As Donald Trump has cleared the field of his GOP opponents — Nicki Haley’s odds at this point seem hopeless, save for Trump being convicted and sent to jail for one of his many crimes — and as Joe Biden deals with a hack job attack by a partisan Republican prosecutor, it’s more urgent than ever to properly characterize Trump’s third bid for the presidency. With a campaign overtly dedicated to retribution against his enemies, reliant on the instigation of threat and violence by his most ardent followers, a clear agenda of lawless rule should he re-gain office, and a pre-emptive declaration that he will not accept the election results if they don’t go his way, Donald Trump is mounting an insurrection in the guise of a presidential campaign. And with his frequent callbacks to the justice and rightness of the January 6 attack on the Capitol and his previous broader effort to overturn the 2020 election outcome, we should view Trump’s current quest for power as a de facto continuation of his initial 2020-21 insurrection, only now swaddled in the propriety granted by the acceptance and forgiveness of his heinous actions by both Republican politicos and the MAGA base.
Indeed, complementing Trump’s effort are currents of insurrectionism and sabotage by the Republican Party, whether it’s Representative Elise Stefanik refusing to say whether the GOP-controlled House would certify a 2024 Biden election victory and echoing Trump in her reference to January 6 criminals as “hostages,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott (joined by two dozen other GOP governors) challenging established federal powers over the border in favor of retro, pre-Civil War states’ rights hokum, or the GOP scuttling a border deal with the Democrats in order to advance Donald Trump’s talking points and sow a sense of chaos at the southern border.
To help foreground and discredit this insurrectionary movement, Democrats and other supporters of democracy should go for the rhetorical jugular and remind voters that Trump’s power over the GOP rests in significant part on threats of violence by himself and his followers. Vox recently published a staggering article by Zack Beauchamp illustrating how threats against fellow GOP politicians have been key to Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. But of course Trump has also turned to applying such threats to the larger body politic; as Jamelle Bouie observes, “He can use the threat of violence to make officials and ordinary election workers think twice about their decisions,” reflecting an overall effort “to use the fervor of his followers and acolytes to tilt the playing field in his direction.” And violence is what Trump promises to unleash upon America in a second term, with his talk of shooting shoplifters and protestors, rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants, and creating an atmosphere of menace that cows the freedom and aspirations of African-Americans and other racial and sexual minorities.
Democrats also need to draw a line from this current and planned violence to the lawlessness that would be integral to a second Trump term based on retribution, dominance, and plunder. Threats to prosecute political opponents for no reason except their opposition to Trump; the pardons of January 6 insurrectionists; the planned firing of civil servants to be replaced with Trump lackeys — all point in the direction of authoritarianism and dictatorship.
Both the violence and the planned lawlessness are critical to keep in the forefront not only to mobilize voters to cast their ballots for Democrats, but also in order to drive home that a Trump presidency would simply lack political legitimacy. Democrats need to insist that political power gained by violence and threats should never be accepted by the American majority, just as a person robbed at gunpoint should never accept that the money in the robber’s hand now legally belongs to the robber. Such a legitimacy argument serves two strategic purposes: it lays the groundwork for mass opposition to dictatorship in case Trump were to win the election by eking out another Electoral College victory, and it prepares the ground for the near-inevitable Republican insurrection that will surely arise even if Biden wins big in 2024.
Democrats cannot proceed as if this election will result in either the total downfall of American democracy or the shining, unchallenged triumph of Joe Biden and the vanquishment of Donald Trump. Should the worst come to pass and Trump win, Democrats need to prosecute the fight to save American democracy in a way that maximizes the chances of doing so — hence my insistence that they lay the groundwork for the illegitimacy of a Trump administration on anti-democratic grounds now. Likewise — and I believe and hope this to be the likelier election outcome — Democrats must steel themselves, and the public, for a sustained fight against a much more open GOP insurrection against constitutional government should Joe Biden prevail.