It’s Not the Economy, Stupid — It’s Trump

By Will Marshall

America’s grand experiment in democratic self-rule was launched 236 years ago in Philadelphia. Since then, it’s survived a Civil War, the Depression, wars hot and cold, and disruptive waves of economic and social change.

In today’s presidential election, it faces another major test. The central question before the voters isn’t the cost of living, immigration, or abortion. It’s repairing the health and effectiveness of America’s political and governing institutions.

Donald Trump adores self-aggrandizing superlatives, so let’s indulge him: He is beyond doubt the most successful demagogue in U.S. history. But he’s already proven that he doesn’t know how to unite and lead our country. Instead, he “wins” by magnifying our differences and setting Americans at each other’s throats.

We know exactly what to expect if he wins: Four years of intensifying social conflict, political chaos, and partisan hatred. Kamala Harris may not be perfect, but she offers at least a chance to deescalate today’s ugly civil strife and revive the norms of honesty, mutual respect, and civility that make self-government work.

Trump is exactly what conservative Founders who were leery of democracy feared most: A populist rabble-rouser who would plunge their new republic into class conflict, paving the way to mob rule and tyranny.

He’s turned the Republican Party into the kind of blindly obedient cult of personality one sees in autocracies like North Korea and Russia. He’s the only U.S. president to refuse to voluntarily surrender power after losing an election.

Instead, Trump launched the first-ever coup attempt against a newly elected president, inciting a mob to attack Congress to prevent it from ratifying the will of the voters. By any reasonable definition, this was an act of treason.

Yet with a few honorable exceptions, Congressional Republicans lacked the courage to do what the Constitution enjoins: impeach a president who goes rogue. And rank and file Republicans have rewarded Trump’s lawless behavior with a third presidential nomination.

I know — it’s never wise to insult voters. But it’s fair to ask GOP voters how seriously they take their responsibilities as citizens. Is putting a pathological liar and polarizer back in the White House out of sheer partisan spite really a way to make America great again?

The Democrats’ struggles to reassemble the anti-Trump majority of 2020 also raise tough questions about their party. For most of this century, they’ve been assiduously pandering to college-educated elites and the cultural left, spurning the working Americans who historically constituted their party’s moral touchstone.

Win or lose, Democrats need to get back to their roots.

GOP apologists from the slippery J.D. Vance down have argued that America survived four years of Trump, so why worry about a second term? As president, Trump was surrounded in the White House mostly by normie Republicans and conservatives who at crucial moments checked his strongman impulses.

Dozens of high Trump administration officials have come forth to testify to his unfitness to serve again as president. These highly credible and patriotic witnesses include his estranged Vice President, Mike Pence, and two four-star Marine Generals: John Kelly, his chief of staff, and Jim Mattis, his Secretary of Defense.

To avoid a repeat of such “disloyalty,” Trump says he’ll appoint only lackeys willing to do his bidding, legal niceties be damned. He’s also promising to use the powers of the Executive Branch to take “retribution” on his political foes.

Maybe our constitutional frame is sturdy enough to survive another four years of Trumpian misrule. But his increasingly shrill name-calling and cognitive lapses on the campaign trail should make it obvious to swing voters that he lacks the character and temperament necessary to bring Americans together and summon the best from us.

The art of political leadership in a representative democracy is foreign to Trump. He erroneously views U.S. politics as a zero-sum game in which one side’s victory means the other’s utter defeat. Trump doesn’t understand that the U.S. political system is designed both to enable and put limits on majority rule. It’s built not for smiting one’s enemies but for bargaining, horse-trading, and forging win-win compromises that aim at accommodating the widest possible spectrum of public interests.

Echoing foreign dictators, he’s referred to Democrats not as legitimate competitors but as “the enemy within.” How can this angry and belligerent man lead a pluralistic, multiethnic democracy while vilifying roughly half the country? He can’t.

So here’s my plea to the small slice of fellow citizens who still are trying to make up their minds about who to vote for or whether to vote at all.

Please do vote, but not on the basis of tribal loyalties or personal grievances. Vote like a citizen. Think of what you can do today for your country, because only citizens can preserve our democratic way of life.

Will Marshall is founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.