The stakes
By 
Dorothy Thompson, author of “Who Goes Nazi? (1941).
I rarely plead with people to take 15 minutes out of their day to read a long newspaper article, but I’m pleading with you to do just that, and read all of this Thomas Edsall compendium of views of top political scientists, historians, and a legal experts, regarding what a second Trump administration would mean. (Gift link).
I also know people here are well aware of the stakes, but all of us know plenty of people who aren’t, or whose awareness is sufficiently vague and unfocused that they need some sort of fairly concise yet still very detailed summary of why Trump and the Republican party that he has completely taken over represent an existential threat to the survival of liberal democracy in this country.
This still sounds like hyperbole when it’s written out in plain terms, but it isn’t. Here are a couple of excerpts from the piece, but it really does need to be read in full to produce the necessary effect on the Netflix and chill voters:
“Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters,” Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, writes in a forthcoming article in Liberties,
have made it clear that they will not accept defeat in November any more than they did when Trump lost four years ago. They believe that Trump is the one true legitimate president, that those who refuse to accept this fundamental fact are the true deniers, and that any result other than Trump’s restoration would be a thwarting of history’s purpose and a diabolical act of treason.
The authoritarian imperative has moved beyond Trumpian narcissism and the cultish MAGA fringe to become an article of faith from top to bottom inside the utterly transformed Republican Party, which Trump totally commands.
Like Wilentz, Laurence Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, does not mince words, writing by email:
All the dangers foreign and domestic posed by Trump’s cruelly vindictive, self-aggrandizing, morally unconstrained, reality-defying character — as evidenced in his first presidential term and in his unprecedented refusal to accept his 2020 electoral loss — would be magnified many times over in any subsequent term by three factors.
First, he has systematically eroded the norms and the institutional guardrails that initially set boundaries on the damage he and his now more carefully chosen loyalist enablers are poised to do in carrying out the dangerous project to which they are jointly committed.
Second, their failures to insulate themselves from electoral and legal constraints during the dry run of 2017-21 have led them to formulate far more sophisticated and less vulnerable plans for their second attempt at consolidating permanent control of the apparatus of our fragile republic.
And third, their capture of the Supreme Court and indeed much of the federal judiciary has put in place devastating precedents like the immunity ruling of July 1 that will license a virtually limitless autocratic power — if, but only if, they are not stopped during the epic struggle that will reach one climax this Nov. 5 and another next Jan. 6.
The most important reason a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first is that if he does win this year, Trump will have triumphed with the electorate’s full knowledge that he has been criminally charged with 88 felonies and convicted of 34 of them (so far); that he has promised to “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family”; and that he intends to “totally obliterate the deep state” by gutting civil service protections for the 50,000 most important jobs in the federal work force, a central tenet of what he calls his “retribution” agenda.
Many Very Serious People wildly underestimated how bad the first Trump term would be, but there’s every reason to think a second term (not to mention a third, etc.) would be far, far worse.
Trump is very stupid and very lazy, but he still possesses a kind of feral cunning, a bottomless appetite for revenge driven by his sociopathic narcissism, and now an enormous cadre of totally dedicated zealots who are smarter and harder working than he is. These people are genuine radical reactionaries and aspiring fascists (again, these are not exaggerations), and they know this is their one best chance to overthrow the government via quasi-legal or semi-legal or flatly illegal means.
Timothy Snyder, who knows more about the Stalin and Hitler regimes than almost anyone alive, is not mincing words:
Democracy depends upon example, and Trump sets the worst possible one. He has openly admired dictators his entire life. He would encourage Xi and Putin. The Russians make completely clear that a Trump presidency is their hope for victory in Ukraine. Allowing Russia to win that war, which I think is Trump’s likely orientation, destabilizes Europe, encourages China toward aggression in the Pacific, and undermines the rule of law everywhere. . . Trump is in the classic dictatorial position: He needs to die in bed holding all executive power to stay out of prison. This means that he will do whatever he can to gain power, and once in power will do all that he can to never let it go. This is a basic incentive structure which underlies everything else. It is entirely inconsistent with democracy.
Edsall also does an excellent job of highlighting how the plutocratic class, which held Trump at arrm’s length eight years ago, is now all in for their tax breaks and deregulation.
As for Trump himself, I realize it’s practically impossible to be shocked any more, so coarsened are we all by the endless barbarities and inanities of this age, but this kind of thing could not possibly be more of a red flag. Trump refers to Josh Shapiro as “the highly over-rated Jewish governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.” The reactionary centrists will take comfort in the fact that he didn’t say “the Jew governor” plus did you know his own daughter is Jewish now? but referring to a political opponent as a Jew in a completely gratuitous way is straight up Nazi language.
I’m as thrilled as anyone by the transformation that Kamala Harris’s candidacy has wrought on the most important election in American political history, but enthusiasm and optimism needs to be enhanced with the cold resolve that the terrifying vision Edsall lays out should inspire in anyone who has not already gone fascist in America 2024.
. . .
I should have mentioned that Edsall includes this not too subtle dig against his own employer:
“Yet, Wilentz writes, “many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup, a staggering failure to recognize Trump’s stated agenda.”