It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly a decade since Donald Trump’s infamous 2015 ride down the escalator at Trump Tower, where, following brief remarks featuring his signature blend of bombast and racist fear-mongering, he announced that he was running to be the next president of the United States: “There’s been no crowd like this…. Our country is in serious trouble…. When do we beat Mexico at the border?… They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
At Trump’s first—and probably only—presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in mid-September, the twice-impeached former president, now also a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, demonstrated that, since leaving office, he has become only more vindictive and deranged. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” he ranted, apropos of nothing. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris, herself a regular target of Trump’s racism, laughed incredulously at his shocking falsehoods about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, which echoed a right-wing conspiracy theory propagated by his running mate, Sen. J. D. Vance. Harris’s successful strategy of baiting the former president into a series of tantrums and non-sequiturs underscored for the debate’s sixty-seven million viewers Trump’s fundamental indecency and obvious unfitness for office.
Throughout this year’s campaign, Trump has doubled down on his career-long tactic of exploiting racial fears and resentments for his own advantage. Yet polls say nearly 45 percent of the electorate still intend to vote for him in November. Given the peculiarities of our antiquated electoral system, in which you can win more votes and still lose, that may be enough to get him back into the White House. Trump has signaled that he would dedicate a second term to detaining and deporting immigrants, destroying regulations concerning the environment, health care, and education, and solidifying his grip on power by firing civil servants and replacing them with loyalists. “I won’t be a dictator, except on day one,” he told Sean Hannity. Trump’s autocratic rhetoric is more than just campaign bluster: the former president, invoking the example of “very smart” strongmen like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Viktor Orbán, has threatened to imprison political opponents and subject them to “military tribunals.” He has encouraged vigilantism, promised to absolve police officers who break the law, and mused about dispatching federal troops to Democrat-led cities to “deter crime” and round up migrants for deportation. It is, by his own account, a “bloody story.” Given the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision this summer granting presidents immunity for “official acts,” there would be little anyone could do to stop him.
Trump and the Republican Party know that their agenda is broadly unpopular, despite its veneer of populism. That’s why the former president has been so quick to disavow Project 2025, which, besides its extreme proposals on immigration and various social issues, mostly amounts to a reaffirmation of the GOP’s traditional agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy and gutting programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. It’s also why, in the wake of Trump’s 2020 loss and his failed attempt to overturn the election during the certification process on January 6, 2021, the GOP has systematically weakened, at the local and state levels, the process that ensures Americans’ votes are properly counted, recorded, and certified. Because this year’s election is likely to be very close, the winner may not be clear on election night. Marc Elias, the lawyer who successfully led the Democratic effort to counter the waves of frivolous Republican lawsuits after the 2020 election, has been hired by the Harris campaign to prepare for similar legal challenges this year. Elias predicts that Trump will again preemptively declare victory regardless of the results. And he has warned that such efforts will be “more competent than they were before.” It will be up to election officials, legislatures, and the courts to make sure they are not more successful.
It is unfortunate that the 2024 election, like the two previous ones, should mostly be about the unique danger posed by Donald Trump, and that once again the results will likely be determined by just a few thousand votes in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The country and the world face serious challenges that Trump’s issue-light candidacy has obscured or distorted. Too many Americans are now struggling to afford housing, medicine, and even food. The wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza threaten to grow into larger conflicts involving neighboring countries and, possibly, the United States. China is rattling its saber in Taiwan and the Philippines, testing the strength of U.S. alliances. Meanwhile, the climate crisis grows worse by the year. Kamala Harris’s record is far from perfect, and much of her agenda remains rather vague. When it comes to the atrocities taking place in Gaza, she has offered noble-sounding condolences but promised no real change from the unacceptable status quo; should she win in November, that will have to change.
But that is tomorrow’s problem, if we are lucky. Right now, what matters more than anything is that Americans disappoint the GOP, which always hopes for a low turnout, and show up to the polls in record numbers. The best answer to the civic nihilism and despair that now imperil our hyperpolarized country is for American voters to reassert their agency in the face of a right-wing personality cult that would prefer they see themselves as passive subjects, not self-governing citizens. As another former president likes to say, don’t boo (or shrug or moan). Vote.
