Act One: A known grifter who created a fake university, a racist who published an ad saying five innocent young Black men should be executed, and a sexual abuser who on tape said he could grab women by their pu**ys gets elected POTUS with 4 million fewer votes than his opponent. He was helped by the FBI publishing further investigations into his opponent days before the election and the Russian government launching a massive election interference campaign in his favor.
Act Two: During his presidency: he tells tens of thousands of lies, tells us to drink bleach as a cure during the worst pandemic in 100 years, sides with Russia over our intelligence agencies, puts children in cages, sends “love letters” to a North Korean dictator, tells the world that during a neo-Nazi march that there were good people on both sides, says he didn’t pay off a porn star he had sex with during his wife’s pregnancy, causes Roe v. Wade to be overturned, loses his re-election bid by more than 7 million popular votes, gets only 232 electoral votes compared to the winner’s 306, refuses to concede, promotes the “big lie” of election fraud, is caught on tape telling Georgia to find 11,000 nonexistent votes so he can win the state, sends a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, and then gets re-nominated by the Republican Party to be their candidate for POTUS in 2024.
Act Three: During his re-election bid: his RICO conspiracy trial is derailed because the district attorney had sex with her lead counsel. He is convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault (rape), threatens judges and prosecutors with jail, and is protected by U.S. courts which ensure that the remaining 54 criminal indictments against him would not come to trial before the 2024 election.
As a candidate, he selects a running mate who attacks childless women as “cat ladies” trying to brainwash our children and is a rabid anti-abortion advocate, he causes his opponent to withdraw from the presidential race by branding him too old to serve and becomes the oldest person ever to run for the presidency. He barely survives an assassination attempt. He is supported by the richest man in the world whose right-wing online platform publishes pro-Nazi propaganda, and a Kennedy anti-vaxxer who had a worm in his brain and dumped a bear cub in Central Park. He creates a cult that agrees with him on “issues.” After all this, his race for POTUS against a woman of African and Indian descent is too close to call.
Epilog: This, of course, is Donald Trump with nine-in-ten (88%) of his supporters agreeing with everything he says, and the full support ofthe Republican Party. How voters, especially “swing voters,” understand this cult-like support is critical to whether this man re-gains the White House.
Support for Trump is characterized more by his supporters’ fears, suspicions, and hatred for the “others” (African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and LGBTQ people), and their alienation from an intellectual bureaucracy committed to science and diversity, than affection for Trump. He has skillfully tapped into this existing reservoir of fear and suspicion and used it to create the MAGA Cult.
Besides what this election means for democracy and a woman’s right to control her own body, it raises the possibility that the Trump Era could usher in a “new normal” of American politics, in which attacking and degrading the “others” becomes the normal way of campaigning. Indeed, this explains how the Republican Party can tolerate Trump’s crude sexual remarks about Vice-President Harris and his photos calling for the imprisonment of Democrats who investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In this “new normal” of American politics, a candidate’s coalition building isn’t about finding groups of people who support their positions but finding people who hate and want to harm the other side. This approach, being offered by MAGA/Trumpism, is aimed at the disintegration of trust in the American government, and transferring that trust to Trump. At this point two out of 10 Americans say they trust our political class to do what’s right, the lowest support in more than 70 years of polling; even lower than after Watergate.
Donald Trump is the candidate for those who want to blow up our system of government. As of this writing the polls are virtually tied between Harris and Trump. If you’re still on the fence about voting for Vice-President Harris, thinking about not voting, or thinking of voting Third Party (which are votes for Trump), think about whether you want to live in this kind of “new normal” world that Trump and the Republicans are selling. Whether this deriding “the others” becomes institutionalized will depend on whether we have a President Harris, or a President Trump come 2025.