Opponents of Donald Trump find ourselves on the eve of an election that we’ve desperately wanted and worried about going on four years now. Because he has turned out to be more monstrous a president than most of us feared, many are legitimately concerned that this awful man will manage to corrupt and steal his way to a second term. These efforts have in fact been underway for some time, from Trump’s efforts to discredit mail-in ballots (at least when they’re mailed by Democrats) to his apparent plan to declare himself the winner of the election if he’s ahead in the vote count on November 3 (this might be termed the “counting votes is stealing votes” gambit).
But it’s self-defeating to the point of masochism to worry that Trump is actually doing the very things that have driven so many million of Americans to loathe and oppose him. Of course he is going to try to cheat his way to a second term. Trump is going to what he does. So while we inevitably worry about Trump being just as bad as we know he is, and do everything possible to publicize and foil what could accurately be termed a slow-motion coup attempt, we’d also be well served to take a step back and recognize the harsh reality of our political crisis.
First, it’s not simply Donald Trump who seeks to deny Americans the basic recourse of kicking him out of office. There should be no gauzy takes that keep us from seeing how dire our situation is. Trump has managed to retain power because many millions have continued to support him even as his irredeemably authoritarian and racist character revealed itself in fresh and revolting ways during his term in office. At least 40% of the country appears fine with not allowing the opposition party’s vote to count; many millions no longer recognize bonds of citizenship with those from across the political aisle; the obviously racist views of so many of Trump’s supporters is a painful and dispiriting reality of our country.
But a politics that sees our fellow Americans as the enemy is a Trumpian politics. Our anger instead should be directed at the vessel for this rancid movement. At this late stage, no ambiguity remains as to the complicity of the Republic Party in the president’s corruption, racism, authoritarianism, and incompetence. Donald Trump adopted the worst of what Republicanism offered, and the party has repaid him in kind. Senators quake in fear at a harsh word from their leader; representatives disseminate Russian propaganda to aid him; bootlicker governors model themselves as mini-Trumps, dispensing at the state level the same murderous ignorance about the coronavirus pandemic that the president propagates nationally. They have embraced his white supremacist instincts, whether by support of immigration policies that aim to halt the influx of brown-skinned newcomers, or by unquestioning support of racist policing that has left a butcher’s bill of slain African-Americans and other minorities as its inevitable outcome. They have stood loyal while he first denied the deadliness of the coronavirus, then fumbled the response so badly that more than 230,000 of our fellow citizens have died through his homicidal ineptitude. They have devolved into a strongman-worshipping group of yes-(mostly) men that is familiar to scholars of failed democracies. Their fealty to a sociopathic president is literally killing us.
So while there is much to worry about going into Election Day, we can’t discount the one great gift Donald Trump has given us: the gift of clarity. We can accept the demolition of our political union, our right to vote, our collective health, and our economy — or we can band together to reject and repudiate democracy’s enemies. Hearteningly, a majority rejected Trump in 2016, and an ever larger majority looks set to reject him in 2020. But whereas we were to some extent not fully awake to the dangers in 2016, we certainly are now — and to the need not just to reject Trumpism, but to reaffirm and revive our democratic government and society at all levels. It can be difficult to conceive of the grandness of what has been happening over the last weeks, trapped as most of us are in semi-lockdowns and the often solitary act of casting a ballot, but don’t let appearances fool you. Democracy’s army is on the march, and we need to recognize and celebrate our collective power: a show of strength that will begin with a tidal wave of votes for Joe Biden and the Democrats on Tuesday, but hardly ends there. Just as Donald Trump and the Republicans have tried to change the rules of the game, substituting hate for debate, ballot suppression for earning votes, and incitement of violence for peaceful discussion, democracy’s march will not end on November 3, or after Joe Biden is declared the winner of the election. There can be no letting up, now that we know the lengths to which Trump and the GOP will go to force white supremacist, authoritarian minority rule on the country. There is no point in underestimating our collective power, the righteousness of our cause, the contempt in which Trump and his enablers must be held, or our absolute claim to self-government and leaders who not only adhere to, but actively promote, a greater democracy in every state, in every county, in every city and town. Against the barbarism of white supremacy, against a president who thinks he’s a king, against the men with guns who act like they own the whole damn place, against a pinched and retrograde idea of taking what you can get and screw everyone else, we will give no quarter. We are done with the con that steals our future.