In less than 24 hours, the first polling places on the East Coast will open their doors to Election Day voters taking part in the 2024 presidential election. The final batch of surveys suggest that somewhere around half of the ballots tallied Tuesday night will be for former President Donald Trump. It’s also rather likely that it will be a slow, agonizing process to sort out whether he or Vice President Kamala Harris will sit in the Oval Office in January.
It isn’t the chance of delay that is the biggest contributor to the unease that millions of Americans have felt as Election Day approaches. It’s that there is any tension about the outcome at all. The 2024 election should not be anywhere near as close as it appears, not with Trump’s name on the ballot for the third straight election. It is disheartening, to say the least, that this should be where we find ourselves as a country once more, four years after Trump was expelled from the White House.
It is a state of play that would have seemed unfathomable in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s chaotic exit. I have not forgotten the slow, horrifying realization that Trump was not going to leave office willingly. I have watched as his various sins and transgressions have been laid bare before the public. And I have watched as he clawed his way back to the center of American politics again, poised to be an even greater threat than before.
Making the Trump resurgence even more dismaying have been the glimmers of hope interspersed throughout. Six months after the attack, the House Jan. 6 select committee began its work investigating Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy. Its public hearings in the summer and fall of 2022 described in stunning detail the scope of his and his allies’ efforts to keep him in office, leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The case against Trump, laid out in prime time, could have been a moment where the country accepted that Trump was unfit to return to power. When the GOP underperformed in the midterms that year, despite Trump’s play as kingmaker, it could have been a sign he had lost his political edge. Instead, he defiantly announced his candidacy just days later. And nothing — including a slew of legal cases against him — has slowed him down as he steamrolled a field of potential replacements at the top of the ticket.
It feels naïve in hindsight to imagine that the four indictments handed up over the course of 2023 would deter his romp through the primary. In each, Trump sought to use the charges to his benefit, raising funds and painting himself as the victim. In all but one of these cases, Trump has managed to avoid — or at least postpone — justice. His delay tactics stalled out three of those cases, with assists from a pliant Supreme Court majority, a novice federal judge he appointed and the personal escapades of Georgia prosecutors. He was convicted on 34 counts in Manhattan earlier this year but still managed to put off sentencing until after the election. It is unquestionable that, should Trump win, he will use the presidency to cloak himself in the trappings of office to avoid serving any sentence in New York, he will end the Justice Department’s prosecutions against him, and he will extinguish any chance of standing trial in Georgia.
Undergirding all of this is the distressing fact that Trump shouldn’t have even been eligible to run in the first place. He would have been barred from running had he been found guilty at his second impeachment trial. And his role in the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol should have triggered the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, disqualifying him from public office. In each case he was given a pass, first by Senate Republicans, then by a unanimous Supreme Court.
It didn’t have to be this way. Though it can be hard to remember now, there was an all-too-brief moment when it seemed like the tide had finally turned against Trumpism. Jan. 6 left the GOP genuinely rattled. But now, although Congress certified President Joe Biden’s win that evening and many of the rioters have faced criminal sentences, it can’t help but seem like the attackers won in the long run. Conservatism, especially as modeled in the MAGA movement, is an ideology of fear: fear of the unknown, fear of the other, fear of what will happen if the balance of power is tipped against those who have been on top for so long.
Undergirding all of this is the distressing fact that Trump shouldn’t have even been eligible to run in the first place.
Republican elected officials have been afraid of their own voters for decades, slinking toward the right in hopes of avoiding a primary from a more extreme candidate. In demonstrating their willingness to turn their capacity for violence against members of their own party, Trump’s supporters instilled a new fear in the officials who represent them: not just fear for their jobs but fear for their physical safety. With damned few exceptions, I have seen the Republican Party, cowed and cowering, rush to defend the indefensible as Trump regained his footing directly on the GOP’s throat.
It is a sign of Trump’s dominance that he hasn’t bothered to hide the ugliness of what he wants to do in a second term. While his campaign shrank publicly from its ties to the politically toxic Project 2025, it is not as though the plans and priorities Trump himself has voiced are any less dangerous. He has put forward plans to tank the economy with massive tariffs and tax cuts for the wealthy. He has promised to expel millions of people from their homes by force. He has made no qualms about his intent to use the full force of the presidency, even the military, to carry out a campaign of retribution against his political enemies.
If being an autocratic demagogue weren’t enough to repel voters, the buffoonery and vile racism on display from him and his surrogates should have been. The only thing that has changed since Trump first descended that escalator in 2015 is that we’ve come to discover how many of our fellow Americans find his grotesqueries as appealing as his promise of one-man rule. And now we are being forced to relive this same trauma yet again, for the third time in a decade.
We are still here living on the knife edge of history. Knowing that it takes only the lightest touch to send us careening down one path or the other is enough to make you feel like you’re going mad. The one comfort is that it’s almost over. Soon the stress of doubt will give way to the resolve of certainty — one way or another.
