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Trump Voters May Get More Than They Bargained For

As in the aftermath of the 2016 election, much of the media is subscribing to the red herring that economic concerns were what motivated many voters to vote for Donald Trump.  Never mind that his economic policy proposals - tariffs on almost everything imported, more massive tax cuts for the super wealthy and corporations, and an open assault on the social safety net - will severely harm these same voters perhaps sooner than later once is regime takes office.  I believe the reality is that Trump's promise to support white privilege, promise to grant evangelicals wide power to discriminate against other citizens, and to basically harm those so many of these voters hold in contempt was the true attraction.  The amazing thing is that many blacks and Latinos voted for Trump even though a reading of Project 2025 clearly makes them a target of the white "Christian" nationalism Trump is promising.  When consumer prices soar, the huge increase in the federal debt and slashing of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security hit, many of the Trump voters may belatedly realize they made a huge mistake.  They reveled in Trump's promise of cruelty towards others may quickly come home to roost on them.  Candidly, I hope they suffer immensely.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at this likely coming shock:

Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat. . . . . the old saw about “economic anxiety” is making a comeback.

These explanations all have some merit, but mostly, they miss the point. Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman.

But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. . . . . Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. . . . . His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities.

And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them.

Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.

Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch . . . . Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.

No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs.

As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” . . . . Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

Sadly, I believe there is no decency to be revived in Trump voters.  By their votes, they proved that have no morality and no decency.

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America Did This to Itself and Most Will Suffer

I continue to struggle trying to wrap my head around how a majority voting of Americans voted to put Trump back in the White House.  So far, it looks like the media again will promote the myth that the election results were due to economic concerns and upset over higher prices.  Never mind that the majority of economist panned Trumps proposals and preferred Harris' or that Trump's promised tariff will increase prices, perhaps significantly.  The working class that voted for Trump could see Walmart prices skyrocket if Der Trumpenfuhrer hits China with very high tariffs as threatened.  Add to that Trump and the GOP's animus towards labor unions, and wages could actually fall and working conditions worsen.  As in 2016, alleged economic concerns are a smoke screen for something far uglier: racism, homophobia, religious extremism aided by the ignorance of too many voters who foolishly believe anything Trump says.  I worry about the future not so much for myself - at my age, I likely have another 10-15 years ahead of me - but rather for my children and five grandchildren who will have to live with the wreckage Trump and his  morally bankrupt sycophants will unleash on the country.  My first ancestor born in America was born in Massachusetts in 1638 while others arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in the early to mid-1700's, all the result of fleeing monarchical regimes.  Now, America is headed towards a cruel regime akin to what those ancestors fled.  George Conway looks at what the nation has done to itself in a piece in The Atlantic:

This time, the nation was on notice. Back in 2016, those of us who supported Donald Trump at least had the excuse of not knowing how sociopathy can present itself, and we at least had the conceit of believing that the presidency was not just a man, but an institution greater than the man, with legal and traditional mechanisms to make sure he’d never go off the rails.

By 2020, after the chaos, the derangement, and the incompetence, we knew a lot better. And most other Americans did too, voting him out of office that fall. And when his criminal attempt to steal the election culminated in the violence of January 6, their judgment was vindicated.

So there was no excuse this year. We knew all we needed to know, even without the mendacious raging about Ohioans eating pets, the fantasizing about shooting journalists and arresting political opponents as “enemies of the people,” even apart from the evidence presented in courts and the convictions in one that demonstrated his abject criminality.

We knew, and have known, for years. Every American knew, or should have known. The man elected president last night is a depraved and brazen pathological liar, a shameless con man, a sociopathic criminal, a man who has no moral or social conscience, empathy, or remorse. He has no respect for the Constitution and laws he will swear to uphold, and on top of all that, he exhibits emotional and cognitive deficiencies that seem to be intensifying, and that will only make his turpitude worse.

He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.

I say all of this not in anger, but in deep and profound sorrow. For centuries, the United States has been a beacon of democracy and reasoned self-government, in part because the Framers understood the dangers of demagogues and saw fit to construct a system with safeguards to keep such men from undermining it . . . . The system was never perfect, but it inched toward its own betterment, albeit in fits and starts. But in the end, the system the Framers set up—and indeed, all constitutional regimes, however well designed—cannot protect a free people from themselves.

My own hope and belief about what would transpire last night was sadly and profoundly wrong—like many, I have the emotional and intellectual flaw, if that’s what it is, of assuming that people are wiser and more decent than they actually turn out to be. I feel chastened—distraught—about my apparently naive view of human nature.

I dare not predict the future again, particularly as it comes to elections and other forms of mass behavior. But I daresay I fear we shall see a profound degradation in the ability of this nation to govern itself rationally and fairly, with freedom and political equality under the rule of law. Because that is not actually a prediction. It’s a logical deduction based on the words and deeds of the president-elect, his enablers, and his supporters—and a long and often sorry record of human history. Let us brace ourselves.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Mourning for America's Lost Soul

While the election results are not final, it is looking as if Donald Trump, a man who in my view is a cruel and dangerous sociopath will be returned to the White House.  Many in America  - the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly - and the world at large with suffer this disastrous decision by American voters.  I take pride that my home state of Virginia rejected Trump, but I shake my head at the millions who voted for this horrible man.  I had perhaps deluded myself into believing that America was better than this, that deep down the vast majority of Americans are good people.   The vote tally so far tells me that the truth is something very different from what I wanted to believe. Clearly, America continues to cling to its racist and misogynistic past and maintaining perceived white privilege outweighs everything else for a majority of Americans. The irony is that if rump does what he has and Project 2025 promise, many Trump voters will suffer greatly financially and many elderly will never be able to retire as Social Security and Medicare face the chopping block so that billionaires can have more tax cuts.  America is now the Germany of 1933.  A post by John Pavlovitz sums up my sadness:

Kamala Harris didn't lose, America did.

As a nation, we collectively failed her—and in doing so we failed girls and women, the LGBTQ community, people of color, Muslims, Jewish people, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the elderly, the people of Ukraine, and Gaza, and the planet.

It's unthinkable, that instead of being able to celebrate a beautiful, hopeful new chapter in the story of this nation with a leader who appealed to the best of our natures—we will instead be holding a postmortem for democracy as we enter our 250th year, stewarded by a malevolent sociopath who despises empathy and shuns the law.

 I truly thought we were better than this, that our shared humanity would show up. I thought we would reject this hatred and ugliness once and for all. I hate being wrong about the majority of the people of this nation.

I don't know what's ahead. All I know is that good-hearted human beings are more necessary now than ever. We did all that we could to avoid this moment, but now that it's here we'll just have to decide who we will be.

There is no way to comprehend or measure how grievous an error this is, but the only thing the decent people of this nation can do is wake up tomorrow and fight like hell for what we still believe is worth the fight, and we will.

I'll be doing that with whoever has the strength to join me. I'm mourning the country we could have been and the one we apparently are—but I refuse to give up believing that compassion is the right path, that diversity makes us better, and that love is greater than fear.

Trump's likely reelection reveals that love is not greater than fear and hatred.  Pavlovitz had two other post that sums up my sentiments:

I will never forgive my family members and former friends for voting for him.

We now know that 2016 wasn't a fluke or an aberration, that this is what the majority wants: whiteness, patriarchy, nationalism, hatred, nihilism. . . . I just know that I'm seeing the nation with my eyes fully open and there is no mistaking what so many people I Ioved and once respected, actually value. 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Will Women Be Trump's Undoing?

Unless one has had a lobotomy or chugged gallons of MAGA Kool-Aid while tuned in to Fox News, it should come as no surprise that Donald Trump holds women in low regard.  He sees women as a male property to be used - and abused and assaulted - at will.  The famous Access Hollywood tape revealed Trump's true view of women.  Much of the male membership of the MAGA base seems to embrace this anti-woman mindset that wants women to be subordinate and controlled by men.  This is certainly true among evangelical and Christian nationalist males who want to reinforce the patriarchy and put women back to a pre-1960 status.   The U.S. Supreme Court's tortured ruling overturning Roe v. Wade had a huge dose of this mindset and viewed it as fine to strip women of control over their own bodies. With election day 2024 now here, a looming question among those of us who see a reelection of Trump with dread and as a nightmare worthy of sleepless nights and distracted days is whether or not women voters will extract their revenge both on Trump and, with luck, the wider field of Republican candidates.  A column in the New York Times looks at this question:

On Saturday evening I was watching a movie with my family when a text message made me gasp so hard that it scared them. “What happened?” my husband asked, worried. “Nothing bad,” I said, slightly overcome. “It’s just … Ann Selzer has Harris up three in Iowa!”

All day, political nerds had been waiting for the results of J. Ann Selzer’s famously accurate poll of Iowa. The state hasn’t been swingy in a long time, but the Selzer poll, conducted for The Des Moines Register, can offer clues about broader trends in the electorate. In 2016, when many Democrats were feeling complacent about a Hillary Clinton victory, her survey showing Donald Trump leading by seven points in Iowa was an early indication of his underestimated strength in the Midwest. . . . . In 2020, her poll again showed Trump ahead by seven points, which was both close to the final tally and, in retrospect, a sign that Joe Biden’s margins in neighboring states like Wisconsin would be much thinner than other polls were indicating.

So many of us were anxious to see how big Trump’s lead would be this time, and the fact that Selzer instead found him losing came as a shock. The poll may easily turn out to be wrong; Selzer’s record is as good as anyone’s in the business, but it’s not perfect. Should Kamala Harris win this election, though, the poll will be part of the story of her victory.

The reason for Selzer’s anomalous finding is simple: women. If it’s anywhere near accurate, it suggests that conventional political wisdom has been seriously underrating the scale of women’s fury over abortion bans and their revulsion at Trump’s cartoonishly macho campaign.

Selzer’s poll shows independent women backing Harris by 28 points, and women 65 and older backing her by 2-1. Speaking to Tim Miller of The Bulwark, Selzer speculated about what might have driven these numbers. “It was over the summer that Iowa’s six-week ban on abortion went into effect after all the court challenges were taken care of,” she said. Now, she said, people have been “living with it for a while.”

Women’s anger has, of course, been a catalytic force in American politics since the insult of Trump’s election in 2016. It drove the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, and persuaded record numbers of Democratic women to run for office in recent cycles. Female rage was rekindled when, thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court picks, we lost Roe v. Wade and women in many conservative states were stripped of control over their reproductive lives. The backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that ended Roe, is probably why the red wave that Republicans were expecting in 2022 never materialized.

Some conservative men have assumed that women’s outrage would fade. “As we settle back into what feels like a status quo,” the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini told NPR last year, it will be “tougher to move people and to message on” abortion. Others on the right decided to lean into the gender gap, hoping to galvanize disaffected young men, including men of color, to make up for their erosion among women.

This appears to be the strategy of the Trump campaign. In 2016, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, were around to help soften his image with at least some female voters. This year, by contrast, Trump’s most influential relative seems to be his aggro oldest son, Don Jr., who reportedly urged Trump to choose JD Vance as his running mate, thus giving us a season’s worth of memes about childless cat ladies.

Trump and his aides made the final night of the Republican National Convention seem like a pro wrestling spectacular. The ex-president has spent lots of time courting young men on podcasts.

Forgoing any significant outreach to women, the campaign has created a permission structure for a carnival of trollish misogyny. In a recent video, John McEntee, a former Trump aide likely to be key to any future Trump administration, said, “When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male: M A L E.” At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, a speaker referred to Harris’s “pimp handlers,” all but calling her a prostitute. . . . . The ex-president himself, in one of his latest demonstrations of contempt for women, last week said that if he’s elected, he’d give the anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. responsibility for “women’s health.”

Maybe Trump’s hyper-patriarchal approach will work. A majority of women will almost certainly vote for Harris, but Trump could win even larger margins with men. With most polls showing a dead heat, the green shoots of Democratic hope could be mowed down tomorrow. Among Republicans, however, you can already see a dawning suspicion that the male voters they’re counting on to replace conscientious suburban women may not be wholly reliable. “The core plot of the Barbie movie was distracting men so they wouldn’t vote,” Gaetz wrote on X on Monday. “Don’t make the Barbie movie come true.”

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump's Mental Impairment Becomes Ever More Visible

Donald Trump's behavior has never been that of a normal political candidate - despite much of the mainstream media's efforts at false equivalency and pretense that Trump is remotely normal - but over the last weeks and days Trump's behavior and statements have become ever more unhinged, ranging from wanting Liz Cheney to face a firing squad, threatening to use the military against citizens,  to miming giving fellatio to a microphone in Milwaukee.  None of this craziness bothers Trump's MAGA base as long as Trump continues to greenlight that base's racism and hatred towards other American citizens and other non-white, non-heterosexual, non-Christian nationalist individuals and groups.  For sane and truly patriotic Americans, however, Trump's behavior and unhinged statements should be terrifying.  Should Trump regain the White House, a madman will not only wield frightening power - including assess to the nuclear codes - but a veritable campaign against elements of the media, political opponents and other critics could be unleashed.  A column in The Atlantic looks at the terrifying threat facing Americans.  Here are excerpts:

I do not know how to put this gently or tastefully, so I will factually describe what happened last night in Milwaukee: A former president of the United States held a rally, during which he used a microphone holder on his podium to pantomime the act of giving fellatio.

I could have put it differently. I might have said that “a cognitively impaired man, who has long been showing signs of serious emotional instability and has a history of sexism and racism, engaged in crude behavior in front of a large audience.” But that wouldn’t capture an important reality: This deeply impaired man is tied in the race to become the next president and could be holding the codes to the U.S. nuclear arsenal in less than three months.

I don’t know if this bizarre display will move votes away from Donald Trump. Nothing seems to dent the loyalty of his base. Trump voters are resolute in their determination to minimize his ghastly antics, or even to scrub them from their minds.

[I]t’s always difficult to single out one terrible moment at a Trump rally when there are so many from which to choose. Last night, for example, he insisted that he won Wisconsin twice. (He didn’t.) He also took a veiled racist shot at the Milwaukee Bucks player Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is Black. . . . Antetokounmpo is a Greek citizen born in Athens of Nigerian immigrant parents.

Trump is white, and we know this, by the way, because he told us so. During a stop in Michigan before he got to Wisconsin, Trump explained that he could have been living an easier life on the golf course had he chosen not to run for president: That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned, beautiful.

[M]y Greek father lived to be 94 years old. He might have found the idea of a Black Greek basketball player kind of amusing, and he might have laughed about it among his poker buddies. My dad was a working-class, shot-and-beer guy who told more than his share of sexist and racist jokes.

But if my father in his late 70s had simulated a blow job in mixed company—never mind in front of an audience that included children—I’d have brought him in for a complete neurological workup.

Trump, by most reports, has always been a vulgar and ignorant man. This creepy moment in Milwaukee will add to our national and international humiliation if he is returned to office. But more important, manifesting this kind of disinhibited behavior in public more and more often is a warning sign that he is simply not stable enough to sit in the Oval Office.

I do not know if Trump’s erratic behavior, his apparent physical decline, his bizarre rambles and their mental cul-de-sacs are part of a larger illness. Trump’s critics claim that he has dementia and other afflictions.

I know this much: If Donald Trump were your father, your husband, your brother, your uncle, or merely your friend, you would insist that he see a doctor, and you would likely shield him from large gatherings where he could become an object of ridicule. You might even suggest that family or friends look in on him more often.

Whatever small mercies and considerations you might offer to a man acting like Trump, you would certainly not place him in positions of pressure or responsibility, or inflict situations on him in which he would be called upon to make speedy and important decisions. You definitely would not make him the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and place the safety of billions of innocent human beings in his hands.

The rally crowd, ever faithful and willing to do its part, laughed as Trump pretended to pleasure a piece of equipment. But for the rest of us, the laughter has to stop, and the horror of what might happen in a few days must take its place.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Vote As If the Country Depends on You—Because It Does

The husband and I are back from our European vacation - we voted before we left on the trip - and have returned for the frenzied last days of the 2024 elections.  It was a nice break from non-stop politics, although I did follow matters from afar.  One of the things most notable during the trip was how people from the five countries we visited almost uniformly asked what had happened to America that enabled someone as morally reprehensible and evil as Donald Trump could have a chance of reelection. It was and is a hard question to answer, but I still believe racial hatred and Christofascist desires for power and the ability to inflict religious dogma on all are the real underlying factors.  Europe is no stranger to racial animus as European right wing political parties demonize immigrants and Europe's history is full of horrors done in the name of religion.  Indeed, Europe's wars of religion and discrimination fueled the Founding Father's determination to have a separation of church and state.  The other factors at play are (i)  the reality that on the political right in the USA, endless lies and untruths have been made acceptable, driven in large part by the liar in chief, Donald Trump, and (ii) and the apathy of the 35 plus percent of voters who may not even bother to vote.  A very long piece in The Atlantic by a conservative and former Republican lists the danger Trump poses and stresses the need for all to vote as if the future of the country and personal freedoms depended on it, because they do, especially for women, gays and non-whites, but also for everyday Americans.  Here are highlights: 

Donald Trump’s presidency was mitigated by his ignorance, idleness, and vanity. Trump did not know how the office worked. He did not invest any effort to learn. He wasted much of his time watching daytime television.

Defeat in 2020—and Trump’s plot to overturn that defeat—gave him a purpose: vengeance on those who bested him.

A second Trump presidency will have a much clearer agenda than the first. No more James Mattis to restrain him, no more John Kelly to chide him, no more Rex Tillerson to call him a “fucking moron.” He will have only sycophants.

Trump has told the world his second-term plans.

He has vowed to round up and deport millions of foreign nationals. Because the removals will be slow—permissions have to be negotiated with the receiving governments, transportation booked, people forced aboard—Trump has spoken of building a national network of camps to hold the rounded-up immigrants. Deportation is a power of the presidency: Trump can indeed do all of this if he is determined to.

Trump has pledged huge increases in U.S. tariffs, not only on China but on friends and treaty partners, such as Mexico. Congress has historically delegated the president’s broad authority over trade. A restored President Trump will have the power to impose tariffs, and will also have the power to exempt industries and firms that bid for his favor.

Trump intends to shut down legal proceedings, state and federal, against himself. A friendly Supreme Court appears to grant him wide leeway to do so. He has promised to pardon people serving sentences for the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021. The president has the power to do that also. He has spoken of prosecuting people who donate to Democratic candidates and of retribution against media companies that criticize him. Although it’s uncertain how far the courts would let him succeed, Trump is seeking a stooge attorney general who will at least try to bring such prosecutions.

Trump ordered his allies in Congress to oppose further military aid to Ukraine and got his way for six deadly months. Trump chose as his running mate one of the GOP’s harshest critics of the Ukrainian cause. Trump boasts that he will end the fighting within weeks. That is code for forcing Ukraine to submit to Russia.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, John Bolton, predicts that Trump would withdraw from NATO in a second term. Trump does not have to withdraw formally, however. NATO ultimately depends on the U.S. president’s commitment to upholding the treaty’s mutual-defense clause and assisting threatened NATO members.

Some Trump apologists put a gloss on his pro–Vladimir Putin instincts by arguing that abandoning Ukraine will somehow strengthen the U.S. against China. Really? China will be impressed by a United States that walked away from Ukraine’s successful war of self-defense against Russian aggression because the American president is infatuated with the Russian dictator?

Whatever theory Trump allies may confect, Trump himself made it clear in a July interview that Taiwan cannot count on him any more than Ukraine can. Trump conceives of the U.S. alliance system as a protection racket, not as an association of democracies. . . . . A vote for Trump isn’t a vote for some Pacific-first strategy, however misconceived or addled. It’s a vote for international gangsterism. Trump feels most at home with dictators (including Xi Jinping, China’s president for life) and with client states, such as Saudi Arabia, that pay emoluments to him and to his family via their businesses.

Yet a second-term Trump will not travel a smooth path to autocracy at home and isolation from abroad. If Trump does return to the presidency, it will almost certainly occur after a third consecutive loss of the popular vote: by 3 million in 2016, 7 million in 2020, and who knows how many millions in 2024.

Minority rule begins to look like not merely a feature of Republican administration, but actually a precondition for it. Trump Republicans may now insist, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.” But most Americans assumed that we were a democracy—and believe that, to the extent we’re not, we should be.

If a president who comes to office without a majority democratic mandate starts doing the radical things Trump wants to do—building detention camps, pardoning January 6 culprits, abandoning Ukraine—he’s going to find himself on the receiving end of some powerful opposition.

Trump may forget, but his opponents will not, that he was the man who wrecked the country’s centuries-long record of a peaceful transition of power. That particular clock reset itself to zero in 2021. The American tradition is now shorter than those of Moldova and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, both of which have a record of peaceful transition of power stretching all the way back to 2019.

A second Trump administration will be even more of a snake pit of craziness, incompetence, and intrigue than the first was. . . . . The lower levels of the administration will see a nonstop guerrilla war between the opportunists who signed up with Trump for their own advantage and the genuine crackpots.

From the viewpoint of millions of Americans, a second Trump presidency would be the result of a foreign cabal’s exploitation of defects in the constitutional structure to impose un-American authoritarianism on an unwilling majority. It enrages pro-Trump America that anti-Trump America regards Trump and Vance as disloyal tools of Russian subversion—but we do, we have the evidence, and we have the numbers.

If Trump is elected again, world trade will contract under the squeeze of U.S. protectionism. Prices will jump for ordinary Americans. Farmers and other exporters will lose markets. Businesses will lose competitiveness as Trump tariffs raise the price of every input in the supply chain, including such basic commodities as steel and such advanced products as semiconductor chips.

Putin, Xi, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un may imagine that because they can manipulate and outwit Trump, they can discount the United States entirely. China especially may misinterpret Trump’s dislike of allies as an invitation to grab Taiwan—only to trigger a U.S. reaction that may surprise China and Trump alike. Until such a desperate moment, however, former allies will look elsewhere for protection. As a French cabinet minister said, only days ago: “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of the voters of Wisconsin every four years.”

Trump’s ascent has driven many to wonder how U.S. politics became so polarized, so extreme. That question, so often repeated, is also profoundly misplaced.

The speech and behavior modeled by Trump are emulated by only his most fervent admirers, and even then only in safe spaces, such as on social media and at his rallies. The most pro-Trump employer in America would instantly fire any employee who talked about women, racial minorities, international partners, or people who lived in big cities the way that Trump does. An employee who told lies, shifted blame, exulted in violence, misappropriated other people’s property, blathered nonsense, or just wandered around vacantly as Trump does would be referred to mental-health professionals or reported to law enforcement.

Trump’s conduct is in fact so disturbing and offensive even to his supporters that they typically cope either by denying attested facts or by inventing fictional good deeds and falsely attributing them to him: secret acts of charity, empathy, or courtesy that never happened.

Trump’s superpower has been his ability to leverage his sway over a cult following to capture control of one of the two great parties in U.S. politics. If all we had to worry about were the people who idolize Trump, we would not have much to worry about. Unfortunately, we also must worry about the people who see him as he is but choose to work through him anyway, in pursuit of their own goals.

For that reason, Trump’s rise has imposed a special responsibility upon those of us with backgrounds in conservative and Republican politics. He arose because he was enabled not just by people we knew but by people we also knew to despise him.

For that reason too, his rise has generated a fierce and determined internal refusal of a kind not seen before in presidential politics.

Pro-Trump Republicans dismiss this internal refusal as unimportant. They also rage against the refusers as party traitors. I have felt that fury because I number among the refusers. . . . One lesson of the Trump years, however, is about how old concepts of “right” and “left” have fallen out of date in the Trump era. What was conservatism once? A politics of gratitude for America’s great constitutional traditions, a politics of free markets and free trade, a politics of American global leadership. This was the politics that excited me, as a very young man, to knock on doors for the Reagan-Bush ticket in the election of 1980.

Ronald Reagan liked to describe the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” As Trump closed his 2024 campaign, he derided the country as “the garbage can for the world.” . . . . Reagan saluted a common American identity bigger than party. In 1982, he honored the centenary of the birth of his great opposite number among 20th-century presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt . . .

Forty-two years later, Donald Trump describes his Democratic adversaries, including the most recent Democratic speaker of the House, as enemies “from within.” Trump also mused about using the National Guard and the U.S. military against “the enemy within.” He has repeatedly spoken of using state power to retaliate against politicians and journalists. . . . arresting and executing opponents, including General Mark Milley, the most senior member of the military who incurred his displeasure. He has endorsed proposals to haul former Republican Representative Liz Cheney before a military tribunal to be punished for voting for his impeachment.

If you are inclined to vote for Trump out of some attachment to a Reaganite idea of conservative Republicanism, think again. Your party, the party that stood for freedom against the Berlin Wall, has three times nominated a man who praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

[T]he Republican Party has rotated from being one of freedom and enterprise to one of authoritarianism and repression. Yet many inside the Republican world and outside—including my email correspondent—insist on pretending that nothing has changed.

A few weeks ago, a researcher released a report that tallied political contributions by almost 100,000 executives and corporate directors at almost 10,000 firms from 2001 to 2022. The tally showed a pronounced trend away from Republican candidates and conservative causes. When reported in the media, the headlines pronounced that “CEOs Are Moving Left.” Are they? Or are they instead recognizing that the party of Trump and Vance has become virtually the opposite of the party of Reagan and Bush?

Trump is opposed by almost every member of his first-term national-security team, and by his own former vice president; he has the support of the anti-vax crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the propagandist for Russian imperialism Tulsi Gabbard. Something revolutionary has happened inside the Republican Party: If you placed your faith and loyalty in Reagan and Bush’s party of freedom, you need to accept that the party of Trump and Vance has rejected your ideals, discarded your heroes, defiled your most cherished political memories. This GOP is something new and different and ugly, and you owe it nothing.

[T]he election of 2024 turn on one ultimate question: whether to protect our constitutional democracy or submit to a presidency that wants to reorder the United States in such a way that it will become one of the world’s reactionary authoritarian regimes.

Some rationalizers for Trump want to deceive you that you face an unhappy choice between two equally difficult extremes. That is untrue. One choice, the Trump choice, deviates from the path of constitutional democracy toward a murky and sinister future. The other choice allows the United States to continue its cautious progress along the lines marked by the Declaration of Independence and the Fourteenth Amendment toward the aspiration of a “more perfect union.”

Harris offers one big idea: the equal right of the female half of the American people to freedom and individuality. . . . Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, American women have become the targets of a campaign of surveillance, policing, and control. In many places, they have lost the right to protect themselves from the consequences of sexual violence. . . . Some conservative states are weighing restrictions on the right of pregnant women to travel across state lines to seek abortions in more liberal jurisdictions.

America’s main interest remains liberty. The election of 2024 will sway federal policy on a huge range of issues: climate change; economic growth; border security; stability on the European continent, in the Middle East, in the Indo-Pacific. Supreme above all of these issues, however, is preserving the right of the American people to govern themselves according to their constitutional rules.

Trump is not an abstract thinker. When he thinks about the presidency, he thinks about enriching himself, flattering his ego, and punishing his enemies. Yet, as he pursues his impulsive purposes, he is also advancing a bigger cause in which he has many more intelligent partners, and one that will outlast his political career. That cause is to rearrange the U.S. government so that a minority can indefinitely rule over the American majority.

As hemmed in as her presidency may be, Harris will also have a great cause to advance. Her cause will be what Lincoln’s was, and Roosevelt’s, and Reagan’s, too: to protect the right of the American majority to govern itself in defiance of domestic plutocrats and foreign autocrats.

In the immediate shock of Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I posted these words:

We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. . . . Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America.

Sunday Morning Male Beauty