Election Countdown, Six Days to Go: Simple Questions About What’s Ahead.
Are Trump-Vance even trying to win votes anymore? Or just trying to win the count? And other imponderables.
Premiere of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, at the Ufa Palast theater in Berlin in March, 1935. The film was about the famed Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg in September, 1934, with its celebration of a new Fuhrer and his message of racial purity. The lettering on the marquee that night, showing the film’s German title, has coincidental resonance for Americans nearly 90 years later. (Getty Images.)
No one has coherent thoughts at this stage in the national drama. At least I don’t. So this is a stream of quick Q-and-As about the world as we dimly perceive it now.
Do we know what is going to happen?
No.
Oh, come on.
Last week I quoted the famed Democratic strategist, James Carville, and the famed Republican, Stuart Stevens, on the reasons both of them were confident that Kamala Harris would win.
For myself, I think that if what has been a hair’s-breadth race might “break” at the last minute, it would break in Harris’s favor. To put it in political-operative terms: Donald Trump might have solidified his base but reached his ceiling. Kamala Harris, by contrast, might not yet have “closed the deal,” as the pundit cliché goes, yet could still have potential for extra last-minute support.
If so, that would mean that polls had yet again missed the fury of many female voters, as happened before the midterms two years ago. They could also have missed the unease and disgust of Republican and centrist voters about everything associated with Donald Trump. The reasons would start with January 6 and the Dobbs decision and go on from there.
I hope that is the “surprise” in store for us. But I don’t know.
And is Donald Trump even trying to win the vote any more? Or is he just thinking about winning the count?
That’s the darkest fear: That Trump has given up even trying to draw newcomers into a majority-rule “big tent.” The fear is that he has skipped his sights past November 5 and is concentrating on what comes next. Intimidation, threats of violence, election-day victory claims, post-election lawsuits that reach an obeisant Supreme Court. That would be the logic behind revving up “Stop the Steal!” rhetoric now, to condition his followers to think a loss must have been rigged.
Only twice in the past few months did Trump strike me as running a “general election” campaign, aimed at more than the MAGA base. Significantly, both were while the vulnerable Joe Biden was still in the race. One was the opening 30 minutes of Trump’s fateful debate with Biden, when Trump was patient and relatively polite as he watched Biden dig himself into a deep hole. The other was the opening 30 minutes of his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, when he more or less stuck to the “president of all the people” prepared text.
In each case, when those 30 minutes were up, Trump could no longer resist and let loose with insults and lies. But since that time, and after Kamala Harris’s debut as nominee, from Trump it’s been all grievance and lies, all the time. His rallies are all the same. Except for off-the-cuff economic promises—no taxes on anything, stiff tariffs on everything—they seem almost scientifically calculated to drive away anyone not already in his thrall.
From Trump himself, we assume this is not calculation but pure impulse. On that point everyone who knows him seems to agree. But for the party as a whole? Can they really be so calm as they watch their standard bearer rant and offend? Or are they acting so calm because they know that November 5 is just the beginning, and that far more disciplined strategists will get to work, on terrain they’ve already mapped out?
I mentioned my hope for a last-minute break in the votes. This is my corresponding fear: About the reserve army for the post-November 5 battle, which ranges from the Proud Boys to the majority on the Supreme Court.
Oh, come on (again). And was this latest Trump rally actually that bad?
Yes. It was.
Obviously you want to be careful with Nazi comparisons. Nothing in the modern Western world matches what Hitler’s Third Reich became, from industrialized mass slaughter to all-frontiers invasions and world war.
But Hitler started someplace. And while the United States in the 2020s could hardly be more different from Weimar Germany after World War I—the strongest and richest nation in the world, versus one defeated and bankrupted—the rhetoric and references between Donald Trump’s current appeals and those of the nascent Nazis are strikingly similar. Listen to the Madison Square Garden rally three nights ago. And compare it with the rhetoric of the 1934 Nuremberg rally shown in Triumph of the Will. Vermin. Poisoning our blood. Bad genes. The enemy within. Round them up and send them out. Floating island of garbage. It’s a closer parallel than you’ll find with any other major US party rally since World War II.
But the press will point all this out, right?
Sigh.
Details to come, including whether you should cancel your WaPo or NYT subscriptions. (My answer: No. Fuller explanation later.) For now I highly recommend this new Columbia Journalism Review piece by Jeff Jarvis.
So, don’t you have anything more positive to say?
As a matter of fact, yes!
It’s too early to have any kind of retrospect or reckoning on this era, since we’re still in a car that’s barreling toward a cliff. But I think people will be remembered for the sides they’re choosing, and we can see those sides now.
Which of our existing civic institutions have “met the moment” in responding to the darkness Trump has awakened in the American spirit and the ethical collapse he engendered in his own party?
As a quick list I’d say the institutions and organizations that have done their best (or tried) so far include:
The federal judiciary in general, with notable exceptions like Aileen Cannon of Florida and Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, plus the current Crow-Alito-Thomas Supreme Court;