How Donald Trump Won Everywhere. by Derek Thompson

How Donald Trump Won Everywhere. by Derek Thompson

Nov 7, 2024 at 6:21 AM

In 2022, pollsters and political analysts predicted a red wave in the midterms that didn’t materialize. Last night, polls anticipated a whisker-thin election, and instead we got a red wave that carried Donald Trump to victory.

The breadth of Trump’s improvement over 2020 is astonishing. In the previous two elections, we saw narrow demographic shifts—for example, non-college-educated white people moved toward Trump in 2016, and high-income suburban voters raced toward Biden in 2020. But last night’s election apparently featured a more uniform shift toward Trump, according to a county-by-county analysis shared with me by Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University. The “really simple story,” he said, “is that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.”

Trump improved his margins not only in swing states but also in once comfortable Democratic strongholds. In 2020, Biden won New Jersey by 16 points. In 2024, Harris seems poised to win by just five points. Harris ran behind Biden in rural Texas border towns, where many Hispanic people live, and in rural Kentucky, where very few Hispanic people live. She ran behind Biden in high-income suburbs, such as Loudoun County, Virginia, and in counties with college towns, including Dane County (home to the University of Wisconsin) and Centre County (home to Penn State).

Perhaps most surprising, Trump improved his margins in some of America’s largest metro areas. In the past two cycles, Democrats could comfort themselves by counting on urban counties to continue moving left even as rural areas shifted right. That comfort was dashed last night, at least among counties with more than 90 percent of their results reported. In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted 12 points right, Queens County shifted 21 points right, and Bronx County shifted 22 points right. In Florida, Orange County (Orlando) shifted 10 points right and Miami-Dade shifted 19 points right. In Texas, Harris County (Houston) and Bexar County (San Antonio) both shifted eight points right and Dallas County shifted 10 points right. In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County shifted five points right, Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Illinois’ Cook County (Chicago) shifted 11 points right.

Other than Atlanta, which moved left, many of the largest U.S. metros moved right even more than many rural areas. You cannot explain this shift by criticizing specific campaign decisions (If only she had named Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro her vice president…). You can’t pin this shift exclusively on, say, Arab Americans in Michigan who voted for Jill Stein, or Russian trolls who called in bomb threats to Georgia.

A better, more comprehensive way to explain the outcome is to conceptualize 2024 as the second pandemic election. Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020. In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.

The pandemic was a health emergency, followed by an economic emergency. Both trends were global. But only the former was widely seen as international and directly caused by the pandemic. Although Americans understood that millions of people were dying in Europe and Asia and South America, they did not have an equally clear sense that supply-chain disruptions, combined with an increase in spending, sent prices surging around the world. As I reported earlier this year, inflation at its peak exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, 10 percent in Italy, and 20 percent in Argentina, Turkey, and Ethiopia.

Inflation proved as contagious as a coronavirus. Many voters didn’t directly blame their leaders for a biological nemesis that seemed like an act of god, but they did blame their leaders for an economic nemesis that seemed all too human in its origin. And the global rise in prices has created a nightmare for incumbent parties around the world. The ruling parties of several major countries, including the U.K., Germany, and South Africa, suffered historic defeats this year. Even strongmen, such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, lost ground in an election that many experts assumed would be a rousing coronation.

This has been a year of global anti-incumbency within a century of American anti-incumbency. Since 2000, every midterm and presidential election has seen a change in control of the House, Senate, or White House except for 2004 (when George W. Bush eked out a win) and 2012 (when Barack Obama won reelection while Republicans held the House). The U.S. appears to be in an age of unusually close elections that swing back and forth, in which every sitting president spends the majority of his term with an underwater approval rating.

There will be a rush to blame Kamala Harris—the candidate, her campaign, and her messaging. But there is no escaping the circumstances that Harris herself could never outrun. She is the vice president of a profoundly unpopular president, whose approval was laid low by the same factors—such as inflation and anti-incumbency bias—that have waylaid ruling parties everywhere. An analysis by the political scientist John Sides predicted that a sitting president with Biden’s approval rating should be expected to win no more than 48 percent of the two-party vote. As of Wednesday afternoon, Kamala Harris is currently projected to win about 47.5 percent of the popular vote. Her result does not scream underperformance. In context, it seems more like a normal performance.

A national wave of this magnitude should, and likely will, inspire some soul searching among Democrats. Preliminary CNN exit polls show that Trump is poised to be the first GOP candidate to win Hispanic men in at least 50 years; other recent surveys have pointed to a dramatic shift right among young and nonwhite men. One interpretation of this shift is that progressives need to find a cultural message that connects with young men. Perhaps. Another possibility is that Democrats need a fresh way to talk about economic issues that make all Americans, including young men, believe that they are more concerned about a growth agenda that increases prosperity for all.

If there is cold comfort for Democrats, it is this: We are in an age of politics when every victory is Pyrrhic, because to gain office is to become the very thing—the establishment, the incumbent—that a part of your citizenry will inevitably want to replace. Democrats have been temporarily banished to the wilderness by a counterrevolution, but if the trends of the 21st century hold, then the very anti-incumbent mechanisms that brought them defeat this year will eventually bring them back to power.

Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost. by Annie Lowrey

Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost. by Annie Lowrey 

Nov 7, 2024 at 4:57 AM

Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. He has inflation to thank.

In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, Americans said the economy was bad—and the economy was bad because prices were too high. This was always going to be a problem for Kamala Harris. “Excess” inflation—defined as the cumulative growth of prices in one presidential term compared with the term preceding it—is highly predictive of electoral outcomes, according to the Northwestern economist Robert Gordon. It is a crucial part of how voters decide whether they are better off and want to stick with the incumbent. The measure strongly pointed to a Trump victory. Indeed, since the global post-pandemic inflation spike began, ruling parties around the world, on the left and the right, have been toppled.

Still, before this week, Democrats had good reasons to believe that they might be spared the inflation backlash. Households’ spending power improved more and faster in the United States than in other countries. On paper, families were doing better than they were before the pandemic, particularly at the low end of the income spectrum. Real wages—meaning wages adjusted for prices—jumped 13.2 percent for the lowest-income workers from 2019 to 2023; real wages for the highest-income workers climbed 4.4 percent.

But voters do not make their decisions at the polls on the basis of price-adjusted time series. Nor do they seem to appreciate pundits and politicians telling them that their lived experience is somehow incorrect—that they are truly doing great; they just don’t know it.

Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high. Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper, but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since COVID hit, and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high.

In response to inflation, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates. Inflation statistics do not include the cost of borrowing, but many Americans experienced higher rates—the supposed cure for higher prices—as making costs worse. Mortgage rates more than doubled from their pandemic-era level, adding insult to home-buying injury. The interest payment on a new-car loan has grown nearly as much. Credit-card APRs climbed to all-time highs, making many families’ buffer against month-to-month earnings and spending changes a costly one. If you include the cost of borrowing, inflation peaked at 18 percent, not 9 percent.

When asked over the past few years about their personal financial stressors, however, voters mostly haven’t focused on housing or auto loans. They overwhelmingly brought up everyday purchases, above all the price of groceries and fast food. Food inflation outpaced the overall rate for much of the Biden administration; in 2022, when inflation was 6.5 percent, the price of groceries grew by 11.8 percent. The price hikes cooled off in 2023, but prices themselves remained far higher than Americans were used to: Margarine, eggs, peanut butter, crackers, and bread all cost more than 40 percent more than they did just a few years ago. That everyday indignity seems to be what made inflation so salient for voters. The mental math families were tasked with felt excruciating. The sticker shock remained shocking.

The optimistic story for the Harris campaign was that, after a year of subdued price growth, the American people would have gotten used to higher bills and appreciated the earning power they gained from the tight labor market. Instead, anger at inflation lingered, even among tens of millions of working-class Americans who had gotten wealthier. This is not a purely economic story; it’s a psychological one too. People interpret wage gains as a product of their own effort and high costs as a policy problem that the president is supposed to solve. Going to the polls, voters still ranked the economy as their No. 1 issue, inflation as the No. 1 economic problem, and Trump as their preferred candidate to deal with it. In interviews, many voters told me they felt as if Democrats were gaslighting them by insisting that they were thriving.

Voters who expect Trump’s victory to herald a return to 2019 prices or relief from the cost-of-living crisis might be due for disappointment, though. Trump’s signature economic proposal of huge global tariffs would immediately raise the cost of household goods. And his promise to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants could create a labor shortage that would raise the cost of food, construction, home health care, and child care. He has offered no serious plan to address the deep, tangled problems that have made a middle-class life so unobtainable for so many Americans. Those problems preceded the Biden administration, and they will outlast the second Trump administration too.  

What Trump Understood, and Harris Did Not. by David A. Graham

What Trump Understood, and Harris Did Not. by David A. Graham 

Nov 7, 2024 at 1:54 AM

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that won him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was on flagrant display in the past couple of weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. For example, Trump promised to both whip inflation and also institute enormous tariffs, a combination nearly all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than soothing the economy. But in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.

Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.

Harris won praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the immediate weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had spent months warning darkly about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking—explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic pain of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on revving and restructuring the economy after COVID, and treated inflation more as a transitory annoyance than a long-term danger. But also, it seems to have concluded that it lacked a good answer to inflation. The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.

In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was offered chances to do so, she demurred. In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections. Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either. Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.

In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that. Having clearly promised to fix the problem and vanquished his enemies, he’ll now be able to declare a swift victory.

Blame Biden. by Tyler Austin Harper

Blame Biden. by Tyler Austin Harper 

Nov 7, 2024 at 4:57 AM

The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams once observed that alienation is not the loss of an old homeland, but the discovery of a new homeland that casts the former in a more dismal light. Today, the country indeed looks alien. The America many of us believed we knew now appears stranger in retrospect: The anger and resentment we may have thought was pitched at a simmer turned out to be at a rollicking boil. And one of liberals’ most cherished shibboleths from 2016—that Trumpism is a movement for aggrieved white men—unraveled in the face of a realignment that saw the GOP appear to give birth to a multiracial working-class movement. A second Trump presidency is the result of this misjudgment.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and much of it will be directed at Kamala Harris. Rightly so. Her campaign strategy was often confounding. Harris gambled on suburban-Republican support, which she tried to juice by touring with Liz Cheney and moving right on the border, a strategy that many warned was questionable. Meanwhile, in her quest to bring these new conservative voters into the Democratic fold, Harris neglected many of the voters the party has long relied on. She took far too long to reach out to Black men—despite a year’s worth of polling that said she was losing their support—and when she finally did, she had little to offer them but slapdash policies and half-baked promises. It was the same story for Hispanic men. Despite polling showing Donald Trump increasing his Hispanic support, Harris largely ignored the problem until a month before Election Day, when she stitched together a condescending last-minute “Hombres con Harris” push. As for Arab American voters, she and her surrogates couldn’t be bothered to do much more than lecture them.

The results speak for themselves: Trump won a stunning victory in a heavily Black county in North Carolina and carried the largest Arab-majority city, Dearborn, Michigan. Early exit polls suggest that he doubled his Black support in Wisconsin and won Hispanic men by 10 points. Meanwhile, Harris’s scheme to run up the score in the suburbs plainly failed to bear fruit: She underperformed Biden’s numbers with these voters. Simply put, almost nothing about the Harris game plan worked. But as easy as it is to play Monday-morning (or rather, Wednesday-morning) quarterback—and her dubious campaigning provides plenty of material to work with—the reality is that Harris was probably doomed from the jump.

The reason is that she had an 81-year-old albatross hanging around her neck: Joe Biden. When Biden got into the 2020 presidential race, he said he was motivated to defeat the man who blamed “both sides” for a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Five years later, Biden’s inability to see his own limitations handed that same man the White House once more. Nobody bears more responsibility for Trump’s reascension to the presidency than the current president. This failure lies at his feet.

Biden was supposed to be a one-term candidate. During his 2019 campaign, he heavily signaled that he would not run again if he won. “He is going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection,” one of his advisers declared. Biden himself promised to be a “transition” candidate, holding off Trump for four years while making room for a fresh Democratic challenger in 2024. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said at a Michigan campaign event with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of those promising younger Democrats Biden was ostensibly making room for.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years.

The idea that Americans would vote for a man who they overwhelmingly thought was too old and cognitively infirm stretched reason to its breaking point. And yet Biden and his enablers in the Democratic Party doubled down on magical thinking. This was a species of madness worthy of King Lear shaking his fist before the encroaching storm. And like Lear, what the current president ultimately raged against was nature itself—that final frailty, aging and decline—as he stubbornly clung to the delusion that he could outrun human biology.

Nature won, as it always does. After flouting the will of his own voters, after his party did everything in its power to clear the runway for his reelection bid, and after benefiting from an army of commentators and superfans who insisted that mounting video evidence of his mental slips were “cheap fakes,” Biden crashed and burned at the debate in June. He hung on for another month, fueling the flames of scandal and intraparty revolt and robbing his successor of badly needed time to begin campaigning. And yet when he finally did stand down, Biden World immediately spun up the just-so story that the president is an honorable man who stepped aside for the good of the country.

He did not stand down soon enough. The cake was baked. The powers that be decided the hour was too late for a primary or contested convention, so an unpopular president was replaced with an unpopular vice president, who wasted no time in reminding America why her own presidential bid failed just a few years before. The limitations of Harris’s campaign are now laid bare for all to see, but her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.

Harris could not distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation and the southern border. She could not distance herself from his unpopular foreign policy in the Middle East. She could not break from him while she simultaneously served as his deputy. And she could not tell an obvious truth—that the sitting U.S. president is not fit for office—when asked by reporters, and so she was forced into Orwellian contortions. If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark.

There Is No Constitutional Mandate for Fascism. by Adam Serwer

There Is No Constitutional Mandate for Fascism. by Adam Serwer 

Nov 7, 2024 at 1:54 AM

Former President Donald Trump won a sweeping victory in the Electoral College, four years after executing multiple schemes to overthrow an election he lost and seize power by force, and months after being convicted of state crimes in New York. He ran a race of slander and lies against immigrants and his political opponents, vowing to seize dictatorial powers in a campaign of vengeance.  

But he won. When all the votes are counted, he may not have won the popular vote, but he will have won a decisive victory in the Electoral College nonetheless. Behind him are Republican Party apparatchiks who see the devotion of Trump’s followers as a vehicle for their most extreme ideological schemes, including national bans on abortion, a mass deportation that could wreck the economy and subject Americans of any immigration status to invasive state scrutiny and force, and an immense distribution of income upward. The Democrats’ reward for steering the economy out of the post-pandemic economic crisis will be watching their opponent claim credit for the prosperity that their work created—an economy unencumbered by inflation and the high interest rates once needed to tame it. If Trump seems popular now, he will likely be much more popular in a year.

Trump will claim a popular mandate for everything he does. He did that when he eked out a narrow Electoral College victory in 2016, and he will do it now. But there is no constitutional mandate for authoritarianism. No matter what the Roberts Supreme Court says, the president is not a king, and he is not entitled to ignore the law in order to do whatever he pleases.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

The Trump administration’s record of union busting, repealing workplace regulations, and cutting the welfare state to enrich the already wealthy will have few obstacles. The coterie of extremists that surrounds Trump has a radical conception of what America should be that includes suppressing the speech and expression of their political opponents; a racial hierarchy entitled to legal protection and enforcement; a society in which women’s bodies are treated as state property and LGBTQ people have few rights that others need respect. They will have a willing partner in an already extreme-right Supreme Court, which will be emboldened to enable this agenda of discrimination, deportation, and domination, using a fictionalized historical jurisprudence to justify it.

The Biden administration sought to bring down the temperature of the Trump era by offering aid to families, revitalizing American manufacturing, and easing inflation without increasing unemployment. That politics brought them few rewards, and the Democrats are unlikely to pursue such an agenda again, if they ever return to power. Trump has expressed admiration for nationalist strongmen such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who holds power in a country that still has elections but where there is little chance of the opposition succeeding, because both the state and social levers of power are under the purview of one man. The Trump entourage will return with more detailed plans for authoritarian governance; perhaps the only guardrail they now face is that they prize loyalty over genuine expertise. But fewer people will be willing to stand up to Trump than last time.

I believe that, as in previous eras when the authoritarian strain in American politics was ascendant, the time will come when Americans will have to face the question of why democracy was so meaningless to them that they chose a man who tried to overthrow their government to lead it. They’ll have to decide why someone who slandered blameless immigrants as pet-eating savages and vowed to deport them for the crime of working hard and contributing to their community, something conservatives claim they want from newcomers, should lead a nation where all are supposed to be created equal. They’ll have to determine why a country conceived in liberty would hand power to the person most responsible for subjecting women to state control over their bodies, to the point of treating them as mere reproductive vessels not worth saving until they are bleeding out in an emergency room.

Millions of Americans are already asking themselves these questions this morning. All of the potential answers are disquieting. Choosing Trump in 2016, prior to everything he did as president, was frightening enough. Choosing him in full knowledge of how he would govern is worse. But there is no sunset on the right and duty of self-determination; there are no final victories in a democracy. Americans must continue to ensure that they live in one.

Trump Won. Now What? by David Frum

Trump Won. Now What?

The Atlantic - Politics / by David Frum / Nov 6, 2024 at 8:48 PM

Donald Trump has won, and will become president for the second time. Those who voted for him will now celebrate their victory. The rest of us need to prepare to live in a different America: a country where millions of our fellow citizens voted for a president who knowingly promotes hatred and division; who lies—blatantly, shamelessly—every time he appears in public; who plotted to overturn an election in 2020 and, had he not won, was planning to try again in 2024.  

Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt. Over the past decade, opinion polls have showed Americans’ faith in their institutions waning. But no opinion poll could make this shift in values any clearer than this vote. As a result of this election, the United States will become a different kind of country.

When he was last in the White House, the president-elect ignored ethics and security guidelines, fired inspectors general and other watchdogs, leaked classified information, and used the Department of Homeland Security in the summer of 2020 as if it were the interior ministry of an authoritarian state, deploying U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Coast Guard “troops” in American cities. Trump actively encouraged the January 6, 2021, insurrection at our Capitol. When he left the White House, he stole classified documents and hid them from the FBI.  

Because a critical mass of Americans aren’t bothered by that list of transgressions, any one of which would have tanked the career of another politician, Trump and his vice president–elect, J. D. Vance, will now try to transform the federal government into a loyalty machine that serves the interests of himself and his cronies. This was the essence of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and its architects, all Trump fans, will now endeavor to make it become reality. Trump will surely try again to dismantle America’s civil service, replacing qualified scientists and regulators with partisan operatives. His allies will help him build a Department of Justice that does not serve the Constitution, but instead focuses on harassing and punishing Trump’s enemies. Trump has spoken, in the past, of using the Federal Communications Commission and the Internal Revenue Service to punish media organizations and anyone else who crosses him, and now he will have the chance to try again.

[Read: The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa]

Perhaps the greater and more insidious danger is not political repression or harassment, but corruption. Autocratic populists around the world—in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela—have assaulted institutions designed to provide accountability and transparency in order to shift money and influence to their friends and families, and this may happen in America too. This is not just a theoretical threat. As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous. As a result of this massive shift in the country’s bureaucratic culture, Trump-connected companies will prosper, even as America becomes less safe for consumers, for workers, for children, for all of us.

American foreign policy will also reflect this shift toward kleptocracy. In his first term, Trump abused the powers of his office, corrupting American foreign policy for his personal gain. He pressured the Ukrainian president to launch a fake investigation of his political opponent; altered policy toward Turkey, Qatar, and other nations in ways that suited his business interests; even used the Secret Service to funnel government money to his private properties. In a second term, he and the people around him will have every incentive to go much further. Expect them to use American foreign policy and military power to advance their personal and political goals.  

There are many things a reelected President Trump cannot do. But there are some things he can do. One is to cut off aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration has three months to drop all half measures and rush supplies to Ukraine before Trump forces a Ukrainian surrender to Russia. If there’s anything in the American arsenal that Ukraine might successfully use—other than nuclear weapons—send it now, before it’s too late.

Another thing Trump can do is to impose further tariffs—and intensify a global trade war not only against China but also against former friends, partners, and allies. America First will be America Alone, no longer Ronald Reagan’s “city on a hill,” but now just another great power animated by predatory nationalism.

Around the world, illiberal politicians who seek to subvert their own democracies will follow America’s lead. With no fear of American criticism or reaction, expect harassment of press and political opponents in countries such as Mexico and Turkey to grow. Expect the Russian-backed electoral cheating recently on display in Georgia and Moldova to spread. Expect violent rhetoric in every democracy: If the American president can get away with it, others will conclude that they can too. The autocratic world, meanwhile, will celebrate the victory of someone whose disdain for the rule of law echoes and matches their own. They can assume that Trump and Vance will not promote human rights, will not care about international law, and will not reinforce our democratic alliances in Europe and Asia.

But the most difficult, most agonizing changes are the ones that will now take place deep inside our society. Radicalization of a part of the anti-Trump camp is inevitable, as people begin to understand that existential issues, such as climate change and gun violence, will not be tackled. A parallel process will take place on the other side of the political spectrum, as right-wing militias, white supremacists, and QAnon cultists are reenergized by the election of the man whose behavior they have, over eight years, learned to imitate. The deep gaps within America will grow deeper. Politics will become even angrier. Trump won by creating division and hatred, and he will continue to do so throughout what is sure to be a stormy second term.

[David A. Graham: The institutions failed]

My generation was raised on the belief America could always be counted upon to do the right thing, even if belatedly: reject the isolationism of America First and join the fight against Nazism; fund the Marshall Plan to stop communism; extend the promise of democracy to all people, without regard to race or sex. But maybe that belief was true only for a specific period, a unique moment. There were many chapters of history in which America did the wrong thing for years or decades. Maybe we are living through such a period now.

Or maybe the truth is that democracy is always a close-run thing, always in contention. If so, then we too must—as people in other failing democracies have learned to do—find new ways to champion wobbling institutions and threatened ideas. For supporters of the American experiment in liberal democracy, our only hope is education, organization, and the creation of a coalition of people dedicated to defending the spirit of the Constitution, the ideals of the Founders, the dream of freedom. More concretely: public civic-education campaigns to replace the lessons no longer taught in schools; teams of lawyers who can fight for the rule of law in courts; grassroots organizing, especially in rural and small-town America; citizens and journalists working to expose and fight the enormous wave of kleptocracy and corruption that will now engulf our political system.

Many of those shattered by this result will be tempted to withdraw into passivity—or recoil into performative radicalism. Reject both. We should focus, instead, on how to win back to the cause of liberal democracy a sufficient number of those Americans who voted for a candidate who denigrated this nation’s institutions and ideals.

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America isn’t too worried about fascism. By Edward Luce

Opinion US presidential election 2024

America isn’t too worried about fascism. By Edward Luce

Harris is correct that the republic is in danger but that message may not suffice to prevent a Trump victory

Here is the thing about Donald Trump’s neofascism, ethnonationalism and the threat he poses to democracy: however you label his prejudices, US voters who do not have an opinion on this subject never will. Or at least not until it is too late.

Perhaps this is because this critical but tiny share of undecided voters think Trump is all bark and no bite. Maybe they are betting he would be fascistic to others, just not towards them. Possibly they are so bored of politics they have no clue what Trump has been saying.

Whichever it is, Kamala Harris should think twice before basing her closing pitch on Trump’s strongman menace. 

Yet that is what her campaign was planning. Some of this is because Harris is strong and fluent on Trump’s threat to the republic. On two of the issues that most bother US voters — the economy and immigration — she is either unsure of herself, or hamstrung by her alleged poor record.

Both characterisations might be unfair. But the way in which Harris talks about those subjects leaves many voters wondering what she really thinks. “So what?” say people in Harris’s orbit. “When the US republic is on the line, the quality of her economic narrative should not matter.” 

The merit of that case is unarguable. Given the retributive threat that Trump poses, which he is ratcheting up as election day nears, nothing else matters. Even were Harris an empty vessel, which is obviously not the case, voting against Trump would be a no-brainer.

The problem is that those who agree with that line do not amount to a clear majority. The rest are either true believers or are unfazed by the spectre of Trump deporting millions, targeting political enemies and replacing civil servants with loyalists (to cite a few of his vows). 

A week before polling day, it is not a strategy to say that voters should be more worried than they are about US democracy; to the doubters that might sound like moral disapproval, which only annoys them more. Liberal confusion between what is and what ought to be was on display in reaction to the Washington Post’s announcement last week that it would not endorse a presidential candidate this election. Most of the anger was directed at the newspaper, which has done copious investigative reporting into Trump. Yet its significance lay in the fact that a US corporate titan, Jeff Bezos — owner both of Amazon and what Trump calls the “Bezos Washington Post” — was caving to Trump in advance. Journalists played no role in his decision. 

Harris would do better to copy the anti-smoking rule book — no matter how many gruesome warnings you make about lung cancer, they rarely cause people to give up. Human psychology is likelier to be swayed by visions of the good life that awaits them.

For both negative and positive appeals, the less abstraction the better. It is one thing to hear that Trump will ignore the constitution. It is another to be told he has promised big donors the licence to trample on employee protections, or to give Elon Musk the power to cut federal spending by a third.

The same applies to abortion rights. Talk of restoring Roe vs Wade rights is fair enough. But it is more powerful to spell out the reproductive options that are in jeopardy. 

The ideal finale to Harris’s campaign would have been another debate with Trump. The last one often occurs a week or so before voting day. Given how badly the first went, it is unsurprising that Trump would not risk another.

Because of the chances they would be beaten up, getting campaign staff to dress up as chickens and taunt Trump into agreeing to a second debate would have been rash. Bill Clinton did use that tactic to shame George HW Bush into a debate in 1992. But the times are harsher. Which means that Harris’s finest moment — and her biggest audience — are now seven weeks behind her. 

What might Harris do to clinch undecided voters in the time that remains? US history shows that big surprises often occur in the final days. It is almost inconceivable that any damaging news about Trump would change people’s minds about him. Almost everyone knows the nature of his character and what he says he will do.

To those in doubt about either, Trump is constantly on people’s screens reminding them of both — and in ever more lurid terms. In that respect, Trump is doing Harris’s job for her. The best that Harris can do is to embrace pragmatism. Both the following observations are true: the US republic is in danger; and a startling share of America is unbothered.