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.

Has Trump's Increasing Bloodlust Finally Pushed the Harris Campaign Into Righteous Outrage?

Donald Trump has long ranted about the need to target for punishment those he labels as domestic enemies, whether through jail or violence, but such rhetoric has been escalating as November 5 draws nearer. More than almost anything else coming from the GOP ticket, such threats are completely disqualifying, rendering Trump not simply unfit for office but an active menace to the safety and security of the American people. You cannot claim to be a candidate for office in a democracy if one of your strategies is to physically threaten your political opponents; even more so when such threats are intended to scare Americans from casting votes against you, as Trump’s efforts to project an aura of physical menace are surely intended.  

In the past few days, this language has at long last spurred the Harris campaign to begin drawing attention to it in a more concerted way. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris went so far as to play a video reel of various times Trump has referred to “enemies from within,” spoken of the need for extreme police violence to end crime, and urged that the military be sent against unspecified “radical left lunatics.” From there, Harris pressed the attack, asserting that Trump considers anyone who does not support him to be “an enemy of our country,” and suggesting that journalists, honest election officials, and judges who follow the law could be targeted by the military under a Trump presidency. She also (rightly) characterized Trump as “increasingly unstable and unhinged.”

In parallel remarks at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, VP candidate Tim Walz cited Trump’s comments as well, but arguably went a step further in his commentary. After emphasizing that Trump’s threats are aimed at anyone who doesn’t support him, he told the audience that Trump is “talking about you” when he says that he will send the military against “the enemy within.” Walz noted that Trumps words made Walz “sick to my stomach,” and characterized them as “un-American.” And in a remarkable line, he said that, “We’ll let the lawyers decide if what he said was treason, but what I know is it’s a call for violence.” Walz also noted retired General Mark Milley’s reported statement that Trump is a fascist, and told the audience that they shouldn’t be afraid to say this.

I’ve quoted both Harris and Walz somewhat at length because I believe that the way they’re talking about Trump is exactly what is needed, and not a moment too soon. Both made the essential point: Donald Trump’s threats of violence are a threat against every American who doesn’t support him. In Trump’s deranged worldview, you are either his supporter or his enemy. And though both the former president and VP candidate J.D. Vance have been escalating their incitement of violence against immigrants in the last few months, Trump’s recent run of comments makes it clear that immigrants are just the start of the retribution he wants to visit upon the country. It’s essential that the Democratic ticket press this basic point home: the American majority that opposes Trump will be in MAGA’s crosshairs should Trump regain power, in unpredictable but dire ways given Trump’s increasing lunacy and stated bloodlust.

If you watch Walz’s comments in particular, you see a couple specific ideas that Democrats urgently need to keep conveying. First, Walz speaks with a palpable sense of anger at Trump’s threats. He’s righteously pissed off. More than this — he’s basically encouraging his listeners to get pissed off, too. I’ve long encouraged Democratic politicians not to shy away from arousing anger among voters when this emotion is appropriate and productive. Such is the case here. Anger is the right response when a would-be dictator threatens to jail or harm you and your loved ones if you don’t vote for him. And anger is doubly appropriate when the would-be dictator prefers that you feel fear and helplessness in response to his threats. Anger can cut through the psychological games that Trump is trying to play, and help us collectively to arrive at a point of resolve, defiance, and indomitability. This is the poise we need in order to win this election and to face down the nearly-inevitable insurrection that Trump will mount to try to overturn the election results.

Related to this is Walz’s willingness to highlight General Milley’s “fascist” comment and to encourage people to speak the truth about Trump. Weeks out from November 5, we are at a point where we can’t have the Democrats beating around the bush as to the stakes of the election or the nature of the threat we face. Whether or not you think it’s effective to use the “fascist” terminology, Democrats need to convey Trump’s determinedly fascistic tactics and goals: his embrace of violence as a political tactic, his demonization of minorities as threats and accompanying vows to purify the nation, his establishment of a cult of personality that brooks no dissent. While darker periods of American history have seen all of these elements, it is right and necessary for Democrats to present these aspects of Trumpism as fundamentally alien and outrageous to commonly-held ideas of American freedom, democracy, and society.

In this vein, it is also notable that Walz suggested that Trump’s threatened action may constitute “treason.” Democrats have been deeply cautious in using this word to describe Trump’s actions, likely in part because the GOP has so abused and overused this term over the last few decades to disparage Democrats. But if threatening to unleash the American military against political opponents is not treason, then it is really hard to say that anything is. It is a sign of the darkness of our times that Democrats are in need of dusting off this term, but we cannot fully describe our political reality unless we use the right words to do so.

You can see the effectiveness of Harris and Walz’s truth-telling in the response of other GOP politicians who basically can’t figure out how to defend Trump’s comments. On CNN, Jake Tapper’s interview of Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin was particularly telling — when pressed on Trump’s violent threats against Americans, Youngkin denied that Trump had said such things even though Tapper had literally played him Trump’s words. This gets to a broader point that we simply can’t overstate: Trump has said things that are simply indefensible. He has been honing this message for months if not years, and there is ample evidence that he sees non-supporters as enemies to be dealt with as he sees fit.

Democrats need to take these threats seriously because they are deeply serious threats. And the need for the Harris campaign to foreground them is all the more important as major media institutions like the New York Times remain mired in deeply misguided and misleading coverage that downplays the sheer horror of Trump’s clearly articulated intentions and violent state of mind. They must do all they can to force the story of Trump’s violent plans for governance into the forefront of campaign coverage. For Americans to take this as seriously as they must, these recent comments by Walz and Harris can’t be one-offs, but the opening salvos of a continuing message that Donald Trump is a personal threat to the lives of individual Americans.

For all the energy Trump and his running mate have put into demonizing immigrants in recent months — for instance, by fomenting violence against Haitian immigrants in Ohio through grotesque lies — Trump’s threats against American citizens demonstrate that the promised round-up of immigrants would be a mere appetizer to the wholesale intimidation and disciplining of an American majority that will forever hold him in contempt. He cannot walk back the long trail of escalating threats he has left behind; the Democrats should flagellate him for this every day through November 5.

Slick Vance Stumbles With January 6 Complicity

As seemingly slick as J.D. Vance can be on camera, questions about January 6 are his kryptonite. We saw this in the vice presidential debate, and now we’ve seen it in an interview with the New York Times’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro: he simply refuses to admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, which in turn inexorably makes him an apologist for insurrection. Hemmed in by his need to stay in the good graces of Donald Trump, and by his own apparent decision to embrace the notion that the attempt to overthrow the government was indeed a good and righteous act, he ends up exposing his untenable position. He supports the former president’s attempt to subvert the election and our democracy, and, crucially, had he been vice president instead of Pence, he would have used his ceremonial role in the certification of electoral votes to deny Joe Biden the presidency. Should he become vice president in the future, Vance’s loyalty would not be not to American democracy but to a dangerous authoritarian.

For a variety of reasons — cowardice, bad judgment, a misreading of polling — the Democrats have not pressed Trump’s attempt to end American democracy after the 2020 election with anything near the ferocity and consistency his unforgivable actions require. But as we’ve now seen, J.D. Vance can’t help but draw attention to the fundamental anti-American lawlessness of Trump and this latest GOP presidential ticket. Democrats should use this obvious opening to ensure Trump’s coup attempt is part of the national conversation in the closing weeks of this election.

What We Talk About When We Talk About January 6

A new filing by special counsel Jack Smith in the federal election interference case against Donald Trump is a timely reminder that the former president’s attempted coup should be a deciding factor for voters this November. The filing is part of Smith’s effort to respond to the outlandish Supreme Court ruling granting Trump immunity for official acts as president, a decision that ignored the plain language of the Constitution by effectively placing the presidency above the law. While the filing contains no revelatory details, it nonetheless includes startling new information about Trump’s degenerate efforts to overturn the election (among other things, he allegedly remarked “So what?” when told of security measures needed to protect Vice President Pence from insurrectionists) that should remind all who are willing to listen that Trump engaged in utterly disqualifying behavior. This includes not just his incitement of a mob to storm the Capitol in order to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election, but literally months of prior illegal activities, public lies, and propaganda meant to overthrow the election results.

Though hundreds of participants in Trump’s efforts have been convicted of their crimes, including rioters at the Capitol and those who engaged in fraudulent state elector schemes, Trump’s evasion of accountability has metastasized from grotesque injustice to a direct and imminent threat to the nation, as he is now in a close race with Vice President Kamala Harris, in which his victory would represent the de facto success of his 2024 coup attempt. With his threats of violence should he lose, his stated interest in suspending the constitution, his vows to jail his political enemies, and his desire to be dictator “for a day,” Donald Trump appears intent on ruling in the same manner that his seizure of power in 2021 would have heralded — through violence and lawlessness, all in service to the aggrandizement of his person power and wealth. 

The fact that millions of Americans don’t see Trump’s coup attempt as disqualifying is terrifying, even more so when they appear to constitute quite possibly enough votes to put him in office again. But to me, this signals more than ever the overriding importance of working to remind the public about Trump’s unforgivable crimes of attempting to overthrow the election and install himself as America’s first authoritarian chief executive. As I’ve argued before, January 6 is a skeleton key for delegitimizing not only Trump, but also a Republican Party that has retroactively validated his coup attempt by continuing to rally behind him. Through lies and threats, the GOP has attempted to re-write history that we all witnessed. Under Trump’s guidance, the party has created a toxic myth of a stolen election, based on false claims that millions of — you guessed it — illegal immigrants recruited by the Democrats somehow cast ballots that placed not just Joe Biden but unspecified numbers of other Democrats into office. Meanwhile, Trump has vowed to pardon January 6 insurrectionists who have been justly convicted for their crimes. The former president understands that the story of January 6 must be contested, and that doing so is central to his quest for power; for if an undeniably criminal event like the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government can be transformed into a heroic and patriotic undertaking, then it follows that there is no limit to the depravities he and his supporters could commit in the name of defending the nation. 

Crucially, as Talking Point Memo’s David Kurtz reminds us in a recent piece, our capacity to tell the truth about Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election is ultimately not subject to the Supreme Court’s corrupt intervention into his case or even to the lack of a conviction. Rather, in the face of those obstacles, the gathering of evidence and the establishment of a historical record are key; as he puts it, “The real value of the fact-based narrative presented by Smith is the story it gives all of us to remember and repeat.” But Kurtz hits on something beyond this that I think has been largely missed by Democrats and others who should know better as they talk about January 6, its lead-up, and its aftermath:

There remains great civic value in repeating that story for ourselves and for future generations so that it becomes woven into our collective memory like the Boston Tea Party or the firing on Fort Sumter or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Jan. 6 debacle is a part of the nation’s founding story, even though it comes nearly 250 years later, because the same principles that animated its creation were under sustained attack, the same threats that the constitutional system was specifically designed to protect against were on full display, and the reactionary forces of chaos and destruction that always linger just over the horizon advanced to within minutes and feet of prevailing over democracy and the rule of law.

In the face of the GOP’s steady and malevolent myth-making about January 6, I think Kurtz gets at some vital points that the public discourse has been largely missing, at least by those talking in good faith about Trump’s coup attempt: the need for the mainstream to tell not a myth, but a true and coherent story about the insurrection that communicates why it was so disqualifying for Trump; why it marked an existential crossroads for the country; and why it’s important to create a broad consensus about the facts of that day. In particular, I like Kurtz’s idea of framing what happened on January 6 as a reminder of why we have a democracy to begin with: to defend ourselves against “the reactionary forces of chaos and destruction.” One of the challenges in processing January 6 in particular is that the day is haunted by a specter of failure and dissolution of our form of government: if the Capitol could be stormed once, why couldn’t it happen again? What if January 6 was just a preview of worse to come? I think Kurtz points a way forward past this dark question, in which we acknowledge that democracy will always be beset by enemies, by those who stand to lose when equality and freedom for all increasingly become the law of the land, or by those like Trump who crave dominance due to some darkness of the soul. If near-death experiences are inevitable for our democracy, then we should do what we can to ensure that those dark passages are times of renewal and re-dedication to first principles.

Particularly as the November election approaches, the urgency of properly communicating the depth of the offenses against the United States committed by Donald Trump and his accomplices has only grown. In the spirit of Kurtz’s observations, I wanted to set out a few ideas for ensuring that public discussions of Trump’s 2020-21 coup attempt encompass the whole of what was inflicted on the country.

First, I’ve noticed that there’s been an obscuring tendency in the language around January 6 to say things like “Trump attempted to reject the election results” or “Trump attempted to overthrow the election.” It’s not that saying that he tried to overturn the election is false — god knows I’ve used this phrasing countless times — but that it elides the full import of what Trump and his allies tried to do. This is because overturning the results of a presidential election in favor of the loser cannot be separated from overturning American democracy and the rule of law itself; they are one and the same. If Donald Trump had somehow succeeded in getting fake elector slates made official in crucial swing states, and had threatened Congress into approving those, his accession to the presidency would have been democratic in form only. There literally would not have been a democracy any longer if the president was not elected democratically. Such an outcome would have been catastrophic any way you cut it, requiring either mass assent to the degradation of being ruled by an illegitimate autocrat, or the mass mobilization of society and politics to eject Trump from office.

In talking about January 6, then, we need to emphasize the idea that Trump was trying to overthrow American democracy. He was not the mayor of a small town in Montana stuffing the ballot box and illegally gaining power; he would have been a president in charge of executing the law of the land and of running the federal government, creating anti-democratic repercussions in every state and city through his basic illegitimacy and the illegitimacy of any acts he undertook. To this end, words and phrases like “attempted coup” and “insurrection” far more properly convey the gravity of what Trump did than “rejected the election results.”

In turn, when we talk about the attack on democracy embodied in Trump’s actions culminating in January 6, we need to be sure to ground the idea of democracy not only in profound yet abstract ideals, but in the lived realities of everyone’s lives. To me, this disjunction can be found in the insufficient “Trump tried to overthrow the election” language that I’ve just discussed. To take the most cynical or dismissive possible response, we can imagine a citizen wondering how it might actually hurt them personally if a presidential election went to the loser. For a person who voted for the true winner, but who already doubted government’s responsiveness to ordinary Americans, you could see them viewing this as an unjust outcome, yet one without real impact on their ability to live their daily life. Yet this perspective — cynical, superficially realistic — ignores the deeply corrupting and dangerous consequences of the most powerful office in the land being occupied by someone who lacks a sense of accountability to voters or loyalty to the rule of law. In such a case, literally any crime and horror against individual citizens becomes possible, because the chief executive ultimately feels as if he can get away with anything. And people who think this way are a danger to anyone who not only gets in their way, but in their allies’ way — a trickle-down effect in which lackies commit crimes and cruelties on behalf of an unaccountable president would seem to be inevitable. Just as we shouldn’t talk about democracy and the rule of law in merely abstract terms, neither should we talk about authoritarianism in the same manner. 

Although acts of violence were not the only elements of Trump’s coup attempt (more on this below), the assault on the Capitol, including attacks against police officers, threats against lawmakers, and property destruction, rightly shocked the public and in many ways has come to represent the gravity of Trump’s offenses. To a great extent, I think people’s instincts are right — violent acts to hold on to power are uniquely grotesque and offensive. But in talking about the events around January 6, we should take care to talk a bit more explicitly about why, exactly, violence has no place in American democracy. In speeches, President Biden has remarked that political violence is “never, never, never acceptable,” but for all his insistence, I haven’t really heard him or other leading Democrats delve into what specifically makes political violence unacceptable. For instance, we could go a step further and say that political violence is in fact the negation of democracy, the imposition by force of decisions whose legitimacy should rest on popular consent, voting, adherence to the law, and a legitimate political framework. Violence is the substitution of the law of the jungle for the law, a might-makes-right attitude that says that the side with the biggest weapons and willingness to use them should win the day. It’s also crucial to talk about how political violence speaks to the fundamental weakness of its perpetrators, as it signals the lack of popular support for their ends. And without question, we should reinforce a public consensus that acts of political violence delegitimize politicians who engage in or incite them, so that the use of violence to “win” an election renders such an electoral victory fraudulent, null, and void. 

Finally, there is an understandable but ultimately self-defeating impulse by some to limit the offenses around the attempted coup to Donald Trump and those who attacked the Capitol — to shape the history around the machinations of a rogue president and those he incited to physical violence. However, Trump’s schemes involved accomplices throughout his administration and the Republican Party as a whole, including many elected officials, who sought by illegal and pseudo-legal means to gain him the presidency. And so, to talk truly about January 6, we must be sure to assign culpability not just to Trump but to his GOP allies as well, while making efforts to emphasize the months of scheming that preceded the publicly visible events of January 6 itself. For example, in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, a majority of House members voted to reject the election results — a stunning vote in favor of lawlessness. And in the months and years since Trump’s failed coup, we have unfortunately seen much of the GOP come to embrace the notion that the presidency was stolen from Trump. With the party apparatus and elected leaders now more or less unanimously supporting his 2024 presidential bid, the GOP has retroactively embraced or forgiven his crimes against the United States. For the sake of a truthful discussion that properly defends American democracy, we must always talk frankly about the Republican Party’s embrace of failed coup leader Donald Trump.

I understand that including an indictment of the GOP and not just the uniquely odious Donald Trump, who is so closely tied in many people’s minds to the signature violence of that day, might be seen as at cross-purposes with maintaining a public consensus as to the historical meaning of January 6. However, the country is not well-served by imagining that the lesson of the coup attempt is that a single bad actor threatened the country. The true lesson is that the United States faced a coup by a mass reactionary movement as much as by a single malevolent man, however important his dark charisma and shamelessness were to reaching that precipice. Going forward, we will not be able to maintain anything close to a healthy democracy if major elements of the GOP continue to claim that no crimes against democracy were committed that day. We must tell a true story, and the GOP must either repent of its prior errors by admitting its complicity and assenting to reality, or be sent to electoral oblivion over the coming years for its abandonment of democracy in favor of political violence and authoritarian power grabs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Paul Waldman recently described, the Republicans are using immigration as a multi-purpose battering ram on pretty much any issue you can think of: from housing and health care to crime and the economy, the proposed solutions revolve around some variant of abusing, removing, or denigrating immigrants. And the fact that talking about immigration allows them a framework to be as racist as they want to be means that the GOP sees it as the perfect issue, a way to rile up a big chunk of the population with fear and anger at fears of “invasion,” while also tapping into the latent or overt racism of millions. As Waldman points out, economic issues south of the border and climate change guarantee that large numbers of northbound migrants will continue to give this issue a real-world underpinning. In other words, the “immigration” issue is not going away, and the Democrats need to do much better than try to blunt it or co-opt tough-on-the-border policies. Trump and the GOP are telling a deeply racist story about immigrants being criminal aliens out to slit our throats; in their broadly racist attacks, they’re also telling non-white citizens that they’re not welcome here. Democrats need to tell a countervailing story about national identity and immigration that exposes the Republican story for the sick, anti-democratic, white supremacist fiction that it is.

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

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

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

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

What appears to be MAGA’s obsessive focus on immigration reveals in turn an obsession with white supremacism, which is to be defended even if the means of doing so will surely sap the country’s collective power, wealth, and future prospects. For all the talk of immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, it is in fact Trump and his enablers who are ready to engage in a bloodletting of the nation, metaphorically and all too plausibly for real, that aims to racially purify the country no matter the damage. Democrats need to find a way to turn the “immigration debate” into an open discussion about American identity and destiny, one that provides a vision of hope and unity while exposing the Republicans’ unending cultivation of division, racist hatred, and national weakness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debate Prep

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

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

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

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

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

Aliens in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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