The Implosion of "Moms for Liberty"

From its outset the so-called "Moms for Liberty" has been a dark money right wing funded organization with Bridget Ziegler (pictured at left), wife of the now embattled Florida GOP chairman, as its putative founder and a big advocate behind Florida's "don't sat gay" law that has sought to erase LGBT individuals from Florida's public schools.  With Ziegler's husband now under investigation for rape of he and his wife's regular three way female companion - apparently a sex tape has surfaced - , some are now calling the organization "Moms for Threeways" and Bridget Zeigler is hiding from public view. South Florida Sun-Sentinel has blasted Bridget Ziegler for her hypocrisy in pushing an anti-LGBT jihad:

She is a nationally known conservative culture warrior, a Sarasota County School Board member and a co-founder of the book-banning Moms for Liberty, which denounces all things LGBTQ. She is also a DeSantis appointee to the Disney World oversight board. . . . Her virulent hatred for all things LGBTQ in public while conducting a bisexual tryst in private is damning only in the court of public opinion.

But the Zieglers show contempt for public opinion and for the Republican political machine that enriched them and made them prominent public figures. They should retire discreetly to private life while the criminal investigation proceeds.

There is a certain deliciousness in seeing liars and hypocrites exposed.  But Bridget Ziegler is only one of Moms for Liberty's problems.  In the recent November, 2023, elections some 70% of Moms for Liberty backed school board candidates went down to defeat.  Plus, other sexual impropriety and hypocrisy have made headlines.  A piece at Salon looks at the welcomed collapse of Moms for Liberty.  Here are highlights:

At first, there was little that was surprising about a report that Christian Ziegler, the husband of Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, is under police investigation in Sarasota, FL following a rape allegation. The modus operandi of Moms for Liberty and their allies is implying, often outright falsely accusing, everyone from drag queens to school librarians of being sexual predators. Lurid finger-pointing from conservatives is often, as most folks have figured out by now, a form of psychological projection. It hasn't even been two weeks since the release of a similar story outing a Philadelphia organizer for Moms of Liberty for his 2012 conviction of sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy. 

Just as predictable were the details dug up by local reporters for the Florida Trident that "both the woman and Bridget Ziegler independently told police they had engaged with Christian Ziegler in a three-way sexual encounter more than a year before the incident, according to a search warrant in the case released late Friday." According to police, the woman had been alone with Christian Ziegler, who is also the chair of the Florida GOP, the night of the alleged rape. Time and again, we have seen this story play out: The self-appointed guardians of everyone else's sexual morality often have rather exotic sex lives of their own. Just ask Jerry Falwell Jr. 

But what is genuinely startling — downright shocking, even — is there are signs that these revelations could result in bona fide political consequences for the Zieglers. Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose support of Moms for Liberty played a huge role in the group's skyrocketing to national prominence, didn't mince words when asked about the allegations Thursday night. He called on Ziegler to resign, saying, "He’s innocent till proven guilty, but we just can’t have a party chair that is under that type of scrutiny." 

DeSantis isn't alone in this, either. The Zieglers don't seem to have a lot of defenders. The Republican Party of Sarasota released a statement saying they were "shocked and disappointed" by the allegations. While Moms for Liberty claims they "stand with" Bridget Ziegler, they also closed replies on Twitter and put out a statement emphasizing that "she stepped back from the organization’s board in 2021." As confirmed by the Washington Post, however, Zieglers remains on the group's advisory board. 

The speed with which the Zieglers are being tossed overboard is fascinating because it wasn't that long ago that the couple were some of the biggest rising stars in the GOP, especially in Florida. DeSantis aligned himself so firmly with Moms for Liberty that they seemed all but an official part of his presidential campaign. He gave a keynote address at the Moms for Liberty conference in Philadelphia in July. He also did innumerable events highlighting the group's work in banning books in school, terrorizing teachers for being LGBTQ or allies, and intimidating educators out of teaching facts about history that conservatives would rather keep hidden.

Bridget Ziegler played a strong hand in writing Florida's "don't say gay" law. DeSantis even appointed her to the tourism board he constructed to harass Disney for daring to speak out against his anti-LGBTQ agenda. 

We can rule out sincere concerns about sexual violence as the reason the Zieglers are looking friendless this week. Republicans do not hold rape allegations, no matter how credible, against their leaders. After all, a court found Donald Trump responsible for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll just this year, which comports with Trump's previous bragging about how he likes to "grab them by the pussy." Yet he is still sailing to the Republican nomination. DeSantis, who is supposedly challenging Trump for the nomination, hasn't even tried to make Trump's history of sexual assault an issue. Neither he nor the voters he's speaking to give a single fig about sexual violence. If anything, rape charges just burnish one's reputation in MAGA circles, which have made a virtue out of toxic masculinity. 

Ziegler has reasons to think he can survive this. The GOP is a party that has made Trump, a thrice-married chronic adulterer, the avatar of their "Christian" messaging. They don't hide any longer that their sexual rules exist mainly as an excuse to harass marginalized people, while those inside their tribe are permitted all sexual adventures they like. If the GOP establishment wanted to rally the troops to defend the Zieglers, we'd probably already be hearing on Fox News how threesomes are simply a Christ-approved way to keep your marriage healthy. 

Maybe it will still happen, but this looks like a proper political defenestration with DeSantis hitting the eject button. It's not hard to guess why: Moms for Liberty has bad mojo. The group's political agenda of banning books and bullying LGBTQ students and teachers turned out to be politically unpopular. Being publicly linked to Moms for Liberty hurt Republicans in the midterms. This was most evident in school board races, where Democrats won big in swing districts that Moms for Liberty had targeted for takeovers.

It wasn't that long ago that Moms for Liberty were the belles of the Republican ball. When Virginia's Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin won in 2021 on a campaign demonizing teachers under the guise of "parents rights," the GOP pinned their electoral hopes on the theory that they could woo swing voters by drumming up fears that LGBTQ acceptance and naughty words in books are a danger to kids. It swiftly became popular on the right to accuse all liberals, but especially those employed in education, of being "groomers," i.e. the equivalent of pedophiles. 

What they didn't count on was how this outrageous and falsified moral panic would create a backlash, especially once the book banning frenzy started to affect the quality of education kids could get in school. As I reported in October, parents in suburban Pennsylvania really began to rise up when Moms for Liberty-aligned politicians started to rewrite social studies curricula away from historical facts to peddle right-wing propaganda. People don't like hearing false accusations that beloved teachers are "groomers." They especially don't like it when that's used as an excuse to deprive kids of lessons they need to get into good colleges and get good jobs in an increasingly diverse country. 

Few people did more than the Zieglers to convince the larger GOP that it was a smart move to bet it all on this whole "Moms for Liberty" thing. And no one was more gung-ho about the Zieglers than DeSantis. That he's dropping them like a hot potato suggests that even he sees the writing on the wall: Moms for Liberty is a political loser — and the GOP cannot drop them fast enough. 

One can only hope this vile group continues to sink and go down in flames.

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A Trump Second Term Could Outlaw Abortion Everywhere

Having followed the so-called "Christian Right" - which I find neither Christian nor right on most issues - and Christofascist organizations for well over three decades, one thing continues to hold true" they are relentless in pushing their toxic and typically hate motivated beliefs and they never give up.  A second factor also holds true" they care nothing about the wants and beliefs of others and seek to impose their beliefs on all of society.  In the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Republicans in many states have suffered from a backlash from the ruling even as the evangelical/Christofascist base of the GOP continues to demand a nationwide ban on abortion.  While passage of a nationwide ban by Congress is questionable, the extremist base of the GOP sees a way to do an end run around Congress:  Have a Trump controlled Justice Department widely enforce the 150 year old Comstock Act enacted in 1873 to block the transport of abortion pills and all medical equipment utilized in abortions.  Under the Act, suppliers, manufacturers, doctors and even individuals could be prosecuted.  Given that the Justice Department under a second Trump regime would likely be controlled by ideologues and Trump could well get onboard with the approach to please the most loyal (and hypocrisy filled) element of his MAGA base.  A piece The Atlantic looks at this possible development:

The year 2022 was a triumphant one for the anti-abortion movement. After half a century, the Supreme Court did what had once seemed impossible when it overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping Americans of the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Now movement activists are feeling bolder than ever: Their next goal will be ending legal abortion in America once and for all. A federal ban, which would require 60 votes in the Senate, is unlikely. But some activists believe there’s a simpler way: the enforcement by a Trump Justice Department of a 150-year-old obscenity law.

The Comstock Act, originally passed in 1873 to combat vice and debauchery, prohibits the mailing of any “article or thing” that is “designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” In the law’s first 100 years, a series of court cases narrowed its scope, and in 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraception. But the rest of the Comstock Act has remained on the books. The law has sat dormant, considered virtually unenforceable, since the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.

Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, the United States Postal Service asked the Justice Department for clarification: Could its workers legally transport abortion-inducing medications to states with bans? The DOJ replied by issuing a memo stipulating that abortion pills can be legally mailed as long as the sender does not intend for the drugs to be used unlawfully.

If Donald Trump is reelected president, many prominent opponents of abortion rights will demand that his DOJ issue its own memo, reinterpreting the law to mean the exact opposite: that Comstock is a de facto ban on shipping medication that could end a pregnancy, regardless of its intended use (this would apply to the USPS and to private carriers like UPS and FedEx).

“The language is black-and-white. It should be enforced,” Steven H. Aden, the general counsel at Americans United for Life, told me. A broader interpretation of the Comstock Act might also mean that a person receiving abortion pills would be committing a federal crime and, if prosecuted, could face prison time. Federal prosecutors could bring charges against abortion-pill manufacturers, providers receiving pills in the mail, or even individuals.

The hopes of some activists go further. Their ultimate aim in reviving the Comstock Act is to use it to shut down every abortion facility “in all 50 states,” Mark Lee Dickson, a Texas pastor and anti-abortion advocate, told me. Taken literally, Comstock could be applied to prevent the transport of all supplies related to medical and surgical abortions, making it illegal to ship necessary tools and medications to hospitals and clinics, with no exceptions for other medical uses, such as miscarriage care. Conditions that are easily treatable with modern medicine could, without access to these supplies, become life-threatening.

Legal experts say that the activists’ strategy could, in theory, succeed—at least in bringing the issue to court. “It’s not hypothetical anymore,” Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, told me. “Because it’s already on the books, and it’s not ridiculous to interpret it this way, [the possibility] is not far-fetched at all.”

Eventually, the Supreme Court would likely face pressure to weigh in. Even though a majority of the Court’s justices have supported abortion restrictions and ruled to overturn Roe, it’s unclear how they’d rule on this particular case. If they were to uphold the broadest interpretation of the Comstock Act, doctors even in states without bans could struggle to legally obtain the supplies they need to provide abortions and perform other procedures.

This is what activists want. The question is whether Trump would accede to their demands. After years of championing the anti-abortion cause, the former president seemed to pivot when he blamed anti-abortion Republicans’ extremism for the party’s poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections (only a small fraction of Americans favors a complete abortion ban).

As president, Trump might choose not to enforce Comstock at all. Or he could order his DOJ to enforce it with discretion, promising to go after drug manufacturers and Planned Parenthood instead of individuals. It’s hard to be certain of any outcome: Trump has always been more interested in appeasing his base than reaching Americans in the ideological middle. He might well be in favor of aggressively enforcing the Comstock Act, in order to continue bragging, as he has in the past, that he is “the most pro-life president in American history.”

The best way to stop this is vote Democrat at every level in 2024 and beyond.

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DeSantis Is Destroying Florida's Universities

In his quest to eliminate any legitimate discussion of race or the very existence of LGBT people in Florida's public schools and universities, Ron DeSantis has created both a climate of fear and smothered academic freedom.  This may please and excite DeSantis' base of support, but it is adversely impacting Florida's universities (and public schools) as professors opt to leave their positions at Florida colleges and universities, often tenured positions, and move to states that are less dystopian.  Meanwhile, desirable graduate students are increasingly avoiding Florida institutions in favor of those in blue states where they will not be censored or in fear of reprisals.  Every day Floridians ought to be concerned that DeSantis' political aspirations and desire to pander to  Florida's racists and Christofascists is eroding the educational opportunities of their children and grand children.  Sadly, DeSantis' base - much like many in Southwest Virginia - do not care that they are ultimately harming their state and themselves as long as their prejudices are being stoked.  A long column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Gov. Ron DeSantis had just taken office in 2019 when the University of Florida lured Neil H. Buchanan, a prominent economist and tax law scholar, from George Washington University.

Now, just four years after he started at the university, Dr. Buchanan has given up his tenured job and headed north to teach in Toronto. In a recent column on a legal commentary website, he accused Florida of “open hostility to professors and to higher education more generally.”

He is not the only liberal-leaning professor to leave one of Florida’s highly regarded public universities. Many are giving up coveted tenured positions and blaming their departures on Governor DeSantis and his effort to reshape the higher education system to fit his conservative principles.

The Times interviewed a dozen academics — in fields ranging from law to psychology to agronomy — who have left Florida public universities or given their notice, many headed to blue states. While emphasizing that hundreds of top academics remain in Florida, a state known for its solid and affordable public university system, they raised concerns that the governor’s policies have become increasingly untenable for scholars and students.

Governor DeSantis’s office did not respond to requests for comment. But Sarah D. Lynne, chair-elect of the University of Florida’s faculty senate, said that little has changed except that her campus has become the focus of national politics.

Data from several schools, however, show departure rates have ticked upward. At the University of Florida, overall turnover went from 7 percent in 2021 to 9.3 percent in 2023, according to figures released by the university.

A report by the faculty senate at the University of Florida found some departments hard hit. The school of arts — which includes art, music and dance — “struggles to hire or retain good faculty and graduate students in the current political climate,” said the report, issued in June.

In liberal arts, the report said: “Faculty of color have left.”

Danaya C. Wright, a law professor who currently chairs the faculty senate, said she sees job candidates avoiding the state. “We have seen more people pull their applications, or just say, ‘no, I’m not interested — it’s Florida,’” she said.

At Florida State University, the vice president for faculty development, Janet Kistner, commented during a faculty senate meeting in September that the “political climate in Florida” had contributed to an upswing in faculty turnover, with 37 professors leaving for reasons other than retirement in the past year compared to an average of 23 during the past five years.

Walter Boot, a tenured psychology professor who had secured millions of dollars in grants for Florida State, is headed to Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, where he will continue developing technology for the elderly.

Dr. Boot said he joined Florida State in 2008 and immediately felt at home on the Tallahassee campus: “This was the place I could see myself spending the rest of my career — great department, great university.”

Things began to change, he said, when the DeSantis administration started to push its education policies. Dr. Boot, who is gay, cited a 2022 law that limits what educators can say about gender and sexuality in elementary schools. It was not technically aimed at universities, but it fueled a frightening environment, he said.

“It’s been very difficult, from a day-to-day perspective, not feeling comfortable or even safe where I live,” Dr. Boot said in an interview.

Other gay professors cited recent state sanctions aimed at transgender employees and students who do not comply with a law, passed in May, restricting access to bathrooms, as well as state restrictions on transgender medical procedures.

Hope Wilson, who was a professor of education at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, had served as an adviser to the school’s Pride club and worked with the L.G.B.T.Q. center.

Dr. Wilson said that she particularly objected to what she regarded as intrusive requests from the state for information — to which her school responded — on everything from how many students had received transgender care to expenditures for D.E.I. initiatives.

“It just felt very dystopian all the way around,” she said. Her professional discomfort was matched by personal worries, because her child is transgender. “Florida isn’t a state where I can raise my family or do my job,” Dr. Wilson said. She landed at the Northern Illinois University.

The University of Florida’s law school has been particularly hard hit this year, with a 30 percent faculty turnover rate.  Some of those professors said political interference contributed to their departures, while other faculty said Florida’s reputation had deterred professors elsewhere from joining.

Maryam Jamshidi said that after a 2021 law permitted students to record professors in the classroom, liberal-leaning professors feared they would see videos of their lectures on Fox News.

Questions about gender and race are fundamental to an array of legal arguments, from constitutional law to criminal justice and workplace discrimination.

But in May, Governor DeSantis signed a bill that regulated what can be said in the classrooms and also barred university spending on diversity programs.

By that time, Kenneth B. Nunn had already decided to leave, one of several Black law professors who have recently departed.

In 2021, Mr. Nunn had been barred from signing a brief challenging state restrictions on voting by felons. Mr. Nunn said that signing such briefs is “something that is considered a matter of course for faculty to do anywhere else.” . . . He opted to retire from the law school, and is currently a visiting professor at Howard University.

“It’s not just that the laws are so vague and obviously designed to chill speech that DeSantis doesn’t like. It’s that they simultaneously took away the benefit of tenured faculty to stand up for what’s right,” he said. “It’s tenure in name only at this point.”

Since Dr. Buchanan writes on tax policy from a progressive perspective, he said that he felt he could become a target any time. “The Republicans who are running Florida,” he said, “are squandering one of the state’s most important assets by driving out professors who otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to leave.”

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Trump: The Danger Ahead

Belatedly, more of the mainstream media is exposing the threat Donald Trump and a potential second Trump regime would pose not only to American democracy but to the existing world order.  American democracy could literally end and Trumps political opponents and media critical to Trump and his lies could face prosecution or worse  Just this week, Trump acolyte Steve Bannon ranted that such domestic threats are "just not rhetoric. We’re absolutely dead serious."  Ironically, Trump's MAGA cultist are too stupid or so overwhelmed with their hatred of others to realize that once a Trump dictatorship was in place they might find themselves  no longer needed and in danger themselves as happened to many Germans under the Nazis. Across the globe, a second Trump regime friendly to tyrants could equate to a green light for Vladimir Putin to move against other former Soviet satellite nations and China and North Korea could likewise feel free to act against Taiwan and South Korea, respectively.  A lengthy piece in The Atlantic authored by a conservative former Republican looks at the very real dangers America faces.  The big worry is that too many Americans will continue to sleepwalk towards disaster and not recognize the urgency of stopping Trump and his enablers such as Speaker Mike Johnson who is busy blurring the faces of January 6th rioters so that they will not face "retaliation" for the crimes they committed that day.  Here are article highlights:

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?

In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead. 

By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury.

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law. 

From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.

A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?

 The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency.

If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up. 

After Trump was elected in 2016, he was quickly surrounded by prominent and influential people who recognized that he was a lawless menace. They found ways to restrain a man they regarded as, to quote the reported words of Trump’s first secretary of state, “a fucking moron” and, to quote his second chief of staff, “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” whose “dishonesty is just astounding.” But there would be no Rex Tillerson in a second Trump term; no John Kelly; no Jeff Sessions, who as attorney general recused himself from the investigation into the president’s connections to Russia, leading to the appointment of an independent special counsel.

Since 2021, Trump-skeptical Republicans have been pushed out of politics. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger forfeited their seats in the House for defending election integrity. Representative Tom Emmer withdrew his bid for House speaker over the same offense. The Republican Senate caucus is less hospitable to Trump-style authoritarianism—but notice that the younger and newer Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance) tend to support Trump’s schemes, while his opponents in the Senate belong to the outgoing generation. Trump’s leading rivals for the 2024 nomination seldom dare criticize his abuse of power.

Most of the people who would staff a second Trump term would be servile tools who have absorbed the brutal realities of contemporary Republicanism: defend democracy; forfeit your career. Already, an array of technically competent opportunists has assembled itself—from within right-wing think tanks and elsewhere—and has begun to plan out exactly how to dismantle the institutional safeguards against Trump’s corrupt and vengeful impulses. Trump’s likely second-term advisers have made clear that they would share his agenda of legal impunity and the use of law enforcement against his perceived opponents . . . .

First-term Trump told aides that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. Second-term Trump would choose aides who would not talk him out of it. Other partners, too, would have to adjust to the authoritarianism and corruption of a second Trump term.

Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.

If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.

In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.

So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.

If a president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer be free. There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.

That at grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on.

A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. . . . every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.

As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. . . . .For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.

When Benjamin Franklin famously said of the then-new Constitution, “A republic, if you can keep it,” he was not suggesting that the republic might be misplaced absentmindedly. He foresaw that ambitious, ruthless characters would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal characters might assist them. Americans have faced Franklin’s challenge since 2016, in a story that has so far had some villains, many heroes—and just enough good luck to tip the balance. It would be dangerous to continue to count on luck to do the job.