Run Up The Score
Defeating Donald Trump is the only way to save democracy, but crushing him is the only way to stop fascism.
Around this time in 2016, I had a number of tense conversation with friends and family members who thought Hillary Clinton was destined to defeat Donald Trump. Some of them lived in my home state of California, where most people understand that their votes for president are symbolic. A few lived in swing or swing-ish states. But they all viewed their options through the lens of Hillary Clinton’s inevitability. Electoral college or no, she couldn’t lose—why not do something expressive or emotionally satisfying, abstracted from the binary choice on offer? Why not cast a harmless protest vote?
In each of these conversations, I made the same basic point. Most of these people weren’t particularly fond of Clinton, and they all thought they knew her pretty well. There was little to be gained from trying to convince them that their impressions were wrong, or overheated, or that they’d been lied to.
I tried instead to persuade them of the symbolic importance of Donald Trump’s margin of defeat.
Trump was a fascist even then, and I stressed (because I believed it) that a country that just barely beats a fascist will remain on the brink of fascism, while a country that resoundingly defeats a fascist might stave off another stare-down with the abyss for years or decades.
We all know how that story ended! And in part because Trump won* that election, I haven’t heard from familiars thinking along the same lines this time around. Everyone knows Trump can and might win. Most of them want to vote against him both substantively and expressively—the expression being something like “can you please fuck off already?!"
But other Americans are thinking along those 2016 lines: first-time voters without adult memory of the Trump or pre-Trump years; progressives who think defeating Kamala Harris (or at least casting a protest vote against her) will teach Democrats a lesson about Middle East policy.
It’s why Bernie Sanders just produced this exceptionally earnest and forceful video.
But I would like to reiterate the point I made eight years ago—particularly to swing-state voters, but also to people who live in uncompetitive states. If Trump had lost handily in 2016, that probably would’ve been the end of him and his miserable “era.” The 2020 election was supposed to be his downfall, particularly after the insurrection, but Joe Biden did not win that contest overwhelmingly, and the political system (including Democrats) turned their backs on an unvanquished Trump who rose again like a Hollywood trope.
At 78, Trump may be too old to seek the presidency again, even if he barely loses. But there will be a universal dividend if pro-democracy Americans somehow manage to defy the polls and trounce him. A second narrow defeat all but guarantees us more false tales of betrayal, another slow-burn insurrection, and a redoubling of GOP efforts to redeem MAGA-style authoritarianism. After all, a more disciplined movement leader might emerge and succeed where Trump failed. But if Trump loses by a wider-than-expected margin, Republicans might finally accept that Trumpism is a dead end and move on from it.
LOSS, LEADER
You’d think the GOP’s serial underperformance since Trump took over the party would be enough on its own to make Republican candidates and donors try on new stripes.
But some incentives point the other way.