Well, dear friends, the election is now just a day away, and it can’t come soon enough. As some wag quipped online, it’s like the whole country is waiting for a biopsy to come back. The problem—as I am quipping, here—is that about a third of the country is rooting for cancer.

Can you believe we’re here again, looking out at a presidential election in which the openly fascist Donald Trump stands a decent chance of spending the next four years (or more) in the White House? After January 6, 2021, one would think he would have been cast out into the political wilderness, excommunicated for violating the most sacrosanct principle of participatory democracy, becoming the first US president ever to balk at the peaceful transfer of power, and to mount a violent coup to overturn the results of a free and fair election. (There are plenty of other reasons why Trump should be a pariah, but that alone ought to do it.)

You’d think that, wouldn’t you?

But nooooooooo…..

Instead, thanks to the cowardice and venality of the GOP, and to Trump’s own chutzpah and skill as a grifter, and the apparent proto-fascism of tens of millions of our countrymen, we are perched on the cusp of something even more dangerous. It is truly astonishing.

That said, bottom line upfront, folks: I believe we will win this thing. I just remain dumbfounded that it’s come down to this once again.

COWARDICE IS ITS OWN PUNISHMENT

Four years ago, my penultimate pre-election piece in 2020 was titled “Scariest Halloween Ever,” in which I reflected the conventional wisdom that Trump would not go quietly, if we managed to eject him at all:

Awaiting at the end of this already fraught process is the very real prospect of Trump refusing to abide by the results of the election (he has openly told us as much) precipitating a constitutional crisis, or even political violence to the point of civil war. He will do so under the veneer of legality, of course, by questioning the validity of the vote should it go against him, and angling to create enough havoc to get the race thrown into the courts, the state legislatures, and eventually Congress, where arcane rules favor his party…..

So the next seven days promise to be intense, and very possibly so do the 78 that follow, before we see who raises his right hand on Inauguration Day 2021 to be sworn in as President of the United States.

That prediction did not require the skills of Nostradamus, or even Kreskin, and it was subsequently borne out. But it all seems rather quaint now.

Of course, not everyone agreed, even at the time—like conservative columnist Ross Douthat of The New York Times, who around that same time confidently published a piece called “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” Naturally, he was fired, and today twirls a sign for a car wash in Encino.

Just kidding! He’s still a columnist for the Times, where he has never truly recanted that shameful prediction, and was last seen (metaphorically) stroking his chin in print about whether Kamala Harris is sufficiently accomplished to earn his vote over a twice-impeached, convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and proven seditionist.

In the wake of January 6, the Republican Party had a priceless chance to rid itself and the whole country of Donald Trump, and make it legally impossible for him to hold power ever again. There was every reason to think its mandarins were prepared to do so, as their Faustian bargain with him had always been…..well, Faustian, which is to say uneasy, not on moral grounds but certainly on pragmatic ones. After the Insurrection, Trump was badly damaged politically, and the GOP never had a better opportunity to break it off. Yet the party’s leaders (“leaders”) chose not to do so, out of that same, pure self-interest. The lure of Trump’s rabid fan base was just too great, overwhelming any infinitesimal shred of principle, integrity, or sense of duty to the public that remained in the erstwhile Grand Old Party.

Four years later, we see where that ghastly decision has left us.

“What’s the downside of humoring him?” some anonymous Republican official infamously said after Trump lost in 2020, when he was first trying out the Big Lie. We got our answer of course, on that day in early January. People like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham would have been happy to see Trump cast into the wilderness, but they decided that they didn’t have to take an active hand in making that happen, that he would just drift away on his own and they could have it both ways, avoiding offending MAGA Nation while still ridding themselves of Donny. Instead, like some sort of bitterly ironic O. Henry story, their failure to act only perpetuated and exacerbated the nightmare that has brought us to this pretty pass.

In the podcast We Live Here Now, hosts Hanna Rosin and Lauren Ober remind us that in the immediate wake of January 6, even Trump himself took the conventional, eminently sensible line that the insurrectionists were criminals who deserved to be severely punished. “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy,” he said in a video he posted the next day. “To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

Within a few months, of course, he completely reversed himself once he realized that he could exploit this movement (and in particular the death of Ashli Babbitt) to rewrite history and potentially propel himself back into power. Now he talks of the insurrectionists as “we,” (attention Jack Smith), refers to those convicted and imprisoned for their actions as “hostages” and promises to pardon them—for what his promise is worth—dubbing January 6^th “a day of love.” And the GOP leadership (cough cough) has once again obediently followed his lead and started handing out the cone-shaped paper cups of Kool-Aid.

POLITICS AS PRO WRESTLING

When it comes to our political discourse, it’s worth stopping to consider just how far the Overton window has moved in the last nine years—or, shifting from the horizontal to the vertical, how low we have sunk.

There could be no better display of that than the hatefest at Madison Square Garden last Sunday, pointedly designed to recall the “America First” pro-Nazi rally held there in 1939, on the very eve of World War II. A parade of speakers engaged in some of the most vile rhetoric ever heard in American politics at the national level, including not only the already notorious “island of garbage” remark, but also “jokes” about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween, slurs against both Arabs and Jews, a reference to Kamala’s “pimp handlers,” and a speaker literally waving a crucifix who called her “the devil and the anti-Christ.” A sports talk radio jock dipped into the oldies to label Hillary “some sick bastard” (points deducted for gender fluidity) and railed about homeless vets “sleeping on their own feces on a bench in Central Park, but the fucking illegals, they get whatever they want, don’t they?” And it wasn’t just D-list nobodies and carnival freaks either: no less a right wing media icon than Tucker Carlson—an A-list carnival freak—cackled as he insulted Kamala’s racial identity and intelligence, saying, “She’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

Then Trump came onstage and declared with a straight face, “The Republican Party has really become the party of inclusion.”

Weirdly, it was only the warm-up act that the Trump campaign felt obliged to distance itself from; the rest it was fine with, apparently. But subsequent claims from Team Trump that the comedian’s horrid standup routine did not reflect the views of the candidate or his campaign were laughable (unlike the comic’s set), given that the Trump campaign chose him, approved his material, and loaded it into the teleprompter.

Apropos of Windows by Overton™, it’s become tedious to say, “Look at what Trump gets away with!,” but the heart of the matter is that his fans—millions of our countrymen—thrill to precisely that vulgarity and nihilism, and we should have learned long ago that it is counterproductive to cite it in trying to sway them. The threat he poses goes far beyond insults, of course, but the rhetoric bluntly signals the kind of fascist, racist, misogynistic, and wildly destructive regime he would foist on America in a second term. As The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote, “as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.”

There’s more to say, but it’s uncomfortable here on my shit-covered bench.

ENABLERS GONNA ENABLE

On the heels of that “scariest Halloween” essay, the final blog entry I posted before Election Day 2020 bore the somewhat highfalutin title “Unto the Breach.” In it, I wrote:

On Election Night, regardless of the results, Trump will publicly declare victory as early as he can plausibly get away with. (And as we know, Trump’s assessment of what he can plausibly get away with is a lot more broad than anyone else’s. And he is usually right.) He will then declare that any subsequent votes, via mail-in ballot or presumably even in-person tallies from late breaking counties, are fraudulent, a lie he has been trying to hammer into the American consciousness for months in preparation for just such a ploy.

Again, it does not require much vanity to say now that I was quite right, because lots of people predicted that—it was bleeding obvious. It is equally obvious that he intends to do so again, and the same remedies apply now as they did then:

It will fall to the much-maligned mainstream media, influential public authority figures, reasonable politicians on both the Democratic and Republican sides (let me know if you find any of the latter), and the general public itself to rise up and say, “Oh no, you don’t.”

Clearcut (Democratic) victories in any of those states—all of which are in play to a greater or lesser degree—will help undercut Trump’s efforts, but not even a clean sweep by the blue team will prevent Donald from trying to claim victory. In fact, the worse his apparent defeat the more desperate he will become, and the less he will have to lose in trying to most shameless and dangerous gambits. (He also informed us that he intends to send his army of lawyers into swing states to challenge the results.) So despite Trump’s best (worst) efforts, we have it within our power to put down this self-coup before it even begins by producing a margin of victory (that) renders all these maneuvers impotent.

We may see this election stolen, despite out best efforts—and let us gird ourselves to do everything we can to fight against that possibility—but the first step, and the one that has the most potential to neuter Trump’s malicious plans, and that will make any subsequent efforts of our own more viable, is to go to the polls in numbers like this country has never seen before. Because if we don’t turn out in this election, and then fight for the integrity of the results, there may never be another one.

All that remains so, and in fact, has only grown more truer in the intervening four years.

Also back in 2020, The New York Times laid the danger out very clearly in a landmark multipart editorial, opining that “Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II,” that Trump was “without any real rivals as the worst American president in modern history,” and that he was conducting “an intolerable assault on the very foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.” The editorial concluded:

Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States….Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the American people—even those who would prefer a Republican president—to preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.

The Gray Lady was 100% right then, and if anything, its assessment has only grown truer than ever since then.

I’ve been hard on the Times, but to its credit, its editorial board issued a similarly powerful indictment of Trump (and endorsement of Harris) this time around, headlined “The Only Patriotic Choice for President.” That was in stark contrast to the behavior of the billionaire oligarch owners of the LA Times and Washington Post, both of whom bent the knee to Donald and violated Yale history professor Tim Snyder’s Rule No. 1 of fighting fascism: Do not obey in advance. As The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols wrote on Twitter (don’t call it ‘X’): “Look, if you want to argue that newspapers should never endorse, that’s fine (if wrong). But to discover that principle a week before an election, against a man who has threatened to destroy the free press, is just cowardice and anticipatory obedience.”

And while Bezos’s craven act may yet succeed in currying favor with our despot-in-waiting, did it do anything to avoid allegations of bias toward the Post? Of course not. Soon after, that human skidmark Stephen Miller was seen crowing (also on Twitter) that Kamala’s campaign was so bad, even the left-wing Washington Post wouldn’t endorse her. So much for appeasing bullies.

Again, from my pre-election blog post four years ago:

Now we stand on the precipice of losing our entire representative democracy full stop, 244 years of flawed but noble dedication to government of the people, by the people, and for the people, brought to the verge of permanent neo-fascist kleptocracy in just a few years by one monstrous game show host, and—and this is the important part—his enablers.

Those enablers—in the GOP, in the media, on Bezos’s superyacht, and Musk’s, throughout public life, and in barrooms and beauty shops and ordinary family homes throughout America—are still enabling, and all of them are living examples of the most famous line from Renoir’s The Rules of the Game: “Everyone has their reasons.”

LAST EXIT BEFORE DYSTOPIA

So we are about to find out just how deep in the Kool-Aid our country is, and whether we are just treading water (er, Kool-Aid), or about to drown.

On that front, I am guardedly optimistic. Tactically speaking, Kamala has run a near-flawless campaign, and under very trying circumstances. The zeitgeist feels like it has subtly shifted in her favor in these closing days, with endorsements from everyone from the Insane Clown Posse (how do magnets work?) to Bret Stephens, a bevy of retired Republican politicians, former four-star generals, and Springsteen and Beyonce and Harrison Ford. (Scoff if you will, but neuroscientists tell us that they make a difference.) The numbers from early voting seem to favor the Democratic ticket, younger people are discovering the Access Hollywood tape via Tik Tok and are even more appalled than we were in 2016, and one highly regarded poll even has Kamala with a thin lead in ruby red Iowa, thanks to women voters.

Meanwhile, the wheels appear to be coming off the Trump train. He’s rambling incoherently at his rallies, miming blowjobs, alienating millions of crucial Puerto Rican voters, pissing off every American woman with a brain, posing in an apron at McDonald’s and in a blaze orange vest in a garbage truck with his name on it, even embracing RFK Jr in a metaphorical bearhug (sorry—phrasing) while going full General Jack D. Ripper over fluoride in the water and our precious bodily fluids. His brazen incitements to violence have become routine now, to include suggesting Liz Cheney face a firing squad. (Let’s be real: The specificity of “nine rifles pointed at her” is clear, but even if you think he just meant she’d never been in combat, was that any better, coming from Cadet Bone Spurs?) You’d almost think that, Producers-like, he’s trying to lose. If you were attempting to engineer a losing presidential campaign, can you think of much else you would do to drive away voters?

But it could still go south for us. We all have PTSD from November 6, 2016, and the right is doing its best to turn that into a sense of apathy and fatalism in order to depress the vote. But the flipside is that it is keeping complacency among the left (ha!) at bay and spurring us all to action.

This past weekend, “Saturday Night Live” had a sketch making fun of folks like me, privileged white people who are apoplectic about the prospect of another Trump term. It was funny, and

reminiscent of a sketch the show ran after the 2016 election that hit the same point. But what’s worth remembering is that SNL wasn’t chiding privileged white people for suddenly caring: it was chiding us because we are so late in waking up and doing so.

If we manage to avoid catastrophe tomorrow (Guy Fawkes Day, as luck would have it), and in the days that follow before a Harris victory is certified, we may be in for a lot of snickering about how we all overreacted. Bring it on, say I. That’s how it goes when you avoid a disaster: no one appreciates just how bad it might have been. In fact, that snickering has already begun, and not only the right wing media, but also from the likes of McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, in a condescending piece called “This Is Not the End of America,” which suggested that all will be fine even if Trump wins. Of course, even in the best case scenario of a Harris victory, snickering will be the least of our problems. To get to Inauguration Day, we will still have to deal with Trump’s attempts to steal the election…..and even if we succeed on that count, there will still be a low-level right wing insurgency to reckon with over the long term, fed by the poison that has long been in the American bloodstream, but that Trump has stirred up to unprecedented post-1865 levels.

So as the saying goes, don’t panic—vote. That is step one, even before we worry about how to combat Trump’s Big Lie 2.0. We can overwhelm Trump with numbers and render his schemes untenable. Of course, he will claim victory regardless, but we can make it harder for him to perpetrate this fraud, and less likely that he will succeed.

It’s a subtle difference, but where Coppins—the author of a recent biography of Mitt Romney—seems to think fears of Trump 2.0 are overblown, the Rev, William Barber II made a more nuanced point in speaking to David Remnick on “The New Yorker Radio Hour” back in 2017, acknowledging the danger while rallying our determination that we can still prevail:

People made it through slavery, people made it through the denial of women’s rights; people made it through the Depression in this country; people made it through apartheid and Jim Crow. It‘s our time to stand up and be the moral dissenters, the moral defibrillators, and the moral dreamers and to make it through this moment and use it to change the course of history, to change America, and—in some ways, if we work together—to change the world.

Regular readers of this column will recognize those words because I’ve quoted them before. They are not meant to minimize the threat of Trump and white Christian nationalism, which will not disappear even if we beat Trump tomorrow. But they remind us that fascism has been defeated before, and will be again. 

IN THE FIELDS BEFORE THE FLOOD

So depending on how things go tomorrow, and in the days and weeks that follow, we will embark on one of two very different agendas.

In the event of a Trump victory, we will have to mount a highly disciplined non-violent program of active resistance if we hope to preserve the battered and tattered remnants of the republic after four more years of kakistocracy, years that promise to make Trump’s first term look like tea time at the Plaza. 

In the happier event that we succeed in beating this motherfucker, we will have to mount an equally disciplined campaign to improve American governance and inoculate our democracy for the long term against the kind of neo-fascist right wing authoritarianism that Donald represents, a movement which obviously has legs, and will carry on even the cheeseburgers and Diet Cokes have done their work with him.

Neither path will be easy, to say the least. But—shameless plug coming—you can read about both of them in my book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, available wherever reading material is sold, or direct from the publisher, OR Books, here in New York. In it, I conclude that “Historians will have it easy when it comes to telling the story of the United States in the early 21^st century. It will be one of two tales.”

In one scenario, the US—the first country on Earth to establish a representative democracy—tragically committed a kind of political suicide, carelessly allowing the rise of a ruthless right wing regime that used the very mechanisms of that democracy to destroy it. Terrible as that was, the autocrats succeeded only because too many Americans were not sufficiently bothered by the threat and could not rouse themselves to stop the small minority that were delighted by it; by the time a significant number awoke to the emergency they were in, it was too late. It was an especially bitter fate, given that the country had recently succeeded in removing that autocratic party from office, only to foolishly let it seize power again. 

In the other scenario, that same country, born in outrageous contradiction, stained with original sin of slavery and genocide, somehow managed to halt a homegrown autocratic threat, and in the process, fundamentally began remaking itself to be true to the democratic principles it pioneered.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

People, I am here to tell you: there is a darkness on the edge of town. Whether or not it ultimately overwhelms us remains to be seen. The good news is that, to a great extent, the answer is up to us. So once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English American dead.

Now there is nothing more to talk about—all that remains is to act. So I’ll end this essay the same way I ended that one, with the banal but absolutely correct observation that, one way or another, tomorrow will be a historic day for these United States, an acid test of just how ill—or well—our country really is, and a decisive moment for what shape America’s future will take, with implications for decades to come.

I’ll see you on the other side.

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Illustration: Stephanie Villagran