General Emergency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slick Vance Stumbles With January 6 Complicity

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

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

What We Talk About When We Talk About January 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debate Prep

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

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

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

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

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

Aliens in America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Unconventional Convention Aimed to Rouse a Strong American Majority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democratic Enthusiasm for Harris Springs from Renewed Imaginings of Our Future

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

Was I ever wrong, and never more gladly so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weirdo Vance Gets Dems Wired

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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