Trump's Immigration Talk Is a Gateway Drug to Full-Throated White Supremacism

Even a casual follower of political news might be thinking that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign seems pretty screwy these days. You might have seen clips of the debate, perhaps a montage of all the times Donald Trump couldn’t look VP Kamala Harris in the eye as she repeatedly pummeled and mocked him. Maybe you heard about Trump tweeting about how he “hates” Taylor Swift (in this, your impression would be accurate, as he did literally tweet “I hate Taylor Swift,” which is an objectively weird thing to write about a very popular and generally inoffensive pop star). Perhaps you read about Trump praising the Republican candidate for North Carolina Governor, who you also heard calls himself as “black Nazi” — that’s not normal, is it? Or maybe you heard how he and VP candidate Sen. J.D. Vance have been saying wild stuff about Haitian immigrants eating house pets in Springfield, Ohio. Altogether, you might be struck by a sense of random stuff emanating from the Trump campaign, all very. . . well, very Trump!

And if you happen to be a reader of major papers of record like the Washington Post or the New York Times, you’d in fact find news analyses to back up this sense of Trump campaign disarray, and that you’re not alone in feeling like you’re experiencing an undifferentiated blast. The Post, digging into recent Trump campaign dynamics, asserts that “with just 45 days left until the election, the past three weeks reveal whatever control and self-restraint helped launch Trump’s third presidential campaign has largely disappeared in the crucial final stretch.” And the Times points to a sense of “chaos” around Trump, while CNN notes that “Wild weeks of outlandish rhetoric by the ex-president have revived memories of the cacophony of his four White House years and shattered perceptions that he’s running a more disciplined campaign than in 2020 or 2016.”

Yet such analyses are quick to point out that this alleged chaos is not the same as Trump being on track to lose, as they point to tight polls and a still-savagely-loyal Trump base. The Times avers that “this year, the nation has met the crush of chaos with little more than a shrug and, some strategists say, a desire to tune out the campaign altogether,” and that “The tepid response to Mr. Trump’s latest round of provocations reflects both the nation’s deep partisan splits and a sense that voters are inured to his style after three election cycles where his showmanship has dominated the news.” In a similar vein, CNN notes that “the nature of the race — a toss-up contest in swing states — has not budged.”

There is more than a grain of truth in the ideas that the Trump campaign is growing desperate, that his extreme statements reflect this to some extent, and that so far this has not seemed to make much difference to the existence of a continued close race between Trump and Harris (though polling averages do suggest a narrow Harris lead rather than a truly deadlocked race). In addition to the examples noted above, there’s also the borderline absurd pandering Trump has addressed to young male voters (he is literally vowing to be a defender of vaping freedom) and his deeply insane appeals to women that with him in office, he will act as their “protector” and that they will be safe, happy, and never needing to worry their pretty little heads about abortion issues ever again. And at still another appearance, he warned Jewish Americans that they’d be to blame if he lost the election. More than ever, Trump seems willing to say anything — appeals to young men’s smoking pleasures, misogynistic vows to protect women, bizarre anti-semitic threats against the Jewish population — to try to regain the Oval Office.

Yet viewing the last few weeks as a blur of interchangeable outrages, incompetences, and violations of decency — of Trump just being Trump —means we risk obscuring the truly important stories and stakes of this election. The underlying reality is that this election is about fundamental conflicts in our politics and society, the outcome of which will affect not only our political future but our daily existence: whether the U.S. will be a democracy or an autocracy; whether women count as equal citizens in our country; whether we address climate change or condemn ourselves to ever-increasing precarity as the natural world collapses around us. This means that every storyline in the news is hardly equal, even as many speak ill of Trump’s capacities.

I would argue that the “Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs” slander perpetuated by Trump and Vance may be the most important story of the last few weeks, as it speaks to perhaps the most potent conflict at play in the U.S.: whether non-white Americans will assume their full share of power in the country, with the U.S. evolving into a true multi-ethnic democracy. Their rhetoric around Springfield, Ohio embodies the most primal, destructive forces propelling the former president and the larger MAGA movement, and constitutes an abhorrent attempt to recruit more Americans to the MAGA cause. Above all, it shines a spotlight on the white supremacism that is the beating heart of Trumpism — even as Trump and Vance claim to be talking only about immigration — and specifically on what may be the most fundamental struggle of this election: the battle over who gets to be considered a real American. Trump and Vance’s deranged direct targeting of thousands of innocent migrants presents a signal opportunity for defenders of American democracy to expose this reactionary movement’s vile strategies and goals.

Much of my confidence in making this case comes from the fact that various political writers have already been sounding the alarm as to the importance of events around Springfield, doing stellar analyses of the story for the past few weeks and making an implicit ongoing case that this story merits continued inquiry into all its rancid fullness. In particular, pieces by Greg Sargent, Jamelle Bouie, and Adam Serwer have all united moral outrage over the disparagement of Haitian immigrants with sharp critiques of how Trump and Vance’s words link up with and advance a broader right-wing vision for America — one that is central to understanding the profound stakes of this election.

Such media attention has been particularly important as the Democratic Party, including the Harris campaign, has pulled its punches relative to the outrage and pushback that the Republicans’ rhetoric and provocations justly deserve. This is not to say they’ve let it slide, or haven’t at some level recognized its importance. For instance, Joe Biden has made strong and unambiguous statements in defense of the Haitian immigrants, while Harris herself has criticized Trump and Vance’s attacks. But the notion that this is a fight just over immigration has clearly constrained Democrats from giving in to Trump’s pretty clear wish to make Springfield as big an issue as he can. Immigration is weak ground for Democrats, goes the general reasoning, so why take the bait? Besides, you can imagine some Democrats believing this whole “eating dogs and cats” rhetoric will likely negate any political advantage Trump might get from inserting an immigration story into the news cycle for going on three weeks. And perhaps they’re right.

Viewed from a more proactive perspective, though, the MAGA onslaught against Springfield’s new arrivals is an opportunity to fully highlight and denounce elements of this reactionary movement that go far beyond ideas of “border security” and limiting immigration, and that are fundamental to Trump’s appeal to voters to put him back in office. What we’ve witnessed highlights the degree to which Trump’s avowedly anti-immigration attitudes rely on a dehumanization, cruelty, and propaganda rooted in racism. The implicit message of Trump’s remarks, and those of Vance, is that darker-skinned people steal jobs, bring disease, and generally upset the proper order of things. From the lies about eating pets, to the lies that they are spreading disease, to the lies that they are murdering fellow residents of Springfield, to the lies that they are sucking away resources like housing and jobs, they are described as less than human, even innately evil, vampiric and implacable. The portrait is of an alien, incomprehensible enemy against whom no weakness should be shown, to whom no compassion should be extended.

It is notable that these attacks have been unleashed despite the fact that the great majority of the Haitians in Springfield are in fact legal immigrants, to say nothing of the fact that they appear to have helped revitalize the city; as Adam Serwer notes, “The Haitians in Springfield are living and working there legally using green cards, humanitarian parole, and Temporary Protected Status, a legal immigration status for people who cannot return safely to their country of origin.” Crucially, though, this is irrelevant to Trump and Vance. Indeed, Vance has explicitly declared that he doesn’t care about their official status, and will continue to call them “illegal.”

For Trump and Vance, the problem is not just that they are immigrants, or even illegal, but that something about them means that they are an irredeemably illegitimate, undesired group of others who don’t belong here. And the basic reason they don’t belong is because they’re not white. In other words, a story framed by Trump, the media, and even the Democrats as being part of the “immigration debate” is only partially or superficially that. Greg Sargent broke through the collective fog and articulated this crucial point earlier than anyone else I’ve seen, as he wrote that, “For Trump and key elements of MAGA, Springfield is not really about border security, or the proper pace of legal immigration, or how best to assimilate new arrivals. Rather, it’s a stand-in for a subterranean argument about the desirable ethnoracial makeup of the American population.” That is, Trump (and Vance) are using attacks on Haitian immigrants to make a larger argument for who counts as a real American — and the only people who count, in their view, are white people. This helps explain the sheer viciousness of their lies about the Haitian community in Springfield; as Sargent puts it:

Trump actively wants the argument over immigration to be as charged with hate and rage as possible. He doesn’t think that will alienate swing voters. He thinks it will activate their latent MAGA tendencies. The picture Trump is seizing on Springfield to invoke—that of a largely white, innocent heartland town getting ravaged by dark, alien hordes who basically constitute a subhuman species—simply cannot be a distraction from the immigration debate. To Trump, it is the immigration debate.

That is, when Trump talks about Springfield being overrun by dark-skinned outsiders, he is actually telling a story about the U.S. as a whole being hideously transformed by non-whites. In this, it is a story about non-white U.S. citizens as well as immigrants. It is an argument, appealing to the most primal feelings of some white Americans, that the U.S. is a country for white people, that white rights and dominance are paramount, and that white people constitute the true citizenry that must stick together to defend itself. 

And so the vicious lies that Trump and Vance tell defile and endanger not only those specifically targeted, but also a huge swath of non-white American citizens as well. They and their MAGA allies talk about immigrants as a fig leaf to cover up their incitement of white Americans’ fears about the gradual browning of America, indifferent to stirring up hatred of anyone who doesn’t fit their strict definition of belonging, even if they are nominally fellow citizens.

Our public discourse is poorly served by the GOP being able to exploit white Americans’ racial anxiety and racism by conducting a proxy war against immigrants, while the Democrats and much of the center and left proceed as if we are just talking about immigrants. When Republican politicians like Trump speak to fears indirectly, it allows them to harness emotional responses that can feel primal and difficult to process logically; by extension, such appeals become difficult for Democrats to counter with recourse to reason and facts. Like an individual beset by psychological conflicts, the country would be better off by making fully conscious those thoughts and feelings that are buried or exist in a liminal space between denial and comprehension. 

This conflict over American identity being played out around “immigration” is closely linked to another defining theme of this presidential race: whether the U.S. will remain a democracy or become a one-party state dominated by Trump and the GOP. The GOP’s animosity to democracy isn’t arbitrary — it’s born out of an understanding that a party based on its appeal to white people will continue to lose power in a diversifying democratic nation where the majority rules. Given the choice between changing in a liberal, pro-democracy direction or imposing authoritarian solutions to its minority status, the Republican Party led by Trump has chosen the latter path, essentially declaring war on democracy on various fronts. From GOP-controlled states creating gerrymanders that restrict the voting of non-white citizens, to voter ID laws that disproportionately target minorities, to a right-wing-controlled Supreme Court that rubber stamps such policies, the GOP has turned itself into an authoritarian juggernaut, driven in large part by resistance to the growing presence and power of non-white Americans, whom the white supremacist mindset cannot bear considering as equals.

It also seems politically advantageous, not to mention morally right, to address head on the import of the vicious language aimed at immigrants specifically. Trump and Vance are trying to inspire hatred for the Haitians and other newcomers, which they would clearly harness for their mass deportations plans in a second Trump term. As Jamelle Bouie writes, “One can imagine Trump spreading Springfield-esque lies from the Oval Office directly to the American public. One can imagine a Vice President Vance touring cities with new immigrant populations, attacking them with the same smears he’s used to target the Haitian community of Springfield, spreading hate so that the public will accept the mass deportation of millions of immigrants.” In other words, what we are seeing is a clear template for future action that would represent the U.S.’s descent into a path previously trod by countries associated with unspeakable repression, societal disruption, and economic chaos. Moreover, talking about such expansively hateful language is a way to communicate to Americans that a Trump regime of extreme deportation would threaten citizens as well, as the language and propaganda intended to build support would inevitably be aimed at dehumanizing all non-whites, as we’ve already seen on display in Ohio.

At bottom, the anti-immigrant hatred on display in Trump and Vance’s rants about Springfield points the way to a greatly diminished and corrupt destiny for America, a vision not of making America great but of making us pathetic and morally repugnant. Shockingly, this appears to be the preference of Trump and his followers, so long as they remain atop the diminished and crumbling wreck that remains. This is a point made by Adam Serwer at previous times during the Trump era, and he sees it happening now around the Springfield rhetoric:

Their actions point to a political theory of the election, which is that fearmongering about immigrants, especially Black immigrants, will scare white people into voting for Trump. They also point to an ideological theory of the nation, which is that America belongs to white people, and that the country would be better if it were poorer and weaker, as long as it were also whiter. Trump and Vance have a specific policy agenda for socially engineering the nation through state force to be whiter than it is now: mass deportation, repealing birthright citizenship, and denaturalization of American citizens. This agenda, in addition to being immoral, would wreck the American economy.

What appears to be MAGA’s obsessive focus on immigration reveals in turn an obsession with white supremacism, which is to be defended even if the means of doing so will surely sap the country’s collective power, wealth, and future prospects. For all the talk of immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, it is in fact Trump and his enablers who are ready to engage in a bloodletting of the nation, metaphorically and all too plausibly for real, that aims to racially purify the country no matter the damage. 

New York Times Fumbles Analysis of Political Violence in U.S.

This past Sunday, the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump in as many months took place as the former president played golf on a Florida green. In comparison to the previous incident, which involved shots not only being fired at the president but actually injuring him (whether directly or indirectly, we may never know due to Trump’s own obfuscations around his medical treatment), the Florida violence seems to have been more in the category of an attempt at an attempt, foiled as it was by a Secret Service agent before the perpetrator ever fired. 

Because Trump was the target in both assassination attempts, their high-profile nature means they have encouraged some in the media to employ them in arguing anew that political violence in America is a “both sides” problem (it’s worth noting that the gunmen in both Trump incidents were far from left-wing or Democratic Party-aligned figures), when in reality it continues to emanate overwhelmingly from the right. A news analysis published by The New York Times shortly after the Florida assassination attempt unfortunately repeats the false “both sides” argument. Though it superficially places a share of blame on the former president for all political violence in the U.S., it badly distorts reality by shying away from assigning him fuller responsibility for legitimizing the far more prevalent existence of right-wing violence. By doing so, it helps advance the fiction that political violence is a generalized phenomenon engaged in more or less equally by both sides of the political spectrum.

Somewhat grandiosely titled “Trump, Outrage and the Modern Era of Political Violence,” it starts off assessing the place of political violence in modern America: 

In the space of less than a week, the once and possibly future commander in chief was both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era. Bomb threats and attempted assassinations now have become part of the landscape, shocking and horrific, yet not so much that they have forced any real national reckoning.

Crucially, Trump is presented as both perpetrator and victim, symbolic of a larger “all sides do it” canard in which his violent language and acts have purportedly caused political adversaries to respond in kind — despite a lack of evidence in the article that his opponents have actually in any meaningful way responded with violent rhetoric or outright violence. Similarly, the “seeming inspiration” line — a reference to recent events in Springfield, Ohio — obscures Trump’s full culpability for the targeting of Haitian immigrants by a campaign of hate. In fact, both Trump and Senator’s J.D. Vance have engaged in open incitement of violence against Haitian refugees living in Springfield, a town that in the wake of remarks by the candidates has been victimized by bomb threats, violence against immigrant property, and the arrival of right-wing militia types looking to intimidate and terrorize the vulnerable newcomers. There is nothing “seeming” about the inspiration the Republican ticket has provided extremist actors who believe themselves to be acting with the blessing of the GOP’s presidential ticket. To all but the most blinkered of observers, Trump and Vance are consciously and knowingly encouraging violence, by their dehumanizing and inflammatory lies about a group of black immigrants. The fact that they have refused to stop even as the obvious damaging effects of their words have become clear to the rest of the world reveals that at best, they are comfortable with the harm that might befall vulnerable newcomers to the country.

Yet the Times asserts that, with the assassination attempts, Trump was the target of “the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era.” The suggestion here is that America is beset by violence from both sides of the political spectrum, seeing as Trump himself was targeted — but this is a deep and dangerous distortion of what is happening in our country. Though Trump and his allies have tried to blame Democrats’ statements that the former president is a “danger to democracy” for causing the shootings, this is clearly balderdash. Rather, Trump himself has acted as a one-man legitimator of right-wing political violence aimed at American society, and in particular at vulnerable groups like immigrants and minority groups, with the results visible in tragedies like the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the mass murder at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 that targeted Latinos. You simply will not find statements encouraging violence against Trump or the GOP from the vast majority of Democratic elected officials, and certainly not from the likes of President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Tim Walz. In fact, if you look at the very statements that Trump has made about the Democrats’ imaginary incitement, he doubles his offense by using those remarks to once again encourage violence against Democrats, as when he told Fox News that, “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.” Presenting the political opposition as an internal enemy “destroying the country” is heady, fascistic stuff that seeks to paint political opponents as an actual enemy to be opposed by any means necessary.

The piece goes on to note that “Mr. Trump’s critics have at times employed the language of violence as well, though not as extensively and repeatedly at the highest levels.” But again, there is in fact no equivalence between what Trump does and what some Democrats have said; more importantly, there is no equivalence between the violence Trump has helped unleash (the assault on the U.S. Capitol being the paramount example) and what might be reasonably tied to Democrats — because the Democrats are not inciting violence in the first place! Let’s be clear: Trump and his allies have deliberately, methodically worked to create an atmosphere of political menace — including dehumanizing language, slanderous lies, and celebrations of violence — in order to cow their political opponents, target “un-American” groups like immigrants, and achieve through violence what they can’t achieve through democratic persuasion. 

What’s particularly frustrating about the Times analysis is that it actually does provide plenty of evidence of Trump’s malign strategy of promoting political violence to achieve power, such as when it notes that Trump “has long favored the language of violence in his political discourse, encouraging supporters to beat up hecklers, threatening to shoot looters and undocumented migrants, mocking a near-fatal attack on the husband of the Democratic House speaker and suggesting that a general he deemed disloyal be executed." Yet it refrains from stating outright that the obvious conclusion to draw is that Trump is consciously inciting violence and celebrating it when perpetrated by those on the right. In fact, this omission involves an additional rhetorical move (beyond the “both sides are doing it” argument) that’s particularly insidious — the introduction of the idea that Trump doesn’t actually have an intent when he uses violent rhetoric. Laughably, it opines that “Mr. Trump does not pause to reflect on the impact of his own words.” Yes, within the strict construction of the phrase “pause to reflect,” this might be true, but the fact that Trump speaks in a way that is clearly pre-meditated, conscious, and malign is at this point not subject to debate, given the countless examples of such rhetoric.

The piece goes on to note that when Trump was “[a]sked by a reporter if he denounced the bomb threats [in Springfield], he demurred. “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats,” he said. “I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.”” Here, the high-falutin’ word “demurred” does pseudo-sophisticated coverup for the obvious reality that Trump is well aware of the bomb threats, is lying about not knowing about them, and in fact is almost certainly pleased that he is creating a wild and threatening situation that he can further exploit to try to regain momentum in a race that he appears to be losing. To think otherwise is to ignore the near-decade of evidence that Trump sees himself as a strongman figure who craves chaos so that he can make his case for brutal order.

A final, grating rhetorical ploy in the Times analysis is a twist on the “both sides do it” perspective, as the piece allows that Trump may well be responsible for starting the path to violence that his opponents across the political spectrum have now allegedly joined. Yet this ends up simply slandering the political center and left in an admittedly innovative way, since, again, the underlying reality is that political violence is almost exclusively perpetrated by the right, and that it is Trump and his allies who see political violence as a conscious political strategy to subvert democratic, majoritarian politics.

Part of the trick here is that the piece’s thesis conflates political anger with political violence, which are of course two distinct things. In fact, what has been perhaps the single most noteworthy and hope-inspiring political fact about the last decade is that the anti-Trump coalition has been explicitly bound to defeating Trump at the ballot box, not with bullets and bombs. If many members of this majority coalition are angry, they are rightly so, because Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have done many awful things —among them, cultivating political violence to intimidate their political enemies. The idea that all sides of the political spectrum have been so infected by Trump’s example and countervailing hatred that even Trump’s opponents are raging out into violence is a grotesque distortion of American politics, and an absurd slam against the pro-democracy and non-violent anti-MAGA majority.

Debate Prep

With the first and likely only Harris-Trump presidential “debate” only hours away, it’s a good time to revisit the extreme, almost farcical (if the stakes weren’t so serious) difference between the two candidates who will be on the stage. One is a career politician, with a long record in public service that is certainly subject to criticisms, but that falls well within the mainstream of American politics. The other is the only president in American history who has tried to stage a coup and overturn American democracy, who has demonstrably lied so often and without remorse that we cannot trust a single word that comes out of his mouth, and who has threatened violence as both a campaign tactic and as a means of governing should he return to office.

This incredible gulf between the candidates means, in the first place, that the debate inevitably provides an unwarranted legitimization of Donald Trump. Ideally, the Democratic candidate should not be granting Trump the legitimacy he gains from appearing as an equal on the debate stage. President Biden did so in part because he had no choice; he had to quell fears about his age, which turned out to be well-placed. In that respect, Biden’s age-related problem took the focus away from necessary questions about whether he should even have debated Trump in the first place. And in the case of Harris, the idiosyncratic process of her ascension, the compressed campaign schedule that’s resulted, and polls showing a tight race make a televised confrontation with Trump more or less unavoidable for her.

But this doesn’t change the reality that at the debate, Trump should be subject to an entirely different type of questioning, and standard, than Harris. Donald Trump has never adequately answered the question of why he tried to overthrow American democracy following the 2020 election, and it is not a spoiler for me to say that he will never be able to provide an answer. Yet what he did, and questions of it, should structure every question ever asked to him, whether at press conferences or at tonight’s debate. To set such disqualifying actions aside is to assume a premise about his candidacy that simply does not exist — that Donald Trump, if he gained power, would protect the Constitution and American democracy. His incriminating behavior around January 6 — documented, irrefutable, often conducted in the plain view of the public — means that questions put to him about policy and actions in a second term must always be contextualized within his hatred of American democracy. 

In a crucial way, this renders debates between the two candidates about policy more or less absurd. Who cares what Trump’s tax policies might be in comparison to the fact that he might well take it into his head to order the IRS to go after his political opponents? Who cares what Trump’s views on monetary policy are when he’s promising to put his political opponents in jail? Who cares what his views on the deficit are when he’s promising “bloody” removal of millions of undocumented immigrants, which in addition to being a humanitarian nightmare would inflict severe damage on a U.S. economy that depends on these people’s labor? In other words, any lines of questioning that ask Harris and Trump to submit their policy ideas for discussion rest on a false premise — that Donald Trump can actually be trusted to hold power in the first place. 

Every time the media chooses to put aside Trump’s insurrectionism, mendacity, and violence past and present, it hands him an unearned advantage. This omerta in his favor will surely be on display tonight — we just don’t know how full-on it will be. One of Harris’s challenges will be to consistently hit Trump’s unfitness for office based on the reasons I’ve outlined, whatever the particular questions turn out to be. As I wrote the other day, at base, he’s a true alien in our midst, unable and unwilling to comprehend the basic reciprocal obligations of society, immune to the appeal of peaceable living, and contemptuous of equality between different ethnicities or sexes. He can’t understand equality or democracy or freedom because he’s singularly obsessed with himself. When he tries to appear otherwise, rest assured that he is faking it, ever eager to hide his freakshow self and the emptiness it ultimately conceals. To the degree that Harris can expose his hideousness and move some Americans out from his thrall, she will be continuing her record of public service.

Aliens in America

Given his compulsive output of dehumanizing rhetoric, authoritarian declarations, racist bile, and vengeful intent in the 2024 campaign, you might think it would be difficult for Donald Trump to plumb new depths — to engage in behavior that might be considered truly groundbreaking for him. How to rise above this hateful and fascistic blur?

Whether by accident or intent, Trump has in fact managed to outdo himself. His late August visit to Arlington National Cemetery was both a stand-alone obscenity and an uncanny summation of so much that is vile and disqualifying about this troubled man. To summarize: In violation of federal law, the Trump team conducted campaign-related activities in areas of the cemetery where such things are strictly forbidden, then in subsequent days lied about doing so while releasing campaign materials containing photos and video obtained by breaking the law. Less lawlessly, but in a grotesque display lacking grace or basic empathy, Trump was also photographed giving a grinning thumbs-up at the grave of a recently deceased soldier. These events alone would be remarkable for multiple reasons. The first is the utter contempt displayed for the sanctity of Arlington, a site where laws and regulations have been specifically adopted to prevent the partisan exploitation of a shared, apolitical, and very much hallowed ground. Not only was this an assault on what Ben Kesling at Politico accurately describes as a uniquely sacred site in American consciousness, it also constituted an enormous “fuck you” to all the families of deceased service members who expected their loved ones to rest in peace beyond the reach of crass political exploitation. With his startling behavior, Trump proved himself to be a man who cannot even visit a cemetery without managing to break the law or shock the conscience.

Equally chilling, though, is the fact that the Trump team has been accused of engaging in physical violence in the course of conducting their propagandistic visit. When a cemetery employee attempted to stop the entourage from filming or photographing in a restricted area, two members of his team engaged in verbal harassment of the woman, and one of them allegedly pushed her aside so that the Trump campaign could do as it wanted. In the aftermath of the incident, the employee filed a police report but declined to press charges, reportedly out of fear of retaliation by Trump supporters. Regardless, the Trump campaign proceeded to slander the employee, with statements that she was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and was “a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”

But these verbal attacks can’t hide the vile behavior they seek to sweep away. As Talking Point Memo’s David Kurtz observes, this sordid graveyard altercation has ominous echoes of the larger air of menace and violence that surrounds Trump: “The fascist overtones from the Arlington National Cemetery incident are unmistakeable: a presidential campaign run like a gang, with enforcers shoving aside a public servant enforcing the rules and a mob of millions of supporters with a track record of doxxing, harassing, intimidating, and threatening anyone who gets in their candidate’s way, all the while being egged on by the candidate himself.” In the last few days, National Public Radio was able to obtain the identities of the two Trump team members involved in the reported altercation, “deputy campaign manager Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team.” Significantly, NPR reports that “[Caporale] was also listed as the on-site contact and project manager for the Women for America First rally in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021 where Trump urged the crowd to “stop the steal” before some of them stormed the U.S. Capitol.” Caporale’s involvement with both the January 6 insurrection and the aggression allegedly deployed at Arlington isn’t just an indictment of him personally, or of the character of the men and women with whom Trump chooses to surround himself. This should also drive home the continuity between the two events, even if they’re disparate in scale — for Trump and his followers, there is no obstacle that can’t ultimately be resolved with intimidation and violence, no law that can’t be broken with apparent impunity.

What’s particularly appalling about the cemetery incident is that, in significant ways, the intimidation seem to be working, as if the nation has learned nothing from the worst events of Trump’s presidency, and Trump is blithely proceeding as if the law doesn’t apply to him. Once again, I think David Kurtz captures this dynamic when he writes that, “The erosion of any kind of strong, unified, national, countervailing force to Trump’s public bullying and nastiness only enables and emboldens the thuggery that is central to his appeal and that he has already notoriously used on Jan. 6 to try to retain power.” We have already seen the Army indicate that it considers the matter closed, even as there’s plenty of evidence that Army officials instructed the Trump campaign ahead of time about the rules it needed to follow; moreover, as Kurtz observes, the Army seems to have made a choice to put a low-level official into an impossible situation of enforcing the rules without full-throated backing. In other words, the Army did not and still does not want to antagonize the Trump campaign, even if doing so is necessary to prevent the illicit politicization of Arlington. 

It is a small sign of hope that the Democrats, including the Harris campaign, seem to understand the political potency of what transpired at the national cemetery, and that Trump can’t be allowed to hide behind false claims of honoring fallen service members or behind his recent lies that the altercation with the Arlington official didn’t actually happen. Democratic staff members associated with the Senate Armed Services Committee are reportedly trying to obtain details from the Army regarding the police report that the assaulted Arlington employee filed, and Democratic congresspersons have criticized the Trump campaign’s behavior. Vice President Harris herself has also employed the incident as an opportunity to hit Trump’s lack of respect for U.S. troops.

Incredibly, given that an ordinary politician would prefer to put the incident in the rearview mirror, Trump himself has continued to pour oil on the fire. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent reports, just days after the Arlington visit Trump “offered a highly distorted account of the scandal and painted himself as one of its victims. Trump even linked this to a bigger lie about the “deep state” being out to get him.” And, as noted above, Trump more recently went so far as to falsely claim that the incident with the employee never even happened. Sargent is exactly right: Democrats should be driven by the Arlington scandal and Trump’s subsequent statements to investigate what happened, as what transpired “reveals a level of contempt for the law and public service that’s incompatible with democracy.”

Indeed, the Trump team’s behavior at Arlington — the lawbreaking, the casual thuggery, the disrespect for the fallen — amounts to what we might term secular sacrilege: the desecration of an area of public life commonly held to lie beyond the realm of politics, as they illegally sought to use the backdrop of America’s war dead to make political hay. And this should remind us of a broader point — that there is in fact no area of our collective life for which Donald Trump holds any respect. Rather, he views our shared world as a thing to be exploited, manipulated, and if necessary, betrayed in order to serve his quest for personal aggrandizement, which at this point reduces to regaining the presidency in order to evade the legal consequences of his many crimes against the republic and its citizenry.

Over the years, Trump has insisted that there are certain limited, prescribed ways in which a person can be considered to actually be a real American. Again and again, he has essentially asserted that being American is a matter of having the right skin color, the right religion, the right ancestry. In many ways, he has simply adopted and echoed the retrograde views of the American right, with its emphasis on a hierarchy atop which sit white Christian males. Regardless, these ideas, particularly the parts about the superiority of being white and male, and the rightness of feeling contempt for women and for black and brown people, have found a deeply receptive home in his addled psyche.

But for the members of the American majority who are either excluded by these degrading definitions, or are alternately unconvinced, appalled, or repelled by them, Trump’s foregrounding of American identity has opened the door wide to a necessary reckoning with such exhausted ideas about national identity. Because if someone as deranged and unfit as Trump can opine on who belongs here, then it stands to reason that average Americans also have a claim to think about the question, and to come to their own conclusions.

In light of events like January 6 and now Trump’s immoral Arlington visit — not to mention the countless lesser depravities of the last eight years — it feels like we’re on solid ground turning the right-wing rhetoric around and asking, Exactly what sort of Americans are Trump and his accomplices? You don’t have to say they’re un-American or anti-American to conclude that, at the most basic level, they’re simply not Americans in the way that most of us think about being Americans. Most of us don’t think it’s OK to desecrate military cemeteries or lie unapologetically afterwards about the desecration or to physically push aside a representative of the U.S. military trying to make sure that federal law is adhered to. For all of Trump’s talk of illegal aliens invading the country, he and his coterie come across as the ultimate aliens in America, unable to understand or respect the most rudimentary notions of patriotism, cut off from human decency, and trapped in a cycle of rage and retribution that has led the ex-president to literally start a fight in a graveyard.

An Unconventional Convention Aimed to Rouse a Strong American Majority

Last week’s Democratic National Convention did not give us a vague or gauzy vision of America — it got right to the business of promoting equality, freedom, diversity, solidarity, patriotism, and an open-ended future. By offering up such a vision, the Democrats presented themselves as the party of normalcy, and unapologetically asserted their status as America’s majority party, open to all. The overall effect was to showcase a nation that is vitally alive and ready to move forward.

This was a convention that also took pains to remind viewers that democracy is not a spectator sport. It took a politically astute non-politician drive this point home most spectacularly, as Michelle Obama spoke in no-nonsense, evocative language about what much of the Democratic base has been fearing as well as hoping for. In acknowledging worries that festered as Biden seemed doomed to defeat, she helped her audience process those fears, let them go, and embrace more fully a spirit of hope. In turn, she tempered this hope with a fundamental sense of reality and agency, essentially reminding everyone that our political future is in all of our hands, and that we should be resilient in the face of inevitable down days ahead. 

But it was Vice President Harris’s acceptance speech that most thoroughly tied together the thematic threads laid out over the preceding days. Most strikingly in my opinion, by so explicitly identifying herself as the child of immigrants, she took direct aim at what Donald Trump sees as his greatest electoral bludgeon — the incitement of hatred of immigrants that he is betting is shared by sufficient numbers of Americans to put him in office. Harris was not just saying that he is wrong to do so — she was essentially putting her own example forth as a way to identify how Trump’s stance would have us collectively erase vast swaths of contribution and vitality on the basis of, when all is said and done, a repulsive white supremacism that would see the U.S. deprived of its greatness in exchange for plainly sick ideas of racial hierarchy. In doing so, she asserted ideas of American identity and freedom that are foundational to a liberal vision of America: the concept that we are all equal, that we should be free to follow our dreams, and that being American is not rooted in blood and ancestry, but in adherence to certain ideas and solidarity with the American community.

At the same time, Harris leaned full into her prosecutorial past and persona, but in a way that tied it to commonly held values, middle class roots, feminism, and service of the public interest. In other words, she didn’t just come across as tough, she came across as righteously so, in a way that ordinary Americans would respect and admire. She left us with the idea that this is the sort of person who should be president — all the more so when contrasted with the documented lawlessness, immorality, and fundamentally self-serving nature of her opponent. 

As others have noted, Harris’s speech aimed not only to rally the Democratic base, but to appeal to swing voters and even those who would not typically vote for Democrats. But as Greg Sargent crucially notes, her talk about border security, the January 6 insurrection, and the U.S.’s role as an advocate for democracy in the world made no concessions to Trumpism; indeed, as Sargent puts it, “In numerous ways, Harris portrayed the broad MAGA worldview as something in need of comprehensive repudiation.” For me, her sternest signal of this was the way she held the line on Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, making clear that the attack on the Capitol was simply unforgivable. Given that Donald Trump has placed the rightness of January 6 at the center of his campaign, including his extremely unpopular promise to free the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol building, reinforcing this red line regarding Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office was crucial for Harris, and for the nation.

For a long time, I’ve argued that the Democrats should embrace the reality that they’re not in normal democratic competition with the authoritarian MAGA movement, and need not just to defeat it at the polls but to destroy it as a political force. After all, when you’re always one election loss away from your opponents using their win to overthrow free and fair elections, you really can’t call the situation normal or tenable. This is easier said than done, of course, and I’ve never been able to settle on a fully satisfactory strategy for how this could happen. After all, what does it mean to “destroy” a movement whose power ultimately comes from (awful) ideas?  So I have over time settled on figuring out ways to delegitimize Trump and the GOP in the eyes of the American public. Watching the Democrats assert values like community, freedom, and equality as normal and mainstream, claim the mantle as the defenders of these values, and paint the GOP as abnormally opposed to these values, I think we all witnessed what such a process of delegitimization can look like in action.

Finally, in the wake of the convention, we’re in a phase of American politics when Democrats and pro-democracy voters need to studiously ignore media narratives that try to fit what’s going on with the Democratic Party into a box, such as the eager insistence that Harris’s momentum will soon stall. If you are feeling excitement that you are part of something far larger than yourself, then that is a precious thing that you should hold onto, share, and encourage in others. That feeling is in fact a completely legitimate and necessary part of conducting democratic politics. Likewise, the sense of possibility that many millions are — collectively — feeling is close to the essence of democracy, the idea that in some immeasurable way we can all get to somewhere better if we stick together. A case might be made that part of our ongoing political crisis is in part due to too many people unconsciously adopting a sober-minded, analytical perspective that too closely mirrors the political media, but that really fails to capture what democratic life is about in its entirety.

As Democrats Learn to Trust Feelings Again, Let's Second that Emotion

For the pro-democracy majority, the last month of American politics has been not only dizzying but exhilarating. Months of gut-clenched gloom as President Joe Biden seemed unable to make his case against Trump (both pre- and post-debate) were swept away by Kamala Harris’ quick, joyful emergence as his successor, the emotional volatility among the Democratic base enough to launch a thousand future mass psychology studies.

But as Anand Giridharadas observes in an intriguing new piece, the changes in the Democratic presidential campaign that have inspired waves of optimism among voters aren’t just a result of the candidate switch. Alongside Harris’s ascension, he sees a new style becoming dominant among Democratic campaign strategists and decision-makers, one that has traded a more staid and traditional approach to political communication for an active, multi-pronged engagement with voters. He identifies several key elements, including storytelling, understanding the importance of attracting and maintaining attention, and mobilizing the base as a way of bringing on board moderate voters instead of aiming campaigns squarely at (often unpersuadable, sometimes imaginary) median voters.

But one element above all others strikes me as the single most important: emotion. Giridharadas often seems to be speaking about the importance of appealing to the heart, not just the mind, and emotional engagement is the through-line linking several of the elements he identifies. Storytelling? There’s no decent political storytelling that doesn’t connect emotionally. Working to command people’s attention? Appealing to the emotions will always be key here. Making cultural connection, whether through art or campaign tchotchkes like some as-yet-undefined response to the MAGA baseball hat? Once again, emotional engagement would like a word. Even “reclaiming,” which Giridharadas describes as an effort by Democrats to take back from the Republicans ideas like patriotism and freedom, involves invoking profound emotions as much as profound ideas. 

Full disclosure: I may be somewhat predisposed to focus on the centrality of emotion in the Democratic strategy changes that Giridharadas outlines. Over the past several years, I’ve repeatedly lamented the disparity between the GOP’s willingness to provoke the most extreme and dangerous sorts of emotionality among its base, on the one hand, and the Democrats’ reluctance to fully rouse their base, on the other. This has been most striking in the Democrats’ general eagerness to move on from the Trump years, even as the GOP continued to radicalize against democracy and to promote ever more extreme ideas, such as the notion that impoverished immigrants crossing the southern border actually constitute an invasion. The Democrats’ aversion to riling up their own base by fully alerting voters to the latent violence and authoritarian lunacy issuing from the Republican Party has been deeply frustrating to witness. At worst, it struck me as not only self-defeating but a dereliction of duty, leaving the American majority demoralized and unprepared to face the greatest internal threat to our democracy since the Civil War. To my mind, if the Democrats couldn’t figure out how to inspire voters, they could at least motivate them to the polls by scaring the bejesus out of them with visions of MAGA.

For an aversion to emotional appeals was also on display as Democrats shied not only from articulating a vision of a multiracial, egalitarian society to counter the white supremacist, misogynistic nightmares of the GOP, but also from encouraging Americans to celebrate and draw inspiration from the great progress we have already made in establishing such a society. Such choices were especially striking given what I believe are the powerful and positive feelings of accomplishment, pride, and hope that are, to be blunt, Americans’ due reward for the better society towards which we have collectively tended. Giving ourselves credit where credit is due is key to an attitude of optimism towards the future, and to building a durable pro-democracy majority. 

Reading through Giridharadas’s take on what’s changed in Democratic thinking, I see some preliminary answers as to why it took so long for Democrats to start doing what, to many of us, has been the right and obvious approach all along. He rightly points to the dominance of a mindset that prioritizes dry discussions of policy over grander narrative, an attitude that to me seems rooted in inertia and personal habits of mind among many Democratic pols. Giridharadas also notes that some Democrats actively disdained more emotionally-rooted appeals in reaction to the unbridled emotionality of Trump and the right, as if this fundamental distinction between the two sides needed to be maintained lest the pathologies of the MAGA movement infect the Democrats — as if the only emotions to be roused were the darker spirits of anger and resentment. 

In Democrats’ defense, the way that primal emotions like hate and resentment have come to dominate the GOP means that Democrats have not been entirely crazy to worry about fighting fire with fire. After all, the GOP is Exhibit A for showing what happens when the darkest impulses come to possess an entire political party, as the most extreme attitudes and politicians have driven out any remaining GOP “moderation,” as a faction of right-wing wackos have become kingmakers in the Republican House caucus, and as a degenerate insurrectionist has claimed the GOP presidential nomination for the third time in a row.

But it is equally true that such bleak attitudes and emotions throughout the GOP did not emerge and develop out of nowhere, but rather have been assiduously cultivated by unscrupulous politicians and commentators for literally decades. For example, many members of the Republican base may have harbored worries about demographic change that threatened the status of white Americans, but it has been right-wing politicians and media that have assiduously inflamed such insecurities and prejudice into outright hatred of immigrants and minorities.

But the deliberate perversion of existing, inchoate sentiment into authoritarian passions on the right can also help remind us that acknowledgment and cultivation of mass feeling, when conducted in a healthier, ethical fashion, can also be a powerful pro-democratic force. When you listen to and validate what people are feeling, you are better positioned for their lived, emotional realities to inform your politics (both in terms of policy and rhetoric) — you are more responsive to their needs. For instance, in a time like ours, when much of the population feels worry and anxiety about the direction of the country, strong and moral leadership can help them identify grounds for optimism and solidarity. Giridharadas himself rightly zeroes in on this general concept when he observes that the new thinking in the Democratic Party says that they should “seek to compete with fascists for the emotional life of people, that you must take an organizer’s approach to helping people process a bewildering age and the dislocations of change and the resentments that come with progress and the pain of capitalist predation.”

This gives us a framework for understanding some of what may have been happening with the Democratic base and other Democratic-leaning voters emotionally since Harris took her place as the party’s presumptive nominee. Harris did not simply conjure good feeling out of thin air, no matter how central her personal role has unquestionably been. She did not somehow implant certain sentiments in millions of Americans as if by magic. Rather, she and her campaign have spoken and acted in a way that has cultivated and unleashed feelings that were already latent in the populace. Democrats went from feeling down to feeling up based not simply on her reassuring presence, but because Harris reminded them that there are good reasons to be hopeful about the future.

On top of this, Democratic optimism is very much rooted in an understanding of solidarity and community among millions of Americans — the optimism builds and sustains itself because each individual draws sustenance from knowing that millions of their fellow citizens are likewise energized and hopeful. This self-reinforcing mass energy, based on shared emotions, is what Democrats have been denying themselves and the American people by not more openly appealing to Americans’ hopes and fears in recent years. They have too often treated voters as isolated individuals rather than as members of a vast community that is already largely united behind powerful, forward-looking ideas that are cause for pride and excitement.

To get a bit more specific, let’s look at how the Harris campaign has addressed the anger and fear that many Americans feel about the extremist GOP. Rather than inciting Americans to hate their fellow citizens in the manner of Donald Trump, the Democratic campaign has directed — specifically towards Trump and J.D. Vance — a withering fusillade of contempt and mockery (the whole “weird” discourse features prominently here, which if nothing else is a way to appeal to people’s gut emotions). While they certainly also argue that the GOP ticket poses a threat to American values and freedom (thus engaging in the realm of ideas), their mocking rhetoric encourages emotions like contempt rather than fear or rage towards the GOP. This doesn’t mean that many millions of Americans don’t still (understandably) fear and hate Donald Trump, but the Harris campaign deserves credit for incentivizing Americans to feel and think about what we face in a way that’s both empowering and more socially healthy. Where the Republican instinct is to dehumanize their political “enemies,” the Harris campaign’s approach is to paint their political opponents as all-too-human hot messes who merit laughter and scorn. This acknowledges the deep emotions many feel, while offering paths for expressing them that can lead to solidarity and optimism rather than fueling a spiral of hate.

And for a large-scale demonstration of the centrality of positive emotional appeals to the Harris campaign’s strategy, last week’s Democratic National Convention offered what is likely to be the most concentrate, sustained dose we’ll be seeing. Reporting from the scene, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch amusingly described witnessing a “natural high of ecstasy take hold on the floor” of the convention, as attendees danced, laughed, and otherwise celebrated the political event with happiness and high energy. In turn, this sense of energy and celebration was inescapable for those viewing the DNC at home. Events like Tuesday’s pop song-infused roll call dared to be silly, fun, and wild, creating a remarkable sense of spontaneity despite the careful choreography of the 50-state musical journey. At a primal level, the state of high happy emotion communicated all sorts of positive messages to viewers — that the Democratic Party is confident, that it is optimistic, that it is unafraid of what the GOP might say.

But this raucous atmosphere was much more than a free-floating invitation to Americans to (virtually) join a fun party; it was also a living demonstration that the values and policies of the Democratic Party are reason for celebration and happiness. These political ideas were communicated by the stream of speakers each night of the convention, but I would point in particular to a pair of standout speeches — by Michelle Obama and Vice President Harris herself — as embodying appeals that linked emotional fire to political substance.

Michelle Obama carefully balanced straight talk about commonly-held anxieties about our political conflicts with a message of agency in determining our collective future; in doing so, she acknowledged that our emotional lives are central to successfully navigating this election, at both the individual and mass level. In a complementary fashion, Harris’s speech wove positivity, joy, sobriety, and optimism into an openly emotional campaign roadmap, though carefully grounded in repeated references to her prosecutorial, legislative, and executive experience. It aimed to infuse the listener with patriotic pride, cultural celebration, and a sense of participating in a historic, vital movement into a promising future, even as she enumerated more substantive goals around greater economic opportunity and personal freedom.

Politics, like the human societies in which it’s embedded, is deeply informed by our emotional realities and experiences; ignoring this fact presents its own set of hazards and handicaps. In a democracy, pro-democracy parties should recognize that it’s vitally important to channel feelings that might otherwise run in more destructive directions, and that it’s fine to engage people’s emotions for socially beneficial purposes. Such emotional appeals bespeak a faith that the passions aroused will not end up burning down democracy, but rather are a necessary means to help achieve social solidarity and societal progress. It is an immensely hopeful sign that the Democrats are letting go of an overly cerebral approach to politics, in favor of one that recognizes that political engagement is as much a matter of the heart and psyche as it is of the cooly calculating brain.

As Trump Teeters, History and Recent Events Show He'll Double Down on White Supremacism

Depending on your personal sense of the time/space/political continuum, it’s either way back in the rear view mirror or light years past, but either way I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists at the beginning of August. First, given the passage of time (14 days by old-fashioned terrestrial measurement), we can now categorize it as the first major evidence that Donald Trump has lost his bearings in the presidential race. Specifically, it was both an effort to re-gain control of media attention and, interrelatedly, to knock Harris off her tremendous momentum, and in both efforts he has so far been unsuccessful. Subsequent failures include his deranged press conference last week and his crazed tweet asserting that photos depicting huge crowds cheering Kamala Harris are actually AI-generated fictions. More face-plants are likely to come.

That his initial effort failed is worthy of consideration, and doubly so as it involved Trump going back to the racist well of resentment, fear, and hatred that has always been at the center of his political appeal to certain Americans. If you can stomach it, I strongly encourage you to watch a video of the interview, as words and summaries don’t convey the full crapulence of his appearance. First, and most prominent in coverage of the event, Trump asserted that Harris “turned” black after first claiming to be Indian, helpfully adding later that there is nothing wrong with either race but clearly suggesting that her black identity is a political contrivance. (“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” Trump said. “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”) There are many levels to Trump’s statements, not because he was being particularly complex or cunning here, but because racist statements always have plenty of ways to intersect with the centuries-long history of white supremacism.

At the most basic level, and I think at the level nearest to his basic intention, Trump wanted to remind white America not that Harris is black (which would be obvious to 99% of voters by now), but more importantly to let them know that he himself is well aware of this fact and wants them to know, as many of them likely already think, that it’s a big, bad deal-breaker. Moreover, he did so in a way that seemed designed to provoke Harris and/or her campaign into a direct response, perhaps something along the lines of saying that “Harris is black and proudly so.” In Trump’s universe, this would be used to further a racist line of attack that would ask how Americans could trust a black person to be president, especially one who so vigorously asserted her blackness. In this way, Trump was wielding white supremacism in a blunt manner no differently than he has for so long — as a way to assert his basic identity as a white man willing to engage in appeals to racism to defeat non-white candidates and the party of non-white people (i.e., the Democrats). He wanted to remind his base, and other possible voters, that he is to be considered the nation’s spokesman for unrepentant white supremacism.

In the same vein, by reminding listeners that Harris is also Indian, he played to the same racist mindset. I don’t think the central intent was to argue she’s untrustworthy because she lied about her identity (although that was obviously a side benefit); rather, he found a way to talk about the basic fact that she’s not just a minority, but doubly so, with Indian as well as African-American ancestry (or even triply so if a listener were confused by the American Indian/Indian American distinction). It was a basic attempt to “other” her, to make her seem alien and strange and definitely not someone with whom white people should feel comfortable (so much exotic blood! So many conflicting loyalties!).

Amplifying the spectacle of American’s white supremacist-in-chief sowing his racist oats was the context of his remarks: the National Association of Black Journalists conference, and the fact that he spoke in response to questions posed by a trio of female African-American reporters. It was in answering their initial question, from ABC’s Rachel Scott, that he uttered his first slanders against Harris, and it’s not insignificant that Scott’s question indeed went straight to the heart of his appeal (or lack thereof) to groups he has targeted. Recounting Trump’s various rhetorical attacks on Blacks, including his birther accusations about Obama and telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to where they came from,  she asked, “Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?”

Trump was clearly angered, replying, “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” characterizing the questioning as “disgraceful,” and asserting this was a “rude introduction. This pattern of indignation and attempts to belittle Scott continued through the rest of the interview, with Trump alternating between critiquing her questions and at times manipulatively bestowing approbation on what he clearly thought was gentler questioning from the two other journalists on stage. He also appeared to blame Scott personally for technical issues at the event, including the interview’s late start (“You’re the one who held me up for 35 minutes”) and issues with the microphones (it was later reported that the delayed beginning actually owed to Trump campaign quibbles with the format of the event). In other words, at the same time that Trump was issuing racist attacks on Harris, he was engaging in a parallel set of racist (and misogynistic) attacks against a black interviewer, as if in Trump’s mind Harris was not fully distinguishable from Scott, nor Scott from Harris. And for receptive racists listening at home, perhaps this was true enough.

In the immediate wake of the interview, it felt as if political coverage teetered on the brink of familiar patterns that have long favored Trump. After all, he did utter outrageous and attention-grabbing assertions that couldn’t be ignored. More than this, Harris would undoubtedly have to respond to them, potentially turning this into a conflict defined on Trump’s terms. But perhaps most decisively to why the story did not play out that way, Harris declined to engage in the manner that Trump likely hoped she would. Rather, at a Houston rally, she remarked that, “It was the same old show. The divisiveness and the disrespect [. . . ] The American people deserve better. The American people deserve a leader who tells the truth, a leader who does not respond with hostility and anger when confronted with the facts. We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strength.” 

This refusal to engage on Trump’s terms appears to have been the right choice, as stories about Harris’s identity provoked by his comments quickly peaked and diminished in a matter of days. But just because it was strategically wise for Harris to decline such engagement doesn’t mean that commentators and other Democratic politicians shouldn’t highlight the fact that Trump’s efforts to regain press attention and reverse his steady slide in polls seem to primarily involve reaffirming his white supremacist credentials as a way to attract voters. Likewise, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t remark on the basic fact that not only are such racist appeals disqualifying, they aren’t working as he intended or as they once might have.

Members of the media should also think long and hard about how the questioning at the NABJ conference proved so illuminating as to Trump’s policies and attitudes — a point rightly raised by Jennifer Rubin in a recent column. After all, not only did he engage in white supremacist strategizing, he offered damning responses on other subjects as well. Among other things, he doubled down on his intent to pardon January 6 insurrectionists, suggesting that they were unfairly prosecuted and jailed. He lied about the inflation rate (suggesting it was the worst in 100 years). He threw flailing VP choice J.D. Vance under the bus, remarking that, historically speaking, vice presidents don’t affect the outcomes of presidential races. And in an intriguing rebuttal to his long-time assertion that he will only lose the presidential race if Democrats cheat, he noted that, “If you don’t like me, I’m not going to win” — a rare admission of reality, and remarkable for being one of his few truthful utterances at the event. At a minimum, it feels quite possible that Rachel Scott’s initial, context-laden question broke his cool, making him vulnerable to questioning on other matters as well, including sharp follow-up questions from Scott and her colleagues.

Trump’s racist attacks on Harris have continued since his NABJ appearance, but we need to keep ever in mind that white supremacism was already the single most important element of his campaign for the presidency even before Harris took Biden’s place in the race. His two biggest issues, immigration and crime, are both rooted in the utterly racist idea that degenerate brown-skinned people are literally invading the United States in order to cause mayhem, steal American jobs, and illegitimately cast votes in elections. In this sense, Trump’s racist invocations against Harris are overdetermined, in that there was no way such a racist campaign would ever be able to resist lumping an African-American candidate in with the criminal immigrant threat on which Trump has staked his election chances.

With white supremacism acting as the glue holding together the Republican base and affiliated voters, Democrats would do well to continue to explore ways to describe these attitudes as beyond the pale, subversive of a strong and united America, and revealing of a moral rot at the heart of Republicanism. White supremacism can’t be called out and rolled back in the abstract; rather, the words and deeds of its political practitioners should be accurately described and condemned, and their electoral careers ended by a disapproving majority. While any mass disparagement of the Republican base as intrinsically racist and in need of repentance would be counter-productive and overbroad, it’s still possible to describe the racism of GOP leaders in a way that might wedge open some moral distance from their supporters, while communicating non-negotiable values of equality to the entire public. I think Harris showed one way to do this when she described Trump as performing “the same old show” and referenced “the divisiveness and the disrespect”; this approach captured both Trump’s racism and general unfitness for office without explicitly describing the former. It was a way of acknowledging his racism while avoiding an exchange that might facilitate Trump’s efforts to “other” her.

But politicians and commentators beyond Harris have more leeway to offer specific indictments of Republican white supremacism. While the “weird” discourse sparked by VP pick Tim Walz has mostly been used to highlight GOP misogyny and culture war extremism (banning books, targeting trans youth), watching Trump carry on in tritely racist ways at the NABJ conference made me wonder if a similar strategy might be used against him and others. As much as Trump was engaging in a political strategy that dovetails with his personal hatreds, he also came across as unhinged, outdated, and embarrassing (in addition to being deeply offensive). I don’t think “weird” is the appropriate way to describe a racist, but on the other hand, it feels like an opening exists to characterize Trump’s behavior as something you’d expect to see in a senile older relative raised in a different era — someone whose bizarre racial obsessions place them outside the mainstream of contemporary American life.

As a specific example, Trump’s decision to voice (feigned) confusion about whether Harris is black or Indian falls within a sordid tradition of white Americans claiming the privilege of sorting non-whites into preferred rankings of a racial hierarchy. At the same time, and certainly related to its racism, his commentary has an inherent “ick” factor to it, with Trump ironically tossing himself into another sorting bucket — the one containing dudes who take it upon themselves to stick their noses into other people’s business. With Trump veering nauseatingly into the territory of demanding an intimate accounting of Harris’ very biological being, he places himself adjacent to the uncanny fixations of the misogynist set, with their irrepressible desire to see women solely in terms of their reproductive function and whether or not they are good girls dedicated to replicating the white race. In both cases — Trump’s racial nitpicking and misogynists’ obsession with imaginary babies over adult women — the common thread is a pseudo-scientific assertion of certain nutjob realities (“everyone is one obvious race and must declare what team they are on posthaste!” in the first case, “blastocysts are pre-adult voting citizens whose parents should cast ballots on their behalf” in the second) that are abnormal by the majority’s standards. If outright declarations that Trump’s words reflect white supremacism are too blunt to break through the defenses of many, then finding a way to mock his antiquated racial yardstick might still get through. 

Democratic Enthusiasm for Harris Springs from Renewed Imaginings of Our Future

Over the past weeks, in an unprecedented process that has rocked the presidential race and arrested the attention of the country, Vice President Kamala Harris took the place of Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket, launched a vigorous campaign of her own, and selected a vice presidential running mate. The Democratic base appears enthused about its candidate in a way it hasn’t been since the Obamamania of 2008, with Harris far exceeding expectations around the size and direction of jolt she might bring. I’d imagined a more gradual taking of the reins, likely conducted with a tone that mixed in a great dollop of sobriety and sadness over Biden’s departure from the race — not a prescription or the “right way” I thought things would go, just my assumption about such a transition.

Was I ever wrong, and never more gladly so.

Harris hit the ground running with high energy, confidence, good humor, and a no-holds-barred attitude towards her opponent. On this last point, she quickly moved to frame the choice as one between a no-nonsense former district attorney and a recidivist criminal. It was particularly impressive to see her categorize him as such, cutting him down to size and crucially communicating that he was a “type” that she knows all too well. I’d speculate that this ability to put Trump in perspective, to suggest what a small man he really is, has been key to the revival of Democratic base enthusiasm. After all, Democrats had spent much of 2024 watching as President Biden failed to land effective blows against Trump (as measured in Trump’s consistent lead or tie with the president), even as Trump evaded accountability for his crimes and seemed increasingly to be America’s inevitable next president. It was as if Democrats had been collectively sharing a nightmare, unable to evade the disaster that all could see coming in surreal slow-motion, until Harris woke them up and reminded them that Trump is eminently beatable.

The seemingly overnight transmutation of Democratic anxiety into enthusiasm has been helped along greatly by Harris’s positivity and high spirits — the “joy” that VP pick Governor Tim Walz attributed to her in their first joint public appearance. Harris not only showed awakened Democrats there was a way forward, but that this campaign and the renewed hope they’re feeling is cause for celebration, for happiness, even.

With her defiant and contemptuous attitude towards Donald Trump, her willingness to put the extremist Project 2025 agenda front and center in her critiques of his candidacy, and her “We’re not going back" mantra, I would hazard that Harris has consciously made herself into the avatar of a pro-democracy American majority I’ve discussed before. This majority believes in American’s egalitarian ideals, either embraces or has no great objections to the U.S. being a multiethnic nation, and generally agrees with the idea of an activist federal government that acts to improve Americans’ lives. This is a majority that some have called the anti-MAGA majority, which has accurately reflected how its energies have been tied to what it’s against perhaps even more than what it’s in favor of.

But with Harris’s attitude that Trump can be beaten, even as she affirms that her campaign is the underdog, we may be at a point where the pro-democratic majority starts to coalesce more consciously about what it’s for. Indeed, the idea that Democrats are fighting for certain ends, and not just against Donald Trump and right-wing extremism, is something that Harris herself has articulated. Her foregrounding of “freedom” as a core Democratic value echoes the urgings of many political analysts and commentators who have been advocating that the Democrats use such language (and as Ron Brownstein reminds us, this turn in Democratic emphasis can be linked, at least in part, to the fact that the GOP has been busy taking away American freedoms in recent years). Practically speaking, it captures the consequences of MAGA’s anti-democratic threat, so that this threat is made much more tangible, and in the process turns the tables on a GOP that has long claimed the freedom mantle (at least rhetorically). The Harris campaign has defined some specific freedoms — the right to bodily autonomy, the right to be free of gun violence — but its obvious, more general power is the idea that every citizen is free to live their lives as they choose and to themselves define what freedom means. 

Because so many Democrats view a second Trump term as likely disastrous for American democracy and basic freedoms, Harris has also been able to campaign without yet fully articulating a concrete platform for her presidency. There is also a general expectation that her agenda would not be a wild departure from that articulated by President Biden’s campaign, which is a non-unreasonable preliminary assumption to make. Personally, I’m ambivalent about how specific Harris should be about her vision for a second term at this point in the campaign. The overriding necessity right now is to defeat Donald Trump and to delegitimize the authoritarian threat posed by the Republican Party, and Harris is performing the necessary role as defender of American democracy, particularly through the “freedom” talk I’ve noted. Along these lines, there are clearly some areas in which Harris has articulated a sharper vision — the aforementioned abortion rights and gun control measures among them — and which are in line with mainstream Democratic Party opinion. Such positions represent a repudiation of the repressive, chaotic, pro-violence politics of Trump and the GOP, and give substance to a democratic and freedom-embracing vision of the United States. 

But for now, and for at least some time longer, I’d argue that it’s sufficient to acknowledge and celebrate the sense of possibility that this candidacy has opened up — the increasing feeling that America’s future is not firmly set on a dark and unavoidable trajectory. At the most basic level, it’s fundamentally healthy for a society to see its future as open and malleable, rather than foreclosed and ominous.

And I’ll even go a step further and say that Harris’s lack of a firmly delineated vision isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the American majority. Harris has given the public space to think big and positive again; the longer this period lasts, the more it may in turn pressure her into thinking bigger than she otherwise might have. A superb example of this is Anand Giridharadas’s new blog series about big ideas for a Kamala Harris presidency; his first interview, with the brilliant Astra Taylor, provides just one example of how we might think bigger and bolder in this time of transition, as Taylor discusses the transformative potential of debt forgiveness in a way that ties it to Harris’ discussion of freedom. There is something fundamentally democratic about this period; it’s a time when “[p]art of the work of earning our votes should involve listening to Americans about our visions for the country and our place in the world,” as Roxanne Gay puts it in an excellent column talking about this unexpected time of revived re political imagination.

Cultivating mass enthusiasm and individual initiative about a wide-open future is all the more important since certain crucial aspects of our political world have not changed over the past three weeks. The most looming is Donald Trump and the GOP’s continued dedication to re-taking the  White House and controlling Congress via efforts properly described as a slow-motion insurrection. From voter suppression to creating an intimidatory air of menace and barely-contained violence, and committed to returning to power a man who promises to be a dictator on day one, the Republican Party has substantially parted ways with American democracy. Recent reporting on state-level efforts to subvert the vote certification process in Georgia in the event of a Trump loss is just one example of an effort to corrupt American democracy with the aim of placing a GOP strongman in power. The single most powerful blow to GOP insurrectionism would be a blow-out win by the Harris-Walz ticket, but Republican electoral schemes mean that even in the event of a clearly huge Democratic victory, the party could still try to cast doubt on the election results. Those who cast votes for Kamala Harris would need to meet such efforts with a mixture of resolve and contempt, and hold fast to the rightness of their optimism and the non-negotiable worth of their votes. Dreaming big now, and insisting on a campaign and a future Harris presidency that dares to be transformative, can only help us overcome a GOP that would drag us backwards by any means necessary.

Weirdo Vance Gets Dems Wired

Alongside the burst of energy, good humor, and sheer relief from the prospect of impending electoral doom, Kamala Harris’ ascension as the Democrats’ likely presidential nominee has also been accompanied by a weird outbreak across the Democratic Party of. . . the word “weird.” Initially directed primarily at Trump’s VP pick, Senator J.D. Vance, the term has spread like prairie fire, embraced by politicians and partisans to describe the right-wing extremism that has gobbled up the Republican Party.

More specifically, it’s frequently been deployed against the antediluvian attitudes that so many MAGA politicos hold towards women, gays, and trans people, and more generally against what we might term “pretensions of moral superiority uttered while skating on thin or non-existent ice.” As opposed to more traditional political language — such as calling the GOP a misogynistic party dedicated to taking away women’s rights — the “weird” discourse conveys moral judgment while evoking all manner of particular, subjective emotions in the listener. You could say that it hits the listener in the heart as well as the head, provoking basic feelings of discomfort and repulsion based on one’s own particular attitudes. You don’t have to agree that, say, Vance is a “misogynist”; instead, you just have to admit to yourself that, yeah, it sure is odd for someone to say that women without kids shouldn’t have a say in society’s future. This evocativeness also makes it a good way to describe in a visceral way how a politician is outside the mainstream, but without speaking so bluntly; it’s aggressive without overtly seeming so.

Not coincidentally, this linguistic offensive has paralleled Kamala Harris’ more openly confrontational opening stance toward Donald Trump, in which she has cast the former president as a predatory criminal running against a justice-dispensing, no-nonsense former D.A. A huge commonality between these two approaches — one playful, the other more traditional in its language — is an effort to cut the GOP opposition down to size. Labeling it as “weird” for a politician to advocate giving additional votes to parents with children registers a gentle contempt and dismissal, with a tacit understanding that of course voters will know automatically that this is a dumb, divisive idea that only a right-wing freak would propose. In the same way, Harris’ labeling of Trump as a criminal strips him of his presidential prestige. Both approaches are about dominating your opponent, though one is subtler than the other. Moreover, both approaches also rely on a sort of commonsense, “we all really know what the truth of the matter is” attitude towards their opponents, so that dominance flows not just from the speaker’s will and say-so, but also from an appeal to common standards and majority opinion. In this sense, it has a touch of the anti-intellectual about it, relying on personal feelings rather than agreement with some smarty-pants description of what exactly is wrong with the particular right wing politician (Vance is “weird” about women’s privacy versus Vance is a “fascism-curious misogynist with unresolved mother issues”).

Getting the balance right between forthright talk and mockery has long been a challenge in dealing with Donald Trump. He’s a buffoonishly malevolent figure, simultaneously an unrepentant enemy of American democracy (he did, after all, attempt a coup to hold on to power), an entertainer who himself uses (often cruel) humor to bind his followers to him, and an utterer of many, many objectively stupid and offensive ideas. Do you concentrate on calling him an unparalleled threat to democracy, or on pointing out what a crazy m’er f’er he is?

And yet, as those who study authoritarianism tell us, there’s much to be gained from mocking and denying credibility to strongmen and the extremist movements they lead. In the case of Trump and the GOP, I wonder if the underlying equation has shifted over the last few years, as we are no longer talking about the prospect of Trump and the GOP doing awful things (in which case sober warnings of their dangers arguably outweigh a mocking approach that potentially downplays these very dangers). Now we’re living in a world in which their awful works lay bare before us. From the nightmares of the Trump presidency, to the red state war on women, it may be that most of us need to hear a bit less about the true dangers, and a bit more about how the politicians inflicting such harm aren’t just monstrous but absurd weirdos owed not an iota of respect. 

To some extent, proof of the effectiveness of the “weird” line of attack is discernable via the squalling and squirming evident on the right side of the political spectrum — not to mention the good old phenomenon of their doubling down on provocative positions in order to, yes, own the libs. Apparently, the Democrats’ “weird” critiques are to be considered juvenile and themselves evidence of Democratic weirdness. . .

Somewhere in this mix is the “good weird” (hat tip to Congressman John Lewis’ concept of “good trouble”) that so quickly broke out among Democrats following Harris’ replacement of Biden as the party’s de facto presidential candidate. I am thinking in particular of the rush by many with meme-making skills to re-contextualize off-kilter remarks by Harris (at least according to right-wing critics) as in fact fun, playful, and meaningful. And so her remarks about falling out of a coconut tree (comments made by her mother that Harris has relayed to audiences) were transmuted into “good weird,” indicative of rule-breaking, the end of Democratic paralysis, and the advent of perhaps not giving quite so many fucks about bad-faith critiques. Indeed, those who came around to believing that Harris was the Democrats’ logical candidate began to speak of themselves as having been “coconut-pilled.”

I think the outbreak of these two parallel phenomena — the Democrats’ confidence in saying that multiple facets of the MAGA movement are weird and creepy, alongside the Democrats’ embrace of a heretofore alien playful 2024 campaign style —should hearten the party while acting as a flashing warning sign to the GOP. When Democrats see little downside in making open appeals rooted in mass understanding of the Republican Party’s fundamental ridiculousness, and indeed appears to gain public support while doing so, we can see the possibility of the floor giving out beneath the reactionary GOP. Apart from careers in clowning and stand-up comedy, the vast majority of successful endeavors in life require other people to take you seriously. This seems doubly true in the realm of politics.

Ultimately, it feels to me like a mix of rhetorical strategies will be needed to rally the American majority against the reactionary MAGA movement. We need to articulate the true stakes, while also reminding ourselves, and persuadable voters, that the right is filled with absurdity as well as true menace.  This one-two punch, accompanied by a positive vision for the future that transcends the bitter backwardness offered by the GOP, may be weird, and wired, enough to work.

J.D. Vance Is Lamely Trying to Turn Americans Against Each Other

As Americans beyond the borders of Ohio collectively learn more about Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the results of this mass crash education have not been pretty to behold. Originally emerging into the public sphere almost a decade ago as the author of the autobiographical Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has apparently spent the ensuing years radicalizing into a particularly nasty dreamer of MAGA-infused nightmares. Over the past week, we’ve been treated to stories about his disdain for the childless cat ladies who apparently run the Democratic Party as well as the federal bureaucracy; his suggestion that only people with children should have a say in the nation’s future (and that their influence should be amplified according to the size of their broods); his ties to the techno-fascist movement brewing out in Silicon Valley; his penning of the intro to a book written by the head of the organization leading the charge for Project 2025; and his friendship with Curtis Yarvin, a fascist who has suggested that the solution for useless poor people is to suspend them in a Matrix-like virtual reality.

For those interested in seeing Donald Trump and the larger MAGA movement defeated in November, Vance has so far proven himself to be a massive self-own on the part of the former president — a far-right VP choice based on a sense that the election was in the bag, and perhaps with an uncharacteristically broader-minded interest in anointing a successor for that distant time when Donald Trump is transported to the great Mar-a-Lago in the sky. So far, Vance seems to have done far more to rally a wide swathe of Americans against his repugnant views than to inspire MAGA-curious voters to jump on the Trump 2024 bandwagon.

I’ve heard observers talk about how Vance’s bald extremism presents all sorts of attack possibilities for Democrats, which is true; but to be more specific, in his articulation of a more cerebral and detailed framework of right-wing nationalism and misogynistic hatred than Trump aims for, Vance has offered valuable openings for a countervailing presentation of progressive and commonsense American ideas. Indeed, in his effort to be both simultaneously logically consistent and maximally provocative, Vance has laid out a hideous, constrained vision that amounts to a MAGA-friendly guide as to who should be considered a “real” American versus who doesn’t make the cut. And so, for example, the idea that only (white) Americans who have babies can be considered true Americans gets run through the thresher of anti-abortion animus towards IVF treatment, with the result that even those white people who have children via IVF are not actually true Americans; neither, apparently, are those who raise non-biological children as step-parents (as in the case of Vice President Kamala Harris) or as adoptive parents (as in the case of Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg). Logically consistent? Yes. But also alienating to most Americans? YES.

So why is Vance vociferously advocating for such regressive ideas? In the first place, he may well believe them, though whether this is the case or he’s engaging in a purely cynical play is ultimately unknowable. But at a minimum, he sees them as appealing to the conservative white Americans who constitute the MAGA base. More specifically, the appeal is designed to flatter the opinions and lifestyles of this base. For example, by suggesting that it is one’s patriotic duty to have children and for women to dedicate themselves to raising them, he isn’t just advancing a white nationalist talking point; he also validates the lives of millions of conservative women who are already doing just this. When he tells such parents that they deserve to have more votes because they have more kids, he’s telling them that their choices are amazing and that as a result they should have more political power than nulliparous liberals walking dogs instead of pushing strollers in their barren blue states.

Moreover, it’s not insignificant that Vance has over the years presented his regressive ideas in a way that is maximally divisive. In the first place, he seeks to sideline widely-held societal values, and to rebrand them as deeply conservative ideas. For instance, his suggestion that adults without children should be punished and those with kids rewarded is already U.S. policy, though admittedly less punitively so than he has proposed. As Josh Marshall reminds us, “There are dependent deductions, a refundable child tax credit, even something as obvious as public schools,” with the latter funded even by those without children, and with no broad complaining that this is the case from those without children. That is, there is already a pro-child consensus across U.S. society that provides material and less tangible benefits to parents. However, in advocating for punitive measures against the childless, Vance pretends we don’t already have a pro-child consensus that transcends the claims of either party. Not only does this flatter those conservatives with families, it also mendaciously tries to rile people up against those without children as some sort of freeloaders, when in fact those literally millions upon millions of Americans have gladly been paying taxes to help educate other people’s kids. Lara Bazelon gets it exactly right when she writes that, “This is a fake wedge issue and reveals a deep vein of misogyny. Some women get married, some don’t. Some women have kids, some don’t. The point is we get to decide and Republicans, when it comes to women’s rights, want to take our choices away.”

A strategy to divide Americans with reactionary rhetoric, in a way that flatters believers and denigrates the unworthy, is also visible in Vance’s attempts to provide substance to Trump’s broad declarations of nationalism and America-First-ism.  Writing for The Atlantic, Adam Serwer zeroes in on Vance’s speech at the Republican National Convention, in which the Ohio senator asserted that the United States is not just a set of principles, but a “homeland” and a “nation” that encompasses both the living and their ancestors. But an apparently unobjectionable idea (the seemingly banal observation that the U.S. is an actual place with actual people) is immediately conditioned and restricted in Vance’s telling, in which coming from generations of Kentuckians who have lived and died in the same geographical territory constitutes a badge of true citizenship:

Now, in that cemetery, there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there, and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.

Clearly, Vance’s story-telling is meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia and recognition in receptive listeners — that these traditional, authentic Americans outright deserve not only their citizenship but pride of place in the American nation, through continuity, longevity, and a willingness to defend their territory and their achievements. But as Serwer observes, “if real Americans are those who share a specific history, then some of us are more American than others”:

In Vance’s definition of what it means for America to be a “nation,” these people who sacrificed their lives to preserve the republic are less American than the soldiers of the slaver army that sought to destroy it. Some of those Union veterans are buried in cemeteries like the one Vance describes, after being forced to bear the kind of nativist bile spewed at the RNC. Vance’s definition of America is less a nation than an entitlement, something inherited, like a royal title or a trust fund. The irony is that Vance’s idea of the nation is as much an abstraction, an imagined community, as the American creed he disdains; it is simply narrow, cramped, and ugly. Unfortunately, people fight and die for those too.

And just as with Vance’s attacks on childless women, his effort to present a conservative worldview that is both propagandistically appealing and logically coherent leads to absurd, untenable conclusions. Is it really obvious, as in Vance’s tale, that a family descended from ancestors who raised arms against the Union is to be considered “more American” than than a woman who emigrated to the United States from Nigeria in the 1980’s? According to Vance’s hierarchy, yes. But this is as nonsensical as proposing that a Mississippian whose great-great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy should be looked at with disdain in comparison to a person of good Yankee stock whose distant forebears came over on the Mayflower. Once again, Vance is giving voice to archaic concepts that flatter those who meet their qualifications — in this case, white Americans whose families have lived for generations in the same place — that begin to crumble once you start peeling apart their assumptions.

Not only does such genealogical balderdash privilege the status of America’s white population versus more recent arrivals (read: people of color), it runs up against a tacit but bedrock liberal principle that there is in fact no hierarchy of citizenship, and that every American is to be considered equal, regardless of heritage. More abstractly, but just as importantly, this reactionary vision suggests that there is an objective, quantifiable way to judge each person’s relative worth as a citizen — a notion that due to its actually subjective nature is unresolvable and subject to abuse by those wishing to denigrate their fellow citizens, as we can see quite clearly in the case of Vance and his slanderous propositions. The liberal attitude, in contrast, rests on mutual respect towards fellow citizens, alongside an implicit belief that we all belong, and that judgments and hierarchies only bring us all down.

So while Vance’s reactionary schema is insidious and divisive, appealing to base hatreds and insecurities, we should also understand that this is also an opportunity for the rest of us to make explicit those widely-shared ideas of equality, tolerance, and mutual respect that are too often left tacit in American society. We should be able to articulate the consensus that already exists among the American majority regarding families and citizenship; in fact, I’d argue that taking this consensus for granted for too long, and not more overtly praising and celebrating it, has opened the door for reactionaries like Vance to come along with their commonsense-sounding notions that are actually quite backwards and self-serving. The majority believes in the value of families, but not that those families must be defined in an outdated and self-serving way that puts down anyone who doesn’t fit the “right” way of doing things; and the majority believes in our common citizenship and love for country, but not in a way that claims special status for a privileged minority based on un-American claims that they were here first. 

With Biden Stepping Aside, Democrats Can Concentrate on Defeating Republican Authoritarianism

President Biden’s announcement that he will stand down from seeking a second term in office, and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place atop the Democratic ticket, has provided a salutary shock to the American political system. For weeks now, a campaign unraveling over question about his fitness to run and then serve four more years has distracted the Democrats, and the country, from the gravest domestic threat we have faced since the Civil War: the possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, this time supported by a fully authoritarian Republican Party. In retrospect, the Democrats have gone through an unavoidable reckoning sparked by Biden’s parlous debate performance a scant three weeks ago. The president’s announcement is providing massive infusions of oxygen to a public discourse that had felt dangerously claustrophobic and self-defeating to anyone who cares about the survival of American democracy.

Concerns about Biden’s age have clearly turned some voters off from supporting him, though it can be difficult to say where such worries end and concerns about his record in office begin, as the electorate has been deeply reluctant to recognize Biden’s role in even objectively strong achievements (the smashing of inflation, the passing of the transformative Inflation Reduction Act, the withdrawal of U.S troops from Afghanistan). But there can’t be any question that had Biden remained in the race, the result would have been a campaign in which attempts to draw attention to the threat posed by Trump and the GOP would have been constantly undermined by concerns about Biden’s age. In a worst-case scenario, the Democrats could have faced a wipe-out from the presidency down through Congress.

Not only would there have been the possibility of significant numbers of a demoralized base staying home, but both Democrats and independents would have had legitimate concerns about the credibility of a party that left unchallenged a president clearly incapable of defeating Trump. The dissonance between the stated urgency of beating the former president and the simultaneous insistence on casting a vote for a man that strong majorities saw as too enfeebled to run would have been toxic for the party’s standing. Even worse for the country, Trump and the GOP would have had a decent chance of hiding the extent of their extremism from the American people; with a nation unprepared for the chaos to come, and the Democrats discredited in the eyes of millions of former supporters, the damage to the country could have been unfathomable.

That full-on nightmare scenario just became far less likely.

But for a Kamala Harris campaign to maximize its chances of victory, it needs to learn from some major errors that Biden and other Democrats have made over the last three and a half years. It’s not just Biden’s age that has dragged him down; it’s also the party-wide failure to hit consistently against Trump and against a GOP that has continued to radicalize even while Biden occupied the White House. In the name of not rocking the boat and restoring “normalcy” to American politics, the Democrats’ deep-seated aversion to conflict has become a huge drag on the party’s prospects. Rather than fearlessly broadcasting the truth about the GOP — that it has transformed into a white supremacist, Christian nationalist, authoritarian party engaged in de facto insurrection against American democracy — the party has too often bought into self-sabotaging rhetoric about “lowering the temperature” and the cult of bipartisanship. 

In contrast, the Republican Party has been playing a far different game this whole time. The GOP has plotted a path to power based on the American public perceiving chaos, danger, and failure all around; based on Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods beyond rational thought, beyond the evidence of statistics, facts, even lived reality. And so the Republican Party, and its allied media organs, have steadfastly promulgated the idea that the economy is in ruins, communistic elites run an oppressive government bureaucracy, trans youth are spreading like a zombie apocalypse, and violent immigrants constitute an invading army storming across the southern border. Alongside this, the party has engaged in a slow-motion insurrection against democratic governance, eviscerating voting rights for millions, echoing the incendiary rhetoric of the previous president about illegal voting and stolen elections, and preparing the way for Trump’s destructive return to the Oval Office. And paralleling the GOP’s legislative efforts and propagandizing, the Supreme Court’s majority has confirmed itself to be an equally partisan player, eliminating fundamental rights (the most prominent being the smashing of abortion rights) and, most destructively, allowing Donald Trump to evade justice for his crimes in office while laying the groundwork for a lawless second term.

The rhetoric, strategies, and ambitions around the 2024 Trump presidential campaign have validated the theory that the GOP’s politics over the last three and a half years have been insurrectionary in nature. Trump vows to exact retribution against his enemies and to be “a dictator on day one”; to engage in “mass deportation” that will likely cost lives, massively violate civil and human rights, and deliver a body blow to the U.S. economy in one squalid go; and to abandon the alliances that keep Americans safe in favor of an incomprehensible deference to Russia and China. Meanwhile, the blueprint provided by Project 2025 would entail a massive assault on Americans’ freedoms, with the goal of establishing retrograde hierarchies of race, gender, and religion, with profound changes not just to American government but to the nature of our society itself.

With Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential candidate, the party will have a chance to reset its stance towards the authoritarian, racist, and misogynistic GOP. If Trump and the Republican Party are as far gone as their critics allege, the attacks on Harris that are to come will provide plentiful, high-profile evidence of these disqualifying beliefs that unite the party. And if Harris and the Democrats are to blunt the impact of such attacks, and even better, to turn them into liabilities for the GOP, they have a massive incentive to describe early and often what such criticisms tell us about the nature of the GOP, its presidential candidate, and its retrograde vision for America. As Josh Marshall bluntly puts it, “Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism.” For Harris is truly a nightmarish vision in the eyes of the Trump-dominated Republican Party. A woman, a person of color, a child of immigrants, a spouse of a non-Christian: in the value system propounded by Trump, such a person cannot be considered American or even fully human, much less a legitimate presidential candidate. Already, Trump has shown his true colors in his vile response to Biden’s exit from the race; it seems guaranteed he will show an equal lack of restraint in his comments about Harris.

Contrary to what some in the Democratic Party’s leadership think, it is to the benefit of the country and to the party to fully expose the contrast in basic moral visions between the Democratic and Republican parties, even if this inevitably results in an escalation of rhetoric and conflict with the GOP. The Republicans’ ability to win the presidency, as well as other levers of power, is enhanced to the extent that the party can fool Americans into believing that the GOP is not as bad as it seems. But the cold hard facts about the party’s true attitude towards people of color and women, and in favor of white supremacy, cannot be set aside:

• A party that believes African-Americans are the equals of white Americans would not work to deny African-Americans fair representation in statehouses and Congress in order to enhance the political power of white people.

• A party that believes Latinos are the equals of white Americans would not engage in gerrymanders that deny them power in states like Texas, and would not support a president whose slanders against immigrants act as an incitement of abuse and violence to all Latinos in the United States, regardless of citizenship or immigration status.

• A party that believes women are the equals of men would not deny those women control over their own bodies and reproductive choices, or show indifference when some of those women die due to draconian laws based not on science but on religious extremism.

Democrats need to anticipate, contextualize, and refute the obvious racist and misogynistic attacks to come against a Harris candidacy. To do this, they must be unafraid to describe in blunt, unambiguous terms the white supremacist and anti-woman tenets that lie at the core of the GOP. Alongside this, they must unflinchingly describe how such hatreds help drive the party’s anti-democratic stance, unwilling as Trump and his ilk are to assent to equal citizenship to huge swathes of the American populace. Simply playing defense here is not enough; Democrats need to make the case to the American people that the hatreds that bring such energy and meaning to GOP politicians like Trump render them unfit to hold power in an egalitarian, future-oriented America.

I noted above the ways that a Biden candidacy threatened catastrophic losses for the Democrats and for the country. A huge part of the danger was that the Democrats wouldn’t simply lose, but lose in the most damaging way possible — in a way that failed to illuminate the true stakes of this election, and that might alert and energize Americans regarding the profoundly divergent visions before them. With Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate, and with the type of campaign that the Republicans will almost inevitably run against her, Americans are much more likely to experience this contest as the true choice that it is, and to mobilize a majority that can win both this election and the longer-term fight to preserve and expand American democracy.

Only Democratic Escalation of the Fight for Democracy Will Stop the Authoritarian GOP

I’ll take with a grain of salt various assessments that many in the Democratic Party had initially given up on beating Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt against him, and that Democrats should quiet their criticisms of Donald Trump’s authoritarian designs for the country. But even if a variety of damning anonymous quotes weren’t really indicative of a broader collapse of nerve, and with the party rejuvenated now that President Biden has given way to Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s candidate, it’s still worth taking apart facile arguments that Trump’s brush with death has given him superpowers in his quest to become America’s next president — particularly when Trump and the GOP continue to cite Trump’s survival as evidence of his toughness and of divine grace.

One key argument has been that “Trump “was already on track to win and the fact that he is now a victim of political violence rather than the perpetrator,” in words attributed to a Democratic senator’s aide, has been something of a game-changer. But this mentality would grant absolution to a man who himself has steadily encouraged violence against Americans and others since he declared his first presidential run so many years ago, and who among other things incited a violent attack on the US Capitol with the aim of overturning American democracy. In the words of Edward Luce, “No honest accounting of America’s fetid climate can ignore the fact that the former president himself is the country’s most influential exponent of political violence.” For Democrats frozen with worry that Trump has somehow been cleansed of his prior sins, a perspective worth considering is that most Americans may instinctively associate the assassination attempt with the atmosphere of mayhem that Trump himself has done so much to encourage.

Likewise, the idea that the so-called “iconic” images of Trump pumping his fist while his face drips blood have somehow transformed America forever is deeply passive, if not outright bizarre. I don’t think we can assume that American voters’ reaction to such images is going to be, “Wow, that guy looks totally sane and is the sort of person who should be our next president.” I think anyone who already opposes Trump is likelier to be unnerved by the fascistic imagery. Likewise, Trump’s apparent mouthing of the words “Fight! Fight! Fight!” seems about as far from a rational response to almost being killed as one can imagine; reprieved from meeting his maker, Trump’s immediate, gut instinct was to double-down on the violent rhetoric that already alienates so many Americans.

Then there is what the GOP has been omitting in its response: the glaring fact that this was a shooting almost certainly enabled and encouraged by decades of GOP pro-gun rhetoric, which has grown so strident and extreme that it is not unusual for Republican politicians to feature themselves gleefully holding weapons of war in campaign ads and other publicity photos. Setting aside the political dimensions of the shooting, thousands upon thousands of Americans experience what Trump did every year — but not all of them are so lucky as to dodge a bullet or have a government team along to provide counter-sniper fire. Given the Republican voter registration of the shooter, a more critical take might characterize this as an instance of Republican-on-Republican violence made possible by a Republican obsession with semiautomatic weapons and a belief in the necessity of violence to political dominance. 

This leads us to the overriding reason why Democrats can’t let themselves get bullied into pulling back from their attacks on Trump: Trump and the GOP have have steadily encouraged and celebrated political violence for many years now, as a key to gaining power and as a weapon to destroy the peaceful contestation of power without which democracy fails. From right-wing mayhem and murder at the Charlottesville Unite the Right event, to the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Donald Trump has unapologetically incited and justified violence against perceived political enemies. Now, the GOP is attempting to fold the assassination attempt into Trump’s fascistic appeal, and it is a sign of our broken media ecosystem that this is not being described as far outside the bounds of normal democratic politics. Democrats absolutely need to counter the GOP’s crazy attacks blaming them for inciting the attempt, because they are right to place the blame for political violence squarely on the GOP, and to defend themselves alongside the necessity of peaceful politics. You will look in vain for a Democrat inciting violence the way that multiple GOP elected officials, including Trump, do. On top of this, the Democratic base is wildly against Trump partly because he is trying to mainstream political violence, and they don’t want that to happen to this country. 

In the aftermath of the assassination attempt, there can be little doubt that the Trumpist GOP will not only continue with its inciting ways, but will now double down with more threat and menace against its “enemies.” We have seen this already, in statements by Senator (and now also vice presidential candidate) J.D. Vance and Texas Governor Greg Abbott accusing the Democrats of sparking the attempt on Trump’s life. If the GOP plan is to accuse Democrats of inciting violence, there is little doubt that this mentality will lead the Republican Party to increase its aggression and menace toward its political adversaries. As Paul Waldman puts it in a sobering assessment of the latent violence flowing through the GOP and the MAGA faithful, “Just as Trump’s supporters have always used the real or imagined excesses of the left to justify their own squalid behavior, they now fantasize about the depths they believe they have permission to sink.”

In light of the party’s increasing appetite for political violence, attempts at the Republican National Convention to paint Donald Trump as a divinely-ordained figure saved from death by the Almighty himself must be seen as particularly audacious and grotesque. If anyone saved Trump’s life, it was the crowd members who first spotted the would-be assassin, and the police who attempted to approach him; these actions quite possibly distracted the shooter sufficiently that he missed his target. Set alongside such farcically hypocritical attempts to depict Trump as a man of unity and holiness, his inevitable appeals to violence (defending the January 6 attack, threatening “retribution” against his “enemies”) provide an opportunity to further highlight the devolution of the GOP into an anti-democratic, authoritarian menace to American democracy and society.

So Democrats must internalize that they need to fight the GOP slander that attempts to make them the offending, violent party. To do so will require their own countervailing aggression — but of a wholly different kind than the violent-minded, mendacious propaganda coming from the Republican camp. It necessarily needs to be an assertiveness that operates within democratic, non-violent norms, limited to rhetoric and political mobilization, but which effectively exposes, denigrates, and delegitimizes the GOP’s violent push against democracy. They must set aside rote instructions from editorial boards, and self-serving demands from GOP politicians, to tone down the political conflict.

The GOP’s reaction to the assassination attempt is only confirming the darkness at the heart of Republican authoritarianism, with grievance and revenge at the center of its politics. The truth is, Democrats must in fact escalate their conflict with the GOP in the name of democracy and the peaceful resolution of differences. They must speak truthfully about the opposition party’s tragic turn against American democracy and its embrace of a retrograde and repressive agenda (from anti-abortion zealotry, to the targeting of minorities for political disempowerment, to threats to gun down peaceful protestors, to an utter indifference to combatting the effects of global warming that are already brutalizing millions of Americans with heat, fire, and flood). They must speak truthfully about how this turn against democracy springs from a toxic stew of white supremacism, religious fundamentalism, misogyny, plutocratic greed, and a correct perception that a majority of Americans opposes its backwards agenda. And of course they must unapologetically advance legislation now that prevents the slaughter of Americans with weapons of war, whether they be a president or a child, welcoming a fight with a GOP that prefers the rights of guns to exist over the rights of humans to do so.

The things that seem to make Trump and the GOP strong — violent threat; unity based on a narrow-minded, hierarchical vision of America; frantic zealotry; cult-like worship of Donald Trump as a king blessed by God — are also what scare the bejesus out of the American majority. Most of us instinctively recoil from violence, from racism, from lockstep politicians who worship a strongman leader, and Democrats need to hit hard against these dubious GOP strengths. Trump, post-assassination attempt, is the same vile and anti-American figure he was before the shooting. In fact, we can assume him to emerge more extreme, more vengeful, and more violent-minded than before — a stance that will be echoed across the Republican Party. Democrats need to be ready to respond to this, and to make the GOP pay a steep electoral price for its war on democracy.

Supreme Court's Immunity Ruling is an Attempt to Legitimate GOP Insurrectionism

In the years since Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow American democracy in the wake of the November 2020 election, I’ve argued that Republican politics should be viewed through the lens of a party-wide insurrection against U.S. democracy, a movement ignited by the former’s president’s foiled coup attempt. You could say that the GOP began this dark endeavor with gusto. In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol building, most GOP House members quickly voted against certifying the election results, despite the fact that this meant validating the rioters’ goal; then, in the following weeks, a majority of Republican congresspeople and senators opposed the impeachment and conviction of Donald Trump for his attempts to undo the election results. Their unconscionable votes proved to be a retroactive endorsement of Trump’s actions, as a large proportion of elected officials, and a majority of the party base, grew over time to embrace the Big Lie of a stolen election as an article of party faith. The GOP also demonstrated its alliance with January 6 perfidy by vociferously opposing investigation of the events surrounding that day, leaving the Democrats to head up what the GOP would try to label as a partisan investigation. 

In the following years, the GOP’s support for Trump’s insurrection has been an essential framework for understanding and properly describing major thrusts of Republican policy and political machinations. At the state level, there have been initiatives to undermine election administration so that future efforts to manipulate the vote might be more successful. Arguably even worse, they encouraged an atmosphere of menace against those administering elections, by tacitly or explicitly supporting right-wing threats against election administrators. Simultaneously, we’ve seen renewed schemes to disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. Even as such efforts have continuity with decades-long Republican voter suppression, in the post-January 6 context they can be more precisely seen as efforts to attack American democracy and majority rule. And beyond law-making intended to corrupt American democracy, the GOP has propagated lies about mass voter fraud and illicit elections results, building on the Big Lie of 2020. To my mind, most singularly toxic are Republican lies that not only are Latino immigrants “invading” the United States, but that they’re also voting and are responsible for whatever victories Democrats manage to win. In one sinister package, the GOP manages to embrace the extremist Great Replacement theory, dehumanize innocent migrants while imagining them as a hostile army, and subvert the electoral system.

The single largest piece of evidence that the party’s overriding end is to overthrow America democracy, though, has been the party’s alignment with Donald Trump, the man who. . . tried to overthrow American democracy — and whose clear goal for a second term is to complete his attempted insurrection, which turns out never to have ended but only evolved and mutated through the present. Even a cursory look at what we can discern of Trump’s second term agenda shows plans to take a jackhammer to the rule of law, our free society, and fair election. With plans to stack the Justice Department with die-hard loyalists, a Project 2025 blueprint to impose reactionary repression across America, and avowals to prosecute and jail political opponents, Trump’s planned authoritarianism is sitting in plain view. The GOP’s elected officials, having looked up these plans, have still pledged themselves to support America’s would-be dictator. Perversely, the fact that such a huge chunk of the GOP is complicit or acquiescent obscures that all of this indeed constitutes an insurrection, since it so neatly overlaps with partisan divisions and allows many to characterize the conflict as simply “polarization” or partisan warfare. Yes, it is both of those, too, but in the same deeply misleading way that you might describe World War II as an instance of a highly polarized political environment involving serious partisan warfare. To put it plainly: a movement that seeks to destroy democracy and the rule of law in order to overturn majority rule, and to permanently replace it with a one-party state, should be seen as insurrectionary in nature.

Which brings us to the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity issued at the beginning of July. As many were quick to point out, the conservative justices ruled in a way that flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution and American democracy as it has existed for nearly 250 years. Asserting an idea of “absolute immunity” for the president’s “official acts,” the Court proceeded to set up a pyramid scheme of legalese and bad faith by which, in essence, anything the president does is by definition not a crime. In other words, the president is to be considered above the law; an equally accurate and more urgent way of putting this is that the president now has absolute power over the U.S. government, and by extension, over all of us. After all, to cut to the violent chase, if he can now legally assassinate members of the other branches of government if they don’t bend to his will, no true limits can be said to exist on presidential power.

It’s not going too far to say that, in issuing a ruling that transforms the president into a virtual king, the Supreme Court has attempted to nullify the Constitution and American democracy in one blow. Given that the ruling was explicitly issued in support of a man who waged an insurrection against the United States, and who wishes to return to the Oval Office to complete the job, as well as in support of a Republican Party united behind this man, it’s fair to conclude that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has now explicitly joined the GOP’s insurrection. It has done so in the first place by making itself complicit in a previous effort to overthrow our system of government and replace it with something vicious, repressive, and unrepresentative. And looking to the future, it provides the ultimate pseudo-legal cover for illegal presidential acts, while asking us to pretend that the Constitution and the separation of powers still exist and deserve everyone’s deference, when in fact a lawless president enabled by the Court’s ruling would render the Constitution’s actual intent null and void. 

More insidiously, the Court has also joined the GOP insurrection by taking aim at the rule of law itself. As David Kurtz writes in an excellent assessment of the ruling and various attempts to hold Trump to account for his crimes, “The rule of law, as the saying goes, must exist for everyone; otherwise, it exists for no one. By placing the president beyond the rule of law, the Supreme Court has deprived all of us of its protections.” In a similar vein, Jamelle Bouie reminds us that the rule of law is no abstraction, but a basic guaranty of our security, noting, “If the president is a king, then we are subjects whose lives and livelihoods are safe only insofar as we don’t incur the wrath of the executive. And if we find ourselves outside the light of his favor, then we find ourselves, in effect, outside the protection of the law.” This means that literally anyone who ever displeased a second-term President Trump might be thrown in jail, tortured, or killed; simply the threat of such retribution could be used to keep Americans in line, as they rightly feared for their lives lest they show opposition to the president (who, even before the immunity ruling, appeared quite willing to deploy armed U.S. troops against protestors should he gain a second term).

But even if you don’t agree, or simply can’t bring yourself to believe, that these could be the broader consequences of the Court’s ruling, even a narrower reading places the Supreme Court squarely behind Trump and the GOP’s insurrectionary drive. The Court, in issuing an opinion that clears Trump of wrongdoing in attempting to overthrow the government, has swept away the possibility of accountability for his crimes and thus cleared him to become president again.

Moreover, by explicitly clearing him of an attempt to stay in office by both violent and pseudo-legal means, the Court has essentially given its green light to future such efforts. Given the Court’s siding with insurrectionists over the U.S. Constitution, this aspect of the ruling may be its most immediately dangerous. By saying that a president has absolute immunity, and that this immunity covers violent attempts to retain power, the Court has also suggested that Trump and the GOP may use whatever means necessary to gain power in November, including bogus legal arguments by bad-faith actors, but also up to and including violence. After all, so long as the result is Trump gaining the presidency, all will be blessed and made holy through the Court’s anti-constitutional alchemy, past crimes washed away by dint of occupying the presidential throne. So not only has the Court knowingly granted legitimacy to a presidential candidate it well knows will make use of the grotesquely broad power it has granted, it has given a wink and a nudge to that candidate to do what he must to gain power in November.

Beyond that, of course, should Donald Trump succeed, he has been empowered by the Court to essentially rule as a dictator.

And this gets us to why I believe it’s so important that Democrats and other supporters of democracy conceive of the GOP’s collective behavior as constituting an ongoing insurrection. As much of a threat that Donald Trump poses individually, the greater threat stems from the way that the Republican Party has joined its power and identity to the former president. The GOP politics that have emerged — scornful of the rule of law, opposed to democracy, comfortable with the utility of political violence, oriented around authoritarianism and strongman rule — is not democratic politics, but its antithesis. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling acts as the cement that glues the whole enterprise together — not only empowering lawlessness, but allowing the movement to claim that lawlessness is actually constitutional and democratic, all in a contemptible effort to confer legitimacy on this dangerous insurrection. 

As such, no American is obliged to treat such politics as legitimate; certainly the Democratic Party is not obliged to do so. Instead, defenders of American democracy must loudly and consistently characterize such means and ends as in the first place illegitimate. For me, the single most potent way of condemning them as illegitimate is to describe how they constitute insurrectionism — an ongoing attempt to overturn the U.S. government, and by extension, the free American society our government protects and makes possible, and that most of us see as non-negotiable. 

The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling should settle any debate as to whether the push towards autocracy is simply the cause of a single person, Donald Trump. Knowingly and thoroughly, the Supreme Court has placed its institutional heft behind a project to put a Republican strongman at the head of America’s government. This same project has been embraced, or consented to, by a preponderance of GOP state and elected officials. And as has been thoroughly documented, the Supreme Court’s conservative members appear deeply committed to the reactionary vision of American society that also propels much of the GOP base and the politicians it elects — a vision that sees white Christian males at the top of a social and power hierarchy below which all lesser Americans are pitifully ranked. It does not take wild speculation to assume that the justices who voted in favor of this joke of a ruling see Trump’s assumption of unbridled power as key to imposing a cultural as well as political regime with which they identify and sympathize.

Reminding ourselves that the Republican Party has been engaged in insurrection for at least the last three and a half years helps us see the immunity ruling in its proper light. Rather than an attempt to operate within the framework of the Constitution and the rule of law — the bounds of our democracy — the right-wing majority’s opinion holds that both are no longer operative in a meaningful way. To grant such a nonsensical ruling from Republican justices any legitimacy is no different than granting the broader Republican Party legitimacy when it attacks majority rule and when its presidential candidate threatens violent retribution against his personal enemies. The Supreme Court majority’s opinion should be treated with the same contempt and outrage Americans would show towards a ruling that re-instituted slavery, or once again condemned Japanese-Americans to internment camps. The ruling, rather than invalidating American democracy, should rightly be discussed and treated as invalidating the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority in one reckless, self-immolating act. Justices who would render such an opinion have shown themselves to be the Constitution’s hangmen, not its defenders.

Since the immunity ruling, public attention has been captured by the maelstrom around President Biden and whether he will be persuaded or forced to stand down from his presidential campaign due to concerns about his mental and physical capacities. The immunity ruling has made the stakes of Biden’s fate even higher than before. Should Trump return to the White House, only the most naive would think that he wouldn’t engage in a spree of violence and criminality, feeling secure in the Supreme Court’s blessing of untrammeled power rooted in freedom from accountability. One might say that much of the purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to prevent a man like Trump from ever gaining the executive power; thanks to an insurrection by the GOP and its allied Supreme Court, the nation is on the cusp of its own negation — but only if the majority acquiesces to this usurpation.

As I’ve argued before, Trump’s actions even before the immunity ruling rendered him illegitimate as a presidential candidate; such actions included his attempt to violently overthrow the government and his use of violent threat to coerce voters to cast ballots for him this time around. The Supreme Court has now acted in an insurrectionary and illegitimate manner to support his return to office and his exercise of dangerous, indeed outlandish power. The Democratic Party cannot proceed as if the immunity opinion is anything but what it is: a declaration of war on American democracy by a GOP-aligned Court majority. At a bare minimum, the ruling must be used as a weapon to rally a majority for rapid reform of the Court, necessarily including the addition of enough new justices to nullify the power of the Court’s radicals. They must state plainly that the Supreme Court has attempted to render every American, at the end of the day, as no longer possessing the rights of a full citizen, but rather reduced to being the subject of a king-like president that the Court is helping to bring to power.

Democrats must also make clear that this idea of American citizenry is now the Republican Party’s position, and that against this the Democrats stand for a real democracy, true equality, and the rule of law. Equally, Democrats must recognize and broadcast the nature of the larger conflict in which they’re engaged, where a determined minority is acting to overturn American democracy, and act with the requisite boldness. You do not defeat an insurrection by describing its participants as a loyal opposition; you do so by rallying the American majority to recognize and deny the illegitimacy of the insurrection’s tactics, goals, and false claims to be engaging in lawful governance.

One of the most debilitating tropes you hear from some otherwise solid defenders of democracy is that the United States is in danger of ending, of being lost forever should Donald Trump and the GOP gain power. And admittedly, what I’ve written here so far could be read in a similarly apocalyptic vein, and intentionally so: between an unfettered Trump, a complicit Supreme Court, and potentially a congressional majority, the GOP could implement all manner of laws blocking the ability of Democrats to win future elections. And this is on top the possibility of a deranged president wielding violence and repression against his political opposition. But in the face of this threat, we need to bear in mind two basics of life: the future is unknowable, and it can be affected by the actions we take today (for good or for ill).

One reason for optimism is that the Republican Party, from Trump to the Supreme Court, has wildly overplayed its hand. Trump, in adopting the rhetoric of 20th century dictators and mob bosses, is running full tilt against the general movement of the United States towards more democracy, not less; towards more equality, not less; towards more compassion, not less. While it is true that he has managed to radicalize a certain chunk of the population, I still believe that a majority of the population understands that what he’s peddling is poison to the body politic. Likewise, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority, in issuing opinions that fly in the face of precedent and openly serve partisan ends, has been working hard to delegitimize itself in the eyes of the majority. The fact that multiple justices have engaged in open and contemptuous corruption (accepting millions in gifts, flying treasonous flags at home, lying to Congress during their confirmation processes) adds insult to injury. The Court majority has rendered itself obscene in the eyes of much of the public.

Beyond the fragility of the Republicans’ ideological positions, the sweeping changes to American society that Trump and the GOP would impose on the United States cannot be accomplished without widespread compliance by the American public. As Chris Hayes suggests in a recent segment of his show, assuming mass submission to immoral laws and acts concedes far too much in advance to political forces that are owed no such deference. Would military leaders really order their troops to fire on their fellow Americans? Would doctors across the United States actually respect a national abortion ban that condemned thousands of women to death, and tens of millions of others no control over their persons? Would Americans really stand idly by as millions of immigrants were rounded up and placed in concentration camps?

So this is a final reason, grim but optimistic, why I keep insisting that we view the GOP’s push for irreversible power as an insurrection against the United States. In a worst-case scenario, even if this authoritarian movement manages to gain the presidency, and even Congress, and seeks to entrench GOP rule by subverting the rule of law, such an insurrection cannot ultimately succeed if a majority of people refuse to recognize its legitimacy, and remain committed to American democracy and the rule of law. It cannot succeed if the majority views it for what it is — an illegitimate effort to subvert and overturn American democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law. If the worst comes to pass, we should not expect or accept pro-democracy politicians to simply go along; we should demand politicians who rally the public, defy the authoritarians, and take back the country and its government. And these reasonable expectations hold equally true for every individual American as well. 

Joe Biden Hasn’t Totally Lost His Marbles, But He’s Certainly Lost His Way

What seemed, mere days ago, like escalating and even unstoppable momentum to convince or force President Biden to make way for an alternate Democratic presidential candidate appears to have transformed into a messy, muddled impasse. Critically, Democratic Party leaders, including Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, have endorsed the president’s continued quest for a second term, following conclaves of elected officials on Capitol Hill. These meetings and statements followed unambiguous declarations by Biden himself that he would not be bowing out of the race, including in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last Friday and in a letter to House Democrats.

Biden’s decision to defy the post-debate escalation of worries among Democratic elected officials and the 70% or more of the public who think he’s too old to run again has placed his campaign and the presidential race in uncharted territory. In a best-case scenario, even if the Democratic Party and most of the Democratic base stick with him, it would be naive to think that coverage of his age and every bit of evidence of debility won’t be a major media theme for the next four months. And this, in turn, will inevitably sap his support through direct damage to his popularity, and indirectly by sucking valuable coverage and energy from Donald Trump’s wild unfitness for office.

Likewise, as others have pointed out, Biden has set himself a trap — if he conducts an energetic campaign as advised by those looking for reassurance, it’s inevitable that he’ll provide more demonstrations of disability akin to those that astounded the nation at the debate. One indirect proof of this is that the president has utterly failed to conduct such a round of appearances in the last 10 days, which would have been the clear and obvious way to dispel or assuage doubts. On the other hand, if Biden continues a lackluster pace of scripted events and minimal opportunities for spontaneous speech and thought, he will confirm fears about his limited abilities. If the debate had been the only evidence of health issues, that would be one thing; but in the week and a half since, we’ve had plenty of coverage of prior similar episodes. In continuing to maintain that the debate catastrophe was a one-off, Joe Biden is attempting to defy reality.

So now that we are at this impasse, what might happen? Before we try to answer that, we should take note of how the nature of the discussion over Biden’s fitness for office and continued candidacy have changed in the last couple days. To my mind, the biggest development resulting from Biden’s pushback and the Democratic leadership’s at-least temporary decision not to call on him to step down is that this story is now as much about the Democratic Party as it is about Joe Biden. The first layer is the potential damage to the Democrats’ electoral prospects. Much of the concern among senators and representatives seems to be flowing from their realization that Biden’s weakened candidacy threatens their elections as well. On a mass scale, whether Biden continues as a candidate, and continues to lose public support, means that he could be setting up the Democrats for larger losses beyond just the presidency. 

The other way this is about the Democratic Party is that Biden’s intransigence requires Democrats to make an existential choice: Having failed thus far to convince Biden to step aside, are major elements of the party willing to match their concerns with their actions, and seek to force Biden off the ticket? If they do, they obviously risk losing the fight, in which case they would probably inflict irreparable damage on Biden’s prospects (i.e. their efforts would validate Republican accusations and voter concerns regarding the president). But if they don’t challenge Biden, what will that do to the public’s idea of the Democratic Party? What will citizens think of politicians who knew that their candidate was unfit, but backed him anyway? At a minimum, this seems like a formula for weakening the party over the coming months. But beyond that, if Biden then loses, what will the public conclude about the values of the Democratic Party, when it spent the critical final months of the 2024 election expending vast resources in trying to convince Americans that they shouldn’t believe the evidence of their own senses?

One thing seems clear: without a massive Democratic outcry against Biden’s candidacy at both the party and voter level, he appears set on his present fatal course, having proven impervious to piecemeal complaints. At this point, it feels like any hope for changing Biden’s mind lies less in the realm of politics and more in the realm of psychology. With the president ignoring significant swathes of reality (polls, his own clear deterioration, his catastrophic debate performance) that might actually persuade him to step aside, he has responded to criticism with declarations of his unique ability to defeat Trump and his incomparable handling of the presidency. In contrast to such recent remarks, I was struck by Brian Beutler’s reminder that back in December, Biden told reporters that there were probably 50 Democrats capable of beating Trump. Now he says that he alone can do it. Something has changed in Biden’s thinking, and not in a way that I’d call either good or reassuring. 

At The Atlantic, Franklin Foer suggests a model for understanding Biden’s behavior, writing that, “Since childhood, Biden has suffered recurrent episodes of brutal humiliation, when the world has mocked and dismissed him. On each occasion, Biden has stubbornly set out to prove his worth. Persistence became his coping mechanism, his effective antidote to humiliation. Triumph was always just a matter of summoning sufficient grit.” But now, this otherwise resilient approach to life has created a “psychological prison” for Biden, as he’s in a situation where no matter how hard he tries, he will not be able to overcome the age-related failings of his body and mind. 

But you don’t have to accept Foer’s theorizing to see the persuasiveness of his prescription for handling Biden at this point:

If his aides and fellow politicians want to help him back away from this disaster, they need to understand his temperament. When they have conversations with Biden about his future, they must respect his dignity, and acknowledge his extraordinary achievements. But the truth can’t be painted over. A man who will do whatever it takes to escape humiliation needs to understand that suffering the near-term indignity of stepping down will allow him to avoid the long-term indignity of being remembered as one of history’s great fools.

So far, what we’ve seen of Biden’s reaction to doubts about his capabilities confirms the advantages of such an approach. His reaction to the threat of mass defections was to thrown down the gauntlet and challenge doubters to try to oust him at the Democratic convention, a sure sign that attempts to confront him are feeding into a narrative of his own rightness and need to double down. In the absence of such a challenge, or of a total breakdown in support, it seems that a softer, behind-the-scenes touch holds the greatest possibility — at least at present — for convincing Biden to stand down. Let’s hope that something of this insight is guiding the widespread attitude among House and Senate members to stand pat for now, and that we’re not looking at an irrevocable collective fatalism that will likely drive the Democratic Party into defeat, and the nation into the arms of GOP fascism.

Is President Biden Getting High on His Own Malarkey Supply?

For those worried about President Joe Biden’s ability to beat Donald Trump and serve another term, his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last Friday raised more concerns than it allayed. Compared to the low bar of his debate performance, Biden came across as more coherent and cogent; even so, he failed to end a few sentences, mishandled questions about the debate itself (offering at least three different reasons he had done so poorly), and took dubious issue with polls that clearly show him behind Donald Trump in key states. And his dismissal of polls showing that many voters view him as too old to run again was particularly striking.

Watching Biden, I felt the sadness other observers have expressed about the interview. It is indeed undignified for the president to have to answer questions about his health and cognitive functions, and yet Stephanopoulos really did have to ask these questions. It was particularly startling for Biden to reject the idea of taking a cognitive test and sharing the results publicly; he averred instead that every day of being president was a neurological test. But in recounting the successes of his presidency, Biden didn’t sound defiant as much as genuinely befuddled, as if he doesn’t entirely understand why people don’t believe past success is a guaranty of future performance. Here, I felt sympathy for him, as I don’t doubt that he is working hard and dealing with high-impact, high-stress situations with global impact on a daily basis.

In light of recent events (the debate, the elapse of a week before we got even a short unscripted appearance), his pronouncement that he’s the person most qualified to be president struck a nerve with me. It felt like a preemptive shiv stuck in any Democratic presidential candidate who succeeds him, ungenerous and grandiose. His declaration that only the “Lord Almighty” could convince him to drop out of the race was likewise defiantly definitive while managing to strike the chord of grandiosity a second time.

Perhaps most jarring of all was Biden’s response to Stephanopoulos’ question as to how he’d feel if he remained in the race only to lose to Trump in November. “I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that's what this is about.” With the caveat that Biden did go on to emphasize what a pivotal election this will be, this felt like a response that, whether through verbal flub or honest expression, totally failed to meet the moment. With the very real possibility that a Trump presidency would usher in authoritarian rule, violence, and an unprecedented assault on basic freedoms, the president’s response had a “peace out, good luck to y’all” vibe that I found unsettling.

It is very, very bad that at this point in the campaign, President Biden is in a position where he has to defend his health in place of taking on Donald Trump and the threat of Republican authoritarianism. This interview raised the possibility of a protracted struggle within the Democratic Party over whether to replace or stick with Biden, which ultimately will only realistically be settled by the president choosing to stand down as the Democrats’ candidate. It may not be too soon to start paging the Lord Almighty for some political opining.