Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy.
Trump tried to stage a coup in the months after his defeat in the 2020 election and then incited a violent insurrection in an illegal attempt to stay in power. He is a convicted felon, a twice impeached, four-times-indicted con man and fraudster, the leader of the MAGA cult who uses conspiracy theories and lies about immigrants and minorities to stoke fear and hatred.
Above all, he is a clear and present danger to the modern American way of life. His greatest ambition is to become a dictator.
American voters need a concise closing argument, one that explains the stakes in the 2024 presidential election and makes clear why Trump can never again be trusted with power. Too many Americans seem to be ignoring the risks that another Trump presidency would pose to the nation, and so it is important to warn about him one more time.
Threat to Democracy
Trump is a fascist who wants to overthrow the United States’ democratic system of government. He doesn’t hide his openness to ending American democracy, telling supporters they will never need to vote again after he wins this election. “Get out and vote, just this time,” he said in July, before adding: “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”
He fawns over his role model, Vladimir Putin, the autocratic Russian president who helped Trump get elected in 2016. Trump has already suggested that he won’t accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses, just like he refused to accept defeat in 2020.
In a court filing in early October, Jack Smith, the special counsel who has charged Trump in connection with the January 6 insurrection and his illegal efforts to stay in power, reminded Americans of the threat that Trump poses. With damning new details, Smith laid out the facts of how Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, showing that Trump knowingly pushed bogus claims of voter fraud with outrageous conspiracy theories in an illegal scheme to cling to power.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith wrote in the brief.
When those efforts failed, Trump used a speech at a rally outside the White House on January 6, 2021, to incite thousands of his followers to descend on the U.S. Capitol, where the election was in the process of being certified by Congress. Trump “knew that he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him.” So he “delivered a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march to the Capitol.”
Trump is responsible for “the tinderbox that he purposely ignited on January 6,” Smith wrote.
Imprison Political Opponents
Trump sees another term as president as a revenge tour.
He plans to weaponize the legal system by packing federal judgeships, the Justice Department, the FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies with lackeys and right-wing extremists in order to prosecute his political enemies. He falsely claims that he is a victim of persecution, but in reality that is what he plans to inflict on his political rivals. He will pardon the January 6 insurrectionists and fire Smith and the other prosecutors who have handled the federal criminal cases that have been brought against him. He plans to use the antiquated Insurrection Act to get the military to crush dissent.
He will likely direct the Justice Department to challenge the votes of minorities, as he tried to do in swing states after the 2020 election, and may try to get compliant judges to throw out election results in key races in which Democratic candidates win. He is likely to repeat the tactics he used in 2020 to incite his brownshirt militias, like the Proud Boys, to intimidate voters at polling places. Just this month, Trump said the military should be used against Americans who disagree with him and said that liberals are “the enemy within.”
Dissent against Trump “should be easily handled by, if necessary, by the National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military,” he has said.
Eliminate Reproductive Rights
Trump installed the three judges on the Supreme Court who provided the margin to overturn Roe v. Wade, and those justices now threaten to roll back reproductive rights even further. Worse, his own MAGA cult will probably pressure him to agree to a national abortion ban, despite his claims on the campaign trail that he wouldn’t sign such legislation. In October, Trump finally admitted that he was open to considering it. After saying in an interview that a national ban is “off the table,” he quickly reversed himself and said that he might be open to the idea, adding that “we’ll see what happens.”
Trump and the MAGA Republicans will try to put other extremist proposals into law to further restrict reproductive rights.
The next step would be a national ban on contraception. Earlier this year, Republicans in the Senate voted against a bill to protect access to contraception; many conservatives also oppose in vitro fertilization treatments. After crushing reproductive rights, the Trump Republicans want to impose a ban on no-fault divorce to increase the legal power of men over women, while trapping people in abusive marriages.
Concentration Camps and Mass Deportations for Immigrants
Trump’s campaign this year is just one long racist rant against immigrants. When he was president, Trump imposed cruel immigration policies, including family separation, but now his anti-immigration rhetoric and proposals are much worse. He traffics in racist tropes and conspiracy theories pulled from a weird alternate reality where immigrants kidnap and eat cats. He is exploiting the hysteria that has gripped many white Americans over their fear of becoming a minority. Trump stokes those worries by using Nazi-style rhetoric that nonwhite immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”
Trump vows to order the mass detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, which could mean the forced removal of an estimated 11 million people from the country.
That would inevitably lead to the creation of a network of concentration camps bigger than the entire U.S. prison system. And once those camps are built, Trump and his allies are likely to find other uses for them as well.
Create a Theocracy
Trump’s most dangerous supporters are Christian nationalists, a growing cadre of evangelicals who don’t believe in the separation of church and state and don’t even really believe in democracy. They share a dystopian vision for a Christian-dominated fascist regime and yearn for a dictator who will impose a religious order on society. Trump appeals directly to Christian nationalists in his campaign speeches when he talks of the need to reclaim a mythical lost white Christian past: “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before. … I really believe it’s the biggest thing missing from this country, the biggest thing missing. We have to bring back our religion. We have to bring back Christianity in this country.”
Trump’s bogus religiosity is purely opportunistic; he is a deeply immoral man who couldn’t care less about Christianity except as a way to motivate his political base.
Trump wants to crush dissent and impose broad censorship over the media. He will seek retribution against the press for criticizing and investigating him, and if he gains power he will bulldoze the First Amendment in order to crush independent journalism.
Trump has repeatedly called the media the “enemy of the people,” and promises to use the government and the courts to seek revenge against individual reporters and entire news organizations that have dared to reveal the truth about him.
Trump will also enable more book banning by right-wing groups who have hijacked public school boards and state government agencies to block books from being taught in schools or being held in libraries. Those groups have frequently targeted books about gender and racial identity, but with Trump in office they are likely to go after many more books about history and politics and current events than ever before.
A Puppet for Putin
Trump is eager to bow down once again before his master, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
Trump and his minions, including many right-wing pundits, have worked tirelessly over the last few years to try to convince Americans that Trump is not Putin’s pawn, and that the Trump-Russia investigation was a hoax.
But Trump is Putin’s lackey, and the Trump-Russia case was not a hoax.
Putin ordered Russian intelligence to help Trump win the 2016 election, and Trump was happy to go along with it.
The Trump-Russia case was a counterintelligence and criminal inquiry into a Russian covert action operation to manipulate the 2016 presidential election by hacking and releasing Democratic emails and related documents to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. The Russian operation, which also included a disinformation campaign that was spread on social media platforms, was designed to help Trump win the election. There is no doubt today that Russia worked to help get Trump elected; the only question that remains unresolved is the degree to which Trump and his lieutenants actively collaborated with Russia in 2016. But there is no doubt that they knew about and welcomed the help.
Now, U.S. intelligence officials have told Congress that Putin wants to help Trump win again in 2024.
If Trump wins, he will do Putin’s bidding by selling out Ukraine and NATO.
Trump is bitter at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he refused to buckle under pressure from Trump in 2019 to fabricate a damaging investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden and thus help Trump’s political fortunes. When Trump’s scheme was uncovered, he was impeached by the House.
But right-wing hatred of Ukraine runs even deeper than Trump’s personal grievances. Christian nationalists love Putin; they see him as their fundamentalist ally in a global culture war against the liberal West. They hate Ukraine because they see it as allied with liberal Western Europe.
Christian nationalists want Putin to win the war and crush Ukraine. They also want the United States to withdraw from NATO to end American support for “woke” Western Europe. Trump is likely to go along with Putin and the Christian nationalists and abandon both Ukraine and NATO, leaving Western Europe on its own to face an emboldened Russia.
Christian nationalists are also ardent supporters of Israel’s right-wing leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and so Trump would give Israel a green light to conduct an even more brutal military campaign in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and the West Bank. Trump would be happy to watch Israel crush the Palestinian people; he doesn’t support the creation of a Palestinian state, while his MAGA Republican supporters in Congress have already proposed banning Palestinians from entering the U.S. and demanding the deportation of Palestinian passport holders already living here.
Dictator for Life
If Trump wins, he might not go away after just one more four-year term. Despite the fact that he is already 78 and is increasingly showing signs of mental decline, he may try to stay in power, despite the two-term presidential term limits imposed by the Constitution. And he might get the blessing of the right-wing Supreme Court.
If Trump does so, he could follow Putin’s example, who circumvented Russia’s constitution that limited the country’s president to two consecutive terms. At the end of his second term as president in 2008, Putin became prime minister for four years before becoming president again in 2012. He then changed the Russian Constitution to eliminate the two-term limit.
Trump could argue that under the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, he could serve as vice president under a compliant president and then return to power when the president resigns to make room for him. That would circumvent the 22nd Amendment’s two-term presidential limit. Some constitutional scholars have been warning about this kind of scheme for years.
If you think that is too far-fetched, you haven’t been paying attention to Trump.