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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is President Biden Getting High on His Own Malarkey Supply?

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

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

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

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

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

Biden Campaign Crisis Continues to Distract Media and Public From Menace of Trump, Supreme Court Radicalism

In the past couple days, and over the last day in particular, we’ve seen an intensification of speculation and coverage over whether President Joe Biden should step down as the Democrats’ presidential candidate. Of particular note was reporting from the New York Times, based on those who have interacted with Biden in recent months, that he has previously displayed episodes of mental disorientation similar to what we all saw on the debate stage last week. Given the seriousness of such observations, and the possibility that some of the anonymous interviewees have an axe to grind, I am taking them somewhat cautiously. However, they are given additional credence by recent episodes of confusion captured on video and described by the Times, such as the president’s difficulty recalling the name of his Homeland Security secretary at a recent event, and a couple different instances of Biden appearing confused at the G-7 meeting in mid-June. Reports that he is only reliably energetic between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. seem equally problematic, if to my mind deeply needing further corroboration.

I’m sympathetic with people who caution that the Times has long had demonstrable bias against Biden, including over questions about his age, but I don’t think this automatically leads to the conclusion that paper, or other outlets, are misreporting here. Questions as to Biden’s capacity were rightly raised by his disastrous debate performance, and are matters of great public interest. To be blunt, his issues on the debate stage were the sort of problems involving memory and cognitive abilities that many of us associate with aging. I think Zachary Carter puts it just right when he writes that, “This was not so much a bad debate as a devastating revelation.” This was not anything like President Barack Obama’s poor first debate showing against Mitt Romney in 2012, in which the president’s problems implicated not his memory or ability to think on his feet, but rather an appearance of disinterest in being there, along with a lackluster advocacy for his own reelection. And indeed, if anyone had had those doubts, they would have been put to rest by his next debate against Romney.

I wrote last time that Joe Biden needs to show the public he has a strategy for allaying their concerns. Yet, in the days since the debate, he has not adopted the obvious rebuttal strategy of putting himself out in public, in unscripted situations, in order to prove that the debate was a one-off. At a minimum, this shows a lack of sharp strategic thinking regarding his present peril; at worst, it provides more (indirect) evidence that he cannot be relied on to make less structured public appearances. Some 67% of Americans in a recent poll said they thought Biden is too old to be president; moreover, “53% of voters say they are more concerned about Biden’s age and physical and mental health, while 42% say they are more concerned about Trump’s criminal charges and threats to democracy.” This latter statistic speaks to the degree to which concerns about Biden based on his age are crowding out concerns about the true threat to America — Donald Trump and the GOP’s plans to remake the U.S. into an autocracy or dictatorship, which have now been supercharged by the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling that the president is above the law, free to commit crimes without fear of prosecution.

The question I keep asking myself is a version of the one I’ve seen others expressing — how likely is it that Joe Biden will be able to dispel concerns over his age in the coming days and weeks so that he gains enough trust and space to pursue the necessary case against GOP authoritarianism, versus the likelihood that more information will come out concerning episodes of debility, or that we will witness in real time such episodes ourselves? To be blunt: I don’t see how Biden can win, even against a monster such as Trump, if the public becomes ever more concerned about his ability to do his job, particularly as such concerns will inexorably compete with coverage of Trump’s (even greater) unfitness for office. At some point, beyond all the talk of the dangers and possible chaos of the Democrats replacing Biden with another candidate, I think you need to let some common sense intrude into the discussion: Americans are rightly confused, angry, and disheartened by a choice between a dictator and a man who increasingly looks unable to do his job, including performance of the role of commander in chief. This is most definitely not a crisis that’s been created by malevolent media or back-stabbing allies (though of course all exist and play some part). Rather, people are reacting to reality, which, like it or not, encompasses how Joe Biden appears on TV during a debate as well as his stated prior interest in having such a debate and his campaign’s insistence that his appearance, contrasted with Trump’s predictably odious performance, would help shift the momentum of the race in Biden’s favor. I think Americans are probably puzzled as to why Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t take Biden’s place as the presidential candidate, as would happen if Biden died or were otherwise incapacitated in the course of his presidency (short answer: she can). 

The issue of Biden’s continued candidacy has obvious implications for the Democratic Party’s broader fortunes, but I think Democrats really need to look beyond the possible impact on the party’s ability to hold the House and Senate if they’re saddled with a presidential candidate who reaches a point of clear unelectability. The basic argument in Biden’s defense that people should disregard the evidence of their eyes and ears because people with a vested interest in protecting Biden’s interest (advisers, etc.) tell them he’s great behind closed doors swerves too close to comfort to the realm of Trumpian untruths (every rally is the biggest ever, the U.S. had the best economy ever when he was president, etc.). For me, the Democrats’ role as the sole remaining major party dedicated to protecting American democracy is deeply entwined with a fundamental commitment to the truth over lies and propaganda. Yes, politics — even democratic politics — is always about power, and there will be grey zones and compromises even in the most utopian of political systems. But the risks involved in telling the public that Biden is of sound mind and body when he is in fact not are far greater than wrecking his candidacy — they also threaten the public’s trust in the Democratic Party more generally to be relied on to tell the truth (a party which, in the most cynical telling, could be accused of propping up an octogenarian invalid as its best response to the country’s maximal point of peril since World War II or possibly even the eve of the Civil War). If they find out that Democrats lied to them about Biden’s health, would Americans be less likely to believe Democrats when they tell them that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country? And would the damage be compounded by the Democrats’ willingness to put forward a candidate who doesn’t actually seem fit enough to defend democracy, calling into question their claims that democracy is actually under threat?  I think the answer to these questions is a resounding “Yes.” As others have said, if we’re in a crisis, Democrats need to actually act like it. 

Likewise, Democrats should not underestimate the democratic legitimacy peril that Biden could put them in (and potentially already has, at least to some degree). Yes, Joe Biden won the Democratic primaries; yet against this you have consistent polls showing a strong majority of Americans saying that Biden is too old for the presidency, coupled with the uncomfortable fact that many Democrats voted for him without any great enthusiasm, and, more importantly, based on the understanding that he and his team were telling the truth about his abilities. Yes, we all knew that Biden was older and slower than four years ago — but I’d bet that very few people thought they were voting for someone who would prove unable to defend himself or democracy up on that stage last week. At some point — and some would say we have already reached it — the continued Democratic elite’s support of Biden against popular opinion begins to look not very democratic at all.

The state of play as I write this, around 5:00 on July 3, shows Biden and his campaign pushing back against reports today that he has told some confidants that he comprehends the gravity of his situation, and that, in the words of the New York Times, “understands that he may not be able to salvage his candidacy if he cannot convince voters that he is up to the job after a disastrous debate performance last week.” In response, the Biden campaign has stated that, “Reports suggesting they or the campaign are considering alternative scenarios are patently false.” Moreover, as the Times also reports, “In an emailed fund-raising message on Wednesday, President Biden reiterated to supporters that he’s staying in the race. ‘I’m running. I’m the Democratic Party’s nominee. No one is pushing me out.’” We’ll soon see if these statements are simply cover fire to buy the president time as he ponders his future, or the opening salvos of a campaign by the president to save his. . . campaign.

Post-Debate Biden Campaign Crisis Collides With Illegitimate Right-Wing Supreme Court Crisis

A few days on, I remain convinced that President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week has led to a crisis of his campaign, and by extension, of American democracy. The election of Donald Trump would, by both Trump’s own stated intention and past example, result in an unprecedented assault on the rule of law, basic freedoms, public safety, and national security. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity today guaranties that no guardrails remain to protect the country against his most outlandish plans for a second term. And beyond the disasters that Trump himself would unleash, his election would open the floodgates to all manner of reactionary mayhem by his right-wing allies in the GOP. There can be no question that just over four months from the election, Biden’s debate failures made Trump’s return to power more likely. The Biden campaign and Democrats should be spending every day reminding Americans of the danger of Trump and the authoritarian GOP, and of a positive alternative vision for the country; instead, we are bogged down with rightly worrying about Biden’s capacity to serve a second term. Such worries are a rational response to what we all saw last week. Saying that everyone has bad days does not cut it; a president doesn’t have the luxury to have some off days during which he can’t complete a sentence, express a thought, or adequately confront a dangerous adversary.

Biden’s performance was so upsetting for so many of us because it not only confirmed some of the severest doubts about his health and mental capabilities, it also raised the possibility of more disasters to come during the remainder of the campaign. Even if Biden manages to impress and reassure in upcoming appearances, his debate performance has planted a ticking time bomb of anger, disarray, and hopelessness in the Democratic base and larger public that’s primed to go off should there be a future display of similar ineptitude. A couple months of high-octane Joementum, chock full of town hall meetings, feats of age-appropriate derring-do, and spontaneous eloquence, could be blown to kingdom come by a single repeat of Debate Debacle 2024.

It’s not sufficient for his defenders to say that Biden simply had a bad night, or that a diminished Biden would make a better president than a hyperactive Trump, even if we accept that both are true. The Biden that we saw last week did not appear to be qualified to be president, full stop. Biden owes it to Americans to reassure them as to his ability to serve another four years. You cannot point to his record as proof, because the shortcomings in question have to do with his age and diminished abilities going forward. For his defenders, and for leaders in the Democratic Party, to essentially argue that it would be better to have an incompetent president than Trump is an insult to voters, and a recipe not just for disaster in November, but for public trust in the Democratic Party out into the future. I think that Ezra Klein is on to something when he writes, in response to the debate and its fallout:

[R]ather than act as a check on Biden’s decisions and ambitions, the party has become an enabler of them. An enforcer of them. It is giving the American people an option they do not want and then threatening them with the end of democracy if they do not take it. Democrats like to say that democracy is on the ballot. But it isn’t. Biden is on the ballot. There are plenty of voters who might want to vote for democracy but do not want to vote for Biden.

While I disagree with Klein’s assertion that democracy isn’t on the ballot — though he is literally correct, this election is most certainly symbolically a referendum on whether the U.S. remains a democracy or slides into authoritarian, one-party rule — it is in fact not a tenable position for Democratic Party leaders to dismiss widespread, good-faith concerns that Joe Biden is not fit for another term. As Klein also rightly points out, the Democrats would be fully capable of replacing Biden if a specific health crisis forced him off the ballot. Does it really serve America’s pro-democracy party to ignore concerns that a president might not be able to do his job?

At least in political commentary, how one answers the question of whether Biden should make way for another candidate is largely tracking with individual views of how relatively destructive it would be for the Democrats to choose another candidate. I haven’t see any advocates of resignation say that this would be risk-free, though some, like Klein, argue that a contested convention could end up exciting the public and charging up a renewed Democratic campaign to stop Trump. On the other hand are those who warn of the dangers of such an unprecedented maneuver, pointing to the intraparty conflicts it could unleash, with frequent emphasis on the destabilizing effect if Vice President Kamala Harris were passed over or defeated as the substitute candidate. Some also note the lack of vetting the candidate would receive in comparison to Biden, laying the groundwork for savage Republican attacks on undisclosed or untested weaknesses. I would say that on balance, more of the people whose political instincts I trust the most are currently arguing that a Biden withdrawal carries too high a risk of chaos.

Personally, I remain in the camp of giving Biden another chance, along the lines I described before, at least in this interim period as we wait for polling to capture the extent of the hit Biden’s chances have taken due to his debate performance. I wrote that Biden must lay out a clear, convincing plan to demonstrate he is fit for another term. In a weekend column, E.J. Dionne gets more specific about what such a plan might look like:

He needs to do a series of televised interviews, including many in less than friendly settings. He’ll have to step up his campaign appearances, offering more speeches along the lines of his energetic performance in North Carolina on Friday.

He should make a major commitment to doing all he can to strengthen the campaigns of Democratic House and Senate candidates, the most vulnerable of whom have more reason than anyone to worry about the electoral impact of a weakened Biden. He needs to use last week’s demonstration of the Supreme Court’s radical right-wing activism to underscore the long-term impact of the choices voters will be making this November. If Democrats lose both the Senate and the White House, the damage to the judiciary over a generation will be catastrophic.

Dionne is on the right track here, which as I see it would have two major elements —providing reassurance that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job through public appearances, while simultaneously emphasizing that he understands that the stakes of this race are much bigger than him. My personal preference involves Biden making a particularly direct, honest pitch to younger voters, with particular emphasis on the environment, college debt, and the immorality of GOP white supremacism that directly threatens the social and economic prospects of America’s diverse upcoming generations.

There’s no getting around that this is an ugly, upsetting, and deeply absurd situation. Donald Trump must be stopped, along with the reactionary GOP that seeks to erase decades if not centuries of social progress and basic freedoms. It very much feels like pro-democracy forces are fighting with one hand tied behind their back as so much energy — much of it necessary, at least in the wake of the debate — is channeled into discussions of Biden’s future. The Biden campaign and Democrats, if they choose to retain Biden, must find a way to decisively change the dynamics of this race to focus on Trump’s perfidy, the GOP’s radicalism, the right-wing Supreme Court’s usurpation of power, and the racist, misogynistic forces that bind together the reactionary backlash fueling them all. As today’s Supreme Court ruling should make blindingly clear, the threat to American society and government comes not simply from Trump, but from an authoritarian Republican Party that sees the former president as its instrument of vengeance and control. The Supreme Court’s right-wing majority has now cemented its role of not only as a defender of Trump’s coup attempt, but of all future crimes he commits in office, joining congressional Republicans in protecting him from the consequence of his anti-democratic actions. To the greatest extent possible, the election must be presented as a referendum on American democracy, not a referendum on Joe Biden.

As His Presidential Campaign Enters Into Crisis, the Future Is Up to Biden - and to America's Pro-Democracy Majority

Last Thursday night, millions of us experienced a traumatic and collective near-death experience — not of our own lives, but of American democracy. Within the first 10 minutes of the Biden-Trump debate on an Atlanta stage, we witnessed the man who tried to overthrow American government four years ago steamroll over our current president with lies, menace, and an aura of invincibility, while the latter struggled to form a single coherent sentence and appeared to reinforce even the most outlandish accusations that he is too old to be president. And though Biden’s performance improved from his checked-out start, it was deeply disorienting to watch the contrast between Trump’s firehose of lies and fascistic rhetoric, on the one hand, and Biden’s inability to defend American democracy and basic freedoms, much less himself, on the other. 

So many of us remain stunned in the aftermath not simply by Biden’s inability to perform at the rhetorical and intellectual level we should expect from a president, but because we perceive that he is all that stands between us and the volcano of hate, retribution, and destruction with whom he shared the stage. Even as Biden seemed to show that he isn’t up to the job — either in terms of convincing people of his overall fitness for office or of advancing the Democrats’ goals for America against Republicans’ demented vision — we also got a reminder of what a profound threat Trump poses to the country. Trump lied remorselessly about his accomplishments and Biden’s. He was in full sociopathic con man mode, telling America that up is down and black is white: that January 6 was the Democrats’ fault; that Trump actually opposes political violence; that America is being invaded by tens of millions of criminals and mental patients who intend to kill and rape us before taking our jobs; that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is not his fault but is also simply the return of common sense with which everyone but Biden agrees, and that also, Democrats abort babies after they are born.

So when we encounter the mass disorientation of Democrats and other supporters of democracy, it is not because we ever believed Biden to be perfect, but because the threat posed by his opponent is so very great, and because Biden showed — both symbolically but also substantively — that he may well be unable to counter this threat. Time and time again, Biden failed to forcefully or cogently defend basic aspects of American life and freedom from Trump’s lies and slanders. A few particular moments stand out to me:

First, Biden’s utter fumble of his defense of abortion rights, instead slipping into a near-non sequitur about women murdered by migrants, and soon after talking incomprehensibly about trimesters. There was also an unpleasant digression into incest which failed to make explicit that victims of incest could be denied abortions in some states.

Second, his inability to counter Trump’s misdirection about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with a straightforward explanation of why the U.S. is backing that besieged country; this was particularly egregious considering the clear opening it held for reminding Americans of Trump’s sycophantic deference to Vladimir Putin, not to mention the fact that Trump was impeached the first time for tying Ukraine’s defense against Russia to its willingness to help Trump kneecap Biden’s first presidential run.

Third, it was appalling that Biden appeared to accept Trump’s lie that the country is being overrun by criminal and/or insane immigrants, and spoke so limply of border security, fumbling the potentially potent point that it was Trump who ultimately directed Republicans not to vote for a bipartisan border bill in order to provide Trump with an issue to run on. It is beyond comprehensible to me that Biden would not have an argument ready to refute such a predictable and slanderous point that is so closely tied to Trump and the GOP’s centering of racial hatred in the party’s appeal to voters. Those who have argued that Democrats have made a grave error in accepting GOP premises around immigration were vindicated, as Biden found no way to upturn the insane premises (brown people are coming to kill us all) and resulting insane solutions (expel 20 million immigrants from the U.S.) proposed by Trump.

Biden is ultimately responsible for his own performance, but you have to wonder about the advisors who were responsible for helping him prep for this debate, and who urged him to participate in it in the first place. Either they did not properly prepare him (including by having someone realistically role-play a vicious and implacable Trump), in which case the team is incompetent, or they did prepare him as much as possible, in which case Biden owns his poor performance all on his own. After all, Trump’s words and actions at the debate were wholly predictable, in line with his prior campaign appearances, and yet Biden seemed to have no plan to deal with his torrent of lies, to undermine Trump’s absurd claims to competence, or to make a case for himself in the face of Trump’s assaults. I hate to repeat a trope that the former president uttered last night, but in this case, it will indeed be a travesty if Biden doesn’t fire anyone for giving him bad advice that contributed to last night’s debacle. 

In the last few days, plenty of Democrats have been hitting the panic button, which for many turns out to be an eject button, wondering how they can jettison Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and get someone more electable in his place. I’ve been skeptical of the dump-Biden arguments up to now, believing that his objectively strong record and commitment to democracy earned him a run at a second term. There was also the not-insignificant fact that no credible alternatives chose to challenge him for the nomination during the primaries, with Biden emerging as the legitimate party choice. And he seemed to do fine and quell a lot of doubts with his strong State of the Union performance back in March.

But if his debate participation was meant to further reassure voters as to his mental and physical abilities while exposing Trump as the degenerate that he is, he failed in the first mission and badly fumbled the second. Instead of the subsequent public discussion being dominated by Trump’s repeated refusal to say that he’d accept the November election results (he hedged his answer in ways that make it clear that only a Trump victory will be acceptable), or by Trump’s lies about abortion rights, or by Trump’s total lack of engagement with questions around climate change, far too much oxygen is being taken up by what is ultimately a self-inflicted (and avoidable) wound on Biden’s part.

So that is where we are, whether we like it or not. But where we go from here is not just up to Joe Biden, but also to the millions of Americans who want to defend our democracy, defeat the fascistic movement behind Donald Trump, and move this country forward. For his part, Joe Biden needs to confront the damage he’s done to our confidence in him, and rapidly implement a credible strategy to regain public trust in his capacity to fight implacably for America’s future. He cannot simply ask the American people to ignore what they saw last week, because what they saw was terrifying and demoralizing, and seemed to validate the widespread concerns about his age held by voters from across the political spectrum. Not only does he need to signal that such a failure will not happen a second time, he will have to deliver on that promise. Even the rosiest possible take on Biden’s health and acuity — that debate night was a one-off, an uncanny convergence of cramming for the debate, a head cold, and the existential burdens of the presidency — must still conclude that his catastrophic performance and choice to participate ended up boosting the prospects of his deranged opponent. And if Joe Biden cannot reassure his prospective voters in the coming weeks, then those voters should feel free to make loud and clear their desire for Biden to step aside, and for the Democrats to choose a successor candidate, however messy and potentially dangerous such an unprecedented maneuver might be.

The country needs a candidate who can clearly illustrate the stakes of this election; it needs to be seen as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, not as a gamble between a declining senior and an energetic psycho. What happened on debate night was totally unacceptable — again, Biden walked into a trap of his own making. No one forced him to debate Donald Trump, and indeed, many have persuasively made the case that you can’t actually have a debate where one candidate has no commitment to either the truth or basic democratic beliefs like adhering to election results.

At the same time, all the millions of Democrats feeling at sea and disempowered need to face the fact that in-fighting, recriminations, and self-doubt will only make defeat in November more likely. For every conversation about Biden disappointing them, and for every call to their elected representatives urging that Biden step aside, I would ask folks to also remind themselves and others of how hideously Trump behaved on that debate stage. To me, the lack of remorse or accountability over his past catastrophes was by itself disqualifying. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that he is running for president primarily to escape accountability for the many crimes he committed before and during office. In this sense, his quest is utterly self-serving, even as his ascendance to the presidency would empower a reactionary cohort of Christian nationalists, white supremacists, anti-labor zealots, and open misogynists. This race is not simply, or even primarily, about Trump versus Biden, but about whether we continue to have a democratic, free society that defends equality and shared purpose, or an authoritarian one where insurrectionists run free, a deranged president jails political adversaries and guns down protestors, women and minorities are treated as second class citizens, and the world is left to burn as oil executives are allowed to write environmental policy. Whether or not Biden remains on the ballot, we must insist that these be the true terms of the debate.

Corrupt Supreme Court Has Inexorably Placed Itself at Center of 2024 Presidential Campaign

Since last month’s post about Justice Samuel Alito’s apparent addiction to treason-associated flags, there’s been a spate of developments related to both Alito’s personal corruption and the corruption of the right-wing Supreme Court majority more generally. It’s been enough that I want to start by reiterating a point I’ve made before: there are certain political dumpster fires where there is very little cost to Democrats in working to define a public narrative and agenda for action, in part because there is a near-certainty that fresh information will continue to come to light that will only reinforce the case they are trying to make.

The current Supreme Court is clearly vying to be the supreme example of my pet theory. In just the last month, we’ve had additional reporting that casts doubt on the Alitos’ public statements about the circumstances on why the pair of treason flags were flown at family residences (even as the judge has continued to place the blame for the insurrectionary symbols squarely on his wife). Beyond this, an investigative reporter infiltrated a Supreme Court shindig and recorded conversations with both Alitos that aren’t simply unflattering, but in the case of the justice, cast still more doubt on his ability to judge crucial cases without imposing his significant and severe personal prejudice. And apart from the Alitos, inquiries by Senate Democrats have resulted in revelations of even more undisclosed financial gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas, in this instance free flights on millionaire Harlan Crow’s private jet. 

As I’ve written before, the corruption of the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is in the first place inherently bad on various straightforward levels — anti-democratic in ways that align with the authoritarian Republican Party, anti-freedom in ways that reflect an Christian extremist bias, anti-civil rights in ways that reflects a fundamentally white supremacist vision of America, pro-plutocrat in ways that reflect adulation of the millionaire class. Together, these are more than reason enough to place Court reform at the center of the national agenda. As more and more people are recognizing and describing, the Supreme Court has effectively become an unelected GOP legislature, ruling on a host of laws in ways that consistently advance a far-right agenda that doesn’t have the votes to pass at the national level.

But though it is very good news that the Court’s malfeasance is coming to greater public attention, there is one enormous downside that I believe the Democratic leadership is struggling to navigate. The more the Court’s corruption and over-extended power comes to light, the more the public will reasonably ask what the Democrats are doing to correct this imbalance. And as we’ve seen in other areas of conflict with the Republican Party, many senior Democrats are conflict-averse when it comes to fully engaging with the GOP. With the Court, of course, there are understandable (if not fully defensible) reasons for hesitation. At the present time, it does appear impossible to believe that corrupt justices like Alito and Thomas might be impeached and removed from the Court — not with the GOP perfecting displays of “totalitarian unanimity” when it comes to defying the rule of law. But this perceived impossibility seems to be leading the Democrats to not even begin a process that might change public opinion and the country’s political dynamics in ways that might yet yield results, at least in the long term.

Not only is this counter-productive for anyone urging Court reform, it also threatens to implicate the Democrats in the very corruption the claim to oppose. If they do not seem to be trying to undo the corruption, then some might reasonably conclude that they’re actually OK with it. To me, this is a huge reason why action is required, even if that action can’t reasonably be expected to yield immediate results. Indeed, too many Democrats seem to assume that a Court and a GOP that defy common-sense reforms will make them look weak — but it seems equally possible that such defiance might help erode public support for the Court majority and its defenders. 

But though the Democrats risk being tainted by the Supreme Court’s corruption if they fail to move to remedy it, it’s equally clear that Chief Justice John Roberts implicates himself in both Alito’s and Thomas’s corruption every more deeply as the days pass and he refuses to impose meaningful measures that might censure or curb their outlandish behavior. At some point, silence must be read as active complicity in the two men’s insurrectionary and anti-democratic projects. A more aggressive Democratic Party would be hounding Roberts’ failure to lead the Court in an ethical manner, which could in turn increase public pressure for meaningful change.

An underlying issue here is that institutionally-minded Democrats seem to genuinely worry about the Court’s legitimacy and the potential damage to the rule of law should the broader public no longer have faith in the Court’s rulings. This is an understandable concern, as the Court should ideally function as a trusted arbiter of disputes between the various interests and factions of American society. But only a fool would say that this is how the Court currently operates. Instead, it’s become the de facto legislator for imposing minority positions that lack support to ever pass Congress and be signed into law.

This means that when Democrats speak of restoring the legitimacy of the Court, but fail to speak of its legacy of corruption and political extremism that has subverted American democracy and freedom, they inadvertently position themselves as defenders of the Court’s long record of bad decisions. And so this leads Democrats to essentially tell the American majority that they need to effectively eat shit for the indefinite future — to accept as legitimate Court decisions that have been issued by a corrupt Court, in order to preserve public respect for the Court when it someday, somehow begins to issue more reasonable decisions.

But apart from other logical flaws I’ve pointed out, this runs into one gargantuan one: the fact that the Supreme Court is currently acting to subvert the democratic political system that provides the most viable path to checking the Court’s power and ensuring its rulings reflect reasonable interpretations of the law, not right-wing fantasies bent on social control and rule by the nation’s white Christian minority. The Court has attacked the democratic system in ways small and large, from gutting the Voting Rights Act, to signing off on unfettered gerrymandering that lets representatives choose their voters, to eliminating limits on the ability of millionaires and billionaires to buy political favors.

Michael Podhorzer makes this very case over at Weekend Reading, where his latest piece is a tour de force accounting of the various ways the Supreme Court has transformed into an unaccountable Republican power center that accomplishes what minority-status Republicans cannot. Unflinching and exhaustive, his indictment of the Supreme Court’s turn against American democracy in favor of partisan ends is breathtaking. Yet none of the Court’s prior attacks on the democratic system may be as consequential as the Court’s complicity in helping Donald Trump evade accountability for his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. As Podhorzer writes, “By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases, Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.” If the Court has over the last 20 years built a ticking time bomb to demolish American democracy and the rights that make our free society possible, its defense of Donald Trump constitutes a lighting of a fuse that may well cause that bomb to explode and blow our democracy to kingdom come.

Podhorzer characterizes the situation wrought by the Court majority around Trump’s immunity case as a “crisis,” as “We will face an irreconcilable showdown between the normal operation of the criminal justice system (which should find Trump in pretrial and trial proceedings for his January 6th crimes over the next five months) and the normal functioning of presidential elections (which should find him campaigning full-time during those months).” But Podhorzer’s piece implicitly argues for an even broader crisis rooted in the Court’s abandonment of democracy and neutrality in favor of open partisan warfare, in which the Court’s effort to protect Trump represent the extreme, logical extension of the MAGA majority’s dark turn.

However, the intersection between the Court’s corruption and Trump’s re-election campaign represents not just a new nadir in the story of the modern Court, but a potential pivot point to restore American democracy by reforming the Court and combatting GOP authoritarianism. Podhorzer’s piece is the most recent exemplar of increasing journalistic attention on how the need to to rein in the right-wing Court majority is fusing with the 2024 election campaign. The groundwork for this convergence was set when the Court handed down the Dobbs decision in mid-2022, which remains a shocking repudiation of a basic right to bodily autonomy that most Americans took for granted, and focused public attention on the Court’s undeniable reactionary bent. But the Court’s recent interventions in the 2024 election shows how very broad the MAGA majority’s impact has become. The Court isn’t just handing down rulings that are erasing decades of social and economic progress — it’s also handing down rulings that kneecap our democratic government and thus render it difficult or impossible to act legislatively to reverse the Court’s rule by judicial fiat.

In putting its thumb on the scale in favor of Trump’s re-election campaign, the Court has left the Democrats no choice but to place questions of the Court’s corruption at the center of the 2024 campaign. As a matter of the Democratic Party’s own survival, it can’t allow to continue unchallenged a Republican power center that floats above even a modicum of democratic accountability. And as a matter of democracy’s survival, the nation can’t tolerate a Court that sides with one party over the other — particularly when its favored party increasingly holds majority rule to be the enemy of cherished reactionary goals. The logical argument for Democrats to make is that tangible reforms of the Court are urgently needed, including term limits and an expansion of the Court to re-balance away from the reactionary majority. Ignoring the Court’s transformation into a bastion of right-wing power would be tantamount to issuing a white flag of surrender.

In recent weeks, we have in fact seen some signs that this political reality is proving undeniable to the Biden campaign. In remarks at a fundraiser, President Biden noted that the next president would likely be able to appoint at least two justices — depending on who holds the presidency, this would result in either a continued MAGA lock on the Supreme Court, or a restored centrist-liberal majority. In this respect, Biden appears to be seeking a middle path, in which he stresses the importance of the Supreme Court to the 2024 election without urging possibly controversial and hard-to-implement structural reforms such as term limits or court expansion. Such signs of prioritizing the Court in his re-election bid are deeply encouraging, both because the Supreme Court is proving an impediment to pro-democracy and progressive reforms in a practical sense, and because the idea of an unelected group of right-wing ideologues setting our society’s course is inherently enraging and galvanizing. The more that Americans learn of the Court’s corruption and subversion of majority rule, the more they will rally to a president and a party that promises a re-balancing of the highest court in the land. Reminding Americans that Donald Trump stands ready to solidify a radical Supreme Court majority that rips away established freedoms while eviscerating our political paths to undoing the damage should be made central to Biden’s re-election bid. In politics, you are always at an advantage when you force your opponent to defend the indefensible; a strategy that highlights an out-of-control MAGA Supreme Court majority beloved of Trump and the GOP will do just that.

Proclaiming Trump Innocent and Democracy Guilty, GOP Flirts With Political Oblivion

The felony conviction of Donald Trump on all 34 counts related to his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels shows that the American justice system is capable of imposing meaningful sanctions on the lawless former president — if a trial actually manages to run its course. The verdict came despite a ceaseless barrage of propaganda from Trump and the Republican Party, including threats against the presiding judge, so that this outcome was hardly certain. Against significant odds, accountability has come for Trump, with the potential to unsettle what has been a neck-and-neck presidential race, and cause more Americans to grasp Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office. The former president’s felony status is disqualifying, and Democrats and others must invest time and effort into communicating why this is so (for a rundown of the arguments they can make, this recent piece by Brian Beutler is an excellent starting point). 

But just as important as the conviction itself is the contemptible and extreme Republican Party reaction that has exploded in its wake. For what most people view as the proper working of the justice system is being characterized by the Republican Party and Trump himself as a corrupt, rigged, and disastrous outcome that must be reversed at the earliest opportunity. More than this, though — the GOP is using the verdict to falsely proclaim that the entire justice system is corrupt, and as justification to plan radical measures to weaponize the justice system against their political opponents. In doing so, they show that they would rather burn down the entire edifice of the rule of law than see their party leader made subject to it.

We need to be clear-eyed about what these Republicans are saying, for they do not actually believe that the justice system is corrupt, and so to treat their claims in good faith is dangerous and self-defeating. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observes, the problem that Trump and the GOP have with the verdict is that the system is in fact not corrupt, and has truly brought the former president to justice. But because their leader is a criminal, they must re-define the rule of the law itself to be the actual problem. This is upside-down, authoritarian logic, which basically reduces to saying that the law is whatever the Republican Party says it is. It’s a mentality that we have seen in countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but which has now migrated to American shores, and been adopted by one of America’s two major political parties.

On top of this, the GOP is now using the verdict as an excuse to seek retribution against their Democratic “enemies,” even though the Democrats did not actually do anything wrong in the first place; rather, the Democrats are being scapegoated because the legal system itself worked as intended ! In other words, they intend to use the everyday, apolitical functioning of the justice system that held their criminal leader to account to justify the complete subversion of the justice system to achieve anti-democratic political ends, such as jailing opponents on false charges. Doubling down on a convicted Trump, the GOP has consciously made criminality and lawlessness central to the party’s political identity, a fact that if widely understood should rightly appall and alienate a vast swathe of the American citizenry.

This Republican reaction to Trump’s conviction — highly coordinated, relentless, and nihilistic — should provide final confirmation that the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian party that rejects democracy and all of its constituents — free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, equality under the law, the illegitimacy of political violence. Indeed, we should also understand that the extreme GOP unity in supporting a criminal president is in itself reason for alarm. As MSNBC host Chris Hayes remarked, “The lesson they learned is if you enforce this totalitarian unanimity, you can keep chugging along. And it is a wildly dangerous lesson. Because they will do this no matter what he does, and no matter how bad it gets.” We might say that “totalitarian unanimity” (what a great, if ominous, term!) is the GOP’s battering ram against democracy, their answer to the rule of law: stick together, say up is down, and seek power by tearing down America’s institutions while issuing a cloud of lies, propaganda, and violent threat. Another way of looking at is one that reveals the GOP’s increasingly fascistic tendencies, as we might say that the GOP is attempting to will itself into power through a unified embrace of lies and a mass subversion of the rule of law.

The GOP’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s conviction, with its accompanying assault on the rule of law, should be seen as on a continuum with Trump’s attempted coup following the 2020 election, the ever-broadening GOP refusal to accept adverse election results in 2024, and the GOP’s use of violent threat to achieve political ends (as Trump has done in threatening a “bloodbath” if he isn’t re-elected). Individually, each of these strategies can be called authoritarian and anti-democratic — but to properly understand, communicate, and confront their collective threat, we need to more precisely describe this GOP effort to overturn America’s democracy for what it is: an insurrection against the U.S. government.

In its denial of Trump’s conviction, the GOP is not simply aiming to overturn the verdict, but looking to overturn for all time the idea that any verdict can ever be considered settled if it goes against Republican Party interests. If they can undo this, they can undo the prospect that any other Republican leader can be held to account for breaking the law. Such a principle, once established, would render the United States not a democracy but a one-party state, where the GOP could engage in any manner of political behavior — lawless or even violent — with impunity. 

If we view the Republican war on the Trump verdict as the latest campaign in an ongoing GOP insurrection, the Democrats’ failure to date to fully amplify the verdict is not just self-defeating, but a dereliction of duty. As I said, not only does the verdict disqualify Trump, the GOP’s reaction to it is an equally — or even more important — disqualifying development. There is a fundamental error in thinking that this is just about Donald Trump, and that if the public simply hears about the verdict, it will form negative opinions about the former president and his capacity to return to the Oval Office. Such thinking ignores the fact that the GOP is actively trying to convince people not only that Trump isn’t guilty, but that American democracy is itself the problem! The GOP isn’t just engaging in aggressive politics — it’s engaging in an effort that, if successful, and in conjunction with the other insurrectionary efforts I noted above, would result in the transformation of the United States into an authoritarian, one-party state. For the Democrats to contest neither the Republican lies about the verdict, nor the accompanying effort to attack the rule of law, would be incomprehensible.

I do think that long-standing pathologies play a part in the Democrats’ reluctance to jump all over the verdict, a risk-averse approach to politics that has no faith in the Democrats’ ability to come out on top in partisan tussles (a point elaborated numerous times by political writer Beutler). But beyond this, I think that Democrats realize, consciously or not, that to paint Trump as a lawless felon who needs to drop out of the race would bring them into full and irreversible conflict with a radicalized GOP that refuses to back down on Trump’s purported innocence — a conflict that would in turn inexorably lead, through the force of logic, to full confrontation with the GOP’s other strategies of insurrection.

I wonder if another concept might help explain this underlying Democratic reluctance. The term “ontological shock” refers to the idea of one’s worldview being overwhelmed and undone by new, radical information that simply can’t be integrated into what one knows about how things work; a fun example is the earthquake that would be inflicted on people’s sense of reality if a UFO landed on the White House lawn. It may be that the Democratic Party leadership, including President Biden, is simply incapable of emotionally and intellectually processing the idea that the Republican Party has become authoritarian, bloody-minded, and relentless in its quest to overturn American democracy and our free society. Yet I think any fair-minded assessment of the GOP’s reaction to Trump’s conviction would have to conclude that the Republican Party has decisively, and irrevocably, broken with democracy and its most fundamental bulwark, the rule of law. If the GOP reaction to the verdict is the latest moment of ontological shock for the Democratic Party, then party leaders must quickly work through their trauma, grasp the new reality, and act to defend the United States against an obvious threat to the survival of the republic.

Perhaps my greatest frustration due to the Democrats’ inability to fully internalize and aggressively act against an insurrectionary GOP — after the obvious necessity of preserving American democracy — is that so much of the Republican Party’s quest for power depends on efforts to bluster and conjure alternate realities into being. Certainly this has been a key part of Trump’s power and appeal, in his case the promotion of the idea that he is subject neither to daily norms, nor to the sternest of laws. But now the effort is far more comprehensive, as the full firepower of the broader GOP has been brought to bear on presenting the party’s lawlessness as redemptive and justified — as being a truer expression of right than the law itself. For this strategy to work, though, the Republican Party must be able to overcome the Democrats’ ability to appeal to basic truth and reality — in this case, the idea that Trump’s trial wasn’t rigged, that Trump has been convicted through the judgment of 12 ordinary Americans, and that for many reasons his felonies disqualify him from the presidency.

It seems to me that the Democrats are being cowed by what is in part an epic bluff by the GOP, both in the case of the Trump conviction and with other insurrectionary strategies, such as the preemptive refusal to accept the 2024 election results. In fact, the Republican Party is far, far out on a brittle limb in terms of advancing ideas that are alien and bizarre to the American majority — for instance, the idea that the entire judiciary is part of a plot to “get” Donald Trump, or that Democrats only ever win elections through the illegal votes of millions of undocumented immigrants. To put it in more Trumpian terms, we could say that the GOP is advancing a high-stakes pyramid scheme, in which at each step the American public is being asked to provide the party with ever more outrageous deposits of credulity (this may be a major reason why Trump, with his history of such schemes, has synched up so easily with the GOP’s fascistic forms of politics).

The fact that the GOP might yet succeed, in large part by convincing enough citizens of objectively insane and anti-American ideas, should clue Democrats into the fact that this insurrection is being fought in the realm of ideas and emotions, not through guns and bombs (even as Trump continues to intimate terrible violence to come should he lose in November). And though the movement challenging America is far wider than Trump, Democrats can leverage the former president to inflict devastating damage on the entire GOP and the anti-democratic movement it embodies. So many Republican politicians have mortgaged their reputations to the former president, hoping that his victory in November will be worth it. But by chaining himself to his criminality over the years, and particularly in the wake of this verdict, they have made themselves vulnerable to public opinion swinging decisively against a felon chief executive, with all the burning red flags that his criminal status raises.

The GOP’s reaction to the verdict — to basically declare that Trump, and by extension the GOP, is actually above the law — is equally damning and disqualifying, showing that the GOP would rather abandon democracy than abandon their criminal leader. Trump is the deranged avatar of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist movement to overturn and replace U.S. democracy with a system that serves an ever-shrinking, self-serving, and radicalized minority of the population. The Democrats need to drive home the true story of his soul sickness and resultant criminality, why this means a second Trump presidency would be a nightmare for the country, and how the GOP’s identification with his sordid values renders the Republican Party unworthy of holding power at any level.

Alito's Treason Flag Addiction Is Far More Than a Generic Ethical Lapse

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 attack, an inverted American flag was viewed flying at the residence of Samuel Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. The news was genuinely shocking, as the upside-down American flag had by that point been seized upon as a symbol by both the insurrectionists who sacked the U.S. Capitol and by more run-of-the-mill election deniers who falsely claimed the presidency had been stolen from Donald Trump. In response, Alito indicated to the Times that, “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs” — but as many quickly noted, this doesn’t fully explain the striking deployment of a symbol sympathetic to insurrectionists in the days following an actual insurrection, Alito’s apparent indifference to the appearance that his household might be in sympathy with the stop-the-steal movement, or the appearance (at a minimum) of judicial conflict of interest given that Alito has sat in judgment in January 6-related cases.

But subsequent reporting by the Times revealed that the Alitos have flown at their home yet another flag (this time at their summer residence in New Jersey, in the summer of 2023) associated with anti-government and insurrectionary behavior — the “Appeal to Heaven” flag that originated in the Revolutionary War, but which has subsequently been re-appropriated by far-right movements. As the later article notes, the Appeal to Heaven flag “is now a symbol of support for former President Donald J. Trump, for a religious strand of the “Stop the Steal” campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.” The article further reports that according to ethics experts, “it ties Justice Alito more closely to symbols associated with the attempted election subversion on Jan. 6, and because it was displayed as the obstruction case was first coming for consideration by the court.” The timing of the flag’s display in relation to the obstruction case feels particularly damning, suggesting the possibility of a consciousness of intent by Alito, as if he might be telegraphing his intentions.

But to whom, exactly, would Alito have been signaling via appropriated Revolutionary War semaphore? To its credit, the Times provides a revealing history of the Appeal to Heaven Flag (also known as the Pine Tree Flag), which in recent years has been particularly embraced by the bizarrely named right-wing activist Dutch Sheets “as a symbol of his ambitions to steep the country and the government in Christianity.” Sheets is “a prominent figure in a far-right evangelical movement that scholars have called the New Apostolic Reformation,” and has apparently made a habit of gifting the flag to Republican politicians, including former Alaska governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Sheets was heavily involved in stop-the-steal campaigns following Trump’s election loss in November 2020, and the Appeal to Heaven flag was subsequently displayed by multiple insurrectionists on January 6. The Times remarks that, “By that day, scholars say, the flag had become popular enough to sometimes be used by a few other groups, including militia members. But most often, they said, it is tied directly to Mr. Sheets, his contemporaries and adherents and their vision for a more Christian America.”

And this is where the connections between the flag, the movement that’s taken it as a symbol, and Alito get interesting — and disturbing:

[Sheets] placed the high court at the center of his mission. In 2015, the court’s ruling that states must allow same-sex marriage had galvanized the movement and helped it to grow. In a speech three years later, he said, “There’s no gate that has allowed more evil to enter our nation than that of the Supreme Court.”

But Mr. Sheets and fellow leaders described Justice Alito, the member of the court most committed to expanding the role of faith in public life, as their great hope: a vocal defender of religious liberty and opponent of the right to abortion and same-sex marriage.

It strains credulity that in flying the Appeal to Heaven Flag, Justice Alito was not aware of its connection to Sheets’ movement, and that in doing so, he was not implicitly or explicitly sending a message of sympathy to Sheets’ anti-democratic cause.

***

At a minimum, the display of the two flags at two different Alito residences cuts deeply against the notion that judges aren’t supposed to show even the appearance of bias regarding the cases they hear. Interviews of ethics experts and other judges reveal the degree to which Alito’s conduct is beyond the pale for a Supreme Court justice. Though the Supreme Court is at this point unbound by any sort of credible ethics regime, such basic notions as appearing unbiased are bedrock enough that Alito surely doesn’t need to reference an official ethics code to know how outrageous the flying of insurrectionary flags might appear.

But we need to think very carefully before we slot Alito’s behavior into simply a generic violation of “ethics” — though it certainly is that as well. Well-meaningly but misleadingly, many have concluded that the flag incidents prove that the Supreme Court requires tougher guidelines to follow, and that Alito’s offenses can in this way somehow be remedied. But this attitude badly understates the depth of his offenses. The indication of sympathy for forces attempting to either overthrow the United States government in open insurrection, or for a movement trying to influence judges with the goal of transforming the United States into an undemocratic, Christian nationalist entity, are not simply ethically wrong. In the display of both the Appeal to Heaven and inverted American flags, Alito has demonstrated the appearance of sympathy for causes that run directly against democracy and the rule of law, of which the Supreme Court is supposed to be a primary defender.

In doing so, he has rendered himself unfit not only to hear cases directly bearing on such issues — such as those involving Donald Trump’s immunity from prosecution and the propriety of certain charges against January 6 defendants — but also any cases involving issues that implicate the rule of law and American democracy. That latter category, of course, involves literally every other possible case that might come before him, for all depend on the rule of law and the government’s legitimacy in promulgating laws. The problem is not that Alito made an error in showing the appearance of bias — which in general terms might indeed be unethical — but what he’s specifically seems to be biased about: the question of whether American democracy should continue. 

The far more serious problem, though, and which also transcends mere ethical considerations, is that these appearances of bias may in fact reveal Alito’s actual sympathies and beliefs. Such beliefs can’t be mitigated by an ethics code, for they’re disqualifying qualities in a Supreme Court justice. To determine whether Alito meets this threshold, congressional investigations are called for; depending on the outcome, impeachment should absolutely be on the table. You can be an insurrectionist, or you can be a Supreme Court justice, but you certainly can’t be allowed to be both in a democratic United States.

As Vox’s Ian Millhiser wrote in the wake of the first treason flag revelation, Alito’s jurisprudence on the Supreme Court marks him as a thorough and unremitting hack for the interests of the Republican Party, rather than a staunch and neutral defender of the law as his originalist pretensions would have us believe. In case after case, Millhiser shows how Alito has placed loyalty to the GOP over loyalty to legal precedent or consistency, essentially switching his positions on issues like free speech or criminal rights depending on the ideology of those affected (it is also worth noting that even prior to the flag-flying incidents, Alito displayed very little restraint in voicing his partisan sympathies regarding the GOP). 

With such a track record, it’s worth asking whether Alito’s shows of sympathy with insurrectionist causes (January 6, the Christian nationalist effort to impose sectarian rule on the United States, Donald Trump’s quest to return to office despite having attempted a coup to remain in office) are merely instances of the justice going rogue — or evidence as well of his long-standing habit of aligning himself with core Republican interests. After all, to be a Republican politico in good standing nowadays, it’s necessary to adhere to Donald Trump’s position that the 2020 election was stolen from Republicans. Such a party position seems not to be a bridge too far for Alito, given his apparent willingness to have his homes display iconography linked to the stop-the-steal movement. Likewise, at recent oral arguments regarding Trump’s claims of absolute presidential immunity, Alito appeared startlingly sympathetic to the former president’s claims. In one incredible exchange, the justice went so far as to suggest that a president may need to be free from prosecution lest his successor decide to prosecute him for crimes, which could lead to the offending president committing even more crimes in order to remain in office. The idea that a president should be considered above the law in order to preserve the existence of democracy and the rule of law is an argument that only an authoritarian-minded zealot could love — and yet Alito seemed to be making it.

All of this leads me to a contrarian conclusion as to whether Alito acted wrongly in displaying flags associated with rebellion and treason. Rather than acting in an unethical manner that merits a simple reprimand or a promise not to repeat the offense, anyone who supports American democracy needs to understand that Justice Alito has in fact done us all a tremendous favor. By flaunting the symbols of his sympathies for all to see, Alito has shown us who he truly is and what he truly believes. In doing so, he has made the case more graphically and publicly than America’s sharpest pundits ever could that he’s not to be trusted by the democratic majority, and is certainly unfit to serve on the Court. So-called ethics reforms that would ban the treason flags but keep in place the treason justice who yearns to hoist them miss the point entirely, to our collective peril.

Already Refusing to Accept Election Results, Trump Renders His Candidacy Illegitimate

The refusal of not only Donald Trump, but of increasing numbers of elected Republicans, to commit to accepting a 2024 presidential election loss may just be the biggest story in American politics. It’s certainly as important as the intertwined phenomena of the GOP’s evolution into a party of authoritarianism and its increasing comfort with threats of violence to achieve political ends. Advance rejection of adverse election results is a scandal, a crisis, and a challenge to the pro-democracy American majority, pointing to a breakdown in U.S. politics as the Republican Party embraces open defiance of majority rule and the rule of law.

Trump himself has tried to hedge his refusal by qualifying that he would accept the results “if everything’s honest,” but that “[i]f it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.” As we’ve already seen, though, the former president conjures accusations of electoral dishonesty out of thin air, spouting lies about fake votes, illegal votes, immigrant votes, and the like nearly as fast as fact-checkers can debunk them. Let’s not be naive: there is no standard of proof that Trump would accept if he loses in November. To think otherwise is to ignore the evidence of his behavior over the last decade. The rabid elephant in the room, of course, is that Trump not only lied in 2020 about the election being stolen from him, but used that fiction as the basis for both violent and pseudo-legal attempts to undo the election results and so topple American democracy as we know it.

By echoing his 2020 refusal to commit to accepting the upcoming presidential election results should he lose — a refusal that we can see with the benefit of hindsight was the predicate for the first presidential coup attempt in American history — Donald Trump is broadcasting his intention to reject an unfavorable 2024 outcome as well. But he is not doing so out of some self-defeating interest in outing his own insurrectionary intent (although he is in fact making clear this intent). Instead, he’s talking about the need to reject “dishonest” election results in order to sow doubt among his supporters now, to prepare the ground for the same efforts to overturn the results that we saw in 2020. The plan for power in 2024 remains the same as before: Crooked legal maneuvers and incitement of violence.

But a second element that was mostly latent in 2020 is more overt this time around. By intimating that he will not accept the election results if he doesn’t win, and by suggesting he will incite a repeat of the post-election maneuvers and violence of 2020 (for example, in his statement that America will experience a “blood bath” if he loses), Donald Trump is using the threat of future violence to sway Americans’ votes in the present and running up to November — a threat given complete and utter credibility by his staging of a coup attempt in 2020-21. He is telling the American people that he will unleash violence on this country, just as he did before, if they don’t act as he commands them. Too many people are misinterpreting Trump’s threats as lying in the future — they are in fact acts of intimidation meant to operate right now to alter Americans’ opinions and votes.

It is difficult to conceive of a higher crime against American democracy than such threats, short of a second coup attempt by Donald Trump. Threatening the American citizenry to vote for Trump lest they suffer untold horrors is a story that any news organization worth its salt should be pursuing, constantly, key to communicating the darkness of Trump’s refusal to commit to respect the election results. Likewise, the political danger of a president refusing to accept election results, preparing the ground for violence should he lose, and using that threatened violence in the present to sway votes together form a catastrophe in the making that the Democratic Party should highlight, condemn, and confront at every opportunity.

Trump’s attempts to subvert faith in the election preparatory to overturning a November result that goes against him, coupled with his active intimidation of American voters in the present day, should be understood by all reasonable observers to disqualify him from the presidency. This is not a question of specific laws being broken, but of a clear intent to subvert Americans’ trust in democracy, sway the election through intimidation, and lay the groundwork for future violence and sedition by recruiting gullible citizens and dishonest politicians to his insurrectionary cause. He has rendered his candidacy illegitimate.

The menace emanating from Trump is made still worse by the fact that so many of the GOP’s elected officials are either actively or tacitly complicit in his attempts at electoral intimidation and subversion. Those who echo his refusal to accept the election results no matter the outcome, like vice-presidential hopefuls Representative Elise Stefanik and Senator Tim Scott, have made Trump’s cause their own, happy to aid his destructive and violent-minded path to the presidency. But those Republican officials who simply refuse to criticize him are little better, shirking the minimum duty required of elected officials to defend American democracy by affirming its most basic tenet — that when you lose, you accept that the other side has won. By behaving as if Trump’s words and intent are normal, they provide through their silence essential cover to an authoritarian politics that has no place in the United States. In this way, the GOP has been poisoned by the insurrectionary spirit that animates Trump’s campaign for the presidency.

I would hazard that this increasingly widespread, even lockstep, Republican position is a major — perhaps even the central — reason why neither the media nor the Democratic Party have responded to the GOP refusal to recognize presidential election results with the appropriate levels of focus and intensity. With Republican pols closing ranks, the media and Democrats imagine that a basic defense of democracy will now appear too “partisan.” But at the risk of repeating myself: in no way can Trump’s campaign be considered legitimate under the most basic understanding of American democracy.

Unfortunately for the political health and even survival of the country, a failure to truly engage the topic of Trump’s relative legitimacy or lack thereof may very well be having the opposite effect — like those Republicans who stand silent while Trump threatens a “blood bath” if he loses, too many in the media and the Democratic Party are normalizing behavior that isn’t just abnormal, but a direct threat to American democracy and the free society it makes possible.

For both the media and the Democrats, fear of taking a firm stand on Donald Trump’s illegitimacy also seems rooted in a reluctance to avoid what might be perceived as unnecessary or extreme conflict with Donald Trump, with the Republican Party, and by extension with the tens of millions of voters who support them. Yet the GOP has no compunctions about seeking escalation on its own terms, with the goal of delegitimizing both the free press and the Democratic Party.

Regarding the media, a hallmark of Trumpism — one which the GOP has eagerly adopted — has been to deny any legitimacy to mainstream news sources. Instead, Republicans now actively label them as “enemies of the state,” deserving of scorn and, if necessary, physical violence. Nor do Trump or the GOP any longer appear to consider the Democratic Party legitimate, or its voters to even be real Americans. In just the last couple weeks, we’ve been witness to no less a personage than House Speaker Mike Johnson suggesting that millions of illegal aliens are voting, in line with right-wing propaganda that such voting has been key to Democratic victories. Stop to consider how very shocking this is: the highest-ranking elected Republican is pushing legislation — and signaling to Republican voters — that the Democrats only hold power through fraud and deception, that the party is in fact a criminal enterprise at war with the intent of actual American citizens. Consider as well that this line of attack is of a piece with Donald Trump’s propaganda about stolen elections, so that Johnson is in fact helping Trump make his case that rejection of election results and violence may well be required for a Republican to return to the White House.

Wishing to avoid an escalation of conflict with the GOP, the Democrats’ refusal to make a reality-based argument for the lack of legitimacy of any Republican candidate who encourages or refuses to condemn political violence, and for the necessity of accepting democratic election results, has helped create a tilted playing field that allows the GOP to engage in an anti-democratic form of politics at little or no cost to its prospects. At its most extreme, and most self-sabotagingly for the Democrats and for our democratic system, this helps make it seem reasonable for the nation to go along with the results of an election won by Republicans if the party and its candidates use threats and actual violence to gain victory.

To the contrary: no American is obligated to accept election results that effectively come at the barrel of a gun. In fact, any decent American citizen is obligated to defy and reject such results. Once a political party becomes convinced that winning through threats and violence will secure it power, and that it will suffer no significant political cost through operating in such an authoritarian manner — as the GOP under Trump appears to have convinced itself — then it has every incentive to do just that. Under such circumstances, such a strategy must be exposed, excoriated, and delegitimized by the democratic majority.

I’m no scholar of authoritarianism, but in this situation, it seems a pretty sorry strategy for the pro-democracy party to preemptively signal to the authoritarian party that if the latter can intimidate its way into winning the next election, they will be considered America’s rightful rulers tomorrow and forevermore. It also seems an impoverished approach to worry more about provoking the authoritarian opposition to say bad things about you than about the dire importance of rousing the American majority to understand the threat it faces, to vote accordingly, and, yes, to deny any grant of legitimacy to GOP politicians who gain office on the basis of threats and outright violence. It has to be asked: Does the Democratic Party as a whole have a plan to defeat Republican authoritarianism? Do enough of its leaders grasp what a watershed it is for the Republican Party to have as a central pillar its refusal to accept any presidential election it does not win, and to suggest that any such loss will be redeemed through violence?

As I said before, Republicans are already laying out the case that Democrats are inherently un-American, anti-American, and all around non-American, never to be trusted with power. The Democrats badly need to come to grips with the nature of their existential conflict with the GOP, and to act in ways that energize the American majority to express its rejection, now and in the future, of those attempting to impose authoritarian rule on the country.

I could say that Democrats are doing a “grave disservice” to America’s citizenry, or some such high serious profundity, but it’s more to the point to say that it feels like the Democrats are unable to accurately grasp the risk/gain calculus. They seem to only see downside risk (i.e., they fear they will destructively escalate tensions with the Republican Party) when the truth is that anything the Democrats do, as long as it’s in defense of democracy and political norms, will always be twisted by the GOP into an argument for why the Democratic Party is actually a gang of godless Mexican drug cartels or some such nonsense. The GOP will always push back when Democrats defend democracy, because that is what an authoritarian party does. Democrats can’t avoid escalating the crisis of American democracy when they directly expose and confront GOP perfidy and bloody-mindedness; this may strike some Democratic politicians as risky, but the alternative of allowing the GOP to continue to wrap itself in the guise of normalcy is simply too dangerous.

At bottom, the Democrats are committing an enormous error by proceeding as if the political stakes and rules have not changed, and that they are simply engaged in regular democratic competition with the Republican Party as in years past, where the rules of the game mean that defeat this year might be reversed by victory in the next election cycle. The Republican Party is very clearly trying to engineer a victory in 2024 that will allow it to cripple the American political system to ensure permanent Republican rule, starting with a president who has signaled, quite openly, that he intends to rule by force and personal fiat.

Again, a big part of the reason we know this is because Trump and the GOP are using strategies incompatible with democracy right now in order to win in November (and also because Trump’s advisors and political allies are laying out second-term plans that are essentially a vision of lawless and unchecked governance, even as the Republican-dominated Supreme Court issues ruling after ruling decimating democratic accountability and basic freedoms). In doing so, they are showing us how they intend to rule. And in behaving as if the Democratic Party and its many millions of voters lack legitimacy, they have left the Democrats no choice in return but to engage in a high-stakes competition on legitimacy grounds, in which the goal is to illuminate and discredit the Republican Party for its war on democracy and embrace of violence to gain political power. Such politics means not simply beating the GOP in the next election, but systematically discrediting and delegitimizing it as a political entity.

A Court Supremely Indifferent to America's Democracy Crisis

I wrote last week about how the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has put its thumb on the scales of justice in favor of Donald Trump and the indictments he faces for attempting to subvert the 2020 election. At a minimum, by ostentatiously and unnecessarily doing a deep dive into questions of presidential immunity, the Court is ensuring that Trump’s trial will not conclude — nor very possibly even begin — prior to November’s election. This would deny the American public a verdict as to whether the president indeed engaged in criminal activity; nearly as destructively, it would hide from view the evidence that Justice Department prosecutors have amassed around the former president’s attempted coup that in itself should be available to voters.

But in appearing to entertain the most outrageous claims of presidential power made by Trump’s lawyers, the conservative justices demonstrated sympathy for concepts that would transform the president into an unchecked king — able to assassinate rivals, defy court rulings, and disregard Congress. Instead of concentrating on the case at hand — Trump’s attempt to discard the election results — they expressed concern over theoretical future presidents who might be unduly constrained by the possibility of future prosecution. This line of thinking led to Justice Samuel Alito’s nonsensical but ominous musings that future presidents might have an incentive to commit crimes to remain in office in order to avoid prosecutions once they’re out of power, and so maybe it would be better to simply give them license to abuse their power in the first place lest they be tempted to abuse their power.

Ladies and gentlemen, the keenest legal minds of the land at work! It is perhaps best that mere citizens try not to look too closely at the glory of their insights, lest the celestial brilliance make us go blind.

Peer beneath the gobbledygook, though, and you see a more straightforward logic: justices grasping for a rationale to help a president of their own party regain the White House, and to aggrandize his powers once he does. Put in the harshest possible light, you might say that the conservatives on the Supreme Court appear interested in joining the insurrection which Donald Trump started after he lost the election, and which he’s never fully abandoned. But even if you cut them a little slack, and allow for argument’s sake that the Court really is interested in higher principle and not at all in sweeping an attempted coup under the rug, you can plainly see how the conservative majority is helping to structure and re-interpret settled law in order to help Trump back into power. They are providing the legalistic cover for a campaign that needs to obscure the president’s criminality from the American people in order to maximize his chances of regaining the White House. In doing so, as I pointed out previously, the Court has made clear that defense of American democracy will require major reforms of the Court to curb the power of a conservative majority whose allegiance is not to American democracy, but to Republican rule.

A recent piece by Michael Podhorzer provides a timely overview of what’s gone wrong with the Supreme Court and the urgent need to address this crisis, charting (very literally, in this case, as he makes use of multiple graphs to illustrate his argument) the growing partisan nature of the Court, as the extremist Federalist Society has been increasingly successful in getting its approved judges appointed to the nation’s highest Court. In doing so, Podhorzer helps us shake off an all-too-easy myopia that overly views the Court in the context of Donald Trump’s past and future presidencies, and reminds us of the longer-term battle going on over the shape and direction of American society. As he puts it, “While it’s accurate to say that the Court is protecting Trump, doing so misses greater stakes, and obscures the motivations of at least a few of the Federalist Society justices, which is to secure for at least a generation what could eventually be called the Dobbs Court.” In other words — as much as the Court is acting to protect Trump, the conservative majority sees Trump as a means to its own political ends. Such ends include the pro-business, pro-Christian agenda of the Federalist Society, and would more broadly advance a reactionary vision of America shared by millions of conservative (and overwhelmingly white) Americans who may well never even have heard of the Federalist Society, but who would agree with its objectives if they had.

Podhorzer rightly identifies the Court’s increasing position as a power center that evades democratic accountability and usurps the roles of our elected branches of government:

Since the Federalist Society was founded in 1982, the Court has transformed from an imperfect arbiter of genuine controversies to an agenda-driven, unelected lawmaking body whose decisions have systematically been opposed by the majority of Americans [. . .] Federalist Society majorities have acted with ever-increasing impunity to leverage the power granted to them by an ever-diminishing proportion of Americans, as reflected by the presidents who nominate them and senators who confirm them. Thus, it’s long past time to stop covering the Court as if it is anything other than an unaccountable super-legislature enacting an unpopular revanchist agenda.

Addressing the Court’s interest in protecting Trump and advancing him to the presidency, Podhorzer notes that a second Trump administration wouldn’t just advance the politics the Court majority is interested in merely in a general sense. Rather, the conservative majority understands that the Court’s own continued power to deeply shape American politics will require a Republican president to appoint conservative successors to the one or more justices statistically likely to retire or pass over the next four years. As he puts it, “It’s difficult to believe that the Federalist Society justices delaying the J6 trial were ignorant or indifferent to the fact that the success of their life’s project is on the line in November.” It’s worth stopping for a moment to consider how truly shocking this observation is. Not only is the Court acting in a blatantly political way — looking to protect its own political goals and aggrandize its own power — it is openly willing to pervert its interpretation of the law in order to achieve these ends. If the Court’s efforts succeed, and the conservative majority provides the margin of victory for Trump, then it’s vital to remember that long after Trump is gone from the scene, an ultra-conservative Court may well endure. If this isn’t corruption, then nothing is.

Immunity to Common Sense

Though a ruling is still some time off, last week’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court regarding Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity showcased a conservative majority intent on allowing the former chief executive to evade trial and accountability prior to the November elections. As others have noted, conservative justices went out of their way to set aside the actual crimes of which Trump has been accused, and to engage in abstract discussions that demonstrated a lack of interest in confronting the true matter at hand — a lawless former president who attempted a coup and now seeks the presidency a second time, apparently in large part to defeat the various legal efforts to hold him accountable for his many crimes. 

The proceedings provide a flashing alert that Donald Trump, three years out of office, continues to crash through democracy’s guardrails. For those who who sincerely believed that he would surely be prosecuted for his insurrectionary activities at least before the next election (and I count myself among them), they are a dark reminder that the justice system — in toxic combination with a slow-footed and overly deferential U.S. attorney general — is simply failing in its responsibility to protect vital public interests. 

We got a stunning inside look at the lack of concern over Trump’s insurrectionism from the judiciary’s highest court — certainly confirmation that the conservative majority sees no urgency in letting play out, one way or another, the devastating allegations in special prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump. Never has a president been accused of such dire offenses against the rest of us. And yet several justices seemed sincerely interested in considering the question of whether a U.S. president might actually be immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office — despite the fact that such a position is tantamount to annointing the president as a dictator. Adam Serwer summarizes the consequences of such thinking:

Trump’s legal argument is a path to dictatorship. That is not an exaggeration: His legal theory is that presidents are entitled to absolute immunity for official acts. Under this theory, a sitting president could violate the law with impunity, whether that is serving unlimited terms or assassinating any potential political opponents, unless the Senate impeaches and convicts the president. Yet a legislature would be strongly disinclined to impeach, much less convict, a president who could murder all of them with total immunity because he did so as an official act. The same scenario applies to the Supreme Court, which would probably not rule against a chief executive who could assassinate them and get away with it.

And yet, despite these absurdly anti-democratic implications of Trump’s legal arguments, Vox’s Ian Millhiser concludes that “the striking thing about Thursday’s argument is that most of the Republican justices appeared so overwhelmed by concern that a future president might be hampered by fears of being prosecuted once they leave office, that they completely ignored the risk that an un-prosecutable president might behave like a tyrant.”

Whether that sort of worst-case ruling comes to pass (i.e., presidents are actually kings!), readers of Supreme Court tea leaves like The American Prospect’s Harold Myerson saw in the direction of other questioning that “the Republican justices are likely to send this case back to the federal district court whence it originated, requiring the judge there to rule which of the charges brought against Trump pertain to his presidential duties and must therefore be dismissed, and which do not.” In other words — a delay likely to push the president’s trial past the November election. This will not just deny the public a verdict that could demonstrate, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the GOP nominee is a treasonous insurrectionist under the judgment of the law and not just under the plain reading of the facts and common sense. As Greg Sargent points out at the New Republic, such a delay would also prevent the public from learning, via the trial, various crucial facts about Trump’s efforts to steal the presidency that Jack Smith has collected during his investigation, which in themselves could have a profound effect on the election.

And this gets us to what needs to be stated plainly: a Supreme Court majority that delays Donald Trump’s trial until after the election is a Supreme Court that is at a minimum aiding him in his cover-up of damaging information. But I think we can go a step farther and say that in assisting Donald Trump, the conservative majority would be making his victory more likely — the result of which would undoubtedly be Trump’s dismissal of the charges against him, whatever corrupt actions that might require. Their ultimate opinion, when it arrives, must be judged in this light.

I’ll ante up here and say that the damage is already done, at least as far as the current Court’s at-least-theoretical role in defending democracy. As David Kurtz writes in a damning piece at Talking Points Memo recounting the broader failure of U.S. institutions to hold Trump to account:

The conservative justices had an opportunity to rally to the defense of democracy, to gird the system against further attack, to righteously defend the rule of law, and to protect its own prerogatives and powers against a wannabe tyrant who is counting on them to be his supplicants. They could have drawn a sharp line. They could have summoned indignation and outrage. They could have overlooked their partisan priors in favor of principle – or more cravenly in favor of self-preservation. With the possible and limited exception of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, they did none of that.

They failed in the worst possible way at the most crucial time.

I absolutely share Kurtz’s bitter assessment — the conservative Court’s behavior, in this instance and so many others, represents an outrage upon the American public. Its corruption is dispiriting and gut-wrenching. At the same time, the Court’s bare display of complicity with the Trump-GOP authoritarian project may yet become a crucial pivot point, as its public meaning is not yet solidified. As a first step, I would say that it’s far better to be aware of the reality of where the Court stands in the fight for democracy than to mistakenly rely on it for future defense.

Not only this — in allowing Trump’s lawyers to argue in favor of nonsensical and hideous powers like the president’s ability to assassinate political opponents, and in broadcasting uncanny indifference to Trump’s actual insurrection, the Court has delivered the democratic majority a powerful shock to the system — a shock that should encourage citizens to understand the clear stakes of the 2024 elections. People need to vote, and get their friends and neighbors to vote, and make sure elections officials are given the maximum protection from right-wing extremists seeking to bully and disrupt vote counts.

The Court’s apparent willingness to abet an insurrectionist in his return to the White House might not feel as dramatic as the evisceration of Roe v. Wade, but it broadens our sense of the threat its conservative majority poses — not just overturning fundamental rights, but working to prevent Americans from electing leaders who might defend and restore those rights (a point New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has made in this piece and elsewhere). And so the Court’s behavior here can also be used a cudgel to fight a mounting anti-democratic tide on the right more generally, as it illuminates how the GOP’s antipathy to democracy extends far beyond Donald Trump, to encompass even the supposedly above-it-all Supreme Court and a GOP establishment that has thrown in with his quest for power at all costs, majority rule be damned.

But it’s not enough for individual citizens and organizations to craft a narrative of a ruthless GOP willing to set aside democracy itself to regain power and order American society according to its preferred medieval and racist view of the world. As America’s remaining major pro-democracy party, the Democratic Party, too, has not only tremendous incentives, but an overriding obligation, to call out the Court for its apparent intention to aid Trump’s re-election campaign and to lay the groundwork for a lawless second Trump presidency.

Brian Beutler has been arguing for years that the Democrats need to be far more confrontational in their political battles with the GOP, and he urges the same around the immunity case, writing that, “Democrats [. . .] are the presumptive victims of Supreme Court corruption—the goal of delaying Trump’s trial is to help the GOP in the election—but they are also, at least in theory, the only people in the country with the power to impose consequences on the justices if they ride to Trump’s rescue and he loses anyhow.” Not only would this alert the public to the stakes, it would also stand some chance of letting the Supreme Court majority know that their outlandish, pro-authoritarian behavior will be met with pro-democratic consequences, up to and including expansion of the Supreme Court to balance out the GOP hacks who constitute its majority.

Beutler also points out that Democrats can throw their weight around more without pressing the Court to reach a certain conclusion, opining that, “It’d be worthy of Democrats to point out that Republicans are serving up lies to exempt Trump from accountability. This would in no way obligate Democrats to opine on the correct verdict. All they need to do is establish that delay equals coverup.” Such positioning would be a win-win for Democrats: in the best case by thwarting the most dangerous Supreme Court ruling, and in the worst, by setting the public stage for excoriating and ultimately rolling it back (Beutler elaborated some of these points in a subsequent piece that can be found here).

Again and again, though, Democrats and the Biden administration have shied away from a more aggressive approach to the Republican Party, even as the GOP has openly transformed into an authoritarian juggernaut. It’s fair to ask if that approach still makes sense (if it ever did) when the GOP presidential candidate has literally argued before the Supreme Court that presidents have dictatorial powers — a position which would not only absolve Donald Trump of his many prior crimes, but that showcases his lawless vision for a second term. It’s also fair to ask whether that restrained Democratic approach makes sense when an extremist right-wing Supreme Court listens to such assertions with apparent sympathy and signals that it would be no more than a rubber stamp for whatever deranged actions Trump might take if he returns to office. With the next president facing fair odds of being able to appoint one or more justices to the Court, rarely if ever has there been such a proper time to make the case for Republican extremism and the centrality of the Supreme Court to that extremism.