Several Sahra Wagenknecht speeches have caught favorable attention among US Greens. Characterize her as you will, but I haven’t yet found disagreement with her.
favorable attention among US Greens
Lash wrote:
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..You just aren't even worth the effort to respond to.
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It's a dimly remembered lecture from when I was a student in the 80s.
Donald Trump’s freakshow continues unabated
Sidney Blumenthal
Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
Donald Trump’s threat to execute Liz Cheney, “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her”, is the apogee so far of his Hitlerian rhetoric. By his own words, Trump has proved her point that he is a “danger” to the constitution and defied his apologists who insist he can be contained or that he doesn’t really mean what he says. “And let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face,” he said. “Shoot Liz Cheney” has replaced “Hang Mike Pence.”
Hours after Trump declared his wish to kill Cheney, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, his reliable excuse maker for the executive collaborator class, published an editorial stating, “We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.”
Trump is hellbent to break through any “sane-washing” of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics.
His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy are an augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization.
Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?
Many of Trump’s former White House staffers, cabinet secretaries and commanding generals are frantically attempting to warn against his madness, that he is “a fascist to the core”, as former chairman of the joint chiefs Gen Mark Milley has unequivocally stated. In private conversation, former staffers and others with intimate knowledge of Trump, all reliable people, talk about the real man as far viler than those who haven’t seen him behind closed doors could possibly know.
Knowledge of Trump’s vileness is widespread among top-level Republicans. “They all hate him,” a former senior Trump adviser told me categorically. And they all have stories, some exhibiting his narcissism, others his malice: how, for example, the time two senators from one state were summoned to the Oval Office to listen to Trump say he would travel there to have a mountain named after him. As a rule, they agree with Senator Mitch McConnell that he is “despicable”. Unlike those former Trump staffers waving their arms, they are silent and complicit.
Now, former staffers speculate about the hazy fine line between Trump’s infantilism and his dementia. There is no responsible person left around Trump. He has learned the lesson, sealed by January 6, not to trust the “normies”.
Trump’s night in the Garden on 27 October was early Hitler in style, not middle Hitler. The bellowing obscenities, racist sneers and violent threats were more reminiscent of the Munich beer hall phase of Hitler rousing the street gangs of Brownshirts than the Nuremberg rallies of disciplined ranks of storm troopers massed before his reviewing stand.
“An immense wave of eccentric barbarism … A primitive fairground brutality,” wrote the great German novelist Thomas Mann in 1930 about the Nazi rallies he observed. “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style … hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
“A quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the Platz in Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.
“The love in that room,” said Trump after his rally at Madison Square Garden. “It was breathtaking. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.”
Trump’s festival at the Garden was a fascist foreshadowing masquerading as a farce. As a screwball flying circus, it was a version of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Everything was turned upside down in a pandemonium. Trump’s comedians, however, were no Groucho. It would have been better for Trump if his speakers had been equipped like the mute Harpo with a honking horn.
Trump’s master race of misfits found an authentic voice in the comic relief of Tony Hinchcliffe, who amid his slurs about Black people (“We carved watermelons together”), Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, said, “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Hinchcliffe is the host of a podcast aptly called Kill Tony. With a dubious laugh line, as if on cue, the stage swiveled. Triumph of the Will turned into West Side Story. His performance fatally died like the character Tony in West Side Story, only this Tony died by suicide.
Life is all right in America
If you’re all white in America
With his assent, Trump’s night at the Garden was orchestrated by a malevolent crew of eternally stunted pranksters and gangsters who took control of his campaign’s closing argument. They were brought together principally by Trump’s son Don Jr, a pitiable figure who engages in abominable displays to gain his father’s approbation, and who has become central to the organization of the entourage floating around the campaign.
“Poor Don, he really got the brunt of everything,” said Ivanka. Abandoned and abused, he was shipped off to Czechoslovakia after the divorce of his parents to be raised during the summers by his mother’s grandparents – “the most memorable time in my life”, he said. He learned to speak fluent Czech. Back home, his new stepfather tried to choke him. His college roommates at the University of Pennsylvania recalled Trump coming to visit and smashing Don Jr in the face in front of his friends, knocking him to the ground. When Trump was invited to give a formal speech at Penn, Don Jr refused to attend. He wouldn’t speak with his brutal father for years. He drank heavily, “a fall-down drunk”, said a college friend. His first wife, Vanessa, once said to him, “You’re the one with the retarded father.” Now, Don Jr does anything he can to win Trump’s distracted attention and alienated affection. On the podium, he called out to his dad as “the king of New York”.
Tony Hinchcliffe rose to the level of insult comedian as an opening club act for Joe Rogan. They both live in Austin. Rogan devoted three hours on his podcast on 26 October to a limp interview with Trump in which he failed to challenge Trump’s dozens of flagrant lies. Rogan traffics in being conspiracy theory curious and science hostile to explain the world, which he punctuates with guffaws of jocular misogyny, the occasional racial inference, some gay bashing and tough-guy posturing. He is the faux regular bros’ Alex Jones, the incels’ Hugh Hefner.
Both Rogan and Hinchcliffe are pals of Tucker Carlson. Tucker lately warmed up a Trump rally in Georgia with his sexual fantasy of a “hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter”, when “Dad comes home and he’s pissed … You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this.” A former colleague of Carlson’s says he has been talking intently about his spanking obsession for years, though this was the first time in public.
Tucker would appear as the interviewer of Trump on 31 October at an Arizona rally, where he brought up “Dick Cheney’s repulsive little daughter”, which triggered Trump to call her “deranged” and then call for her execution.
Tucker, Don Jr’s buddy, was instrumental in the selection of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate. JD, with his deep thoughts on “childless cat ladies” and “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female”, is a new addition to the boys’ club. Except for Rogan, all of them, from comic to billionaire to VP candidate, appeared on the podium at the Garden. Tucker Carlson, taking his turn at standup, distinguished himself by slagging the woman who’s been a bad girl: “As the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ, former California prosecutor ever to be elected president …”
Then, Elon Musk, relocated to Austin. He has launched himself like one of his spaceships into Trump’s orbit. The aspiring oligarch has donated tens of millions to a political action committee to support Trump, produced misleading TV spots to smear Harris, and used X to promote disinformation for Trump. He offers a million-dollar giveaway to register voters, cheap money, which has landed him in a Philadelphia court. He speaks secretly to Putin. Whenever Musk strays from his skill at hardware and software into the realm of human interaction, however, he falls flat on his face. His robo-taxi crashes through a shop window.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its transformation into X was doomed to fail because it is about his greatest weakness: human expression. He treats human relationships as a horror show. He is the father of 12 children, some of whom he’s given the names of software programs and he has savagely disowned his trans daughter. He bought an enclosed compound in Texas to contain former wives and children. “He has even offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances,” the New York Times has reported. He seeks life on Mars because he’s an alien on Earth. Techno authoritarianism is the only comfortable spot on his political spectrum. He calls himself “Techno-King”. Trump has promised him that he will be put in charge of the federal workforce “to start from scratch”. Musk was sanctioned by the Securities and Exchange Commission in September. His regulatory troubles will all go away with Trump. The Nasa and defense contracts will flow. If anything might befall Trump, Musk and his fellow techno authoritarians have Vance positioned a heartbeat away. At the rally, Musk introduced himself, “I am dark Gothic Maga.”
Among the other speakers in the Garden, David Rem, a 60-year-old New York sanitation worker, mounted the podium to hex Harris as “the antichrist” and “the devil”. He claimed to be a childhood friend of Trump’s from his Queens neighborhood, but, in fact, had only recently met him. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to acting as a courier to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to 151 months’ imprisonment.
Grant Cardone, a real estate operator from Florida, is a longtime Scientologist and major donor to its slush fund used to harass critics. He told the Maga faithful that Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country”. To great applause, he flipped his middle finger.
A local New York radio broadcaster, Sid Rosenberg, who had called Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew”, to Trump’s approval in April, told the crowd, “She is some sick bastard, that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole ******* party, a bunch of degenerates, lowlives, Jew haters and lowlives. Every one of them. Every one of them.”
The obscenities echoing in the Garden embroidered the vulgar vision of the great replacement theory. “America is for Americans and Americans only,” declared Stephen Miller, a former Trump aide. If Trump were to be elected, Miller would play a large role in implementing what Trump boasted would be “the largest deportation program in American history”.
Trump came on stage to shout threats to the rafters. “The United States is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer,” he said. “We don’t have the same country any more.” He stated he would restore the country to what it was by reaching backwards in history. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Think of that. That’s how far back. That’s when they had law and order. They had some tough ones. Think of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.”
Undoubtedly, Trump had no clue he was referring to the political period that Thomas Jefferson described as “the reign of witches”. President John Adams enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to harass and imprison his critics and opponents, the Democratic-Republicans organized by Jefferson and James Madison, a grouping that was the origin of the Democratic party. Adams lost the election of 1800 to Jefferson. Adams was bitter, but freely and peacefully gave up the presidency, and transferred power in the first election after Washington. The acts expired, except for the Alien Enemies Act, which is invoked now by Trump. Yet, that act is only operative during wartime.
“And when I say the enemy from within, the other side goes crazy, becomes a sound hole,” Trump barked. “How can he say now they’ve done very bad things to this country? They are indeed the enemy from within. But this is who we’re fighting.”
Trump’s vision of America was also Hitler’s understanding of the country. Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and chief of war production, became his confidant. He participated in hundreds of dinner table conversations with Hitler. “In general, no such thing as an American people existed as a unit,” Speer wrote in his memoir of Hitler’s view. “They were nothing but a mass of immigrants from many nations and races.”
After the disastrous show at the Garden, Rogan, keen on his commercial viability, separated himself from his sinking sidekick, Hinchcliffe, while at the same time winking at his bro base with a couple of little racially tinged asides. “I’ve gotta tell you, that joke kills at comedy clubs. I don’t like the joke, [but] it kills,” Rogan said on his podcast. “It’s just like, if you’re Puerto Rican and you hear that in the audience, you’re like [groans]. But it’s a funny joke. The joke does well. But I said to him, I go, ‘Dude, that’s the one that’s gonna get you stabbed.’ And he used to talk about it on stage, saying, ‘Joe Rogan always says that’s the one that’s gonna get me stabbed.’” After creating some distance between himself and Hinchcliffe, he singled out Barack Obama for criticizing the “joke” as “really fucked up. You know that’s a joke. That’s like going to a Quentin Tarantino movie [and saying], ‘And then the man killed that woman.’ Like, he didn’t really kill that woman … this is a movie.” But “Kill Tony” really did make himself roadkill and in the process “stabbed” Trump in what was not a movie or a comedy club.
Dancing around having Harris as a guest, Rogan decided that if she would not drop her schedule to see him he would not deign to travel to interview her. Instead, he hosted JD Vance for three hours on Halloween, in which Vance held forth on how young men with more testosterone are more conservative, liberal women are “celebrating” their abortions with “birthday cakes”, and that the surefire way to gain admission to an Ivy League university “is to be trans”. Then, after confidently predicting Trump would win “the normal gay guy”, Vance pronounced the Emily In Paris Netflix series a “masterpiece”.
Conspicuously missing from the cabal that staged the Garden fiasco was the most diligent student of Hitler of all the minions swirling around Trump. Steve Bannon, imprisoned for defying a congressional subpoena to testify on his role on January 6, was still behind bars.
When Bannon saw Trump descend down the Trump Tower escalator to launch his campaign in 2015, he thought, “That’s Hitler!” Bannon was ecstatic, he told New York Times correspondent Jeremy Peters in his book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted. Trump was the demagogue he was waiting for.
After a career on Wall Street, Bannon spent years failing as a film producer; then, radicalized as a rightwinger, he announced his ambition to become “the Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP”. Promoting his dreadful documentary in 2011 on Sarah Palin, The Undefeated, he said, “People have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl.” Riefenstahl was the leading film-maker of the Third Reich, mistress of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and auteur of Triumph of the Will, a brilliant, innovative account of Hitler’s 1935 Nazi rally in Nuremberg. Bannon, who became Trump’s campaign manager in 2016 and White House senior adviser, saw himself staging Trump as Riefenstahl filmed Hitler. He boasted that he asked himself, “What would Leni Riefenstahl do?”
Bannon walked out of federal prison on 29 October. He still faces New York state charges of financial fraud in a scheme to fleece donors to build Trump’s wall along the Mexican border. He declared that he would resume where he left off. He was on to the coup of 2024. He picked up once again on the big lie of “election integrity”, that the 2024 election might be stolen from Trump just like in 2020. “If people think American politics have been divisive before,” said Bannon, “you haven’t seen anything.”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
Maia Sandu wins second term in Moldovan election in rebuke to Kremlin
Incumbent wins presidential runoff with 97% of votes counted, defeating Russia-leaning rival
The pro-western incumbent Maia Sandu has won a second term in office in the Moldovan presidential election, preliminary results have shown, marking a significant boost for the country’s EU aspirations and a clear rebuke to Moscow.
Moldovans voted on Sunday in a runoff election seen as a crucial indicator of whether the country’s long-term geopolitical alignment will be with Russia or Europe.
The pro-western incumbent, Sandu, who has intensified the nation’s efforts to break away from Moscow’s influence, was facing the Kremlin-friendly political newcomer, Alexandr Stoianoglo, from the Socialist party, in the second round of voting on Sunday.
With 97% of the votes counted, Sandu was leading by a margin of 8%. With only parts of the country’s diaspora vote still outstanding, analysts said that Sandu was all but guaranteed to win re-election.
Early results indicated that the large Moldovan diaspora, accounting for about 20% of the electorate, had overwhelmingly voted for Sandu.
The result will be a significant boost for Sandu and her long-term EU agenda.
In her victory speech, delivered after nearly all votes were tallied, Sandu said that she had listened to the voices of her supporters and those of her opponent, Stoianoglo. She said that her primary goal for the coming years would be to serve as a president for all citizens.
Writing on X, Sandu also said: “Moldova, today you are victorious. Together, we’ve shown the strength of our unity, democracy, and commitment to a dignified future.”
Sandu’s position was weakened after a referendum she initiated, asking Moldovans whether they supported EU integration, that was passed by only the tiniest of margins on 20 October. The referendum was held alongside the first round of the presidential elections where Sandu received 42% of the ballot but failed to win an outright majority.
The election outcome will be welcomed in Brussels a week after Georgia, another ex-Soviet state hoping to join the EU, re-elected a party viewed by most countries as increasingly Moscow-friendly and authoritarian.
The EU has promised a €1.8bn multiyear package for Moldova to help it on the accession path which the country officially began in June. Sandu has pledged to “work night and day” to take Moldova into the EU by 2030.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moldova has gravitated between pro-western and pro-Russian courses. But under Sandu, a former World Bank adviser, the impoverished country has accelerated its push to escape Moscow’s orbit as the war in neighbouring Ukraine continues.
Both presidential election rounds as well as the EU referendum vote were marred by accusations of Russian interference.
For months, Sandu and her allies have accused Russia and its proxies of leading a large-scale campaign involving vote-buying and misinformation to sway the election.
Officials in the capital of Chișinău believe that Moscow invested approximately $100m (£77.2m) before the first vote and had reportedly smuggled in some of the funds by “money mules” detained by police at the main airport while carrying bundles of €10,000 (£8,390) in cash.
Sandu’s team said it intensified efforts to prevent a repeat of what they described as a large-scale vote-buying scheme orchestrated by the Russian-backed fugitive oligarch Ilan Shor during the first round.
“Moldova has had a monumental task before it: just two weeks to stop a sprawling Kremlin-backed vote-buying scheme that proved effective in the twin vote on 20 October,” said Olga Rosca, a foreign policy adviser to Sandu.
Still, on Sunday, Sandu’s national security adviser, Stanislav Secrieru, wrote on X that they were “seeing massive interference by Russia in our electoral process … an effort with high potential to distort the outcome”.
“Cybersecurity agency reports the Central Election Commission’s voter education site was temporarily down this morning due to a DDoS attack,” Secrieru added.
The Kremlin has denied interfering in the vote.
“We resolutely reject any accusations that we are somehow interfering in this. We are not doing this,” the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
The tight result of the EU referendum has weakened Sandu’s standing, placing her in direct opposition to Stoianoglo, a former prosecutor general who exceeded expectations with 26% of the vote on the Party of Socialists’ ticket.
In last weekend’s presidential debate, Sandu accused Stoianoglo of being a “Trojan horse” candidate for outside interests bent on seizing control of Moldova.
Stoianoglo has denied working on behalf of Russia. In an interview with the Guardian in October, he claimed that he was in favour of joining the EU but boycotted the vote, calling it a parody.
He has also declined to criticise the Kremlin for its invasion of Ukraine and called for improved relations with Moscow. “The level of Russian interference in Moldova is highly exaggerated,” he said, adding that he would seek a “reset of relations” with Moscow.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shocked many in Chișinău, which is just a few hours’ drive from Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa, and the Kremlin’s shadow looms large. Moscow has 1,500 troops stationed in Transnistria, a region run by pro-Russian separatists who broke away from Moldova’s government in a brief war in the 1990s.
Ukraine, whose president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has repeatedly praised Sandu, will breathe a sigh of relief, as many in Kyiv had been anxious about the prospect of a Russia-friendly president leading the country that borders them.
Put your phone down, and back slowly away from those election forecasts. In a presidential race that has remained stubbornly close for weeks, nothing short of a campaign-shattering seismic event is likely to budge the polls much in the next few days.
But the polls have much to offer beyond the horse race. Throughout this campaign, pollsters have been asking voters a broad range of questions, and the answers will help tell the story of this election and provide valuable context in the weeks to come.
Who represents ‘change’?
Consider this: For more than a decade, most Americans have been saying that the country is on the wrong track, and this election cycle is no different. On average, about two-thirds of Americans are saying it right now. Former President Donald J. Trump has broadly campaigned by promising a return to a prosperous past, and Vice President Kamala Harris on moving toward a brighter future. The question is, which direction do voters think they want to go?
Mr. Trump has highlighted Ms. Harris’s role in President Biden’s administration, while she has made the promise of “not going back” to Mr. Trump’s era and brand of politics. These are strategic decisions when considered in terms of other common polling metrics: job approval and favorability. Job approval measures how many voters approve or disapprove of how a candidate is doing their job (or did their job, in Mr. Trump’s case). Favorability, obviously, measures whether voters express a favorable or unfavorable view of them.
Currently, Mr. Biden has a favorability rating of 40 percent on average and a 38 percent approval rating, according to a tracker from FiveThirtyEight. When Mr. Trump left office, his average was 39 percent, but in recent polls Americans have been more generous (as they’ve tended to be after presidents have left office), giving his performance a 48 percent approval rating in an October NBC News poll. While the Trump campaign aims to tie Ms. Harris’s fortunes to those of President Biden and his low ratings, the Harris campaign hopes to remind voters of how they felt about Mr. Trump when he was in office.
“When you have an incumbent president whose job approval nationally is in the high 30s, that’s just got to be a huge burden on the party trying to retain the White House,” said Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School Poll.
That said, Ms. Harris’s numbers have been much more positive than Mr. Biden’s. On July 21, the day Ms. Harris began her campaign, her average favorability rating was 38 percent; by Oct. 31, it had climbed to 46 percent. Over the same period, her job approval rating also improved, to 44 percent now from 38 percent on July 21.
But while voters may have a warmer view of Ms. Harris, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they believe she would offer a meaningful change from the current administration, and that could be a problem for her.
“The American public has been telling us for two decades that they want ‘change,’” said Chris Jackson, who heads U.S. public opinion research for Ipsos Public Polling. “This election cycle it’s sort of an open question which one of these two candidates actually represents ‘change.’”
Both candidates could reasonably make the argument that they are the “change” candidate. In fact, both of them have. But it’s also easy to see them as representing familiar philosophies, and voters have been split. When asked in separate questions in a New York Times/Siena College poll whether they thought each candidate represented change, likely voters were more inclined to say it of Mr. Trump: 59 percent said so, while 45 percent said the same of Ms. Harris.
But when asked in a later survey whether “represents change” better describes Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris, likely voters said it was Ms. Harris, 46 percent to 44 percent.
What’s on our minds?
The economy has consistently been voters’ No. 1 priority this election, and in every New York Times/Siena College poll this year, more voters chose it as their top issue than any other. And more likely voters say they trust Mr. Trump on the economy than Ms. Harris, though that edge may be shrinking.
“We may look back and say, ‘well, this all makes sense,’ if Trump wins,” said David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. “The two most important issues to all voters were the economy and immigration and Trump has the edge on both of those.”
However, in the most recent Times/Siena poll of battleground states, those priorities weren’t as stark. The economy was still the most-cited answer for the top issue, by 24 percent of likely voters, compared with 27 percent in the last national poll. Abortion was listed as the top issue by 18 percent of likely voters in the battleground states, compared with 15 percent nationally, while immigration was named as the top issue by the same share as had named it nationally, 15 percent.
Cross-tabs, the breakdown of polling results by subpopulations such as age and gender, are tricky to parse. Because they represent smaller samples, their margin of error is higher than that of the overall poll. That said, general themes across multiple polls show gaps emerging between voting groups.
When it comes to their top issues, in the national poll, Republicans were more likely (41 percent) than Democrats (12 percent) to list the economy, while a higher share of Democrats (28 percent) said it was abortion. The economy and abortion were cited as the top issue by an equal share of women, but abortion was not even among the top three issues for men. And men were more likely than women to list immigration as their top issue, as were Republicans compared with Democrats.
We’re also seeing stark gaps in candidate choice by sex. On average, Ms. Harris leads Mr. Trump among women by 10 percentage points, while Mr. Trump leads Ms. Harris by eight, according to an aggregation of poll results from the last two weeks collected by a former Democratic pollster, Adam Carlson. There’s an even starker sex divide among young people; across three Times/Siena polls this fall, Mr. Trump led Ms. Harris among young men by 21 percentage points, while Ms. Harris led him among young women by nearly 40.
Voters are not always one-dimensional
All of this data is painting a complex picture of voters as we head into Election Day. It could even result in some surprising results, such as split-ticket voting across some states.
In Arizona, for instance, voters will be deciding on a ballot measure to codify “the fundamental right to an abortion” in the State Constitution, which a majority of likely voters there support (54 percent in the latest Times/Siena poll). At the same time, more of those voters cited immigration as their top issue than abortion, and they’ll also be voting on a ballot measure on that issue, to decide if illegal border crossings should be a state crime. In the presidential race, Mr. Trump has pulled ahead in the polls, but in the Senate contest, the Democratic candidate, Representative Rubén Gallego, is leading by four points.
“There’s 10 states with abortion on the ballot, does that impact female turnout in the state?” said Camille Mumford, the director of communications for Emerson College Polling. “Immigration, too, is on the ballot in Arizona, so will one of those have more of an impact?”
While these patterns can’t necessarily help predict who is going to win on Tuesday, they provide valuable context that, in retrospect, may help explain why exactly voters made the choices that they did.
You’re a funny character.
You just start yelling ridiculous random hyperbole when you are revealed.
Like clockwork.
Even if Trump can’t really mobilize large numbers of people to the streets, just prolonging a sense of chaos might be enough
Whatever happens next, one day historians will have to explain why a candidate who earlier this year had been presented as disciplined started to veer off into unrestrained racist rhetoric and dancing for 40 minutes to his own playlist. Was it age, as plenty of commentators have speculated? Was it a brilliant attempt to balance dehumanizing attacks on minorities with an effort to make himself look human?
A much more sinister explanation must be taken seriously. We still assume that we are witnessing two campaigns for the presidency. But what if we are witnessing one campaign and one slow-motion coup, whose organizers need to go through the motion of campaigning for the plan to work? Since winning at the ballot box does not matter, taking a break to listen to Pavarotti isn’t a problem; conversely, a festival of racism and conspiracy theories, as at Madison Square Garden, is not about convincing any undecided voter, but motivating committed Trumpists to go along with another coup attempt.
To be sure, this can also sound like conspiracy theory. The point is not prediction, but to call for preparedness. After all, there is an overwhelming number of reasons why, should Trump lose, he will once more try to take power anyway. His followers have long been primed to assume that evil Democrats will steal the election. The unchecked racism fits into a logic of far-right populism more generally: far-right populists claim that they, and they alone, represent what they call “the silent majority” or “the real people” (the very expression Trump used on January 6 to address his supporters).
If far-right populists do not win elections, the reason can only be that the majority of the electorate was silenced by someone (liberal elites, of course). Or, for that matter, people who are not “real people” – fake Americans – must have participated in the election to bring about an illegitimate outcome. This explains the Republican obsession with finding proof of “non-citizen” voting.
Dozens of lawsuits have already been launched to put election results into doubt. As in 2020 and early 2021, Trump is likely to make sharing his lies a test of loyalty.
"Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle
Here analogies with other far-right populists are again illuminating: it is doubtful that all followers of the far-right Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland truly believe that relatively liberal prime minister Donald Tusk had colluded with Russians to have the country’s president, a member of PiS, killed in a plane crash in Smolensk in 2010. But professing the Smolensk conspiracy theory was not about making an empirical statement; it became a means to signal membership of a political tribe.
In theory, Republicans could seize the chance at last to break with Trump, who, after all, has only delivered defeats to the party. He has stated that he will not run again (though it would of course be naive to take any of his promises at face value). Yet there were already plenty of incentives to get rid of Trump in early 2021, and still Republicans did not disown, let alone impeach, him.
Most worryingly, Maga members have been primed to resort to violence. Trump and his allies – including the world’s richest man, who just happens to be a rightwing extremist – have framed the election as an apocalyptic battle. If Democrats win, Musk has claimed, there will not be any proper elections ever after; they will bring in more foreigners to secure a permanent majority. It is already half forgotten that Trump held his first major rally this election cycle in Waco, Texas.
Who knows whether Trump can really mobilize large numbers of people on the streets; it might be enough to prolong a sense of chaos. Vance has claimed that the 2020 election was problematic, because so many citizens had doubts about its “integrity” and Democrats prevented a “debate” which the country needed to have (never mind that Republicans had created the doubts in the first place). How long a debate would Vance like, exactly? Incidents like the infamous Brooks Brothers riot, where rightwingers in fancy suits stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, might accompany this debate. After all, as Jack Smith has claimed, Trump campaign operatives in 2020 already issued the order: “Make them riot.”
The hope may well be that, if decisions are kicked to the correct court, things could still go Republicans’ way. Trumpists know from the US supreme court’s decisions about ballot access and immunity earlier that some parts of the judiciary have given up on any conventional legal logic; they are likely simply to deliver whatever benefits Trump. The conservative justices’ decision this past week allowing the removal of voters from the rolls in Virginia so close to the election – a clear break with precedent – might well have been a preview of what a court captured by Trumpists is willing to do.
To be sure, the system as a whole is less vulnerable than in 2020. What is officially known as the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes it harder to challenge results in Congress; the theory that legislatures could overturn the outcome – popular among Trumpists in 2020 – has not found much legal support. But since Trump has everything to lose (including his freedom, given the charges still pending), there’s every reason to think that he’ll try everything.
Two years ago, when the US was still convulsed by January 6, we suggested that the possibility of spiraling violence verging on civil war warranted serious consideration.
It remains imprudent to dismiss it. MAGA fever has hardly broken, and Donald Trump is in a very tight race for the presidency with Vice President Kamala Harris. Whoever wins the popular vote, the election will almost certainly be close in the Electoral College, as the 2016 and 2020 elections were. The Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 makes electoral vote certification less vulnerable to manipulation, although Democrats continue to worry that Republicans will attempt to obstruct it. A Harris victory will undoubtedly elicit fierce legal challenges from Trump, and his supporters, with his encouragement, may resort to escalating force to try to secure their political objectives.
In its annual threat assessment for 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stated:
• We are particularly concerned about a confluence of factors this year, including violent extremist responses to domestic sociopolitical developments—especially the 2024 election cycle—and international events that domestic and foreign violent extremists likely will use to justify or encourage attacks.
Furthermore, some Republican and Democratic members of Congress are worried that mass-casualty political violence could disrupt government continuity, and some are proposing a constitutional amendment to address the problem. While there are reasons to believe that the moment of maximum danger from Trumpism has passed, that relatively few far-right activists are willing to resort to arms, and that disparate local eruptions of violence would not escalate into large-scale civil breakdown, there are also reasons to doubt such optimistic assessments.
Today the US political situation radiates civil instability. Extremism stoked on the Internet has generated the kind of stark disengagement with opposing positions that is conducive to violence. Virulent groups are gaining traction by voicing intense hostility to a federal government perceived as heavy-handed and excessively protective of minorities—an attitude that has coursed through some parts of America for decades, just beneath the surface. Its roots reach back to the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction, and it has been nourished by the Lost Cause myth, the lingering effects of Jim Crow, and a persistent strain of white supremacy. White Christians’ feelings of cultural besiegement and of a need to forcefully reassert their political power have sharpened racism and xenophobia and unequivocally correlate with support for Trump, political violence in general, and the January 6 assault in particular. It is worth considering, however speculatively, that myths comparable to those prevalent in America fueled right-wing opposition to the Weimar Republic, and that by the early 1930s a majority of Germans effectively supported extremist parties on the right or left, and centrist parties had been co-opted.
Unlike post–World War I Germany, the United States has not just lost a devastating war and is not plagued by a valueless currency, but a similar politics of cultural despair seems to have consumed the Republican Party.
Surges in violent nativism are nothing new in the United States, and events that occurred decades ago are still potent accelerants. Perhaps the most angrily remembered one is the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms’ fifty-one-day militarized siege and eventual “dynamic entry,” involving sixteen tanks, of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Eighty-two members of the Christian sect—which sanctioned polygamy and pedophilia and financed its community by selling weapons at gun shows—and four federal agents were killed. The episode reinforced paranoid fears on the right that the federal government would ban privately held guns, prompting mainstream figures like Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the radio personality Rush Limbaugh to cryptically urge rebellion against the Clinton administration. Militias burgeoned. On the second anniversary of Waco, Timothy McVeigh, a disaffected army veteran enamored of the white power movement, detonated a “retaliatory” truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people.
A crackdown deterred further attacks, and after September 11 jihadist threats crowded out concerns about domestic extremism. Yet as national politics have become more contentious, the mythic appeal of Waco and Oklahoma City has increased. Trump chose Waco for his first major rally after announcing his candidacy for the presidency in 2023, casting the 2024 election as “the final battle.”
More than a quarter of Republicans claim to believe that violence will be necessary to prevent racial and cultural degradation. How many would really resort to arms and what exactly would make them shoot remain unclear. In a July 2022 poll conducted by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, 28 percent of all voters—including 37 percent of gun owners, about 35 percent of Republicans, and roughly 35 percent of independents—agreed that “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.” These numbers were probably rather soft. Asking more specific questions in a June 2024 survey, the political scientist Robert Pape determined that 10 percent of those polled—a third of them gun owners—considered the use of force justified to prevent Trump from becoming president, while 7 percent, half of them gun owners, supported the use of force to restore Trump to the presidency.
Americans bought sixty million guns between 2020 and 2022, in each of those three years exceeding gun sales for any other year in the twenty-first century. In 2022, 42 percent of American adults lived in households with firearms, up from 32 percent in 2010. The Covid pandemic appears to have stimulated fearful insularity and the impulse to purchase guns. The National Rifle Association has encouraged armed paranoia—for instance, in a tweet featuring a woman holding a rifle and admonishing those storing food that they’d also better stockpile weapons to defend it. Right-wing individuals possess a substantial majority of privately owned guns in America and are far more likely than left-wingers to commit violent extremist acts. Yet half of first-time buyers during this period were women, nearly half were people of color, and all were mainly driven by the expectation of civil breakdown, which gun ownership itself tends to bolster. The popularity of guns, the Second Amendment absolutism of most conservatives, and the political efficacy of the gun lobby have made meaningful gun control difficult if not impossible to achieve.
The FBI recorded an increase in hate crimes of 11.6 percent in 2021 over 2020, with African Americans the most frequently targeted and attacks on Jews and LGBTQ people climbing. They may be bellwethers of broader social and political regression in the United States.
Accordingly ominous survey results can’t be shrugged off as armchair bravado. Legal reforms and heavy penalties prompted by January 6 might discourage the halfhearted from engaging in violent actions, but their longer-term deterrent effects are unclear. A swift and effective response can sometimes nip an insurgency in the bud, but it can also lead fence-sitters to pick up guns, follow true believers underground, and adopt better security and a more resolutely military approach. (Northern Ireland is one resonant example.) After January 6 the FBI and the Department of Justice mainly targeted participants who were easy to identify and locate because they gleefully committed crimes in front of cameras while talking to one another nonstop on social media and communications platforms. It is easy to decapitate a resistance movement when it sticks its head above the parapet. And some current militia leaders, like American Patriots Three Percent’s Scot Seddon, appear to be eccentric, inept charlatans.
Far-right leaders may have learned from their slipshod operational security on January 6, however. Within a few days of the Capitol breach, Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes acknowledged that a successful revolution required rebels to stockpile weapons and cover their tracks. American militias tend to act according to the theory of “leaderless resistance,” whereby relatively small, dispersed groups or individuals mount rebellions independently, but January 6 suggested that they could make pragmatic adjustments toward organized insurrection, spurred by Trump’s dog whistle.
The number of those who are willing to take up arms against the US government or on behalf of an authoritarian leader may seem relatively low. But the challenges for law enforcement are considerable. The post–January 6 mobilization did not result in a revision of the priorities and practices of US domestic law enforcement agencies in order to marginalize and contain the militia movement. Since the September 11 attacks, enhancements to the US counterterrorism apparatus—including the Transportation Security Administration, the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and various amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—have effectively addressed jihadist threats. But the political constraints on fixing problems that contributed to September 11 were minimal: the attacks shocked all Americans, highlighted the need for better counterterrorism, and produced a broad consensus on how to achieve it.
As appalling as January 6 was to most Americans, it was not, as the terrorism expert Brian Michael Jenkins has put it, the universally “galvanizing event” that September 11 was. Many Republicans refuse to see January 6 even as a contravention of American constitutional democracy, let alone as an insurrection, characterizing it as essentially an exercise of free speech that got a little out of hand. The extreme view that the January 6 protesters were acting in support of a legitimately elected president who was fraudulently denied his victory is a minority one. But a Christian nationalism that embraces white identity and conspiracy theories as well as religious fervor readily accommodates the boys-will-be-boys-for-the-cause gloss.
The far-right movement in the United States remains broad-based. Yet there is no federal agency truly in charge of domestic counterterrorism. Such agencies exist in many European countries that have experienced sustained violent extremism, notably France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Several factors may make establishing one in the United States infeasible. One is mainstream political leaders’ willingness to valorize right-wing vigilantism, which—unlike polarization, identity politics, attacks on democratic norms, disinformation, and conspiracy theories—is something new in recent American politics. Because casting vigilantes as swashbuckling heroes seems to appeal to voters, it is difficult to wean politicians off such cynical practices. The celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse’s 2021 acquittal for shooting two unarmed antiracist protesters dead in Wisconsin—epitomized by Idaho’s Bonneville County Republican Central Committee’s auctioning of a trip to a shooting range with him and an AR–15-style rifle that he signed—is a particularly egregious example.
More substantially, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Florida governor Ron DeSantis have moved toward institutionalizing vigilantism by mustering state militias to target migrants, and the “Texas Tactical Border Force” has already been brutally deployed at Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. In New York, Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman, a vocal Trump ally, is recruiting citizens with gun permits to become “provisional emergency special deputy sheriffs” to preserve public order in a crisis, vaguely defined. Vigilante sponsorship has even reached the federal level: starting in New York in 2017, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) discreetly trained civilian volunteers in the use of surveillance techniques and firearms to help federal officers impose immigration laws. How active the program remains is unclear. As the Philadelphia Inquirer national columnist Will Bunch reflected in an article about the Texas and Florida militias:
• I think sometimes our imagination is stymied by images of blue-and-gray-clad troops lined up in rows at Manassas. That’s not happening again. Instead, a second American War Between the States looks a lot like the bloodstained barbed wire of Eagle Pass: leaders of a growing rebellion against federal authority unleashing their own militias on The Other, who today is a brown-skinned pregnant teen fleeing despair in Central America, and who tomorrow could be anyone who speaks up in dissent.
Despite these trends, and federal agencies’ assessment that domestic extremism now poses the biggest nonstate threat to national security, the term “domestic terrorism” is politically toxic to most congressional Republicans. As a result the federal strategy for countering it is poorly organized. Training in this area, funded by the DHS, does not focus on crucial underpinnings like white supremacy and replacement theory; it seems almost surreal that a DHS/FBI document defining categories of domestic extremism does not even mention these terms. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), established in 2004 primarily to address transnational Islamist threats and relatively insulated from direct political pressure, would be a logical coordinator of federal law enforcement agencies charged with a variety of counterterrorism missions, but the NCTC and the DHS lack full access to FBI files. By default this makes the FBI, despite its historical difficulties in reconciling intelligence and investigatory functions, primarily responsible for producing strategic intelligence on domestic terrorism for the US government.
The NCTC has no explicit domestic counterterrorism remit, and it is barred from producing polished intelligence on domestic terrorist groups unless they have operational transnational links. Usually they don’t. The closest connections are between domestic and foreign white supremacist groups—which the January 6th Committee’s investigation illuminated—and those are mainly online and insufficiently substantial to warrant NCTC involvement. Right-wing American militias—the most severe threat—tend to be built from the bottom up, from visceral personal preferences that only later are distilled into ideological stances (for instance, anti-vaxxers pressured to get shots might become antigovernment activists).
Federalism itself also impedes counterterrorism coordination, which is spotty between federal agencies and their state and local counterparts. While US agencies have the intelligence collection capabilities to map right-wing groups, for constitutional reasons they can’t easily use them domestically. State and local authorities could mitigate the problem, but they are not legally required to report to federal authorities, which therefore must importune their cooperation. And in nonfederal agencies one often finds lower threat perceptions, incompatible interpretations of their legal obligations, and adverse conceptions of the role of government. In March the Idaho state legislature barely rejected—the vote was tied—two bills that would have removed the state ban on private armed militias and excluded solely American groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations from the state’s statutory definition of “domestic terrorism.” A county law enforcement official might not regard a passionately antigovernment gun owner as a potential threat or even as ideologically suspect. A local police officer could consider the state government the highest authority to which he or she is answerable. Most state and local officers worry about employee grievances, which can result in mass-casualty events, and welcome intelligence about them, but many shrug off even extreme ideological complaints. Federal agencies are thus hobbled by the scarcity of effective interlocutors. As a result they do not really know how many domestic terrorist crimes or plots have arisen. They have tried to ameliorate the problem by noting cases that have a domestic extremist nexus, but that still leaves significant uncertainty about the scale and dimensions of the problem.
Outright infiltration is a third vulnerability. Disaffected law enforcement officers can be susceptible to right-wing extremism. Former FBI special agent Jared L. Wise was charged with several misdemeanors in connection with January 6, and three FBI special agents’ security clearances were suspended because of their apparent sympathies with the insurrectionists. Shane Lamond, a lieutenant in the Washington, D.C., police department who headed its intelligence unit, has been charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly warning Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio that he was about to be arrested before January 6 and lying about it to investigators. “Anti-federalist” elected law enforcement officials at the county and local level constitute a more substantial systemic weakness. A penetrating recent study by the political scientists Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman found that groups like the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters had successfully targeted elected county sheriffs for recruitment as so-called constitutional sheriffs, focusing on their tendency to hold “mythological views of their interpositional authority.” Constitutional sheriffs, of which there are many, not only tend to let cases with connections to domestic terrorism slide but also engage in rhetoric and activities that encourage it.
Former and active-duty military personnel—particularly those who consider the country unappreciative of their sacrifices—are similarly susceptible to militia recruitment; nearly two hundred people with military backgrounds have been charged with crimes in connection with January 6. When Trump contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy American soldiers in response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the US military leadership stoutly resisted him. Were the military to overcome its reservations—which are based on constitutional doctrine and institutional culture—and enter the domestic fray, the right-wing tilt of some enlisted members and officers could induce them to execute a far-right Republican’s order to put down left-wing activism with extreme prejudice or to ignore a Democratic commander-in-chief’s order to thwart a right-wing extremist revolt. Despite the increased risk of large-scale domestic terrorism, then, US national security policy should continue to strongly discourage deploying the active-duty military for domestic counterterrorism purposes. A comprehensive law enforcement approach treating far-right extremism essentially as a criminal problem is the appropriate one.
It may not be enough, given the resistance of state and local authorities. Counterradicalization through civic education could in theory reduce extremism: particularly on the right, extremist inclinations tend to feed on exaggerated “metaperceptions” about the other side’s appetite for violence that education can moderate. But such efforts are notoriously difficult to mobilize on a society-wide basis, especially where—as in the United States—politics are already very polarized and antigovernment biases are entrenched in many locales. A kind of Catch-22 kicks in: widespread radicalization necessitates effective counterradicalization but may also render it impracticable. An alternative remedy would be the establishment of an American agency with a comprehensive domestic security remit, akin to MI5 in the United Kingdom, that is authorized to collect intelligence on and run operations against suspected extremists. It would probably take the bureaucratic form of an empowered DHS more tightly coordinated with the NCTC. The constitutional impediments are not insuperable, as analogous ones were not after September 11. Due process concerns, for instance, might be addressed through special tribunals similar to the existing Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act courts. But there is a risk that such an agency would be politically weaponized, especially by a Republican administration against Democrats and left-of-center activists.
This leads to the question of what might ensue from a Trump victory in November. He and his allies have portrayed the two assassination attempts against him as a kind of deification by martyrdom, while also feeding conspiracy theories that identify his political opponents on the left as their orchestrators, even though there is no evidence for this. Harris’s nomination has challenged Trump to improvise, since he expected to be facing a faltering President Joe Biden. His desperation has brought out ugly misogynistic and racist tendencies; some Trump supporters, including Republican members of Congress, have labeled her a DEI candidate, and he has baselessly questioned her Blackness.
Such reactions put independent and moderate Republican support for Trump at risk. But his bloody ear and raised fist after the July 13 shooting in Pennsylvania were potent inspiration to extreme-right activists. The policy mechanism for mobilizing them is well known, having migrated from his executive order creating an expansive category of unprotected federal employees, known as “Schedule F,” at the end of his presidential term (though it was revoked by Biden) to his present campaign’s Agenda47 platform and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. In essence, he would substantially replace the professional, nonpartisan civil service with militant loyalists and then use them to target his political enemies.
His response to Black Lives Matter protests sent an ominous signal of how a second Trump administration might proceed free of institutional guardrails such as a professionalized federal bureaucracy. When senior civilian and military officials balked at his first resort to the military, Trump, with the support of Attorney General William Barr, issued an executive order, based on the DHS’s narrow statutory mandate for protecting federal property and personnel, that authorized the agency to muster a kind of praetorian guard for repelling protesters and imposing his personal law-and-order agenda. The DHS came up with the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT), staffed it with personnel drawn from myriad federal agencies (some untrained for urban law enforcement), and dispatched hundreds of them to quell the protests in at least eight American cities—some in unmarked vehicles and wearing combat fatigues with obscured insignia, and some enlisted from private military companies.
Possible provocations for a newly elected Trump to assert autocratic authority are easy to picture. Mass protests could erupt over a federal program of mass deportation or a renewed tolerance for racially tinged law enforcement excesses. Effectively shielded by the Supreme Court from criminal liability, Trump would have the license to try whatever he wanted through established bureaucratic channels, subject only to weakened structural and political checks. It is well short of outlandish to imagine him designating antifa activists as terrorists, invoking the Insurrection Act and declaring martial law, selectively suspending constitutional protections, and having opposition figures charged with sedition—all of which he contemplated in 2020 and supporters like Steve Bannon, retired general Mike Flynn, and Roger Stone have broadly advocated. Last November Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution published an op-ed in The Washington Post urgently alerting Americans to the possibility of a Trump dictatorship. Senator J.D. Vance, now Trump’s running mate, sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggesting that Kagan be charged with insurrection or conspiracy. Today’s puerile political pandering could easily become tomorrow’s administrative reality.
If Trump returns to office, his lack of any concern about reelection would amplify his penchant for autocracy and his zeal to leave an irreversible legacy. He would likely avoid appointing cautious “adults in the room” like James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, and even William Barr to important positions and turn instead to unquestioning and unqualified toadies like Kash Patel. And Trump would undoubtedly try to top-load the military with generals and admirals keener on his ideas than General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom he suggested ought to be executed for allegedly betraying him. Were that effort to fail—and even if it didn’t—Trump might tacitly greenlight militia groups to act on his behalf. This would be perfectly in line with his broader encouragement of right-wing vigilantism. His exhortation to the Proud Boys in September 2020 to “stand back and stand by” turned out to be a call to arms that was met on January 6.
Indications that Trump’s mental faculties are declining and his rhetorical impulsiveness increasing sharpen concerns about incitements to political violence that a second term could bring. Recently his verbal attacks on trial judges in the cases against him prompted followers to urge on social media that the judges be beaten, tortured, and killed. Sympathetic state and local law enforcement officials would be more emboldened to look the other way or, worse, collude with them. Support for a violent response from the left would rise significantly, as it did among Democrats when Republicans claimed that Biden’s victory was fraudulent, diminishing only after efforts to overturn it had clearly failed. The possibility of retaliation from the left evokes the scenario contemplated in Alex Garland’s recent film Civil War: abject societal breakdown followed by counterrevolution by centrist insurgents against a fascist dictator.
The United States is not as combustible as Weimar Germany, and US militia groups do not appear to be strongly networked. Whether they will ever encompass more than the amateurish and collectively inept members who have filled their ranks thus far is entirely speculative. Radicalized Republicans ultimately may be too dispersed to mount a concerted rebellion, and Trump may be incapable of transforming them into a unified operational force. Lone actors still appear to perpetrate most domestic extremist operations. Yet the MAGA movement’s grievances are so widely shared that it amounts to a nascent insurgency, and gaps in domestic counterterrorism arrangements leave space for it to flourish and evolve. Attacks on individual political figures have increased, as have those on law enforcement personnel. Federal officials are concerned about “targeted violence”—such as the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville in August 2017—that may not immediately rise to the level of terrorism but eventually could.
Large-scale civil collapse need not involve orchestrated mass effort. Purposeful militias aren’t required, only acts of violence by small numbers of people that may originate spontaneously but, fueled by cycles of retaliation, develop their own momentum and shape. A critical enabler is the availability of high-powered mass-casualty weapons like AR-
15s, which can kill many more people more quickly than rifles used for hunting or handguns purchased for home or personal protection.
If just one far-right activist decided to take such a weapon and strafe a political event or a demonstration, killing dozens or even hundreds, it could spark a wider escalation of political violence. This past summer the nationwide unrest in the United Kingdom, prompted by the stabbing murders of three young children in Southport by a culprit mistakenly identified as an immigrant on social media, indicated how powerful a provocation a single act of shocking violence, inevitably amplified by online propaganda, can be. Right-wing violence could encourage some on the American left, though it is less prone to political violence, to strike back. A contagion of localized tit-for-tat violence could produce mass abdications on the part of local law enforcement. Even a liberal American president would be forced to respond with the kind of federal means—mobilized law enforcement, increased surveillance, restrictions on movement—that would further turbocharge the far right. Unrest could conceivably exceed the territorial sweep of federal authorities, giving rise to potentially expanding pockets of US territory under the control of extremists. Such enclaves arose during the run-up to the Civil War, in “Bleeding Kansas” and elsewhere.
Presidential elections are won or lost in the center, and moderates and independents seem increasingly alert to Trump’s perniciousness. The former president’s fraught legal situation compels him to attack the legitimacy of a wider and wider swath of American institutions—officials and legislatures as well as courts—further degrading American democracy. The rhetoric of his campaign has been grossly autocratic and anticonstitutional, and he has demonstrated clear intent to rally willing Republican state election officials to improperly refuse to certify the vote regardless of the Supreme Court’s rejection of the “independent state legislature” theory, which purportedly justified such an effort. A plausible chain of events could lead to nationwide civil conflict: Harris wins both a popular and an Electoral College majority, state officials and Congress refuse to certify the results, Trump claims victory, Harris appeals to the US Supreme Court, the conservative majority turns her down, the decision goes to the House, it votes Harris or Trump in, and spontaneous outbreaks of local unrest ensue.
It is reasonable to hope that moderates and independents will have had enough of Trump in November, emulating British and French voters who rebuffed right-wing candidates earlier this year. A clear rejection of Trumpism might deflate the MAGA movement for a while. But if Trump loses narrowly and declares himself the winner, rallying dispersed local groups prone to violent resistance to install him in office, orderly de-escalation could prove impossible. If he wins, his march to autocratic coercion may be unstoppable, and it would inspire burgeoning resistance from the left. The historian David Blight has observed that tipping points can only be determined in retrospect, and he isolates Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided by the Supreme Court in 1857, as the point of no return in the run-up to the Civil War. When historians look back on this traumatic era of American politics, they will probably assess the 2024 election—not January 6—as the event that foreswore or foretold the collapse of the American republic.
