The presidential election of 2024 is in fact the unfolding of the rolling coup d’état that began in earnest four years ago. To imagine otherwise is to normalize what is patently abnormal and thus to falsify the crisis. It is to comprehend our politics as much of the political media does, clinging to shattered institutional norms, willfully blind to what is obviously the real story, always caught unawares when worse comes to worst. The superficial quadrennial trappings are here, of course, the primaries, the conventions, and the attendant hoopla. These reassuring atmospherics affirm the conventional wisdom of our pundits and pollsters that, despite the high-intensity fervor, this is at bottom a good old contest between rival political parties with different policies, different visions for America, campaigning to win two hundred and seventy electoral votes. In fact, this is no more an ordinary election than the election of 1860 was. Like then, Americans are confronted with a continuing power grab by a boundlessly ambitious and relentless force that repudiates the essentials of democratic politics (even when it avails itself of democratic language) and the rule of law.
Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters have made it clear that they will not accept defeat in November any more than they did when Trump lost four years ago. They believe that Trump is the one true legitimate president, that those who refuse to accept this fundamental fact are the true deniers, and that any result other than Trump’s restoration would be a thwarting of history’s purpose and a diabolical act of treason. The authoritarian imperative has moved beyond Trumpian narcissism and the cultish MAGA fringe to become an article of faith from top to bottom inside the utterly transformed Republican Party, which Trump totally commands. So has the corollary (not stated as much publicly) that should Kamala Harris be declared the next president, self-styled patriots would be duty-bound to rise and resist her by any means necessary. The place of violence in the MAGA universe has been well established.
Trump, who does not speak in metaphors, has made it plain: “If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath.” This is a time for imagining the worst. Not a single loyal Republican official has objected to that statement or to similar MAGA warnings about an impending civil war. Nor have any objected to Trump’s promise to a rally of Christian Nationalists on July 26 that, should he win this year, voting won’t be necessary in the future: “Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians….”
Yet many of even the most influential news sources hold to the fiction Trump and his party are waging a presidential campaign instead of a continuing coup. The broadcast news organizations barely, if ever, accurately and fully report on Trump’s repeated and explicit threats to end democracy. Instead, most journalists hide behind a false equivalence that has become a craven excuse for supposed balance.
That staggering failure of basic journalistic objectivity to recognize Trump’s stated agenda is helping to pave the way for the rolling coup. Winning the election, which of course Trump might well accomplish without fraud or overt violence, is but the first step in a grand seizure of power. And Trump is no longer merely a self-centered kleptocrat out of the Roy Cohn school of public service as he was in his New York real estate days. Surrounded now by disciplined right-wing figures and organizations with, in some cases, decades of political experience, he has become the most powerful enemy of the American rule of law and the established constitutional order in modern times. That is not partisan hyperbole. If conventional journalists would perform their duty, they would report it as objective fact.
Indeed, a congeries of reaction envelops Trump. There is the MAGA-dominated House of Representatives, eager to do Trump’s bidding, whether by scuttling breakthrough bipartisan immigration legislation because Trump demands it, or undertaking asinine but incendiary political investigations (e.g., James Comer’s Oversight Committee, fabricating the ludicrous and failed impeachments of Joe Biden and the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas), or recycling wacky conspiracy theories as matters of grave public concern (notably by Rep. Jim Jordan’s scandal-mongering Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government). Then there is the Supreme Court of the United States’s right-wing majority — tainted, in some instances, by evident conflicts of interest and serious corruption — which defines its mission as protecting Trump’s political as well as legal interests while rewriting the Constitution.
Trump’s private benefactors include the so-called “broligarch” high-tech libertarian reactionaries led by the maniacal Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, an early Trump bankroller and J.D. Vance’s sugar daddy, famous for remarking that he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” There are, as ever, the Russians, with Vladimir Putin counting on Trump to lift him to victory in crushing Ukraine and then to stand idly by as he, Putin, destroys the Western alliance. Particularly active and influential of late, though, has been a group of lesser-known activists and organizations headquartered in Washington, DC. This network includes the Heritage Foundation, with its now notorious Project 2025, overseen by a former academic and educator named Kevin Roberts, in combination with one of the foundation’s chief benefactors, Roberts’s fellow ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society.
Around the time that Joe Biden abandoned his re-election bid, Democrats began pointing to Project 2025 as a detailed blueprint for a right-wing takeover of the federal government, which it is. Yet that document only begins to describe the intentions of the network from which it came, hedged and euphemized in accordance with what Roberts has called, in a fine Orwellian locution, a strategy of “radical incrementalism.” In fact, these reactionaries have in mind the destruction of the existing American legal and political order, which they demonize as the “deep state” or the “administrative state.” They hope to replace it with a second American republic, a Christian Nation, led by a president who, though elected, would rule like an unchecked overlord or caudillo. Come the coup’s completion, the nation will be secure within its own militarized borders, dedicated to traditional hierarchical values, patriarchal in its suppression of women’s rights, and hostile to secular liberalism, let alone to the American version of social democracy, inserting a highly sectarian and reactionary version of Christianity as the core of its national identity.
Trump’s return to the White House is essential to the success of this upheaval. Toward that end, especially as the coup has picked up speed this past year, the reactionaries have achieved a great deal.
Trump’s major contribution to the coup since leaving office has been to continue to demonize the rule of law and rattle the criminal justice system while creating an atmosphere of surly intimidation that delights and incites his followers. Pinned down by the legal consequences of January 6, by a federal indictment over the theft and concealment of top secret government files, and by felony convictions in New York about falsifying business records to hide campaign-related hush money payments, not to mention allegations of rape and defamation, massive fraud in his real-estate dealings, and election interference in Georgia in 2020 — the man has quite a rap sheet — Trump has been unrelenting in his vicious personal attacks, singling out judges, witnesses, even court clerks, along with the Department of Justice and the FBI, which he regularly targeted while president. “The DOJ and FBI are destroying the lives of so many Great American Patriots, right before our very eyes,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform when four members of the neo-fascist anti-Semitic Proud Boys were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with January 6. “GET SMART AMERICA, THEY ARE COMING AFTER YOU!!!”
But he has saved his nastiest outbursts for his own legal proceedings. Between March 1 and April 30 of this year, according to a Reuters report, Trump posted at least one hundred and twenty-nine attacks on Truth Social against judges handling his various cases, either in his own words or in repostings of supporters. He was especially voluble about New York County Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw his hush money trial and whom he accused of running a “kangaroo court” as the “corrupt” and “highly conflicted” tool of the Biden administration. When not going after the justice, he attacked Merchan’s daughter. “It’s clearly strategic,” former White House lawyer turned Trump critic Ty Cobb remarked. “His attacks are designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.”
The strategy did nothing to spare Trump from conviction on thirty-four felony counts in Justice Merchan’s court, but it paid off in rousing his supporters. For them, Trump’s contempt for the law and its institutions is only a sign of his independence and courage and all-around badassness. “The judge must be arrested the minute Trump is inaugurated!” “Gallows!!! For Traitors!!!,” “Needs to be strangled with piano wire before he makes it to the hangman!”: in March and April, at least one hundred and fifty-two posts on three leading pro-Trump sites called for beating or killing Merchan and two of the other judges overseeing Trump cases, alongside hundreds more hostile or menacing messages that stopped short of direct appeals for violence. Bolder MAGAites, swept up in the atmosphere of violent intimidation, directly threatened Trump’s targets, including harassing calls and emailed death threats that required beefed-up security and official gag orders, the latter of which Trump, the perpetrator forever playing the victim, called violations of his rights to free speech.
Meanwhile, a broader MAGA campaign against the rule of law has chilled the federal courts, where hundreds of accused January 6 insurrectionists — if that was not an insurrection, what is? — have stood trial over the last two years. According to the U.S Marshal’s Service, between 2021 and 2023 the number of threats directed specifically at federal judges and deemed serious enough to investigate more than doubled, from two hundred and twenty-four to four hundred and fifty-seven. “Donald Trump set the stage,” the retired Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, observed, saying that “by his actions and words,” Trump gave his followers permission to attack individual judges and the entire judiciary. “I could not believe how many death threats I got,” U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, appointed to the federal bench in 1987 by Ronald Reagan, recalled, once he began hearing January 6 cases. Attacked on MAGA websites as part of the “deep state” conspiracy to destroy Trump and his supporters, Lamberth and his colleagues had to take the threats seriously. “We had never even contemplated that one of us could get killed on this job,” he said. This was not paranoia. It was prudence.
While Trump has incited his base, his devotees in Congress — now led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, a co-conspirator in the effort to overturn the 2020 election including the January 6th insurrection — have conducted their own attacks on the rule of law. A prime example has been the work of Jim Jordan’s weaponization subcommittee, its existence a concession that right-wing hardliners in the House extracted from the craven then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy in 2023 in order to secure his short-lived position. Stocked with such scorched-earth grandstanders as Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, and Darrell Issa along with Chairman Jordan, it too has played its part to advance the coup by doing precisely what they accuse the federal government of doing.
The committee’s unstated purpose is an exercise in doublethink: to weaponize congressional authority and harass government agencies and officers of the court whom Jordan and his colleagues, without a shred of evidence, accuse of selectively tormenting right-wing Republicans while protecting their wicked globalist Democrat puppet masters. Jordan himself was a co-conspirator in Trump’s January 6 plot. Witnesses such as Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, both of whom were complicit in the fake elector scheme to overturn the election, have rehashed in sworn testimony all the bogus allegations surrounding Hillary Clinton’s email server, Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, and Hunter Biden’s Burisma ties. Sweeping promises by Jordan about “dozens and dozens” of FBI whistleblowers stepping forward to expose the evildoers consisted of three disgruntled witnesses with little to offer besides additional insubstantial conspiracy theories. One witness, Alexander Smirnov, was arrested and indicted for fabricating a false story he retailed to the FBI. According to David Weiss, the Department of Justice special counsel in the Hunter Biden case, Smirnov, the son of a Russian intelligence officer, is a Russian asset.
Unfazed at being exposed as the useful idiot of a Russian intelligence operation, Jordan has doubled down, casting about for malefactors and corroborators, accusing the FBI of unjustly pursuing known January 6 participants, and finally commanding prosecutors of Trump’s cases in Atlanta and New York to turn over all their records, because “your actions raise serious concerns about whether they are politically motivated.” Nothing more has come of his stunts, but his committee is still at it, calling experts like the bombastic lawyer Robert Costello — whose testimony as the star defense witness in Trump’s hush money trial backfired, helping to assure Trump’s conviction — to expound on what right-wingers dub “lawfare,” that is, the Deep State’s supposed tactics “to weaponize the rule of law” against Trump and his accomplices. “Lawfare” has emerged as one of the MAGA era’s contributions to American political language.
Foolishly revealing his own political motivation, Jordan let it slip early on that he thought his investigations and others would “help frame up the 2024 race, when I hope and I think President Trump is going to run again. And we need to make sure that he wins.” As with so much else in Trump world, meanwhile, the charges about the abuse of power are projections of how Trump and his co-conspirators attempted systematically to abuse his office. According to sworn testimony, Trump, while president, pressed for prosecutions of his political enemies while undercutting prosecutions of his allies. He fired inspectors general inside executive agencies whom he feared were threats. He even tried to shake down the Ukrainian president, Volodimyr Zelensky, to manufacture dirt against Joe Biden and his family in exchange for desperately needed Stinger missiles, a gambit which led to Trump’s first impeachment. Yet Jordan and his colleagues at the time either denied there was any wrongdoing or defended the outrages as legitimate exercises of presidential power.
In their shamelessness as well as empty shapelessness, Jordan and the weaponization committee have shown how far House Republicans are willing to go to substitute the rule of Trump for the rule of law. And though sloppy in execution, Jordan and his colleagues, if only by raising a stink, have done their bit to turn Trump’s followers virulently against their own government, the better to overthrow that government. Anyone who doubts that this is the ultimate goal has only to inquire not just into Project 2025 but also into the reactionary matrix from which it springs.
Forty years ago, the Heritage Foundation was the chief think tank of the right-wing edge of Ronald Reagan conservatism, advocating hundreds of policy recommendations that included cutting personal income tax rates, massively increasing defense spending, and ending affirmative action. Heritage then became the home of Newt Gingrich’s more radical and nihilistic version of Reagan Republicanism. Today the Heritage Foundation has turbo-charged its radicalization, becoming the engine of the right-wing extremism that has made Donald Trump its instrument, advocating hundreds of recommendations that would dismantle the federal government as we know it, centralize power in the executive branch, and, in the name of “religious liberty,” impose Christian Nationalist doctrine as the supposed foundation of American politics and law.
“Americans in 2024 are in the process of carrying out the Second American Revolution,” Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts proclaims, all to overthrow “a corrupt ruling class.” Whereas Reagan wanted to limit government’s purview, Roberts wants to destroy the entire federal government that we have, the product of a century and more of admirable reform, and replace it with an army of right-wing Christian ideologues. Then, to exert its power as fully as possible, he — and Trump — want to construct mass detention camps prior to deporting eleven million undocumented immigrants, all under the command of an unrestrained leader who embodies the nation’s will and who won’t have to “second guess, triple guess every decision.” Much as Trump says, menacingly, that he will accept the election results so long as they are honest, Roberts says the second revolution will be bloodless — “if the left allows it to be.”
These threats are not frivolous. Heritage’s Project 2025 — contributed to by more than one hundred conservative and right-wing organizations, its contributors including at least one hundred and forty former Trump administration officials or associates, with Paul Dans, Trump’s former chief of staff for the Office of Personnel Management, serving as project director — has been in the works for a long time. (The document’s all-important Chapter Two, on the consolidation of executive power, came from Russell Vought, the Christian Nationalist director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget and policy director of the 2024 Republican platform committee.) Project 2025 is in part a policy agenda and in part a field manual for turning the federal government into a bastion of right-wing power, a politicized enforcer of ultra-conservative social and cultural values.
“I have no idea who is behind it,” Trump lied, preposterously, when, around the time Joe Biden withdrew from the race, the public began becoming aware of what was in Project 2025. “I have nothing to do with them.” In fact campaign officials acknowledged that Project 2025 “aligns well with their ‘Agenda 47’ program.” But the project was becoming so big a problem that at end of July, Trump senior adviser Susan Wiles and campaign strategist Chris LaCivita, in an obvious panic, furiously disowned it, with LaCivita warning that people involved in Project 2025 would be barred from a second Trump administration. According to the Washington Post, while Kevin Roberts tried telling people in private “that the storm will blow over,” Heritage staffers, their dreams of cushy Trump administration jobs crashing, immediately started jumping ship. In early August, as the Trump campaign was flailing against the phenomenon of the Harris campaign, the publication of the plan as a book called Dawn’s Early Light, with a preface by J.D. Vance, was postponed until after the election.
The panic caused a predicament for the Trump tacticians, at least momentarily. Unless such major Trump figures as Dans, Vought, Peter Navarro and Tom Homan were now to be blackballed as well as Stephen Miller (who risibly tried to deny any connection when his American First Legal group was a participating organization in compiling the project report), LaCivita’s threat was empty. Anyone disgraced now could easily be reinstated after a Trump victory. More important, given the enormous overlap between Project 2025 and the Trump forces’ program, as outlined in Agenda 47 and other public statements, there was no way that the Trump forces could renounce it without renouncing its own campaign. Unless and until that happens, there is no reason to regard Project 2025 as anything other than what it is, the most detailed statement by dozens of Trump’s own key policymakers about what they intend to do if he and they are returned to the White House.
Some of Project 2025’s most alarming proposals — forcibly detaining and deporting those millions of undocumented immigrants, abolishing the Department of Education and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and using the Comstock Act of 1872 to restrict access to contraception as well as abortion pills — have received enormous attention. Even so, there’s much more there than at first meets the eye, all of it in keeping with the Trump campaign’s official pronouncements.
When it returns to familiar conservative policy priori-ties, the project may seem to be treading familiar ground, but it is in fact much more radical. Its proposals “to promote prosperity,” for example, predictably amount to slashing income and corporate taxes even beyond Trump’s windfall for the wealthy in 2017. But rather than skew tax rates even more heavily in favor of the wealthiest Americans, in Reaganite fashion, Project 2025 would take a sledgehammer to the federal tax system itself, replacing the current code with two flat rates of fifteen percent and thirty percent — a giant leap toward eradicating what has been a cornerstone of modern government for more than a century. Meanwhile, Project 2025 would sustain the vastly reduced maximum rates for capital gains, estate, and gift taxes enacted as part of the 2017 overhaul but due to expire in 2025; a regressive national consumption tax, however, would be very much on the table. Trump, on his own hook, has suggested replacing federal income taxes altogether with an “all tariff policy,” which would take us back to the 1890s and a protectionism so disastrous to consumers that even its main proponent, President William McKinley, eventually disowned it.
The Project’s better-known policy proposals also reach far deeper than the most spectacular examples alone suggest. The Project hardly stops, for example, at the detention and deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, in step with what Trump advisers like Stephen Miller have indicated they will do. Combing through the boilerplate and fine print, the careful reader finds that the Project also recommends potentially terminating the legal status of half a million immigrants settled under deferred action for childhood arrivals, suspending application intake for large categories of legal immigrants, barring U.S. citizens from receiving federal housing assistance if they reside with anyone who is not a citizens or permanent legal resident, compelling states to share driver’s licenses and tax information with federal agencies at the risk of losing vital funding, and more. In all, as the Reaganite conservative Niskansen Center acidly and correctly observes, the Project “aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”
Properly decoded, meanwhile, the Project’s language connotes specifically Christian Nationalist objectives invisible to most readers but that profoundly enlarge its scope, as Andra Watkins has pointed out in Salon. Taking a single example among several, one of the Project’s most forceful passages reads:
Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
Most readers would understand this as an appeal to wipe out Pornhub and similar smut sites, and the proposal would appear to be problematic mainly to First Amendment defenders. But “pornography” has many meanings. Speaker Mike Johnson has described homosexuality as pornography. Outraged parents have demanded, as in one Florida school, that reproductions of Michelangelo’s David are pornographic and must be banned from classrooms. Are teachers who introduce their students to Renaissance art to be registered as sex offenders? Should writers and publishers and filmmakers who depict homosexual themes be imprisoned? In 2024 these are not unreasonable questions.
The heart of the Project, however, is not about changing policy, it is about changing the basic structure of our political institutions, most notably the presidency. Addressing a student civics summit sponsored by the right-wing outfit Turning Point USA in 2019, Trump offered a lesson on the Constitution in which he remarked, notoriously, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do anything I want as president.” When Richard Nixon said nearly the same fifty years ago after the Watergate scandal — “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” — it sealed his reputation as a failed would-be autocrat. Project 2025 would go a long way to enabling Trump to achieve what Nixon could not.
The key proposed changes have now been widely discussed. Reviving an executive order Trump approved while in office but that Biden killed, some fifty thousand federal civil service jobs would be reclassified as political appointments, forcing current employees either to pledge unswerving loyalty to Trump and his policies or lose their jobs, to be replaced by Trump partisans. Thereafter the president would, in accord with a maximalist version of what is known as “unitary executive theory,” exercise absolute control over the executive branch. The government would operate, Russell Vought writes, on “the fundamental assumption that it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies that operate under his constitutional authority.” That is, the Justice Department, the FBI, the Treasury Department, the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, would all operate at the whim and in the interests of one person, the president, who will become an American duce.
This enormous expansion of presidential power is driven by the same presumptions that animate the coup at large, above all the need to destroy a “deep state” that, in Vought’s view, which is widely shared on the right, is “increasingly weaponized against the public and a President who is elected by the people and empowered by the Constitution to govern.” The potential for tyrannical abuse by a corrupt president is, I hope, obvious. So long as a president controlled the Congress, the only check on his power would be the Supreme Court. But as the John Roberts Court proved in the 2023–2024 term, Trump would face no check at all. Indeed, this Court has presented Trump with unaccountable power beyond anything the Project 2025 collaborators could have imagined when they initially drafted their report.
To understand the character of the current Roberts Court requires returning to the same right-wing networks that generated Project 2025, and particularly to the formidable figure of Leonard Leo. Like Kevin Roberts, Leo is an ultra-traditionalist Roman Catholic, connected to the Opus Dei prelature represented in Washington by a group called the Catholic Information Center. He has dedicated his life to rooting out what he has called the “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists, and bigots” who slander and defame people of faith and desecrate the divinely inspired “natural order.” Leo is the generalissimo of the Federalist Society and the overseer of a multi-billion-dollar dark money empire of right-wing institutions and shadow groups. From his position in the Federalist Society, he handpicked five of the six justices of the current Roberts Court majority, including the Chief Justice, while remaining a close associate of the sixth, Clarence Thomas. What by all rights might be more appropriately known at the Leo Court emerged in 2023–2024 as the coup’s most powerful ally.
Relying on its bogus “originalist” or “textualist” method except (as ever) when it was inconvenient to do so, the Court made several audacious decisions in line with the hard right’s policy agenda. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the majority gutted the regulatory agencies and arrogantly enshrined the opinions of judges over the opinions of experts in the extremely technical matters of regulatory policy, notably as pertains to the protection of the health of the citizenry and the environment — a proud victory for ignorance that delivered to American corporations the relief from social responsibility (and its economic cost) that they sought. In Garland v. Cargill, the majority opinion by Justice Thomas followed strict textualist principles to decide that even the Trump administration had gone too far when, after a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 that killed sixty people and wounded four hundred and thirteen, it ruled that attaching a bump stock turned a legal automatic rifle into an illegal machine gun. The chief text that Thomas employed, though, was neither the Constitution nor the relevant congressional debates, but firearms illustrations from an amicus brief supplied by the Firearms Protection Coalition Foundation, a right-wing Second Amendment lobbying group dedicated to “creating a world of maximal LIBERTY” that is “free from government coercion.”
It was, however, the Roberts Court’s political decisions and its alterations of the Constitution itself that did the most to aid the coup. First, the Court deliberately delayed proceedings to insure that Trump would not face trial on serious federal charges stemming from January 6 until after the November elections, if ever. Then, in Trump v. Anderson, the majority nullified a crucial provision of the Fourteenth Amendment in order to rule that an adjudged insurrectionist is entitled to hold the office of President of the United States so long as he controls one house of Congress. And finally, in Trump v. United States, the Court held, with no textual basis whatsoever, that
under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.
This jaw-dropping assertion was followed by this lame little sentence: “There is no immunity for unofficial acts.” Which of course will only have the effect of the Chief Executive’s lawyers inventing expedient new meanings for “official” and “unofficial.”
It is difficult to imagine a more anti-American conception of political power than the one that the Court has recently made into law. This decision reversed nothing less than the reason for the American Revolution — that we do not live under kings, that power in America never be presumed above the law. It represents everything that George Washington despised, everything that James Madison and his far-seeing colleagues in Philadelphia toiled to spare us. This feverishly activist Court has done nothing less than enact authoritarianism into law, and it has done so with an authoritarian waiting in the wings, who happens to be the same authoritarian who appointed three of them for precisely the purpose of legitimating his fetish for power. Is this cynical? The cynicism is not in the interpretation but in the facts themselves. To think otherwise is to be played for a fool, and democrats, whose adversaries are always flourishing, must never be fools.
The country faces, in sum, a critical emergency. It is so because Donald Trump’s apocalyptic plans and pronouncements, repeated emphatically and enthusiastically embraced by his supporters, make it so. The press corps and pundits that treat this as a normal election must constantly avoid Trump’s insistent refrains that it is not. Trump has declared he will stop at nothing to seize power, including unleashing violence. His closest advisors have offered a program for systematically destroying the federal government and replacing it with their vision of a Christian Nation. Trump has openly assured his followers that, if he wins, they need never vote again, that everything will be “fixed.” He warns that long-established institutions, men and women sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, have betrayed that trust — an “evil” Deep State that must be eradicated. Since January 6, Trump has been conducting war on the entire system of justice that has been attempting to hold his criminality to account. Historians have written a library on societies that have succumbed to cults of personality because decent people believed that it could not really happen. The historians’ questions have been: how could they not take the threats seriously? How could they let it happen? Well, then: how could we not have taken the threats seriously? How could we let it happen?