It is no exaggeration to say that two weeks from now, if Donald Trump defies the odds—yet again—and wins the presidency for a second time, we may be looking at the end of participatory democracy in the United States. (Note to hairsplitters: yes, I know Donny would not take office until noon on January 20, 2025. But “The Last Eleven Weeks of Democracy” does not really sing.) I have been part of the large chorus sounding this alarm for the past several years, as have many of you, dear readers, I am sure. It is hardly news. But now that the moment of truth is nearly upon us, it is especially nerve-wracking.
I am not writing to say that I believe that is sure to happen. Far from it. We have it within our power to beat him like a whipped dog. But even if we do, it’s going to be a nailbiter, and that in itself is telling and alarming.
I wrote recently about how astonishing (and depressing) it is that this election is as close as it is, after nine years of seeing Trump in action, and in particular, after a year or more of hearing his angry, vengeful plans should we return him to power. In any rational world, Kamala would be leading in a blowout. For that matter, in any rational world, Joe Biden would be leading in a blowout, despite his age and declining cognitive capacity, and Kamala would not have been called upon to step into the race in the first place.
But news flash: We ain’t in a rational world. Obviously.
I don’t feel the need to explain why Trump’s re-election would signal the end of democracy. Feel free to peruse the news on any random day over the past two years. He has openly announced his disdain for the rule of law (including a call to “terminate” the Constitution), his desire to be a tyrant, and his eagerness to put an end to free elections in this country. Debates over whether to apply the “F word” to him and his political project have long since been rendered moot. As many sage observers have noted, Trump—unlike many would-be autocrats—is not trying to hide his authoritarian impulses or policy prescriptions: he is trumpeting them.
Yet an alarmingly large segment of the American population is totally cool with Trump, and therein lies the problem. They are a minority, yes, we should never forget that, but a minority large enough and radical enough to make significant trouble. Frankly, it has ever been thus, from the very founding of the country by our forefathers in contentious compromise over the matter of human bondage. That authoritarian strain—one that favors privileged classes oppressing the rest, sometimes quite brutally—has been at the core of the American dilemma for our entire existence as a nation. We famously fought a bloody civil war over it, a war whose repercussions continue to be felt powerfully to this day. And Trump represents that dilemma’s latest flashpoint.
The United States therefore is about to undergo an acid test of the highest order. We are a country that ostentatiously fancies itself a beacon of democracy, “the shining city on a hill,” the leader of the Free World as we used to say during the Cold War, the “indispensable nation,” and lots of other highfalutin, self-flattering folderol. Now we stand on the verge of electing an openly fascist candidate who makes a mockery of every value we claim to hold dear. And tens of millions of Americans love it.
The question before us now is whether the rest of us can summon the will to stop them at the ballot box.
WHO YA GONNA CALL?
In the immediate wake of the 2020 election, I wrote a piece for this blog called “The Ghost of Grover Cleveland,” named for the last president to make a successful return to the Oval Office after being ousted from it. In it, I optimistically floated the hope that a twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president who had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans during a pandemic that he managed (“managed” in bigass quotes) with depraved indifference would find it hard to win the White House again. And that was before he tried to overturn a free and fair election by force, before we knew about the stolen classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, before he was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in a pair of civil trials and ordered to pay $82 million in restitution, before he was convicted of 34 felonies related to tax fraud and electoral interference stemming from hush money payments to a porn star.
I didn’t rule it out, but I posited that it would be hard.
Oh, naivete, thy name is Bob.
In that piece, I wrote that it was very likely that Trump would continue “to control the Republican Party like a high-priced dominatrix, tormenting the Biden administration from exile, maintaining an only slightly diminished profile in the media (with its obvious addiction to covering this trainwreck), and preparing himself for his revenge in 2024…..Trump will be able to keep a chokehold on his party, freeze the field of other potential Republican contenders, dictate GOP policy as the de facto leader of the opposition, remain in the spotlight he craves, and most importantly for him, raise money hand over fist from his cult of reliable suckers until they are bled dry.”
That part was pretty much a bullseye, even if I do say so myself.
I also quoted a Republican consultant named Patrick Griffin who told the right wing Washington Times: “Donald Trump is not exactly going to follow Jimmy Carter, who is out building homes with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House. This is going to be the worst leader in exile the world has ever seen.”
Bullseye again.
I also predicted—and it wasn’t hard—that the Republican Party would continue bend to Trump’s every whim. “To grasp the depths of the GOP leadership’s servility, one has but to witness their craven obsequiousness even in this lame duck period, when they know he will soon be out of power, to the point of sitting on their collective hands while he tries to mount a coup.” And the coup of which I spoke was of the Brad Raffensperger-pressuring kind; January 6th hadn’t even happened yet. And even that did not ultimately crack the GOP’s pathetic subservience to this grifter.
Lastly, I suggested that Trump’s legal troubles, which were then only looming, would hamper his run in ’24:
(O)nce he leaves office he is going to be hit with a tsunami of legal problems and criminal prosecution, almost surely including felony charges for everything from bank fraud to money laundering to tax evasion. Come 2024 he may well be in prison, or at least under indictment. (Not that that would stop him from running, or his supporters from voting for him.)
Of course, Trump being Trump, he will only use such legal and financial woes as fuel for his candidacy, given that his political career has always been built upon personal grievance, in a feedback loop with the grievance of his supporters. But there is a limited appeal to that model, and the last four years have largely exhausted it.
You can see that my batting average was beginning to dip there. (Everyone OK if I switch metaphors from archery to baseball?) I did not anticipate just how successfully Trump would be able to manipulate the legal system with his patented strategy of delay delay delay, even though he had done so his whole adult life, or how far his handpicked Supreme Court would go in shamelessly assisting him.
Because on the whole, back in December 2020, I largely shared the prediction of smart observers like Steve Coll of The New Yorker and Yascha Mounk and David Graham of The Atlantic that Donald Trump was likely to fade into irrelevance as even his diehard followers got bored with what Mounk called “the ever more histrionic antics of the sore loser they just kicked out of office.” Or as I put it:
Trump may soon be a marginal figure in American culture: a pathetic, unhinged old man rambling around his Florida mansion in the grip of increasing cognitive decline, in between trips to the courthouse, beset with financial woes, ranting at an ever-diminishing following and leaving the rest of the country scratching its collective head at how this guy was ever president in the first place.
Correct on every count, except the crucial last one.
So here we are.
It would be one thing if Trump had made a convincing case for his return to power, even if it was a dishonest, demagogic one. (Does anyone think he could make any other kind?) But his campaign, if it can be called that, is a dumpster fire on the deck of the Titanic as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.
Not only has Trump made an open embrace of fascism the centerpiece of his campaign, he has also displayed over and over again his patently obvious cognitive decline with his rambling and incoherent public statements, even if the mainstream media repeatedly gives him a pass while scrutinizing Kamala within an inch of her life. He careens from one outrageous episode to the next, holding rallies in states he can never win, insulting everyone in sight, and making outrageous promises he could never keep but for which he is never sufficiently held to account by the media or the Democratic Party. In the past couple weeks alone he has blamed Zelenskyy for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, held a 39 minute dance party in lieu of a stump speech, reiterated the violence-inciting lie about Haitian immigrants barbecuing stole housepets, told a crowd about the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick (do pro golfers really shower together, ever?), spewed vulgarities about his opponents like an eighth grader, bragged about taking away the right to an abortion to right wing audiences while lying out the other side of his mouth that he did no such thing, doubled down on Nazi-like rhetoric about fellow Americans as “the enemy within,” called January 6th “a day of love,” and of course repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And that is but a small sampling.
In the past—and even now, with any other politician—any one of those things would have been immediately and automatically disqualifying. The mind reels.
By now we ought to understand that for his true believers, all that stuff falls under “feature not a bug.” They LIKE that he is that way. But what of ostensibly rational Republicans, independents, and others who don’t love “Trump being Trump,” but are somehow gonna vote for him anyway? (We can leave out of the discussion the cynical opportunists like Vance, Rubio, Graham, Hawley, et al who know how bad he is, but long ago rationalized their obeisance to him.) Their reasons—tribal, financial, self-deluding, or what have you—matter not at all in the end, only the fact of their ultimate complicity.
If the race were being decided purely on policy—which is to say, on the facts—Kamala would be running away with it. (The Washington Post recently reported that, when presented with Harris’s agenda and Trump’s side by side in a blind taste test, Americans resoundingly prefer her positions to his, even in areas like crime and immigration where—inexplicably—a slim majority says it trusts him more.) On character, too, Trump’s deranged behavior and brazen, undisguised promise that he will dismantle the very foundations of American governance and turn it into nothing more than a mechanism for score-settling and punishing his political enemies ought to be dealbreakers, even for so-called conservatives, doncha think? But tribalism and demagoguery, it turns out, are remarkably powerful….much more so than we foolishly believed not so long ago.
Then there is the segment of Americans who have tuned it at all out, including folks on the far left, exhausted by the barrage of disinformation, misinformation, fake news, pro wrestling-style antics, and deliberately provoked divisiveness. But that is yet another trick of the authoritarian right, well documented by everyone from Hannah “Banality of Evil” to Steve “Flood the Zone with Shit” Bannon: hammering the populace with propaganda that aims not to convince but merely to destroy the willingness (or ability) to think critically, or care, until those subjected to it are numb, jaded, and resigned to the false belief that “both sides are equally bad” and what’s the point of voting, or caring about politics at all?
Of course, the most magic trick of all was taking the shame of January 6, when even contemptible Republicans like McConnell and Graham—briefly—could not deny the ghastliness of Donald Trump, and inverting it over the course of four years into a perverse badge of honor and litmus test for the nationwide Jonestown that is the contemporary GOP. Observing that process alone ought to tell us all we need to know about how and why Donald Trump is within a frog hair of regaining the presidency.
But again: As maddening as it is that Trump is even in this contest, we must not give in to fatalism. Generating a sense of despair among Democrats and independents—an illusion that Trump’s victory is a fait accompli—is another part of the Republican playbook, extending even to right wing polls trying to create a false sense of momentum on Trump’s behalf in hopes of being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This just in: It ain’t. Not by a longshot. We must remember that if the race is that close and Trump has potential triumph in his grasp, SO DOES KAMALA. Of course we would all prefer a saner world where she’s assured of any easy win. But the operative word is “win,” not the adjective modifying it. We can push her to victory, and render all this angst and dread irrelevant.
In that case, fake right wing polls showing Trump cruising to victory serve another purpose: laying the groundwork for claims they wuz robbed if and when they do lose.
ALL YOU FASCISTS BOUND TO LOSE
Even ahead of the outcome of the election, this much we know already: America is not well, and in two very distinct ways.
The first is systemic. In the Electoral College—like so many of America’s ills, a result of our slaveholding history—we have a patently un-democratic, antiquated, countermajoritarian method of choosing our head of state. Our indefensible allegiance to this institution means that unique among advanced democracies using the presidential system, we do not choose our leader by popular vote, but instead allow a conniving minority to take power. (For a deep dive on that, see Elie Mystal’s recent piece in The Nation, “A Lesson in Basic Civics for People Who Stubbornly Defend the Electoral College.” I’ll have more on that in an upcoming post.)
Twice in the past six presidential elections the loser of the popular vote has won the election regardless, thanks to the Electoral College—both times benefiting the Republican candidate, with help from the Supreme Court the first time and from the Kremlin the second. Prior to that, it had happened only three times in the preceding 211 years, all in the 19th century. But now, thanks to shifting demographics, it is pretty much a 50/50 coin flip every time. And it might happen again in just two weeks, as Kamala is all but certain to win the national popular vote by several million (as did Hillary and Joe), while the result in the Electoral College is far less clear.
So that is awful.
But the second diagnosis is even more damning.
We have a radical minority of tens of millions of Americans who are totally fine with fascism. If that were not so, the tyranny of the Electoral College would be far less damaging. But enough Americans fall on the fascist continuum—from the casual and apathetic who aren’t sufficiently bothered by it, to the firebreathing fanatics who actively thrill to it—to allow them to exploit our fucked up system and potentially seize power. Even if we avoid that fate come the first week of November, it promises to be a photo finish, and that is far too close for comfort.
And that is the best case scenario.
How to reckon with those twin ills is a question for another day. If we’re lucky that day will come in early November, if we manage to stave off the anti-democratic threat in the short term. If not, we will have a far more pressing and urgent set of concerns to contend with.
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Photo: Doug Mills The New York Times
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