidential Election that Biden had won. The House of Representatives charged him with "incitement of insurrection." Again, the Senate cleared him of the charges. In June last year, Trump was indicted for illegally retaining the classified documents taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago residence after he left the office in January 2021.

One expected the Indian Americans, who traditionally supported Democrats, to turn up in large numbers and vote for the Indian-origin Kamala Harris. It is unfortunate the Indian immigrants, whom America adopted, turned against her and voted for Trump. A shift in Indian-American loyalties ultimately contributed to victory for Trump. From 2020 to 2024, the percentage of Indian-Americans identifying as Democrats dropped from 56% to 47%. The Hindu right-wing elements in America who support Modi have turned to Trump because he called Modi his friend. They find ideological affinity between Trump and Modi. So, it was Moditva that worked against Kamala Harris.

For a community rooted in hard work, education, and family unity, this shift is a departure from the values central to their success in America. They will realise how bad the Trump administration is when it starts deporting nearly 11 million illegal immigrants, imposing visa restrictions, denying them and their children citizenship, and when the native Americans – whites and blacks – turn against the Indian immigrants for taking their jobs.

Trump has already announced the appointment of Thomas Homan – an ex-police officer and national security hawk who crafted the draconian policy of separating parents from their kids to deter illegal immigration in Trump's first term - as a 'deporter-in-chief,' a 'border czar.' He will oversee "the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in US history." He is dreaded for his barbaric and inhuman treatment of immigrants.

That Trump could defeat twice the women presidential candidates – Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris - shows the inbuilt gender bias in American Society. Kamala Harris faced the double whammy of gender and race. Both these accomplished women have lost to a man who normalises sexualising women, boasts about groping women and was found liable for sexual abuse. They were accused of witchcraft. It is paradoxical that sexual liberation and social conservatism coexist in America. The Americans, cutting across communities, do not think that a woman is capable of running a government. America is essentially a socially regressive society. The people of the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia are more progressive and gender-neutral than Americans when it comes to the political empowerment of women.

America has become a mirror image of Europe, where right-wing leaders have gained significant political ground. A spectre of unchecked power will haunt America. For authoritarian leaders worldwide, Trump's victory sends a message that it is all right to be illiberal and oppressive. Right-wing populism uses electoral democracy to elect those who crush democracy and dissent. The system of checks and balances provided in the American Constitution is turned on its head.

As Professor Ashutosh Varshney says, "The US under Trump will be less racially inclusive, more immigration-unfriendly and selectively retributive. There will be tax breaks for the rich and tariffs on imports. There will be a move towards pro-Russian and pro-Israel war settlements in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine." There is little doubt about how Trump intends to govern, given his naked pursuit of power and the preservation of the cult of personality he had built around himself. He has no respect for law and the values and traditions of democracy.

His re-election is a worse scenario in that a convicted felon, a chronic 'liar' who tried to overturn the last election, who calls America 'a garbage can of the world' and who threatens revenge against his political rivals could win. His comeback is hard to believe as his idea of America is so different from the idea of America enshrined in its Constitution. The election outcome is the rejection of consensus and the rule of law. His ability to defy all norms of decency and ethics is a pointer to the fact that America has lurched away from mainstream polity to extreme right-wing politics of anger, rage, and crudity, posing a threat to liberal democracy and pluralistic American society. America has lost the moral authority to speak for a democratic world order. A morally decadent America had chosen a perilous path.

Today, America is a sharply divided society. There is more trouble in store. As reported in The Times of India, November 12, 2024: "Racist text messages invoking slavery raised alarm across the country after they were sent to black men, women and students, including middle schoolers. The messages, sent anonymously, were reported in several states, including New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. They used a similar tone but varied in wordings. Some of them mentioned the incoming administration. Ajay Bhutoria, an Indian American fundraiser of Kamala Harris, had also received racist messages. Bhutoria claimed he had got threatening messages on his phone from Trump supporters asking him to leave the US and go back to India." The extreme right-wing elements who supported Trump are emboldened by his return to power.