Insurrection Resurrection

There are many well-founded reasons to fear for the country once Donald Trump takes office in just over a month: his plans to appoint incompetents to key public health positions; his eagerness to gut the federal workforce and our government’s ability to function effectively; his intention to deport millions, which will wreak havoc on the economy and violate the rights of non-citizens and citizens alike; his interest in empowering Russia by helping it crush Ukraine; his clear aim to turn the federal government into a piggybank for the ultra-wealthy; his lack of interest in protecting the United States from the ravages of climate change.

With this tsunami of awful bearing down on us, it’s more necessary than ever to prioritize the relative badness of what’s in the pike so that opponents can strategize the most effective defenses against the incoming administration. And on this score, Donald Trump has been uncharacteristically helpful in recent weeks, as he gave his first post-election network TV interview to NBC News. In it, he said many terrible things, but one strand stands out above the others: his apparent commitment to resurrect the January 6 insurrection that most Americans probably think ended back in 2021.

Trump’s NBC interview further confirmed that for the president-elect, January 6 is a day that should forever live in infamy — because simply too many people have tried to hold Donald Trump to account for trying to overthrow American democracy. And so he claimed that the true criminals are those in Congress who investigated his insurrection, and that they deserve to be in jail. He averred that while he would not tell his Justice Department appointees to prosecute people like former Representative Liz Cheney, he expects them to do so nonetheless — a lame effort at plausible deniability by a man who has chosen to nominate corrupt and sycophantic individuals like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel to be the nation’s highest law enforcement officials.

Pursuing this upside-down logic, Trump also repeated that he plans to pardon those convicted of storming Congress, beating police officers, and attempting to stop the transfer of power to his duly-elected successor. His obsession with busting out of jail these violent extremists shows that Donald Trump’s hatred of American democracy is boundless; to him, those who engaged in insurrection are heroes for the simple reason that they fought for him against the U.S. government. The January 6 rioters are his own rebel army; back on the streets, they will supply the new president with a legion of violent-minded foot soldiers steeped in the belief that they are above the law, with all the danger to public safety that flows from that.

Every other terrible thing that Trump intends to carry out once in office should be viewed through the context of his clearly stated intent to illegally prosecute his political opponents and free America’s enemies. For the moment such pardons and prosecutions commence, he will cede any legitimacy he might have re-gained by winning the presidential contest after trying to overturn our government four years ago. In particular, no acceptably democratic politics in the U.S. is possible while one party illegally prosecutes and jails members of the opposition party. And it would be be nearly as subversive of our politics to prosecute non-elected officials, such as Justice Department prosecutors, for attempting to enforce the law. Such actions would be show-stopping violations of the foundations of American democracy that would put the country on a path to one-party rule and autocracy. And the fact that they would be carried out in order to reverse the public understanding and historical record of his attempted coup, and to outright criminalize those who have defended the United States against its enemies, provides an easy-to-grasp guide to Trump’s intent. 

That Trump’s wish to prosecute Democrats and other perceived enemies has its avowed roots in his failed coup attempt helps us understand the depth of the crisis that will open before us if and when such prosecutions begin. At the most immediate level, Trump would be seeking to criminalize those who have defended the United States against its enemies. More broadly, as the prosecutions inevitably grew to encompass those not directly involved in January 6 prosecutions and investigations, it would quickly become clear that for Trump, “illegality” has always translated to simply “opposing Donald Trump,” who by his insane personal reckoning should be able to do whatever he wants to maintain power.

Pardoning the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol and going after those who prosecuted and investigated them are themselves insurrectionary acts. As Liz Cheney said in response to the recent interview, “Donald Trump’s suggestion that members of Congress who later investigated his illegal and unconstitutional actions should be jailed is a continuation of his assault on the rule of law and the foundations of our republic.” Donald Trump is attempting to pretend that his recent victory somehow erases his criminality in attempting to overthrow the last election — but in choosing to go after those who tried to hold him to account, he himself is reminding us of his own discrediting criminality (in a way, you could say that his obsession with making clear his own guilt is the one paradoxically honest thing about the man). Likewise, his commitment to pardoning insurrectionists would in a better world be an impeachable offense, an act so deranged that any senator committed to the Constitution would have no choice but to convict him.

Trump’s twinned prosecution and pardon intentions don’t just throw a dark shadow of criminality and treason over Trump himself and his second presidency. By remaining silent in the face of such promises, and refusing to stand against either the coddling of terrorists or the lawless persecution of America’s public servants, Republican elected officials make themselves complicit in the prior insurrection and the predictable lawlessness to come. This is a stain that the GOP cannot be allowed to wash off; this is what the party is. The Republican Party stands for insurrection, for the celebration of criminality, for the jailing of anyone who would defend the country against its enemies. 

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Clearly, many Democratic Party elected officials and leaders feel like they are on defense following Trump’s victory. Some have gone even farther, and echoed Trump’s lies that he won a massive and historical win, a bizarre self-flagellation that betrays the millions of votes of those who want a future of freedom, equality, and security, not the chaos of Trumpism. Alongside this, there’s a tendency by some opponents of Trump to treat too much of his behavior as a fait accompli, a juggernaut that there’s no hope or — even worse — no point in trying to resist. But Trump’s plans to pardon insurrectionists and prosecute political enemies should shock Democrats out of such defeatism. Allowing Trump to do so unchallenged would be to concede far too much to his anti-democratic agenda, pass up vital opportunities to highlight his authoritarian aims, and fail to inflict real political damage or even defeats on his presidency.

Of the two strains of Trump’s January 6 payback schemes — the pardons and the prosecutions — the pardons are a simpler target for Democrats, in part because there is nothing Democrats can realistically do to stop them. Trump is going to exercise his pardon power as he has promised, in a sort of lawless show of force as his first act in office — but the fact that he can’t be stopped from doing this shouldn’t at all be confused with thinking he can’t be made to pay a high political price for doing so. Democrats need to get ready for his actions now; a well-calibrated strategy could do serious damage to Trump even before he issues the pardons.

Democrats could start by asking a simple question: Why is Trump’s highest priority to pardon those who sacked the Capitol and tried to hang his former vice president, and not, say, acting to lower the cost of living for Americans through the many magical solutions he has proposed? They should be guided by the basic idea that when your opponent tells you what is most important to him, and that thing involves incriminating beliefs regarding lawlessness, violence against police officers, and treason, then you should probably think of a way to communicate to the public about such flawed (and in this case, disqualifying) priorities.

More aggressively, Democrats could talk about how throwing open the jail cells of insurrectionists is a clear abuse of the pardon power, especially so when done in pursuit of Trump’s goal of convincing the American public that breaking the law and breaking democracy are legitimate pursuits in making America great again. It will be an enormous self-own on Trump’s part, and Democrats should be clear about both its inherent criminality and its ominous portent for how Trump will rule in his second term. Democrats could also argue that, in letting loose a terrorist army of America-haters, the pardons make a joke of Trump’s claims to an election “mandate.”

Democrats also need to bear in mind that the pardons of insurrectionists and the threatened prosecutions of party members are two sides of the same rotten coin; both are elements of a profound inversion of justice and patriotism. The pardons are a shocking and deeply illuminating demonstration of Trump’s lawlessness; calling these out for the abominations they are will in turn help delegitimize Trump administration prosecutions of political enemies, by calling out the common thread of corruption. It’s also worth noting that recent polling shows that opposition to Trump’s planned pardons is a majority position among Americans — and this is in the absence of anything like serious pushback from the Democrats so far.

But generally speaking, responding to threats and actions to prosecute innocent politicians and federal officials is a more complicated matter for the Democratic Party, in great part because it requires not just characterizing Trump’s actions (as with his insurrectionist pardons) but actually fighting to stop them. Before either can be done effectively, though, Democrats must first internalize the full implications of Trump’s threats. As I suggested earlier, there is no democratic future for the United States that includes the successful persecution of political opponents and the criminalization of those whose job is to defend the country against threats to its very existence. For the Democratic Party, Donald Trump’s apparent intention to attempt to jail elected officials like incoming California Senator Adam Schiff and others is impossible to reconcile with bipartisan, “find common ground” approaches to the Trump administration. You can’t compromise with someone who would break the law to put you in a jail cell; even the threat of doing so could pervert our politics if sufficient numbers of Democrats curbed their opposition to Trump out of fear of being illicitly prosecuted.

In forming strategies to counter and defeat Trumpist plans to prosecute the innocent, Democrats shouldn’t lose sight of the most basic point: that such prosecutions are themselves illegal and absurd, an abuse of power that renders their participants beyond the pale of American government. They cannot allow the idea to take hold among the public that the Justice Department can simply fabricate charges against Trump’s opponents. This is the behavior of Russian dictators and Hungarian strongmen, not normal Americans. Democrats need to approach such prosecutions with the aim of exposing the illegality and lawlessness of the Trump administration; they can leverage Trump’s apparent intention to keep public attention on January 6 to emphasize how Trump, not satisfied with trying to overthrow American democracy once, is now trying to complete the job by abusing his power and perverting the rule of law.

Democrats should also take a stance of defiance and contempt for the Trump administration’s illegal efforts, in order to communicate to the public that the party merits their trust in standing up to Trump. The worst thing for Democrats would be to cower before mere threats from the incoming president, as this would encourage fear and despair in those looking to the Democrats for leadership at this time of crisis. Ideally, Democrats would work to encourage the public’s anger and revulsion at tactics drawn straight out of banana republics and eastern European autocracies. And a smart politics would make clear to members of the public that Trump’s threats could very conceivably be directed at ordinary Americans (and indeed, Trump’s definition of his “enemies” essentially encompasses everyone who voted against him).

At a practical level, Donald Trump won his margin of victory over Kamala Harris by persuading a crucial number of Americans that he understands their concerns about the economy and the direction of the country, and would be responsive to those concerns. I would bet that a substantial number of those voters would be alarmed to learn that one of Trump’s highest priorities is not bringing down the cost of living, or making sure they have well-paying jobs, but in meting out “justice” to people who worked to investigate and convict terrorists who beat cops, trashed the Capitol, and came within a hair’s breadth of killing elected officials. They should be even more alarmed to learn that his very highest priority is pardoning the January 6 insurrectionists, which he recently said he will do within hours or even “minutes” of re-assuming the presidency. 

A more self-restrained person than Trump might have acted with cunning and restraint regarding his prior crimes. He could have taken the win, having (incredibly) returned to the presidency after evading accountability for the worst political crime in U.S. history since the South seceded from the U.S. a century and a half ago. Instead, not satisfied with beating the rap, Trump is attempting to completely overturn the rule of law, to turn insurrection into righteousness and defense of the United States into treason. There can be no overstating the harm to the country that would flow from such a reversal of right and wrong, no overestimating the degree to which the bottom would give out in terms of presidential abuses of power and the ability of extremists to lord it over the rest of us.

To Blunt Trump's Populist Charade, Democrats Need to Go on Offense ASAP

Recently, I began to outline how Democrats should approach a second Trump administration that’s beginning to ever so painfully congeal upon the body politic like the self-inflicted wound that it is. Trump promised corrupt, cruel, and authoritarian rule, and he has shown that he plans to deliver, based on the evidence of his nominations of unfit freaks like RFK Jr. and Pete “pardon me while I help pardon some war criminals” Hegseth. We can already see the outlines of a presidency aiming to target its political enemies, destroy vital functions of government like public health, abandon American allies to the designs of dictators like Vladimir Putin, and sabotage the U.S.’s wobbly progress toward fighting climate change. In the face of the threat he poses, Democrats have every incentive to resist this administration’s malign designs, starting now.

To this end, I want to elaborate on one of my suggested strategies from last time, that Democrats tell the story of the Trump administration both in advance and as it’s happening. In the first place, this involves describing the reasons Trump and MAGA are a threat to the United States — but it also encompasses setting public expectations of what Trump will likely try to do, and describing particular developments in light of this narrative as they happen. Though the Trump administration has yet to take the reins of power, preparations to do so already offer ample examples and opportunities to begin implementing a “confrontation through narration” strategy.

One example: Trump has named Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a commission whose ambit is purportedly to increase government efficiency. Without any context for understanding this commission, some voters might take Trump at his word that it’s going to root out government bloat and waste. However, the commission is clearly a cover for helping implement a Project 2025-style purge of the federal government, ridding it of those with experience and expertise so that Trump can replace them with sycophants and ideologues. The commission will also be used to justify massive cutbacks to government services, both as an end in itself and to help offset massive proposed tax cuts for the rich. But Democrats don’t need to wait until the commission returns with its “findings” to talk about its true purpose now, with an eye to telling the larger story that Trump is only interested in helping the rich and in subverting government to serve him and his extremist allies, not the larger public good.

Another, even more urgent example involves Trump’s clear plan to obliterate the rule of law. He has referred approvingly to the immunity that Supreme Court has granted him, and there’s no reason to think he won’t take advantage of this kingly power. Already, we see him taking steps to pursue vendettas against political enemies in his choice of attorney general — first, with the pliant and utterly corrupt Matt Gaetz, then with the pliant and utterly corrupt choice of Pam Bondi when Gaetz withdrew from consideration, and more recently with the nomination of extremist Kash Patel to head the FBI. Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz gets right to the heart of what’s going on here: 

Trump wants to use the Justice Department as a centerpiece of his retribution, corruption, and destruction jihad. It doesn’t much matter who is the figurehead for that effort. The fact that it will no longer be Gaetz doesn’t dramatically change the analysis. Trump is the problem. The president-elect is the source, instigator, and prime mover of the malfeasance.

In this instance, an effective Democratic strategy would view Trump’s attorney general nominee not just as a problem in him- or herself, but as a symptom of a more profound threat that needs to be publicly discussed — that of Trump’s aim to turn the law into an instrument of his will and desire for retribution. The emphasis should be kept on the bigger picture, even as the particulars can be used to make that case. And an understanding that Trump should be the ultimate target does not mean that Democrats need to get trapped in advocating for abstractions and first principles. Rather, in the case of the AG nomination, Bondi now offers specific routes of attack for Democrats to target what Trump’s quest for lawless rule means. As New Republic’s Greg Sargent outlines:

For instance, how will a devoted election denier–turned–attorney general handle remaining prosecutions of people who assaulted the Capitol? Does Bondi view a pardon of all the Jan. 6 criminals as in keeping with the rule of law? One House Democrat points to an interesting wrinkle: If Trump does pardon them, he’ll have to decide between individual pardons and a blanket one. As this Democrat notes, Bondi should be asked: “What does she think of a mass pardon?

Democrats can also press Bondi on how she’ll respond if Trump orders her to drop all remaining January 6 prosecutions. This is an opportunity for political theater: They can highlight specific cases of really heinous January 6 violence and ask Bondi if she’ll defend it when Trump pardons those good people.

In critiquing a specific nomination and the concrete, malicious possibilities it presents, Democrats should also be sure to pull back the camera and talk about future scenarios. For instance, if Trump has an attorney general who thinks the 1/6 attack on the Capitol wasn’t a crime, then what’s to stop Trump from inciting future violence to get his way? What happens when Congress doesn’t vote for a bill he wants?  Will his attorney general look the other way after Trump tells the Proud Boys to show up in the Capitol Rotunda? As Sargent points out, it will be inherently difficult to get the public to care about things that happened in the past — this makes it even more important for Democrats to point to Trump’s past illegal actions as a guide to future ones, and to highlight that the common thread is a desire for personal power above all else, including his commitment to serve the American people.

Democrats can aim this preemptive strategy at distinct groups of the voting public. In the first place, it can rally those who already oppose Trump, who voted against him, and who are primed to expect the worst from a second term. Reminding them of why they oppose Trump and MAGA, and why they have continued reasons to do so, is essential to maintaining the morale of the Democratic base and creating a backlash to Trump that can help propel the party back to power in 2026 and 2028. 

Democrats should also direct this narrative strategy at a second group of voters — those who supported Trump, but who are not hard-core MAGA voters. This includes those whose final decision to support Trump was rooted in concerns about inflation and the larger economy, as well as those whose votes for Trump were based on a belief that he would not pursue his more extreme campaign promises (such as mass deportation), who believed his lies on other issues (such as that he won’t pursue abortion restrictions at the federal level), or who had concerns about his character and policies but voted for him anyway for reasons that outweighed such concerns. These voters can be approached in a variety of ways. For instance, though they may be less upset about Trump’s assault on the rule of law, the Democrats can point to how Trump’s obsessions with personal power (such as by appointing a lackey as his attorney general so that he can persecute political enemies) means that Trump is more concerned with revenge than on improving the economy. For this group, laying out Trump’s predictably self-serving moves ahead of time can help the Democrats cultivate the idea of “buyer’s remorse” in connection with Trump — the idea that some voters may have voted for him for certain understandable reasons, but that Trump is not delivering on what they wanted and/or is pursuing policies they don’t agree with.

Finally, Democrats should keep in mind the possibility of peeling away some voters who are currently full-on MAGA or deeply sympathetic to the movement. While Trump appears to maintain a cult-like devotion from tens of millions of right-leaning Americans, this devotion is based in a belief that Trump’s interests are aligned with their own. Here, Democratic assertions that Trump will serve the interests of himself and the rich over everyone else may hold the best hope for starting to fracture that loyalty, particularly should Trump’s mass deportations and tariffs start to wreak havoc on the economy. 

The Democrats’ interest in presenting a coherent story about the Trump administration is all the more crucial because of the GOP’s tremendous capacity to propagandize and dissemble about what’s really happening, via the megaphone provided by the vast conservative media apparatus. A Democratic narrative strategy is also necessary since the media has generally shown itself unable to focus adequately on the big picture of Trump’s threat to America. In the David Kurtz piece I quoted from above, Kurtz notes how “the old confirmation dance for cabinet nominees – and the news coverage it drives – has no real salience with Trump in office.” This is a classic not-seeing-the-forest-for-the-trees situation — reporting on who’s up and who’s down in the nomination process, most major media are not consistently contextualizing the larger implications of who Trump is nominating. These early days are important, as the media has an instinctual drive to treat the post-election interregnum as it has treated those in the past, following a timeworn template that focuses on the nitty-gritty on the flow of nominations and other typical activities of setting up a new administration. If Democrats make an effort to tell such a story, it may yet influence coverage of the Trump administration in a more illuminating direction.

Trump and his allies clearly understand the importance of displaying initiative and taking control of the overall media narrative about the incoming administration. Not only has Trump done this with a rapid-fire process of nominating unfit freaks to staff his White House, he and other Republicans have crowed about a non-existent “mandate” based on his razor-thin election victory. Democrats should certainly do everything possible to mock and undercut these fake mandate claims, and turn them into more of a liability whenever a Republican repeats such lies. Not surprisingly, undercutting and ideally destabilizing Trump’s claims of a mandate are key to telling the story of the Trump administration. This isn’t a president who has massive support to do whatever the hell he wants — this is a president who just squeaked into office, in large part by lying to voters about his solutions to their genuine concerns about the economy and their cost of living. In talking about his shaky victory, Democrats will be better positioned to describe the coming onslaught of outrageous and unlawful presidential actions as lacking the public support that Trump claims. For kicks, they can note that just as Trump lied to get people’s votes, he’s now rubbing people’s noses in believing his likes when he tries to use their votes as justification for actions that will hurt far more people than they help (such as tariffs, mass deportations, and massive tax cuts for the richest Americans that will justify sharp cutbacks to broad-based programs for the working and middle classes). 

There’s less Democrats can do to disrupt Trump’s ability to take the initiative at this point, though, given the very real news value of his activities in rolling out a new administration — but here the “confrontation through narration” strategy can blunt that initiative, by making what Trump would prefer to appear disruptive and off-putting seem predictably awful. In a best-case scenario, Democrats could work to paint a clear line between Trump’s attempts to dominate the news and his strategy of pulling a fast one over the American people — turning his appearance of strength into a weakness.

Democrats shouldn’t expect Americans to unquestioningly accept their descriptions of all that the Trump administration is doing that is wrong, illegal, and destructive. They should bring the receipts in terms of statistics and facts, presented in compelling and meme-worthy ways. Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall gets to the heart of this in a recent using about “scorecards” to compare how things like the economy are doing under Trump II versus the Biden  administration. He writes that, “What matters is consistent, easy to understand repetition, in line with a really constant recitation of what the opposition party offers. These things do matter. But it can’t come only at election time. It can’t be in policy-speak. It has to be in the language and idioms and visuals of social and alternative media where people are really getting most of their information.” In other words, providing hard evidence of the Trump administration’s lies, failures, and shortcomings presents both a challenge and a massive opportunity to a Democratic Party that needs to deal effectively with a media environment badly tilted against it. And ideally, the party would figure out some clever media approaches to communicating its overall “confrontation through narration” strategy — no point in having a great idea that the public never even hears about!

One final note — this “confrontation through narration” oppositional strategy doesn’t require the Dems to present (at least at this point) a fully-formed alternative agenda (though the sooner the better would be great). But they can at least defend broad principles that Trump is almost guaranteed to oppose — an economy that works for ordinary people, not just the rich; the rule of law; a government that serves the public, not the powerful.

Hunter Biden Pardon Inadvertently Highlights Democratic Caution In Confronting MAGA Threat

I started off this week talking about Joe Biden’s weekend pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, and what a truly bad idea this was. I won’t recap all my arguments here, but I want to follow up on one particular aspect that, more than any other, truly bugs me about our outgoing president’s action. Many of those defending Biden from the predictably bad faith GOP attacks point to how Biden did the right thing by showing that Democrats are no longer afraid to break norms and can fight fire with fire. As someone who’s literally been begging the Democrats for years to take the gloves off and act not just to defeat but destroy the MAGA movement, I’m something of an ideal audience for these arguments. A huge part of the problem, though, is that Biden has chosen to break norms in a situation where not only are his motives rightly suspect (in granting mercy to a family member who was legitimately convicted, even granting the corrupt origins of his persecution), but apparently in a one-and-done fashion. As I said before, what about breaking some norms to protect the rest of us? For good or ill, the pardon highlights the degree to which Biden and the Democrats are otherwise not fighting with all the tools at their disposal.

It appears I’m not alone in this critique, as Brian Beutler is out with a piece picking up on this same constellation of concerns: among other things, he raises the question of why Biden and the rest of his party aren’t using the power they still have to shine a harsh light on the corruption of Trump and the rest of the GOP. Beutler is well enough acquainted with the details of the prosecution of Hunter Biden to do a deep read of the president’s statement that accompanied the pardon. He picks out the points where Biden clearly understands the GOP malfeasance that was involved in the pursuit of Hunter Biden, but where the president holds back from providing adequate detail to clarify for the ordinary reader the depth of GOP corruption. As part of the larger picture, Beutler notes how for years the Democrats refrained from the obvious step of investigating subversion of the Justice Department during the first Trump administration, writing: 

This “weaponization of government” could on its own have formed the basis of a concerted congressional inquiry, starting in the second half of Trump’s first presidency, continuing into Biden’s. On the basis of all this wrongdoing, Garland could’ve terminated the Hunter Biden investigation, or fired Weiss, or reassigned the case, or launched new investigations of criminal activity in the first Trump administration.

In a truly perverse twist, Democrats’ earlier lack of initiative has now led to Biden feeling that he has no choice but to pardon Hunter, with all the dubious ethics and predictable GOP and political media backlash that has brought. 

Beutler is also spot-on in pointing out how the pardon was a missed opportunity by President Biden to talk about Trump administration plans to subvert the rule of law:

He did not mention Trump’s dictatorial campaign themes. He did not mention the warnings from Trump’s former allies that he intends to subvert the rule of law much more than he did in his first term. He did not mention Trump’s implicit promise to fire FBI Director Christopher Wray, or his explicit promise to give that job to Kash Patel, or that Patel literally keeps an enemies list.

This enumeration of missed opportunities really drives home the hollowness of Democratic celebrations of the pardon as an outbreak of Democratic toughness. As has happened far too often, it was a half-measure at best, with Biden choosing not to escalate it into an illuminating and full-throated attack not only on past GOP subversion of the rule of law, but the further subversion that is sure to come - an escalation that would have potentially put the GOP on the defensive rather than providing an obvious line of attack for Republicans to pursue about Biden’s own alleged corruption. 

Without a doubt, this is not a time for political caution. Donald Trump has nominated a worst-case gallery of frauds, incompetents, and conspiracy-mongers to the highest positions in government, whose potentially dire effects on everything from public health to national security should be easily grasped. The incoming president is already engaging in open corruption, with no plans to recuse himself from his businesses and shady schemes like his crypto venture acting as obvious conduits for what we used to call bribes. He apparently intends to impose tariffs that will spike inflation, and enact mass deportations that both undercut the economy and promise massive human rights abuses that will surely do harm to both immigrants and citizens alike. He stands ready to sell out Ukraine and our NATO allies to Vladimir Putin for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting the United States. And he seems set on turning the Justice Department and the Pentagon into agencies of vengeance against both elected officials and ordinary American citizens.

A president who clearly intends to break his oath of office the instant he takes it deserves no honeymoon, no second chances, no benefit of the doubt.

It may be too much to ask that an 81-year-old retiring president break the cautious habits of a lifetime and act with the forthrightness that the moment calls for. But it’s certainly not asking too much for sitting Democratic senators and congressmen to act with the aggression and righteousness that are some of the most powerful weapons for a party currently cast out of national power. As Josh Marshall notes, “One of the benefits of being out of power is clarity. Democrats are outsiders to all the decision-making right now [. . . ] Democrats have total freedom of action to oppose on their own terms.” Trump is making no attempt to hide his authoritarian and retrograde intentions, making his current efforts to set up a new administration a veritable shooting gallery for a political opposition willing to take off the gloves and fight for the country. And as Beutler reminds us, the Democrats still have the power of the presidency and the Senate to do all manner of exposure and investigative work.

Unfortunately, it is becoming ever clearer that our crisis of democracy is not just a matter of a MAGA-fied Republican Party. Democratic elected officials who decline to rise to the moment and engage in baseline behavior like doing what they can to highlight the GOP’s corruption, contempt for basic American freedoms, and disregard for working people are abdicating their duties. If this crop of senators and representatives can’t bring themselves to fight for us — and it is increasingly looking like this is the case — then it’s going to be up to the public to exert what pressure they can now to change their torpid attitudes, while recruiting candidates who give a damn to oust these cowering incumbents come 2026 and beyond.

With Pardon, President Biden Has Undermined Necessary Democratic Offensive Against Impending Trump Corruption

President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son in the waning days of his presidency has inadvertently highlighted his failure to protect the rest of the American population from the MAGA threat we’ll all still be dealing with long after he’s left office. At a time when the Democrats should be aiming full-bore at the massive corruption and authoritarian designs of the incoming administration, Biden has delivered the GOP an easy way to push back and muddy the waters by issuing a pardon that would have attracted plenty of criticism even in the best of times. The Republican Party will not be letting go of this misbegotten act any time soon.

While there are plenty of persuasive arguments that Hunter Biden was unfairly targeted and harshly punished because of the spotlight on his father, these are simply overwhelmed by the context in which Biden has made this decision and the damage he has now done to Democratic efforts to defend the country against a second Trump term. While this pardon is objectively not as bad as Trump’s pardon of a war criminal or (to go back to the original odious pardon of the modern political era) Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, we are living in a time when every day brings fresh news of unfit Trump appointees and a general message that the new president is ready to double-down on his plans for retribution against his political enemies by corrupting the justice system. By pardoning his son for crimes for which he was legitimately convicted, Biden has provided fuel to Trump’s false arguments that the American justice system has already been subverted by Biden and so requires a countervailing burst of vengeful pseudo-justice. In particular, Biden’s pardon decision so close to Trump’s pick of the deranged Kash Patel to be the new FBI director is already being seized on by Republicans as both justification for this choice and for Patel’s vengeful and illicit brief.

While there is no real equivalence between Trump’s pardon of Charles Kushner and the pardon of Hunter Biden in terms of the crimes for which each was convicted, such special treatment of family members (with Trump pardoning the father of his son-in-law) inevitably carries an air of corruption, with suggestions of favoritism and self-dealing. Are we really to believe that Hunter Biden is more deserving of a pardon than hundreds of other worthy candidates who will remain behind bars once President Biden has left office? It is not crazy to conclude that the country has a two-tiered justice system, one for those with powerful connections and those without. The pardon also raises the question of why Biden is acting to protect his son against unfair prosecution, and not the hundreds of public servants now in the crosshairs of the Trump II administration for the “crime” of rightly seeking justice against Trump for his many transgressions of the law. This is not to say that Biden should preemptively pardon those federal employees (I do not think he should) but to emphasize that Biden is attempting to apply a child-size band-aid to a gaping wound in the body politic — a wound that he played a fundamental role in creating by failing to prevent Trump’s re-election and the MAGA-run-amok spectacle now before us.

It’s also worth noting that President Biden previously stated that he did not intend to pardon his son. But if Biden was moved by more recent developments to change his mind, such as Trump’s now-undeniable plans to use the Justice Department to seek vengeance against political enemies, it seems naive to think that a pardon will actually offer his family any relief against such truly corrupt intent. If nothing else, Biden has now provided the Trump Justice Department a new investigative opening: looking into the circumstances of this very pardon! Biden has still not grasped that you cannot try to legally outmaneuver a lawless movement — you must crush it wholesale, or be crushed by it in turn.

While a strong case can be made that Hunter Biden was unjustly treated, the political reality is that Democrats are in no position to win the fight to communicate such a case to the American people — not with the mainstream press primed to both-sides corruption issues, not with Biden having previously said he would not pardon his son, not with the GOP’s clear intent to treat the facts of this pardon in bad faith and a right-wing media apparatus ready to amplify this bad faith, and not with the public’s likely lack of attention beyond the headlines and the GOP’s condemnatory response.

As Vox’s Zach Beauchamp put it, “I don't think the Hunter Biden pardon will *cause* Trump to abuse power. He doesn't need any help in that regard. However, it will likely *enable* Trump's abuse of power by creating a ready-made excuse for other Republicans to dismiss any concerns about his behavior.” Biden just made a difficult challenge for Democrats that much harder, as many will now have to spend time defending the pardon, vainly trying to draw out the subtleties of why this act was not corrupt while Trump’s pardons were, and sacrificing valuable media time that would have been better spent describing the corruption of the incoming administration in clear, unvarnished terms. This also undercuts the proactive efforts the Biden administration itself should be undertaking to undercut Trump’s authoritarian intentions, whether it’s by making public incriminating intelligence about Trump’s dealings with foreign powers or issuing unambiguous reminders to the U.S. armed forces that their ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution, not to whomever the president happens to be.

But however much harder Biden has just made their job, Democrats have no choice but to lay out a case against MAGA corruption and abuse of power in the coming months and years. It should be obvious that there will not be much left of our democracy and our freedoms if Donald Trump and his allies can impugn or jail their opponents through misuse of their official powers. This requires Democrats to stick religiously to first principles — to be opposed to self-dealing, to fight for the rule of law, to talk clearly and tangibly about due process and justice. And the flip side of this is that our democracy and freedom are also under threat to the degree that Trump and his allies can act above the law, as a dictator and his minions would. Given the obvious ease of abuse contained within the presidential pardon power — including Trump’s ability to use it to clear himself and his henchmen of even the most horrific of future crimes against the United States — it seems that the Democrats will sooner or later find themselves on a collision course with the power of the pardon, and will need to find a way to limit it. Let’s hope they can put Biden’s mistake behind them so they can start to make this urgent case.

Justice Delayed Is Retribution Green-Lighted

Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, and thus American democracy, is the great political crime of our age. From his efforts to suborn GOP officials into throwing out legitimate votes cast for his opponent, to his incitement of a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, Trump fully transformed himself into an authoritarian enemy of the United States. We saw footage of the mobs with our own eyes; we were subsequently able to read extensive reporting from the media and evidence from the January 6 investigations of what Trump had done. His offense against America was real, and it was damning.

The U.S. government’s failure to prosecute and convict Trump for his actions adds catastrophe upon catastrophe. A lack of urgency from Attorney General Merrick Garland and other high officials in the Justice Department meant that charges against Trump, when they emerged, came perilously close to the next election cycle. Even if the Supreme Court had not stepped in to protect Trump from his crimes with its absurd immunity ruling, our justice system did not work with the urgency called for to bring a rogue former president to account. 

The single most disorienting and disheartening fact about the presidential election we’ve just had is that a majority of voters decided that Trump should be returned to office despite the fact that he had tried to overthrow our democracy. Of course, many of his MAGA supporters don’t think he attacked democracy in 2020-21, but tried to save it — but it’s safe to say that Trump’s 2024 margin of victory came not from those hardcore voters but rather those who either didn’t think January 6 was disqualifying for a presidential candidate, or those who saw Trump remain out of jail in the subsequent years and concluded that what he did must not have been very serious. For the existence of these latter groups, we have both the weak-kneed Justice Department and the corrupt right-wing Supreme Court majority to thank.

Today, we’ve received the inevitable news that special counsel Jack Smith has asked a judge to withdraw the federal indictments against Trump both for his attempts to overthrow the 2024 election results and for allegedly retaining classified documents when he left the White House. The reason? A long-standing Justice Department rule that it’s unconstitutional to prosecute a sitting president. And so the absurd, failed process comes full circle. Slow to prosecute a criminal president, and sabotaged by a right-wing Supreme Court majority with a direct interest in that president’s return to power, the Justice Department now declares that Donald Trump’s re-election means that he escapes being held to account for crimes that relate directly to his fitness to be president. 

It is well within the realm of possibility that a successful case against Donald Trump could have discredited him in the eyes of enough voters to deny him a second term, even if the Supreme Court had at some point intervened to stay any punishment (i.e., jail time). We are seeing the concluding act of a federal justice system unable to hold to account the one person it needs to be able to hold to account if we’re to be a nation of laws, based on the nonsensical idea that the president is above the law so long as he is president (an idea unfortunately strengthened by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, which holds that a president may try to overthrow the government as long as he considers doing so to be within the scope of his official duties).

Nonetheless, January 6 and its associated cloud of criminality remains a primary lens through which every American should view the second Trump administration. Trump showed himself not simply unfit to be president but to be an enemy of the country that I believe most people still understand the United States to be, where elections are decided by majority will, not by Proud Boys and other insurrectionists hunting legislators in the halls of Congress. His election three weeks ago by a majority of voters does not magically wash away his crimes; a majority of voters have made a grave mistake in entrusting power to Trump again, a mistake we will be measuring in lives lost, freedoms curtailed, national wealth looted, and equality under the law nullified. When a country fails to hold criminals to account, it will eventually find itself ruled by criminals.

If you don’t want to take my word (or case) for the 2020-21 insurrection being central to understanding Trump II, then I suggest you try listening to Donald Trump himself. Trump has always grasped that there was no way forward for him that didn’t involve presenting his attempted coup as a glorious defense of democracy, which not only means he is innocent of any crimes, but has also led him to such noxious behavior as calling jailed January 6 participants “political prisoners” (indeed, one of his first campaign promises was a vow to pardon those convicted of assaulting the Capitol). But Trump, being Trump, cannot ever really contain his criminality from public view, and so he has kept pushing his defense of the insurrection to its logical conclusion — to claim that a “stolen” election means that he can continue the insurrection once back in office, by turning right and wrong upside down, and punishing those who tried to stop him four years ago, as if those who defended American democracy are enemies to be subdued and jailed.

This is the mindset of a would-be dictator, not a prospective president.

I’ve read some smart takes that Donald Trump clearly aims to re-write the history of January 6 completely, with the end goal of making it disappear or even transforming it into a day that celebrates his greatness and absolves him completely of blame. I agree that such efforts are highly likely to occur, and have to admit that I find the prospect sickening; even more sickening is the thought that Trump might succeed in permanently altering mass perceptions of January 6 and his unparalleled criminality in trying to overthrow an election. But I’m fairly certain these attempts will not succeed — not for Trump’s lack of trying, and not just because opponents of Trump can still have their say, but because I think I’m right that January 6 remains the skeleton key for understanding Trump and his lust for power.

January 6 and Trump’s subsequent embrace of it as justification for second-term abuses makes it highly likely that his next term will be lawless beyond what most people currently imagine; that January 6 will increasingly look like a sneak preview, not an aberration that can be easily covered up. A man who would try to kill American democracy is capable of all manner of depravity; the great failure of the American people in this election was a self-destructive inability to grasp this basic truth. We already know that Trump is a sexual predator, that he wanted US soldiers to shoot protestors in 2020, that he has spoken of executing generals who questioned him. Donald Trump remains the deranged man he fully revealed himself to be after he lost the election in 2020; despite the shelving of the federal charges against him, he’s still a dedicated enemy of American democracy, and attempts to strategize against him or to opine on the unfolding of his second term while ignoring this reality will only end badly.

Unfit Nominees Validate Dire Predictions For a Second Trump Term

Given all that we know of Donald Trump’s previous misrule and vengeful, authoritarian plans for a second term, relentless Democratic opposition to his administration is both morally and politically the right call. Trump’s rapid-fire rollout of proposed cabinet secretaries and other high-level executive positions over the past week confirms that those who warned of the dangers of a second Trump term were on the mark. His nominees to critically important positions range from incompetent to wildly destructive. The latter category includes vaccine denier RFK, Jr. as the proposed secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; accused sexual predator Representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general (though he has withdrawn in the last day and been replaced with former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi); Russia-propagandizing former Representative Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence; and unqualified Fox News personality Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense.

The clear and obvious choice for Democrats is to pummel these execrable nominees starting now. Whatever Trumpist strategy lies behind these picks — an attempt to push the GOP-controlled Senate into early obedience to awful Trump choices, a deep-seated wish for these terrible people to serve as hardcore loyalists beside him, a desire to overturn public faith in key parts of the government so as to increase his own relative authority — the Democrats’ primary goals should be to defend the American people from harm and the federal government from sabotage as much as possible. In the pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., we can easily imagine a future government campaign against mass vaccination, driven by Kennedy’s literally worm-brained opposition to basic science, with “success” measured in thousands of preventable deaths. Lives are on the line, and it’s on Democrats to fight this one tooth and claw.

The other choices carry their own serious dangers. Hegseth, whose nomination appears to be in trouble even with those who nominated him, is trailed by sexual assault allegations, a history of advocating for the pardon of war criminals, and an affinity for white nationalist tattoos. His appointment would be both an insult to the U.S. military and a clear sign that Trump intends to corrupt and co-opt the defense establishment. Gabbard, more devoted to dictators than democracy, appears to be a genuine security risk, with dubious loyalty to the United States and the secrets she would be sworn to keep. And though he is no longer in contention, Democrats should broadcast far and wide the insanity of Trump proposing Gaetz to be America’s top lawman in the first place; scofflaw Gaetz is like a parody of an attorney general, akin to appointing The Joker to be mayor of Gotham.

Beyond the non-negotiable duty to defend Americans against death, lawlessness, and treason, Trump’s awful choices present a golden (if ominous) opportunity to start defining the nature of the incoming Trump administration for the American people. It should be obvious at this late date that ordinary people who don’t watch a lot of news will not automatically understand the depths of the threat and insult on display in Trump’s choices. What will increase the odds that people pay attention is Democrats talking about how Trump’s choices are so crazy that even a lot of Republican senators don’t seem to want to vote for them!

Indeed, as political analyst Brian Beutler writes in a persuasive piece about the Democrats’ need to make a big deal out of these nominations, Democratic outrage can help put pressure on Republican senators who have doubts about Trump’s choices. Beutler outlines what might be accomplished by the Democrats publicizing the accusations of child sex trafficking against Gaetz, including putting the controversy on citizens’ radar and ideally ending with Gaetz’s name being withdrawn. Given that Gaetz has indeed withdrawn without a full-bore Democratic attack, this now feels like a missed opportunity, where Democrats could have pushed on an open door and created a sense of momentum for themselves in their efforts to restrain Trump. Regardless, Beutler suggests applying this approach to the other cabinet picks, which would create a situation in which GOP senators have to choose between opposing Trump, or owning the likely destructive consequences of allowing these picks to assume power.

Unfortunately, Beutler sees troubling signs that Democratic leaders are currently not so inclined to take the fight to Trump, and criticizes recent remarks by House Democratic majority leader Hakeem Jeffries characterizing Trump’s outlandish nominations as “distractions.” Pushing back against such dismissiveness, Beutler notes that, “The sooner the rest of us establish that chain of responsibility the better, and when Democrats say ‘this is all a distraction’ or, worse, ‘this could be a constructive undertaking,’ they are blurring the lines connecting Trump to his enablers—making life easier for the people who should share blame in the the event of catastrophe.”

I agree wholeheartedly with Beutler’s criticism of this Democratic timidity, and worry that it points to a broader strategic failure in Democratic thinking beyond just these nominations about how to take on the second Trump administration. The Harris campaign was premised on the assertion, grounded firmly in reality, that Donald Trump poses a unique, anti-democratic threat to the United States: from the acts of treason that led to his first impeachment, to January 6, to his campaign promises to seek vengeance against the “enemy within” should he be re-elected, there is every reason to fear for our collective safety and democratic future during a second Trump term. One problem Harris faced, though, was making tangible the threat Trump posed, beyond gesturing to the attack on the Capitol, his incompetence in handling the covid pandemic, and a handful of other touchstones. 

With these recent nominations, though, Trump has all of a sudden given a great deal of substance to the nature of his menace by naming compliant miscreants as key lieutenants in governance. Here’s what I’m not sure Democrats are quite wrapping their heads around — the very things that make these choices dangerous to the country also make them vulnerable to sustained attack from their opponents. Politics might seem topsy-turvy these days, what with a majority of voters returning an insurrectionist to the White House, but I don’t think morality has shifted so much that most Americans don’t realize it would be bad to have an accused sex predator as the country’s top law enforcement official.

And while a huge number of Americans might not know of Trump’s intent to unleash his attorney general to harass and indict his political enemies, the fact that Trump’s first AG pick moved under a cloud of criminality due to sex crime allegations might well be a way to focus people’s attention on the larger corrupt intent in this and other nominations. Is there really any doubt that Bondi, his second choice, will be as pliant as Gaetz, if not so obviously malign? And so the possible danger to Trump goes far beyond the potential of these individuals not being appointed. Because of their loyalty to Trump, their lawlessness, and their penchant for a little “light treason” (in the case of Gabbard), such appointments in fact provide tentpoles for Democrats to start describing and attacking the authoritarian government Trump so obviously aims to install:

• RFK Jr.’s nomination gives them a starting point for explaining what anti-science, anti-truth animus can do to Americans’ health and safety (and in a larger sense to our commitment to a shared reality).

• Gabbard’s nomination makes tangible the danger of the wrong people running America’s security services and undermining our national security (with her long history of defending dictators like Vladimir Putin, there’s plenty of tape to roll to amplify her problematic allegiances). 

• The unqualified, extremely right-wing Hegseth’s nomination helps make concrete Trump’s plans to corrupt the military by actions like cashiering high-level officers and replacing them with those who place loyalty to Trump above the Constitution.

Any Democratic strategy for taking on Trump II (and the rest of the GOP-controlled federal government) needs to start with a sense of initiative. In the coming months and years, there will be plenty of times and places where those who want to protect American freedoms and democracy will have to play defense, whether in terms of mitigating harm or just plain protecting their fellow Americans and others. Yet this reality, due to MAGA’s very real control over powerful levers of government, does not change the other basic reality of our political situation: rather than possessing a mandate to implement authoritarian, far-right rule over the United States, Trump and his MAGA allies are in fact planning to act in defiance of both the wishes of the majority and our form of government outlined in the Constitution. A majority does not wish to see the populace ravaged by preventable disease, innocent public servants thrown in jail, government scientists forced out of their jobs, and their country’s defenses weakened by those of questionable loyalty. As writer Joseph O’Neil recently noted, it’s actually the Democrats who have a mandate — to uphold our long democratic heritage against those who seek to burn it down.

From this perspective, it’s in the Democrats’ interest to do all they can to keep Trump and MAGA on the defensive, by acting with aggression, defiance, and/or mockery as the particular situation merits. Trump and his team are well aware of the psychological aspects of exercising power, including their blatant attempt to cow Democrats by claiming Trump has won an overwhelming victory (fact check: Trump’s vote total has dropped to below 50% of those cast, meaning that more than half of voters did not support his election). The nomination of a rogue’s gallery for the cabinet and other high-level positions is another clear power play — but as I’ve been describing, Trump’s aggression carries within itself the seeds of its own possible defeat. Such seeds won’t mature on their own, though. It’s up to Democrats to describe why his appointments are dangerous for the country.

But this isn’t just a matter of pure power politics — Trump is actively trying to expand the bounds of what is acceptable in this country, into territory that is destructive, cruel, and openly authoritarian. Those limits will not defend themselves; a backlash will not just spontaneously occur. If Trump is allowed to do awful things without a cost — like appointing a vaccine-denying freak as HHS secretary — then a line will not just have been crossed, but erased, setting us up for further depravities. Each time Trump succeeds in normalizing extremism and anti-democratic measures, it isn’t just a loss for Democrats and the majority — it threatens permanent alterations of American politics that advantage the forces of repression and authoritarianism.

Democrats should position themselves as omniscient narrators of the Trump administration’s catastrophic nature and necessary demise. Just as they should employ these nominations to provide concrete illustrations of the evils that Trump plans to inflict on the country, they should be sure to provide an overall narrative for what Trump is doing and why. In the most optimistic scenario, this would help equip ordinary citizens with a context for interpreting and understanding what is sure to appear chaotic and fear-inducing in the coming months. Tell the true story of his authoritarian mindset, his obsession with personal advantage over the public good, and the reactionary MAGA movement behind him that wants to drag the U.S. back to the 19th century.

Rather than treating Trump’s victory as a decisive rebuff to the Democrats and proof that he’s an unstoppable juggernaut to be faced only with extreme caution, party leaders should open their eyes to reality and to their heavy responsibility to defend the nation. Trump barely won the presidency; a good half of the country finds him unfit to govern. Indeed, he has arguably already gone beyond what an American majority supports; as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg recently tweeted, “Trump has misread his ‘mandate,’ and has made serious errors out of the box. He has made the most reckless, dangerous cabinet appointments in American history, and has immediately plunged his early Presidency into chaos and struggle.” But as Rosenberg also rightly points out (in commending attacks leveled by Democratic Representative Jim McGovern against Trump’s insane nominations), “Every single Democratic elected official in the country should be talking like this and creating events to talk like this every single day for the next four years. Our electeds do not just govern and legislate, they also communicate and we need much more of this, every day.” The struggle against Trumpism can’t just be conducted in reference to specific votes and legislation; it’s on Democrats to stay on the offensive against Trump and MAGA, to make news with their defiance and appeals to American decency and democracy. 

Trump's Victory Has Discredited Timid Democratic Approach to MAGA Threat

As pro-democracy voters clear their heads and strategize on how to take back power at the federal level, the first thing to be absolutely clear on is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party did not receive a “mandate” from the voting public in last week’s election. While they won the presidency, the Senate, and the House, a quick look at past elections shows that their margins of victory are not those associated with other significant turning points in public sentiment or historical political realignments. Yes, they won, and with these victories will be able to exercise power, as is the case in our system of government. Crucially, though, this is not the same as receiving mass approval for the radical and extreme plans that they appear poised to unleash on the country. As the ballots have been counted, Trump’s percentage of votes has slipped to just a fraction over 50%. The GOP is up in the Senate by 3 seats. And the party’s continued hold on the House appears to be by a Vance’s whisker.

A survey of state-level results also refutes a sharp nationwide swing to the right. Perry Bacon, Jr. recently surveyed the array of progressive legislation that just passed in moderate and conservative states:

Voters in seven states, including Arizona, Missouri and Montana, all of which Trump won, voted to change their states’ constitutions to guarantee abortion rights. Kentucky and Nebraska, two other very Trump-leaning states, rejected school vouchers measures. Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska passed provisions mandating employers provide their workers paid leave; Alaska and Missouri also raised their minimum wage to $15 per hour.

These are simply not the types of results you’d expect to see in a nationwide political realignment, and in fact shows that majorities of voters in plenty of red states disagree with Trump and the GOP on vital issues.

Yet there is nothing at all surprising about Trump proclaiming a mandate for himself, perhaps especially with results like these cutting against the notion of a new Republican hegemony. This is a man for whom lies and exaggeration are primary political weapons. Much more surprising has been the willingness of some in the political media to go along with such claims, when they really should know better. It’s no excuse that some may have been surprised by Trump’s victory. It’s slightly more persuasive when they point to the significant shifts in the Latino and male African-American votes — yet a quick look at the last two elections show us what a crock the mandate proclamations truly are.

Currently Trump leads Harris by 1.8% of the popular vote, but this is expected to narrow as blue-leaning West Coast votes continue to be counted, with a strong possibility that Trump will fall below 50% of the total popular vote. In comparison, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by just over 2%; in 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump in the popular vote by 4.5%. Needless to say, neither Clinton nor the media talked a lot about a “Hillary mandate”; nor was there a bunch of mandate talk when Biden won.

Apart from being rooted in long-standing bad practices like groupthink, I would wager that many in the media feel incentivized to ascribe such democratic legitimacy to Trump’s win because of the very real anti-democratic and reactionary threat they know that he poses. “Mandate” is an idea rooted in democracy, with the sense of a strong majority making its voice heard; in a perverse way, political media who echo this language are in fact strengthening the hand of an unapologetically anti-democratic Trump and GOP.

Even more disheartening have been those Democrats who have appeared to accept Trump’s proclamation of a massive victory. They speak of a catastrophe for the party, of the Democrats being massively out of touch with the American people and doomed to some undefined but vast time in the political wilderness — even as the continued counting of votes unravels Trump’s already discredited claims of a mandate. There is a huge difference between the normal political behavior of acknowledging a loss and vowing to do better next time by engaging in introspection, on the one hand, and preemptively declaring one’s party a hopeless wreck condemned by its own haplessness, on the other. The one silver lining is that those throwing out the baby with the bathwater have clearly identified themselves as the people that Democrats should opt not to treat as credible leaders in the coming months and years.

This brings us to the second point we need to be totally clear-eyed about: The Democratic Party leadership has failed at its primary mission of this election, which was to keep from power a criminal authoritarian who leads a made-in-America fascist movement. Saying so does not mean that everything the Democrats did in this election and in the decisive preceding years was all bad or wrong, or that there is something irredeemably unsound about the party’s core values or policy prescriptions (in fact, I believe very much the opposite to be true in most areas). Moreover, any fair accounting needs to admit that there were many headwinds to a potential Harris victory — including the inflation of the last few years and longer-term concerns about cost of living — that Harris herself had little control over. And a fair accounting must also acknowledge a truly hideous media environment for Democrats, in which a far-right echo chamber propagated lies to untold millions (including to undecided and unaffiliated voters), and in which the mainstream media largely failed to communicate to the public the overwhelming threat to our democracy, our society, and our lives that a second Trump presidency would entail (for instance, by badly downplaying warnings from former generals associated with the first Trump administration that he is a “fascist.”)

But a primary reason why Donald Trump was able to beat Kamala Harris is because a sufficient number of Americans saw him as a legitimate choice for the presidency — and the relative legitimacy of Trump in the eyes of the public was at least somewhat within the Democrats’ control over the past four years. Given that Trump is a convicted felon, handled the covid pandemic so ineptly that literally hundreds of thousands of American died unnecessarily, and tried to overthrow the 2020 election and so end American democracy, the fact that a majority of voters chose him over Harris may well be one of the most depressingly remarkable facts of our lifetimes. And while a great deal of Trump’s vote surely came from his MAGA base, and his appeals to white supremacist, misogynistic, and Christian nationalist sentiments, his margin of victory was provided by attracting a certain number of voters who could have been persuaded not to vote for him — as well as by a significant number of voters who cast a ballot for Biden in 2020 but chose to sit out 2024. 

Both sets of voters — the persuadable pro-Trump voters and the disincentivized pro-Biden voters — might well have shown up for Harris if the Democrats had done their duty to the country over the last four years by relentlessly reminding everyone of the first Trump administration’s many horrors and Trump’s unfitness to hold political office. Among other things, congressional Democrats could have launched all manner of well-premised investigations into the corruption of his administration. From the repeated ripping off of taxpayers by forcing government employees to stay in Trump hotels at jacked-up prices to the abysmal handling of the coronavirus pandemic, to the human rights abuses against migrants (including the infamous family separation policy), the public deserved an accounting, and Trump a discrediting.

Yet even after Trump’s insurrection following the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, leading Democrats decided that a perfunctory and unsuccessful impeachment effort would be sufficient punishment. Shamefully, more than a few may have been taken in by assurances from some in the GOP, like Senator Mitch McConnell, that Trump was finished as a force in the Republican Party. Alongside this, newly-elected President Biden decided he wanted the country and the party to look to the future, not the past. The Democrats hewed to this strategy — which amounted to a faith that the nation, in rejecting Trump once, would never elect him again — despite the fact that within mere weeks of Trump’s impeachment, the Republican Party began a rapid shift to fully embrace Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and to renew its bonds of affection with this rotten man. The January 6 commission, while admirable, is the exception that proves the rule, a stand-alone effort overshadowed by Democratic inertia on multiple other possible fronts (and undercut as well by a Justice Department that simply failed in its duty to bring Trump to justice in a timely manner).

Meanwhile, the GOP’s near-lockstep allegiance to Trump, and punishment of those who deviated from this worship, accomplished two important things: it allayed any lingering fears among many GOP rank-and-file that Trump had engaged in discrediting behavior, and it communicated to non-MAGA voters that insurrection was a matter of partisan controversy, not an objectively disqualifying fact about Trump. So not only did the Democrats fail to finish off a mortal threat to our politics when he was diminished, this lack of effort also cleared the path for a truly diabolical propaganda effort on the part of the GOP to rehabilitate Trump.

Seeking to return to an elusive pre-Trump era normalcy, the Democrats as a party also failed to fully engage with a widespread disillusionment with democracy itself that Trump’s 2016 election revealed. Addressing this issue was, and is, admittedly a complicated order. To their limited credit, congressional Democrats did draft excellent legislation that would have nipped gerrymandering in the bud, beat back voter suppression, and made Election Day a holiday, among other improvements, but these never got to up or down votes. Yet, given such legislative hurdles, the party had a strong interest in encouraging public discussions about the basics of our democracy that it simply did not pursue (though this failure was shared by much of American society, with a few notable exceptions). Among other things, they did not seem particularly interested in examining why so many Americans seemed outright ready to abandon the basics of democracy (free and fair elections, the rule of law) in favor of the authoritarian solutions offered by Trump. Nor did they appear to grasp the appeal that Trump’s fascistic politics could have on so many Americans, or display any urgency in countering them. Finally, they seemed to lack any strategy for confronting the rivers of white supremacism, misogyny, and Christian nationalism that were at the heart of the movement backing Trump.

However, as I noted above, the fact that Democratic leaders made grave errors in setting the party’s anti-Trump and anti-MAGA strategy, and that these errors have contributed greatly to the party’s failure to stop him, does not mean that the Democratic Party itself is a failure, or that its competing vision for American is broken. I don’t think Democrats made these mistakes because they didn’t actually want to beat Trump and win power, or because they secretly hate democracy.

It is true that the roots of these errors tie to serious flaws in the party that will need to be addressed, including but not limited to: a general lack of aggression in confronting the GOP and asserting power when the party holds it; a geriatric president whose lack of vigor and memories of the pre-Trump Republican Party hamstrung the Democrats; a failure to address long-term cost of living challenges; and an unwillingness to confront and solve the reality of a media environment heavily tilted against the party and in favor of the GOP.

But it is also true that the Democrats are firmly rooted in the democratic traditions of this country, and for all their flaws are the sole remaining major pro-democracy party in the United States, with a long history of fighting for equality on many fronts — on race, on gender, on the economy. One thing the Democratic Party should never apologize for or browbeat itself about is how the party made defense of democracy a key plank of the Harris campaign. If anything, this argument needs to be expanded and sharpened — both to make concrete the harms that MAGA authoritarianism will do to our individual and collective lives, and to provide a countervailing vision of American life. As the party begins to debate strategies for taking on MAGA and winning back power in the coming years, the commitment to democracy provides ample guidance for starting to confront the incoming Trump administration right now, without further delay.

And the first order of business is to refute the propagandistic declarations that Trump has won a “mandate.” There is no point letting Trump start off his presidency with an unchallenged lie that overstates popular backing for his radicalism, corruption, and authoritarianism; as Adam Serwer acidly puts it, “Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery.” At worst, this country is split down the middle over many fundamental issues; at best, a progressive majority is sitting right in front of us, but half-hidden, ready to be rallied by Democratic politicians ready to take the fight to MAGA, to re-energize American democracy so that it regains the faith of the disillusioned, and to fix the economy so that a huge chunk of the population isn’t constantly a paycheck away from financial disarray.

In an interview about the recent election, author Paul O’Neil took aim at Trump’s mandate talk, noting that, “Trump’s margin of victory was humdrum. His final vote tally will fall millions short of the votes won by Biden in 2020. The opposition to him is huge and intense and in the right. So let’s be clear: this malicious criminal does not have the barbaric mandate he claims for himself. On the contrary, it is the opposition that has a mandate, derived from centuries of democratic tradition.” O’Neil’s assertion that it is in fact the Democrats and other opponents of Trump who have a mandate is an idea we should all take to heart, a no-holds-barred attitude not of resistance but of utter defiance. It would be myopic to view this election outcome without context, without a sense of our long history of increasing democracy and the way MAGA seeks to slam that flow into dizzying reverse. Even if Harris had not received nearly as many votes as Trump, the Democrats would still have the full authority of American democracy and the constitutional order behind them. It’s time to start acting like it.

Against MAGA, For the People

Editor’s note: The following was written on a few hours sleep right after the election last week, in an effort to start coming to grips with the disaster that had happened. I’ll say upfront that it covers a lot of ground, and reflects some still-developing thoughts, particularly on the factors that added up into a Trump win. (We are also not unaware of the irony and borderline cheekiness of making this piece even longer with this editor’s note.) In the coming weeks, I’ll be expanding on various points; front of mind are the questions of How this happened? and What strategies should be pursued by Democrats and other opponents of MAGA? As urgency is the order of the day, I’m putting this out there as a draft of a road map and to share my initial sense of what we’re facing. This was no ordinary election, but the elevation to power of a man and a movement that, if not stopped, will severely degrade if not bring to outright ruination the country and free society that we all love. As Trump has spent the last few days seeding his administration with a Christian nationalist television personality, a Russian stooge, an accused sex trafficker, and an anti-vax nutjob, we begin to discern the possible forms of our American apocalypse — and like most apocalypses, the options aren’t pretty.

Donald Trump’s victory is a shocking and disastrous conclusion to the 2024 presidential race. Four years after he turned insurrectionist by attacking the results of the 2020 election through fraud and violence, a majority of voters have chosen to return him to the Oval Office. His campaign laid out an American future of mayhem, mass hardship, and repression; with the presidency, the Senate, and a compliant Supreme Court in the hands of the GOP, there is no reason to think he won’t do what he has said he will. From seeking vengeance against “the enemy within” to deporting 15 million immigrants, to gutting the economy with insane tariffs, to lowering our defenses against Russia and other enemies, to installing anti-science zealots into positions meant to protect the environment and the public health, to gutting the rule of law through the appointment of hack judges and bent prosecutors, Donald Trump’s election is poised to make most of our lives much worse.

There can’t be any mincing of words: Americans have elected a man who is fundamentally an enemy of America, a man who detests democracy, a sociopath who has no real sense of lives outside his own. He has returned to finish the job that he started on January 6. Among his first acts in power will be to pardon the traitors convicted of assaulting the Capitol and to eliminate the remaining legal cases against him, whether or not such interference is actually legal.

In his ascent, Trump is the conduit to power for deeply regressive and corrupt forces in American society. Right-wing oligarchs see him as the path to increased riches and control over American workers. Far-right religious groups and adherents see him as the man who will increase their influence and impose their backwards views on women and non-Christians in the country. Many millions more see him as a strongman who will restore the fortunes and status of white citizens and put uppity minorities in their place. Bound together by propaganda and lies, worshipping a strongman leader, steeped in grievance and scapegoating “the enemy within,” America has assented to rule by what is clearly a fascistic movement.

Or has it? One fundamental question going forward is to what degree people were fully aware of what they were voting for when they voted for Donald Trump. I will put my cards on the table and say that I don’t think most people knowingly voted for a dictator who will obliterate the rule of law, gut our rights, and destroy our national security. Some did, yes, but certainly not a majority. The New York Times has a pretty decent analysis of some of the structural issues that helped Trump win, but its assertion that “Donald Trump told Americans exactly what he planned to do” is only half-true: Trump indeed did so, but the political media did an abominable job in communicating this to the public, engaging in all manner of sane-washing and repeatedly failing to foreground the deep threat he poses to our country. Then there is the matter of people simply not believing that he would do the things he said, like shoot protestors or deport millions of immigrants — a disbelief shared by plenty of his hard-core supporters.

The dust is still settling, but it seems likely that economic concerns were heavy on the minds of many in their decisions to vote for Trump. Inflation was a generationally unsettling experience for the citizenry (Annie Lowrey smartly points out that “This is not a purely economic story; it’s a psychological one too”) for which the Biden-Harris administration paid a heavy price, and long-term, festering issues like housing and child care costs (also topics Lowrey has written about) mean that Democrats’ huzzahs for the economy rang hollow for many. With the pummeling in the Senate that the Democrats took, it feels like this was a general rejection of incumbents tarnished by such feelings. There is also the fact that ruling parties across the democratic world have been booted in the wake of covid and its disruptions, suggesting a world-wide dissatisfaction with political leadership — as well as a turn to authoritarianism as right-wing parties have gained in power.

A related, more general point that many others have made from various angles, and that I’ll talk about more in the future: the contemporary world is obviously disorienting and complex, and it’s not crazy that many people feel varying levels of specific and general insecurity. Trump offers a simple, easy-to-grasp solution: believe in me, give me your support, and I will keep you safe. This is an appeal that’s both atavistic and authoritarian, but it clearly works. Along these lines, the Democrats have been inconsistent if not absent in telling a narrative of the country and our society, particular with respect to the admittedly gigantic social changes they have rightly helped advance. In the absence of a progressive story for where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going, we got Make America Great Again.

But for those of us who despise Trump, it’s deeply unsettling that more voters would choose the path he offers — the obviously bogus claim that he will bring safety and security. Did they not live through the same first Trump term as the rest of us? Deeply unsettling as well that the promise of chaos and hate brought other voters on board, along with Trump’s four years of claiming that he, and they, were robbed of their rightful power. All that sense of vengeance and retribution, bottled up for years, now uncorked — only the insensate would not be at least a little afraid.

In terms of fully confronting his authoritarianism, providing a sense of economic hope, and conveying a more general sense of being able to provide security to Americans, the Democratic Party has clearly failed to do its job. Put most bluntly, the Democratic Party has failed to defend the country against an undeniable threat to our freedom and our democracy, to the point that they have lost the popular vote against a man who is gunning to take away both. Throughout the last eight years, there has been a pattern of refusing to admit the threat that Trump, and the fascist MAGA movement he brought together, truly pose to the United States. Democrats need leaders who fully understand this danger and are committed to defeating it. Those whose errors in judgment have helped get us to this point of disaster need to make way for leaders who can get the job done.

During his first term, Democrats consistently refused to employ what powers they had to hold Trump to account; even when his actions were outrageous enough to merit impeachment, Democratic leadership both resisted the confrontation and then treated it as a pro forma process to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. After Trump’s first term, Democrats declined to investigate the many, many scandals of his time in office or to pursue other strategies to keep his reputation properly in tatters. Save for the January 6 commission — the exception that proves the rule — Democrats behaved as if we were still in the era of “regular,” pre-Trump politics. This, despite the growth in plain sight of a cult around the Big Lie claiming that Trump had been robbed of his re-election, a clear rejection of democracy. Not only this, but Trump and the GOP also tied the Big Lie into the white supremacist Great Replacement theory that millions of migrants were being imported into the United States, with the neat twist that such migrants were providing the margin of victory for Biden and other Democrats.

Beyond this, Democrats have failed to reckon with the immense media advantage that the GOP possesses through a broad array of right-wind networks. As Matthew Sheffield puts it in a survey of the media imbalance that he argues was decisive to the Democrats’ defeat, “Trump’s victory was built on blatant lying, but it could not have worked without the far-right media machine that Republicans have been building for decades but which has mushroomed in size since the once-and-future president came onto the political scene in 2015.” It is incredible that the Democrats have not grasped by now that reliance on traditional outlets means ignoring those outlets’ determined bias to a “both-sidesism” that benefits the radicalizing GOP. Likewise, it’s incredible that the Democrats have failed to grasp the degree to which a substantial number of Americans get their news from right-wing sources that report Republican propaganda, not reality.

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To fully confront the threat that Trump poses, we must first acknowledge his personal depravity, and second that his very depravity is at the heart of his appeal to millions of our fellow Americans. At the same time, we have to see that for millions of others who supported him, their support is more contingent, and can more relatively easily be peeled away from him. But for both groups, we have to recognize that the appeal is not rational, is not based on facts and figures. It is rooted in extremely basic, even primal feelings. If we are to reach them, we need to understand the emotional appeals Trump is making — to pride, to resentment, to insecurity — in order to offer a healthy alternative that is democratic and unifying for all Americans.

Among other things, we need to double down on democracy, and the principles of equality and freedom, in ways that are vivid and tangible to people. Donald Trump essentially tells citizens to surrender their power to him, and that in return he will keep them safe. Not only is this contrary to basic ideas of dignity and self-respect that I would hope have an intuitive appeal to most people, the idea of trusting a king-like figure to do what’s right is literally what our country was created to avoid. Trump and his political allies very much want to take away our power, whether it’s through voting restrictions, outlawing abortion, or banning books, or through decimating unions, despoiling our god-given planet, or letting the richest among us buy elections and political office. 

We need to get back to the basics. Don’t just talk about protecting “the rule of law” — talk about what that phrase means via concrete details, about what happens when it doesn’t exist, and about how we can see examples of its absence in other countries. We have gotten to this perilous point in part because we have been lazy with the meaning of words that we hold to be central to our lives. And the same goes for the terms we use to describe the MAGA movement — if we rightly call it “fascist” to draw attention to its uniquely threatening nature, we have to be sure to have an open discussion about what we mean by the term. We can’t take anything for granted.

We must also stand firm against Donald Trump’s authoritarian interpretation of his powers, for which he can point to the Supreme Court’s ignominious immunity ruling in support of his attempt to overthrown the 2020 election. Adam Serwer cuts to the heart of the matter when he writes that “there is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism. No matter what the Roberts Supreme Court says, the president is not a king, and he is not entitled to ignore the law in order to do whatever he pleases [. . .] Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery.” This will be a vital observation to remember as we wrestle with the fact that Trump won a majority of the vote. Does this mean that a majority have voted to end democracy? We need to articulate a resounding and thorough “no” to this question over the coming months, against what will be Trump’s inevitable attempts to assert outrageous new presidential powers.

We need to make sure that democracy includes meaningful popular influence not only on government, but over the economy. MAGA fascism includes powerful supporters like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel who see their engagement a way to increase their personal wealth at the public expense, as do other billionaire and multi-millionaire supporters who expect returns on their investment measured in favorable laws and regulations. This is a topic for another day, but those who hope to defeat the MAGA-fied GOP need to articulate a vision of the economy that gets us beyond what feels like hand-to-mouth, all-against-all competition for so many people (and yes, this does get us into heavy questions about capitalism, government’s role in the economy, etc., hence the saving it for another day).

We need to stress solidarity, both among those who oppose the MAGA movement, and also towards those who support Trump. Everyday supporters of Trump are some of his greatest victims, marks whom he claims to love and represent, but from whom he’d rip away health care or Medicare without a second thought. Trumpism runs on hate, with MAGA voters encouraged to believe that fellow citizens are enemies and undocumented immigrants are animals. We need to resist the hate bait, and out-Christian the so-called Christians; we must make an effort to love, understand, and find common ground with our neighbors, as hard as it can be. At its heart, the MAGA logic is to give people feelings of hate, resentment, and vengeance to distract them from the fact that the politicians they elect never seem to actually do anything to make their lives better in tangible ways.

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I’ll end with some initial thoughts on how to confront and ultimately roll back Trump and the authoritarian MAGA movement. Even as we process our grief and work through our disorientation, we need to get to a place where we prioritize initiative, confrontation, and confidence. The MAGA movement is a fascistic and insurrectionary movement that has broken into democracy’s house and is in the process of ransacking it, with our freedoms, our security, and our economy on the line. Though its authoritarian and white supremacist elements are rooted in centuries of American history and culture, pluralistic democracy is the only legitimate form of government in this land, and freedom and equality are our rightful inheritance.

In the near term, keeping the initiative should be the order of the day, once folks have had time to process and grieve this disaster. First, we badly need the Democrats to start kneecapping the incoming Trump administration ASAP. The Biden-Harris administration owes the country a peaceful transfer of power — but they also have no obligation to unnecessarily empower a man who has already declared his intention to be a dictator on his first day. Taking a page from recommendations made by Brian Beutler, if the Biden administration has transcripts or other evidence of conversations between Trump and Vladimir Putin, release those now. The same goes for evidence in the now-doomed federal prosecution of Donald Trump for his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. Cover him in mud while he’s still waiting to take the oath of office.

Given his obvious pleasure in fantasizing about ordering the military to shoot protestors and seize political opponents — fantasies that may soon become horrifically real — Biden and other Democrats should take this interval to send a public message that the use of the military to suppress political dissent is illegal and an abuse of power. They should communicate this both to the armed forces and to the public at large. They should remind the public that Trump is talking about murdering American citizens, and defiling the highly-revered armed forces by making them complicit in murder. In other words, they should take Trump’s threats seriously and do what they can to blunt them, given that they’ve otherwise failed to keep this authoritarian out of power.

In light of the near-certainty that Trump will cut off aid to Ukraine, Biden and his team need to basically ship every possible needed supply to Ukraine, stat. Let’s see Trump and his cronies complain that the U.S. is trying too hard to defend American interests in Europe, and start howling to help Putin before he’s even in office.

Democrats should also concede not an inch of the Harris campaign’s assertions that Trump is a threat to democracy. They should reiterate clearly and forcefully the awful things Trump has promised to do, and to do everything they can to publicize those acts when Trump does — both to inform the public, and to demonstrate that he is exactly the unfit character that they have been saying he is. This can help galvanize those who already detest him, and start to reach some of those who disbelieved that Trump meant what he said. It is a good bet as well that he will attempt to engage in actions that many of us haven’t even yet imagined, and we need to have a framework already in place to capture and communicate those to the public.

The need to be ready to call out and describe Trump’s extreme measures is all the more important since, as David Kurtz points out in an interview with Greg Sargent, Trump’s team is already trying to backfoot and intimidate the opposition with the breadth and intensity of their promised early actions (including mass deportations). There can be no cowering as if Democrats are helpless victims; likewise, any Democratic leaders who counsel us to give Trump a chance and see whether his bark is worse than his bite need to be laughed off the public stage.

Democrats need to characterize as deranged the actions that Trump will try to present as righteous and proper. I am thinking here of efforts to persecute political enemies, to brutally deport millions of immigrants (including children who are American citizens), and to purge the civil service of dedicated experts and replace them with sycophantic pro-Trump hacks. They must do so with an eye to building public outrage and opposition, and in a way that explains how the actions violate basic American principles — whether of due process, a belief in facts and truth, or basic human decency. They need to have faith that they can use Trump’s actions to change minds and build up the opposition to defeat his movement and cripple his presidency. This is not a static situation; Trump will surely overreach, and such overreach will be a great vulnerability that Democrats must ruthlessly exploit.

One particular idea: Democrats and other opponents of Trump should immediately start discussing the idea of buyer’s remorse about the choice America’s voters have made. There is simply no way Trump will not be unleashing, over the next few months leading up to his inauguration, all manner of threats, sordid plans, and vengeful promises — as well as the deranged gibberish that seems to come out of his mouth half the time these days. He cannot be allowed to fill the airwaves uncontested. No respect is due to a man who has lost his right to respect; even the vote of the majority this time around cannot wash away the stain of his insurrection attempt and his open vows of second-term violence and mayhem. Trump is on course to engage in actions that will surely shock and surprise many millions of Americans, including many of those who voted for him without knowledge of or belief in the promises he made. Democrats must be ready to expose this divergence between reality and expectation, with the goal of showing Americans how Trump is fundamentally betraying the trust they gave him.

Opponents of Trumpism should be prepared to call out and condemn the blatant corruption that is sure to come — not only self dealing like we saw in the first Trump administration, when he fleeced the U.S. government by overcharging for Secret Service stays at hotels he owned, but larger-scale efforts that intertwine the interests of Trump and powerful businesses. Considering the likelihood of a Trumpist oligarchy, Franklin Foer writes, “The regime does the bidding of the billionaires and, in turn, the billionaires do the bidding of the regime. Power grows ever more concentrated as the owners and the corrupt leaders conspire to protect their mutual hold on it. In short order, this arrangement has the potential to deliver a double blow to the American system: It could undermine capitalism and erode democracy all at once.” Politically, the prospect of Trump doing favors for billionaires cuts against his populist image, and could be quite damaging, particularly if those favors have to do with repressing worker rights or funneling money to the ultra-wealthy.

It’s not too soon to start organizing civil society groups to defend against future depredations. MAGA has already declared war on abortion rights, and doctors need to speak out about the harms to women’s health. In the closing days of the campaign, Trump made clear that mandatory vaccines are now in his crosshairs, thanks in part to the influence of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.; medical professionals need to sound the alarm about preventable illnesses running amok due to anti-vaccine madness. Lawyers have a role to play in defending (and like I noted above, explaining) the importance of the rule of law in our country, and why, for starters, it’s really bad for everyone that the Supreme Court has indicated that Donald Trump is above it. Americans need to understand that the threat Trump poses is not just to marginalized groups, but to everyone; the threat is personal.

We need to listen to and learn from authoritarianism experts like Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Timothy Snyder. Every country has its particular politics, but we should use existing tools gained from other countries’ experiences, rather than completely re-invent the wheel.

We can’t be afraid to call out the lunacy of Trump’s suggestions that he has been divinely-appointed to lead the nation. I feel safe in saying that God had nothing to with Trump’s victory (if a deity really was involved, I’d place my bets on the guy who dwells Down Under — and I’m not talking about Australia). For many, even most Americans, such declarations are reminiscent of the prophesying of street-corner preachers and religious charlatans. In Trump’s case, they are so self-serving and transparently profane that they should make even an atheist blush. Short version: he sounds 100% nutso, and we should feel free to respond accordingly.

Finally, speaking broadly, we have to double-down on truth and facts, including by effectively addressing the huge media advantages currently held by the right. What binds MAGA fascism together is a constant firehouse of lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that keep people disoriented and malleable. Among other things, there can’t be a pro-democracy movement that doesn’t place the reality and threat of climate change in a central position. To me, MAGA’s denial of this baseline reality is one of its major vulnerabilities — a doomed attempt to tell people that what they’re seeing with their own eyes isn’t actually happening. 

With the situation so dire, the only choice for those who want to protect themselves against the assaults to come is to organize, brainstorm, and develop strategies to defend our democracy, our freedom, and our lives. Our lodestars should be reality, truth, solidarity, and democracy.

Closing the Door on MAGA: A Closing Argument

Eight years ago, I started this political blog on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. I fully expected to soon be writing about President Hilary Clinton’s struggles to govern against a Congress partially or fully dominated by the Republican Party. My model of politics was the Obama years: a grinding struggle between a deeply conservative, anti-government party and an activist one that sought incremental but real gains in the realms of economics and social equality.

In other words, I started my Very Serious Engagement with American politics almost at the exact moment that I learned that I might actually know nothing at all about politics, or that what I thought I knew was wrong, which pretty much amounts to the same thing. In this, I can at least comfort myself in the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. Many with political expertise failed to see Trump’s real shot at victory; and when the dust settled, and his term began, they also couldn’t really explain what the hell had happened or was happening in front of their disbelieving eyes. Instead, much of the media defaulted to treating Donald Trump as a normal president, with examples of what we now call “sanewashing” evident from the start. Likewise, for too long, the Democrats failed to talk about the anti-democratic spirit of Trump — and the way the larger GOP so quickly made itself complicit in what quickly turned out to be a regime of cruelty, lawlessness, and incompetence.

In retrospect, though, my initial sense of disorientation has served me well. Having my assumptions so thoroughly pummeled, at just the moment when I thought I might have something to say about American politics, was something of a humbling experience, to say the least. But in a way, my disorientation buoyed me, and I felt like I had nothing to lose in persevering. Looking back, two things in particular kept me writing.

First, I genuinely wanted to figure out what I’d missed and why a figure as truly terrible as Trump had not only been elected president, but was managing to so quickly mold one of America’s two major political parties in his own image. Like many of us, I had a basic need to understand reality, and why it suddenly seemed so unreal.

Second, I realized that I at least knew enough to say something. You didn’t need a Ph.D. in U.S. history or a journalism degree to see that Trump was deranged, his rhetoric racist and authoritarian, and his role in U.S. politics destructive. It was also quickly apparent that many in the media simply weren’t sufficiently conveying obvious realities in their coverage of Trump, such as his racism and his lies. I also grasped that I could make my efforts to learn part of what I wrote about. I didn’t have to be an authority on everything. I could share my questions, and the answers I was tentatively finding.

Eight years on, we can safely say that Trump’s power and influence over so many people is due not simply to his charisma, his shamelessness, and his ruthlessness, but also to the fact that he’s a figurehead and leader for a vast reactionary movement that wishes to roll back the egalitarian social advances of the 20th century, shift the country’s wealth upward, and impose a white supremacist order on a rapidly diversifying nation. In crucial ways, Trump’s personal odiousness has at times helped obscure this bigger picture, without which you simply can’t begin to grasp the reality of our politics and our society. Trump is a danger to America both because is a violent-minded sociopath for whom reality begins and ends with his own well-being, and also because millions upon millions of Americans have chosen him as their instrument of redemption and dominance over their fellow citizens.

Over the past eight-plus years, Trump and the MAGA coalition have existed in a symbiotic, mutually-radicalizing relationship. Trump has adopted fascistic politics to maintain and gain power, including the incitement and validation of violence as a political tool; the dehumanization of immigrants and the labeling of political opponents as internal enemies; and a de facto war on democracy as a hated limited on his own power. In doing so, he has drawn on the support of his base, who have proved depressingly eager to view their fellow citizens with disdain and hatred, and to turn against democracy if democracy means they can’t impose their preferred vision on American society. His support has been augmented by a cohort of voters who might not agree with him ideologically, but to whom he appeals for other reasons (a belief that he’s a disrupter, that he’s a successful businessman, that he’s on the side of the little people, and so on). Alongside this, the Republican Party, too, has radicalized to embrace Trump’s personal quest for power and the MAGA movement’s reactionary aims — chillingly evidenced in the failure of most GOP congresspeople and senators to vote for his impeachment and conviction following the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, as well as in the Supreme Court’s efforts to immunize Trump against the crimes he committed in office (most glaringly, his efforts to overthrown the 2020 election).

And cementing it all has been a relentless flow of lies and propaganda from Trump, his allies in the Republican Party, and an extensive right-wing media universe, in a concerted effort to re-write reality itself so that up is down and day is night. In this alternate universe, Donald Trump actually won the presidency is 2020, a vast “deep state” conspiracy is out to get the former president, a great replacement is under way in which brown-skinned immigrants are taking away the power and diluting the votes of white Americans, transgender surgery is a daily occurrence in elementary schools, and climate change is a hoax. Conspiracies supplant reality in a narrative of unholy enemies hellbent on destroying America.

To understand where we stand here at the cusp of our third presidential election featuring Donald Trump, our perspective needs to include these various elements. First, Donald Trump’s personal danger to our democracy and freedom, with his threats to imprison and turn the military on political opponents, his insane mass deportation plans that would wreck the U.S. economy and ethnically cleanse the country of millions of citizens and non-citizens alike; and his openly-stated intentions to overthrow the rule of law to keep himself safe from prosecution for his many alleged crimes. Second, the reactionary MAGA movement that wishes to turn to United States into a land where women and minorities are second-class citizens, white Americans are considered the only “true” Americans, and extremist religious views are imposed on the majority (with repercussions from the banning of abortion to the denigration of non-Christian religions like Muslims). Third, the effort to undermine Americans’ ability to separate truth from propaganda, so that some Americans are led to view their fellow citizens as enemies, to view immigrants as soulless invaders, and to view Donald Trump as a savior of the nation who is licensed to enact the most extreme measures to address imaginary threats.

Taken together, the means (fascistic, violent, anti-democratic) and the ends (the replacement of American democracy with an authoritarian regime where Trump and the GOP hold incontestable power, where the government serves the interests only of “real” Americans and treats all others as enemies) add up to what I’ve repeatedly argued should be viewed as a slow-motion insurrection against the United States. This, too, is a framework that helps us understand what’s happening with this election and what the stakes truly are. Even as Trump competes with Vice President Harris to win, he has consistently declared that the election is rigged against him and has refused to say that he will accept any results that don’t put him in the White House. He has suggested retribution against his political opponents. He has promised that there will be “blood” if he doesn’t win. In other words, he is pursuing anti-democratic means to win, with the clearly stated goal of ruling like a dictator should he regain the Oval Office. 

If there is hope for this election, it is because a majority of voters have repeatedly shown that they understand that both Donald Trump and the larger MAGA movement are threats to our democracy and to our freedoms. If I’m feeling optimistic about the outcome, it’s because the American majority now has hard, irrefutable evidence of how very real the threat is. In particular, Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt and related illegal efforts to remain in office sent a message through the country that Trump had forever gone beyond the acceptable bound of American politics. Likewise, the Supreme Court’s overturning of abortion rights — made possible by Trump’s appointment of three justices — was both an undeniable consequence of his presidency and a clear-cut attack on the fundamental rights of half the population to a degree unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. We might say that January 6 provided irrefutable proof that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms, and that the overturning of Roe v. Wade — born of right-wing religious extremism — provided irrefutable proof that the MAGA movement is a threat to our freedoms. No amount of Republican propaganda can convince the American majority that Trump isn’t an authoritarian monster, or that the MAGA movement believes that women are the equals of men.

On top of this, Trump has cast aside any pretense of moderation. Whether through psychological decompensation or a faith that his extremism will motivate current followers and convert new ones, his rhetoric has grown increasingly violent and outlandish. He has said that the removal of migrants will be “bloody.” He has fantasized about Liz Cheney facing a firing squad. He has spoken of journalists getting shot in an imaginary assassination attempt. He has told rally-goers that his second term will be “nasty.” 

Should Harris prevail, Trump will still proclaim himself the winner, and attempt to cloak his claim in lies about election fraud and a vast conspiracy against him and his supporters. Journalists and Democrats will talk about him trying to steal the vote, but the more accurate way to describe someone who lies about millions of illegal immigrants voting and who demands to be placed in the White House or else is as an insurrectionist — as someone attempting to overthrow democratic results and install himself in power against the will of people, which is inseparable from overthrowing our democracy itself.

Trump will do so not because he is strong and fearsome, but because he is weak. For as many people have been taken in by his strongman con, or energized by his open racism and misogyny, many more Americans are repulsed and appalled by his unfitness to lead; for all his bluster, he cannot move their opinions of him, which are well-founded and correct. Likewise, the movement he leads, driven by white supremacy and misogyny but also by a preference for unjust order over the uncertainty of freedom, is weak, and immoral. In particular, white supremacism is a howling moral abyss, with no basis in reality, truth, or basic humanity, leading its adherents into a state of mind largely indistinguishable from madness, where they would give up their individual power to a man so manifestly crazed and cruel as Donald Trump, rather than do the hard thing and learn to love their neighbors, or at least get along with them like normal people.

With Trump, the MAGA movement has made a true deal with the devil, a pact that has granted it great powers but at a hideous cost. Trump’s shamelessness has eroded boundaries not only of taste but of basic humanity, creating space for millions of right-wing Americans to become the very worst versions of themselves. In a very real way, he has encouraged his supporters to defile themselves even as he helped channel into full public view the darkest aspects of humanity — hatred, violence, scapegoating, dehumanization, a lust for domination of their fellow Americans. Unfortunately for their electoral prospects, this mutually beneficial but socially destructive pact is now in clear view to those of us outside it, and we find it appalling and un-American. The most retrograde forces in America have yoked themselves to Trump, and have taken an enormous risk in doing so, since his election loss would constitute an enormous blow to the greater MAGA movement. Let this Election Day be a victory for democracy and another step in exorcising the demons of hate from the body politic.

Can the Trump Campaign Really Keep Attracting Latinos By Attacking Latinos?

Given that the promised mass deportation of Latino immigrants is near or at the center of Donald Trump’s second term pitch to voters, it’s been notable that the Harris campaign and other Democrats have avoided a full-on condemnation of such an unprecedented measure. In a recent piece, political strategist Michael Podhorzer takes aim at this reluctance, critiquing polls that purportedly show support, particularly in the Latino community, for deportation. He points to vaguely worded questions that obscure what is actually quite weak support for such measures among Latinos, particularly those whose families are relatively recent arrivals in the country. As he puts it, “there is abundant evidence, often in the same surveys, that there is much less Latino support for the reality of what mass deportation would entail than for what survey respondents think they are being asked.”

Podhorzer’s thorough analysis of the polling, and of a misleading discourse based on this misleading polling, provides yet more evidence that Democrats are taking a big risk in not pushing back on Trump’s deportation plans and these distortions in the public debate. In particular, it appears that the Democrats risk leaving on the table large numbers of Latino voters who might be persuaded to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris if they knew the details of Trump’s plans. He notes that, “Often, Latinos open to voting for Trump presume that his deportation plans are principally aimed at those crossing the border in the last few years. On the contrary, Trump allies have been open that they can and will sweep up non-citizens – documented or not – who have lived here for decades.”

One final point I’d highlight from his analysis — he reminds us that Trump’s deportation plans are rooted in fascistic, dehumanizing language about immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, and that Trump promises such mass removals will be “bloody.” As I wrote in my piece about mass deportations last week, Democrats seem to have given Trump something of a pass on his deportation threats because they perceive immigration as a weak issue for themselves. At the same time, though, Trump’s mass deportation stance may actually be a counter-intuitively weak issue for him, given that it involves language and ideas that are simply outside the mainstream traditions of American politics. When Democrats don’t push back on his mass removal plans, it also gives Trump something of a pass on dehumanizing language that is borrowed at least in part from fascist movements of the 20th century.

A pair of recent events also add fuel to arguments that mass deportation may be a greater liability for Trump than many Democrats think. First, in an interview on 60 Minutes, Trump’s former acting ICE head Tom Homan added some details to what the deportations would involve that should shock the conscience. Homan pushed back against the idea that there’d be family separations under a mass removal regime. Rather, whole families would simply be sent over the border — including American citizen children whose parents were being deported. But as journalist Ron Brownstein points out, “There are about 4 million Latino US citizen children w/at least one undocumented parent. So Homan is talking about deporting millions of US citizens in the name of family preservation,” which takes Trump’s deportation plan “much deeper into the realm of ethnic cleansing.”

This admission by Homan, whom The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson has labeled as the “father” of the Trump administration’s family separation policy and who would surely be involved in a second Trump term, goes exactly to the point that Podhorzer argues — American simply aren’t being told the gory details of Trump’s deportation plan when they’re asked if they’re for or against it. Let’s be clear — shipping millions of American children across the border wouldn’t be a kind-hearted plan to keep families united, it would be an unconscionable deprivation of these kids’ rights to live in the United States and to enjoy the many blessings of American citizenship.

This is what the Democrats are giving up when they fail to take on mass deportation plans head on: the way that Trump’s plans inevitably cascade into full-on assaults against American citizens in a way that seeks to redefine them as not fully American, and the way his plans are the thinnest veneer for attempting to change the ethnic makeup of the United States. Trump’s confident bluster around mass deportation hides an untenable authoritarian assault against our fellow Americans, as well as against undocumented workers scapegoated for problems that Trump doesn’t have the faintest idea how to actually solve.

Finally, though it does not go to the mass deportation issue directly, the MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden intended as Trump’s closing pitch to voters foregrounded the party’s animus to Latinos in all its racist and xenophobic grotesquerie. From an opening act comedian who disparaged Puerto Ricans and Latino immigrants more generally, to the vampiric Stephen Millers’s declaration that America is for Americans only, the message couldn’t be any clearer: if you are not white, or if you are a recent immigrant, you are not part of the real America. As Ron Brownstein observed in relation to the family separation policies noted above, this is the sort of rhetoric the Trump campaign is engaging in even as it’s aiming to pull record numbers of male Latino voters into Trump’s camp. The pushback we’ve seen from Democrats in the last few days against the rally’s blatant anti-Latino racism means that they smell blood in the water now that the mask has come off the MAGA movement; we’ll see if this pushback grows to encompass racist and inhumane deportation schemes that sprout from the same rancid ground. It’s clear that Trump and his allies are trying to rally Latino voters their side while also telling their white base that they actually hate Latinos (or at least the ones who are the wrong type of Latino); it’s well past time to draw this hateful contradiction into the full light of day.

A Second Trump Presidency Would Aid Our Enemies and Abandon Our Allies

Many millions of Americans are acutely aware of the dangers to their lives and livelihoods should Donald Trump again be elected as president due to the domestic repression and economic chaos he appears intent on unleashing. But the threats from a second Trump presidency to American democracy and prosperity aren’t what I see as necessarily the most frightening. No matter how bad things get in terms of our domestic conflicts, I have a deep-rooted faith that the American majority will prevail, sooner or later, in defending our democracy and freedoms, though the cost could well be terrible. Rather, though I haven’t focused on either topic here at The Hot Screen during this election season, I worry that in the shorter and medium term Trump’s likely unleashing of foreign policy chaos would fuck over our country six ways to Sunday, and that on a longer timeline his likely sabotage of climate-friendly measures would inflict untold and perhaps irreversible harm on our country and our planet.

In the case of the first, the very real dangers of a Trump presidency are obscured by the way in which foreign affairs are siloed off into the realm of “the experts.” Even in the case of the United States’ support of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, where I believe President Biden made absolutely the right call to back Ukraine, the lack of a concerted, consistent effort to build a public consensus for this support has been glaring — and revealing of a real breakdown in democratic accountability for U.S. foreign policy. Simply put, even pro-democracy leaders like Joe Biden simply don’t encourage Americans to closely examine what the U.S. does overseas, or to see it as deeply important to inform Americans about foreign policy challenges. 

Of course, most people have their hands full with managing their own lives, much less keeping up on domestic politics, and I don’t mean to say that there’s a sinister conspiracy to keep Americans uninformed as to foreign policy matters. Yet I think that, with the threats that Trump poses in our relations with the rest of the world, we are somewhat hamstrung by a long-standing weakness in public attention to foreign affairs that leaders of both parties have condoned (for example, with Joe Biden in the case of Ukraine) if not outright cultivated (for example, in the case of George W. Bush, who infamously told Americans after September 11 to go shopping rather than, say, talk with their neighbors about what it might mean to try to occupy Afghanistan and convert it to democracy at the point of a gun).

So when Donald Trump attacks America’s allies and praises American’s enemies, he doesn’t do nearly as much damage to himself, in terms of turning off voters, as he rightly should. To get right down to it: the prospect of Donald Trump pulling support of Ukraine and guaranteeing its destruction at the hands of Russia, with the accompanying chaos that would be unleashed on Europe, is chilling. It’s not just the likely slaughter of untold numbers of Ukrainians that should conjure nightmares, but the prospect that Russia would then turn its attention to other countries in Europe. This isn’t just a matter of principle — our economy, and the world economy, is deeply tied up with Europe. A larger war in Europe, or a grey zone between war and peace, is not a place that any of should want to inhabit. And yet Donald Trump, with his bizarre dedication to pleasing Vladimir Putin, and his obsessive attacks against American allies — fellow democracies that are treaty bound to protect us as we are to protect them — could send us on a destabilizing path of war or national isolation.

In ways that have not been adequately covered, Russia appears to have already decided that it is in a shadow war with the United States. In 2016, 2020, and now, Russian operatives are attempting to influence the presidential election and sow chaos in American politics, part of a larger anti-American initiative that has at least received some reporting. Meanwhile, as part of its war on Ukraine, it has been promoting a campaign of sabotage against European countries backing that beleaguered country, including an assassination plot against the CEO of a leading German arms manufacturer. Recently, the US Army’s top-ranking general in Europe warned that Russian sabotage could escalate conflict with Russia; speaking of the Russians’ violation of NATO airspace to attack Ukraine, he also noted that, “So, this is very real, and it could escalate … which means that we need to be ready to fight tonight.”

As Noah Smith writes in a chilling piece addressing the full range of chaos overseas that might result from a second Trump presidency, chaos in Europe is only one piece of a whole bucket of catastrophes that could ensue. Smith points to increasing coordination between Russia and China, countries that have a common interest in taking the U.S. down. And of Asia specifically, he writes, Trump could well act in ways that empower China, an authoritarian juggernaut. The result could be the loss of American allies and trading partners, and even war, as China might see an opportunity to invade Taiwan as a Trump administration looks the other way. Smith ominously but with plenty of justification paints a picture of a world where autocracies come to hold sway, as the U.S. forfeits its crucial role as a defender and example of democracy. 

Smith’s warning is only supported by the evidence of Trump’s first term and his commentary since then. More than ever, Trump seems unable to grasp that Russia, China, and North Korea are not our friends or allies, even as he speaks of our actual friends and allies as if they were neither. Remarkably, he has said that Russia should do “whatever the hell” it wants to NATO members that don’t pay what he thinks they should for their defense — a statement that in earlier, healthier times would have been roundly condemned by members of both major U.S. political parties as borderline treasonous and utterly disqualifying for a would-be president to say.

As Smith summarizes, “Although it’s not possible to know for certain what the consequences of a second Trump presidency would be, it’s very possible that it would result in the U.S. essentially surrendering its European allies to Russia and its Asian allies to China — thus dramatically weakening America’s own ability to resist those enemies in the future.”

In some ways, I don’t think even Smith’s gloomy musings are dark enough. For instance, what’s to stop Donald Trump from actively assisting Putin with his invasion of Ukraine? As commander-in-chief, he could order the U.S. military to attack Ukrainian targets — and who would stop him? Here is where Trump’s visions of domestic repression dovetail with all manner of foreign policy insanity, as he would feel accountable to no one except himself and his deranged notions of personal advantage.

There is also the way in which Donald Trump’s fascistic message in the election’s closing days that America’s internal enemies — defined as anyone who opposes Donald Trump — are worse than external enemies suggests a wholesale collapse of American maintenance of its basic defenses in the world. A U.S. in which Americans are encouraged to see each other as enemies doesn’t seem like a country that would be able to defend itself well against a foreign threat should one arise. To take one hypothetical: if the United States were to be attacked by a Russian-funded terrorist plot, would a second Trump administration defend the United States — or use American fear to double down on a war against “parasites” and “enemies within,” whom he might allege were the cause of American weakness that invited Russia’s attack? And his references to immigration across the southern border as an invasion aren’t just a reinforcement of the white supremacist Great Replacement theory — he also betrays the public by wildly distorting what actually constitutes an invasion or a war, particularly when we also hear him denying that Russia is responsible for its attack on Ukraine.

And then there’s the threat that a second Trump presidency would pose to our efforts to combat climate change — an existential threat to modern civilization that Trump and nearly all GOP elected officials insanely claim does not actually exist. While Democrats have responded to the pressures of their base and others by enacting pro-climate policy in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act, and do acknowledge the reality of human-caused global warming, we are still seeing a profound lack of leadership in terms of speaking bluntly to the American people about the need for even more serious measures and spending to deal with this unprecedented crisis. Meanwhile, it seems like much of the U.S. population is split between denial and dread, which only speaks to the need for leadership and open discussion at all levels of our society and political system. Climate change is something that should unite Americans against a common threat; this tantalizing possibility makes Trump’s efforts to divide and conquer the American people, and the GOP’s lies against climate change, even more grotesque.

With our national security and planetary survival on the line, the stakes of this election couldn’t really be any higher; the rapidity with which life could rapidly unravel under an insane and fascistic President Trump, particularly in the realm of war and peace, are nauseating to contemplate.

A Trump Presidency Unbound by Law or Morality is the Central Question of This Election

In a podcast conversation with former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade out today, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent brings up a point that he rightly flags as generally downplayed by the press: “Media has largely failed to cover Trump potentially canceling prosecutions of himself as a big story in its own right. How many voters know that what's on the ballot is whether Trump can place himself above the law?” This is something I’ve observed as well — the way, as Sargent puts it, that journalists and others mention that if Trump is elected, he will order the Justice Department to cancel investigations of himself, a point from which they move on from immediately as if it’s a given, a simple fact of nature. But Trump’s obvious plans to do so are in fact a gigantic story, displaced only because of the sheer number of competing outrages currently perpetrated or planned by the former president. Maybe I’m an optimist, but pre-Trump, I’m pretty certain that most Americans would have agreed that it would have constituted an abuse of power for a president to make charges against him go away.

This point also goes directly to the dire threat that a Trump restoration would pose to the rule of law and the security of ordinary citizens. If a president can cancel investigations of himself, we can justly say that the rule of law no longer truly exists, as the basic principle that it applies to all would be subverted. And while this may seem abstract to many people at first glance — “Well, he’s the president, so why can’t he protect himself?  How is that going to actually hurt me?” — it starts to become a lot more concrete when you pursue the logic a bit further. It’s not a great leap to see that it means that Trump could also try to have cases against allies dismissed — or have false cases against opponents filed, which in fact he has already vowed to do. How many steps removed from an ordinary’s citizen’s life do such outrages have to be before people realize that without the rule of law, no one would be secure?

It’s in this light that we should view Trump’s recent comments, flagged by Sargent as well, making it clear that the former president is gleefully aware of the Supreme Court’s decision granting him broad immunity from prosecution. To hear Trump talk about it, he certainly sounds like someone who believes the Supreme Court has declared that the law can’t touch him. This should serve as a corrective to the way the Court’s horrific empowerment of a second-term Trump has been generally shunted to the side in campaign coverage. We have never before had a presidential candidate who thought himself unbound by any constraints, either of law or of morality. The reluctance to foreground the obvious danger of such a person speaks to a media and political system unable to adequately acknowledge and address an existential threat to democracy. At last, in the final two weeks of the campaign, we are seeing the charges of “fascist” and “authoritarian” gaining a bit more purchase, through the words of unimpeachable generals and the Harris campaign as it seeks to highlight Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office. Whether America should have a president who can do anything he wants, who knows he can, and who has promised violence against massive swaths of the population if he returns to office has no serious rivals as the central question of this election.

General Emergency

Over the last few decades, Americans have had a superficially healthy but in reality troubled relationship to the U.S. military. Public faith in the military as an institution has been quite high, even as many Americans who said they supported service members gradually tuned out the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations even as they chewed up thousands of American lives for dubious gain. I’ve speculated that Americans’ relationship to the military has elements of the mystical or at least superstitious: in the case of the Middle East debacles, the deaths of service members were viewed as sacrifices to protect against a repeat of September 11, even when rational analysis (particularly of the Iraq invasion) showed these needless occupations served no such purpose. Likewise, despite supposed widespread support for those in uniform, relatively few Americans choose to enlist. The support for the military might sound real, but it is filled with these and other curious inconsistencies.

But it’s the Republican Party and the right that have made the most ostentatious displays of not just support but professed worship of the U.S. military and military power. Certainly George Bush demonstrated this with his belief that force of arms could bludgeon vast tracts of the Middle East into submission and even democracy — in this, he was channeling the delusions of neoconservative thinkers and others on the right who had deeply catastrophic beliefs about the power of technology and basic human nature when it came to those whose lands were invaded. And as millions of Americans rightly turned against occupations that never should have started to begin with, it was second nature for many in the GOP to attack these citizens for not supporting the troops — a logic by which no criticism of U.S. war-making could ever be considered legitimate.

The willingness of right-wing politicians to try to leverage Americans’ well-meaning support for the military for deranged policy ends has ended up rendering such collective faith in the military problematic — a weapon ready to be wielded against the public interest by the unscrupulous. Among the darker possibilities, it means that the U.S. has a lot riding on high-ranking generals and admirals maintaining an apolitical stance, lest they use their acquired political capital to influence the fortunes of either the Republicans or the Democrats. And in the case of Donald Trump, who has threatened to use the military against political opponents in a second term, it raises the possibility that Americans might be swayed by their deep faith in the military to assent more readily to Trump’s deeply insane desires.

But right now, we’re hopefully seeing a far different dynamic play out than the darker ones I’ve imagined. In recent days, we’ve learned that two high-ranking military officials associated with Trump’s first administration have characterized the former president as a “fascist.” First, we learned that former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told reporter Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.” Then, this week, retired General and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly told The New York Times that he also considers Trump to be a fascist. Beyond this comment — which Kelly backed up by comparing Trump’s behavior and beliefs to a definition of “fascism” — he spoke of how Trump’s recent threats to unleash the military on the public catalyzed his decision to speak out. Importantly, Kelly indicated that Trump has a long-standing interest in deploying the military against the public:

Mr. Kelly said that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told dating back to his first year in office why he should not use the U.S. military against Americans and the limits on his authority to do so. Mr. Trump nevertheless continued while in office to push the issue and claim that he did have the authority to take such actions, Mr. Kelly said.

Kelly’s other remarks to the Times about Trump are likewise deeply unsettling — how he “prefers the dictator approach to government,” how Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution or the nature of the United States, how Trump “seemed to have no appreciation that top aides were supposed to put their pledge to the Constitution — and, by extension, the rule of law — above all else.”  Trump also reportedly told Kelly that “Hitler did some good things” (in a separate interview with The Atlantic, Kelly also said that Trump remarked, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” He also conveyed that Trump did not want to be seen with U.S. soldiers who had undergone amputations, and that those who were injured, killed, or captured were “suckers” and “losers.” On this last point, Kelly observed that, “To me, I could never understand why he was that way — he may be the only American citizen that feels that way about those who gave their lives or served their country.”

Nothing in this interview is a complete revelation; various of Trump’s comments have previously been noted by Kelly and others. But we shouldn’t see the general’s words in isolation, but first in the context of Milley’s similar remarks about Trump’s fascist beliefs. When two high-ranking generals — one of them in the non-political position of JCS chairman during Trump’s first term and the other someone who actually served in a political role on Trump’s team — tell us that Trump is a fascist, and provide details that support the case for his bloody-minded, anti-American nature, this demands at least a few moments of reflection from every American. I think that we can trust that U.S. generals know more about fascism (and its most infamous incarnation, Nazism) than the average citizen, and would invoke it quite consciously and with a full grasp of its ominous weight. Unlike Trump, they know why the United States fought in World War II and who our enemies were. I think we can also trust that Milley and Kelly are both aware of the apolitical expectations of the military, particularly of the highest-ranking officers, and of the startling breach of tradition in which they’re engaging. 

There’s really no other way to put it: these remarks from Milley and Kelly are flashing red warning lights that the voting public ignores at its peril. They are saying exactly what you’d expect high-ranking members of the military to say if the United States was in imminent danger of a political catastrophe. In turn, any failure of the media to take this seriously, to present the generals’ comments as the ground-breaking warnings that they are, would be a terrible sign of its own, one needing remedy by journalists’ critiques, public pressure, and amplification of this news by the Democrats.

And let’s not get led astray by imprecise or obfuscatory language: when we hear of Donald Trump wanting troops to shoot Americans in the streets or to deal with his internal enemies, we are talking about a president who would in no way be defending the nation, rather would be murdering innocent Americans in cold blood, recruiting members of the military as accomplices in a scheme for which the words “evil” and “treasonous” barely convey the depths of his depravity.

So far, at least, the Harris campaign does appear to grasp the significance of Kelly’s comments. Today, in reference to Kelly’s remarks, Vice President Harris said that Trump “wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders, even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States. We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be, ‘What do the American people want?” Harris’s comments rightly point not just to the threat against Americans, but to the corruption of the U.S. military for which Trump aims.

Indeed, this latter point has been greatly under-examined in the coverage I’ve seen. Any orders by Trump that the military be turned on fellow Americans would require the military to break with its obligation to defend both the Constitution and the citizenry. Specifically, it would require both military leadership and rank-and-file to make themselves into accomplices to what should more accurately be described as murder, even mass murder, of civilians. Not only would this defile the military beyond redemption, it would obviously turn upside-down the basic role of the military — to defend the nation, not to destroy it. In some ways, it would represent Trump’s most obscene attempt to destroy the constitutional order — a turning of America’s defenses on those meant to be protected.

It’s a sign of our deep political crisis that Trump’s threats to unleash the military against broadly-defined internal enemies may be what it finally takes to decisively shift public sentiment against him. We can hope that a populace that claims to so greatly trust and admire the military will listen when high-ranking leaders speak out in warning, and when a president threatens to irrevocably destroy the military’s standing by turning it against the citizenry. While the silence or even active defense of Trump from GOP elected officials is to be expected, I have hope that ordinary citizens, including sizable numbers of previous GOP voters, will listen to what the generals are saying. Some may want to disbelieve that Trump would go through with his threats, but this would ignore the evidence that unleashing the military against civilians is a long-held obsession of Donald Trump, one that tracks perfectly with other indications that he sees the presidency as a position of unchecked power. Even in a nation with deep partisan divides, I have some measure of faith that most Americans understand that only psychos want to murder their fellow Americans for political power.

Barack Obama Shows Democrats How to Push Back on Trump's Mass Deportation Plans

As I wrote last time, the Democrats have been reluctant to directly challenge Donald Trump’s stated goal of deporting 20 million or more legal and illegal immigrants from the country, rooted in a political calculus that their party is perceived as weak on immigration and it’s best not to fight on weak ground. But as I wrote then, and am even more convinced of now, Trump’s vow to ethnically cleanse the nation of brown-skinned immigrants is inextricably tied up with his and the GOP’s goals of putting non-white American citizens in a subordinate place. The deportation plan is in essence a gateway to enacting a deeply white supremacist vision of American that uses the wedge issue of anti-immigrant sentiment to redefine the nature of American society: from a nation of immigrants to a nation of “blood and soil” sentiment, where the only real Americans are those whose families have been here for generations, and from a nation aiming towards multiracial democracy to one that is dedicated to the maintenance of morally indefensible white supremacy. Unchallenged, the extreme notion of deporting millions upon millions of people — an action that would inevitably tear apart families that include American citizens as well — itself validates Trump’s claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country; otherwise, why on earth would Trump be claiming that such extreme measures are needed?

So it caught my attention the other day when former president Barack Obama, campaigning in support of the Harris-Walz ticket, took aim at Trump’s threatened mass deportations. While it wasn’t an all-out attack, Obama showed at least one way forward for Democrats to engage. Crucially, he tied the deportation threats to Trump and Vance’s desire to deflect attention from their lack of viable plans on a host of issues, from health care to housing. Obama told the audience that when they’re challenged, they always fall back on the same answer — immigrants — and that “if you elect [Trump] he will just round up whoever he wants and ship them out and all your problems will be solved.” On the one hand, Obama’s remarks reinforce the importance of denying the GOP free rein to say whatever it wants about immigration, since immigration is indeed the party’s catch-all explanation and justification for a host of indefensible policy ideas (such as they are). On the other, they show that it’s indeed possible for Democrats to attack Trump’s anti-immigrant animus and deportation plans through common-sense language, as Obama went on to talk about fair immigration that helps build the country without demonizing undocumented immigrants. Instead, he framed the situation on the border as one requiring us to make sure that immigration across the border is “orderly” and “fair,” and segued into talking about how Donald Trump blocked passage of a law to do just that.

I’m not saying that Democrats should pivot to talking about immigration 24/7, particularly as Trump’s mental decline and fully-unveiled fascism seem more productive targets in the final weeks of this election. But because Trump’s war on immigrants is so tied up with his war on American democracy and equality, it seems like a lost opportunity to not engage more fully on just how cruel Trump’s plans are, and how they are meant to distract from a host of GOP failures and bad ideas in multiple realms. Obama showed that there’s a way to talk about immigration and deportation that can unravel the GOP’s lies; surely the Harris campaign can figure out some similarly productive approaches that doesn’t cede such enormous ground to Trump.

Where Is the Democratic Pushback on Trump's Insane Mass Deportation Plans?

A few weeks ago, I argued that Democrats need to figure out a way to engage Trump and the GOP on immigration not only because this is a central line of attack by the GOP that allows them to blame all the country’s ills on newcomers and makes the Democrats look weak, but because attacking “immigration” is actually a proxy for attacking the mere presence and status of non-white American citizens as well. In attacking non-white immigrants, the GOP is also implicitly asserting that the only “real” Americans are white Americans.

Adam Serwer has an incisive piece at The Atlantic that shines a light on Trump’s anti-immigrant smears and racist strategies; in particular, it provides compelling explications of Trump’s specific strategy and the Democratic response that have helped me look at the GOP’s actions with a fresh perspective. Serwer notes that the Trump campaign wants to make race as salient as possible to white people, but offers a nuanced view that goes beyond the idea that the GOP is just appealing to racist sentiment among white Americans.

Rather, he sees Trump and his allies as making two related but distinct appeals. The first is to those with more overtly white supremacist views, for whom invocations of dark-skinned foreigners invading the country are enraging and frightening, and thus motivating in terms of getting them to vote for the Republican ticket. The second, subtler approach is using their attacks on immigrants to spur counter-attacks about Trump’s racism, which “will activate a sense of white solidarity”; white Americans would be provoked to conceive of themselves as constituting a distinct societal group whose interests are being challenged or undermined by undeserving non-whites. In the terms of writer Ashley Jarden, whom Serwer cites, the first can be characterized as appeals to racism, the second to white identity.

I think this one-two racist/white identity-provoking punch of Trump’s anti-immigrant incitement helps explain, though not fully justify, the Democrats’ reluctance and perceived difficulties in forcefully pushing back against Trump’s war on immigrants. As Serwer points out, beyond immigration, the Harris campaign has been fairly muted in its talk of racial discrimination and other race-related issues. It does appear that there is trepidation among Harris and Democratic strategists about condemning Trump’s overtly racist attacks in a way that might galvanize white Americans into feeling that their interests as white people are being attacked. Some white people might think to themselves, “Why is Harris spending so much time defending immigrants instead of normal (white) Americans’ interests?” or “Why does Harris care about people who are coming here to take normal (white) Americans’ jobs?” To the degree that this white identity backlash is a real possibility, the Democrats’ fears are somewhat justified, at least in defensive electoral terms.

But as Jarden tells Serwer regarding Trump’s racist appeals, “I think there’s a segment of the white population who finds this at least distasteful, if not appalling.” In other words, the Trump campaign’s goal of activating overtly racist voters while also activating white identity impulses is hardly an exact science, and carries with it the risk (from Trump’s point of view) of creating a backlash among whites who aren’t overtly racist or don’t want to view themselves as such. This means that when Democrats shy away from calling out Trump’s racism, they essentially help ensure that Trump pays an insufficient price among those white voters upset by such appeals. This Democratic reluctance is particularly frustrating, and I would argue increasingly difficult to credit, when Trump’s racist appeals have become so extreme and violent that they should rightly provoke revulsion in all decent Americans. Here, it’s worth quoting Ron Brownstein, who has also been digging deeply into Trump’s anti-immigrant language and the Democrats’ response, regarding the sheer depravity into which Trump has descended:

More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”

A potential self-sabotaging consequence of the Democrats’ timidity is that those who might be appalled by Trump don’t find their views validated by America’s supposed pro-equality party, and so might not conclude that their feelings of revulsion are worth acting on when the Democrats don’t seem to share their outrage.

A parallel risk is that a lack of Democratic engagement regarding Trump’s racism — whether directed against immigrants or otherwise — may also allow Trump to evade electoral blowback from non-white citizens as well. Brownstein has dug into this possibility in recent essays, noting that Trump’s anti-immigrant mass deportation plans could wreak havoc with non-white citizens (he points out that a quarter of Latino households include non-citizens, raising the prospect of such mixed communities being torn apart under a second Trump administration). He has also explored how Trump’s supposed tough-on-crime policies, such as encouraging police departments to use discredited stop-and-frisk tactics, would disproportionately affect young, male African-Americans and Latinos. Brownstein talks about how “Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans.” Brownstein ties the reluctance of Harris in particular to challenge Trump on his outrageous mass deportation plans to her and other Democrats’ feeling that Democrats are on weak ground on immigration, writing, “Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue.”

What’s so frustrating to me, in terms of the Harris campaign’s appeal to both white and Latino voters, is that Trump’s mass deportation plans may be the ultimate example of Trump going too far in a grotesquely racist manner. For instance, Brownstein points to polls that show sharply diminished support for mass deportation once the questions include the idea of family separation and the removal of long-term residents. Having presented immigrants as a pack of disease-bearing killers bent on voting illegally for Democrats, Trump’s own logic leads to the need to expel such people via mass deportation. Under these terms, it seems pretty important that most Americans might well be opposed to the inhumanity and disruption of what he presents as the inevitable solution and end point of his hate-mongering. Conversely, though, if left unchallenged, Trump’s radical “solution” might convince Americans that he must be telling the truth about the crimes and derangement of immigrants — otherwise, why would he be proposing such a staggering remedy?

We also need to ever bear in mind the larger context of Trump’s racist attacks on immigrants: his false assertion that on a range of issues, from high housing costs to health care shortcomings, immigrants are at the root of the problem. Americans are not just randomly concerned about immigration, or even concerned based on the material impact on their lives — rather, immigration has become a prime issue because Trump and the GOP have now spent years lying about how illegal immigrants are a fundamental cause of all our challenges, both economically and culturally (the latter including the whole sordid grab-bag of great replacement theory and fears of white Americans losing their pride of place in American society). Such lies in the first place defy the reality of immigrants’ positive contributions to American society, grossly overstate the harms they do, and, perhaps most critically, draw attention away from the actual reasons for the real challenges Americans face — reasons that all too often have far more to do with the GOP’s tooth-and-nail opposition to workers’ rights, access to health care, the barest limitations on the power of ultra-wealthy individuals and imperious corporations, and continuous race-baiting that would have white Americans see non-whites as predatory enemies rather than as equal partners in a great, mutually-beneficial national project.  

That is, the Democrats are reluctant to engage on an issue the Republicans are pushing where the GOP arguments are based on a combination of demonstrably untrue assertions about material reality, and deranged notions of national identity rooted in the primacy of white supremacy. To a startling degree, the Republicans have created a fantasia of threat that bears little relationship to material reality, even as it bears quite a deep relationship to psychological fears and hatreds. And apparently, on any issue that Democrats see as strong turf, like health care, the GOP is ready to assert that illegal immigration is the real culprit for any problems. 

Should the former president’s campaign promises around mass deportation be enacted, he and the GOP would fundamentally change the nature of the modern United States by engaging in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that would cripple the economy, harm and very likely kill some of those targeted, inevitably violate the rights of significant numbers of American citizens caught up in a hysterical dragnet, and open the door to even greater scapegoating and cruelties once the initial deportations inevitably failed to make America great again. After all, Trump also talks about the need to discipline the “enemy within,” clearly already thinking beyond mass deportations to the necessity of persecuting a political opposition that seems to include everyone who doesn’t sycophantically support him. The Democrats need to grasp that Trump’s deportation plans would likely be a gateway to analogous horrors to be visited on the internal enemies he sees all around him. It seems increasingly untenable for the Harris campaign to refrain from describing and condemning a bloodthirsty plan to punish millions of undocumented Americans for the crimes of helping build the economy, raise their families, and seek a better life. Dehumanizing some of us is a prelude to dehumanizing many more of us.