Two years shy of its 250th birthday, America is about to face one of the most fateful decisions in its history. Presidential candidates quadrennially serve up the platitude that voters confront the most consequential choice of their lifetimes. But in 2024 it’s no drill. This truly is an epochal election. Defcon1 for democracy. A harbinger, feasibly, of an American form of dictatorship.
Illustration by Jim PavlidisCredit:
Certainly, this election is markedly different than the previous two contests involving Donald Trump. In 2016, he was an unknown quantity, and for all his bluster and braggadocio, there was a sense that assuming the powers of the presidency would have a humbling effect. “I believe that every man whoever occupied it, within his inner self, was humble enough to realise that no living mortal has ever possessed all the required qualifications,” President Lyndon Johnson once observed. Trump, however, experienced the opposite of imposter syndrome. In his first television interview after taking office in 2017, he immediately compared himself to Abraham Lincoln.
By the 2020 election, voters had a clear sense of what a Trump presidency looked like. The norm-busting. The rule-flouting. The threats to wipe entire countries off the map (although he did not start any wars). The adulation of authoritarians, such as Vladimir Putin. The self-satire of his appearance on the White House balcony after recovering from COVID-19, when he adopted the buffoonery of an American Il Duce.
Donald Trump arrives for a Fox News Channel town hall in Des Moines, Iowa on Thursday.Credit: AP
Still, voters in 2020 had little idea that January 6 was in the offing: an American insurrection incited by a sitting US president. Now, then, they are not only being asked to cast judgment on his four years in office, but also the four criminal indictments against him, two of which stem from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
So this year, the road to the White House will be more like a mammoth multi-lane freeway. Some paths will go through the traditional caucus and primary states, such as Iowa, which kicks off the Republican nominating process on Monday. Others will go through the courts. At various points these ribbons of highway will intersect. On the eve of Super Tuesday – a red letter day in the primary calendar when 15 states hold contests – Trump’s trial for allegedly conspiring to defraud the United States in his bid to overturn the 2020 election is due to begin in Washington DC. If, as Trump’s legal team hopes, those proceedings are delayed, they could well start in late-July, just after the Republican convention.
Each day, it seems, brings extra layers of legal complication. Two states, Colorado and Maine, are already trying to remove the former president from their primary ballots, citing a provision of the 14th Amendment ratified after the Civil War which was designed to disqualify from office candidates who supported the rebel confederacy. That has brought into early play the US Supreme Court, the country’s conservative-dominated constitutional adjudicator, which will consider the Colorado case in early February. Legally, then, we are already witnessing something of a demolition derby. It brings to mind the Florida pile-up in 2000, when right-wing justices appointed by Republican presidents ruled along nakedly partisan lines to hand George W. Bush victory. That ended up being a milestone in America’s democratic decline and the diminution of its rule of law. Dressed in their black jurist robes, it felt like the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had pulled off an electoral heist.
Faced with the jailhouse rather than the White House, Trump’s legal and political strategies have become entwined. His hope is to delay the trials against him until after the election. As president, his hand-picked attorney-general could instruct the Justice Department pursuing the federal cases against him to drop the charges. Alternatively, he could try to pardon himself, which would take us into a constitutional grey area. In Georgia, where he has been targeted by state prosecutors beyond the control of Washington and where presidential pardon powers do not apply, he would hope the convention that sitting presidents should not face trial while in office would be upheld.
American democracy’s at Defcon1. A Trump win may seal its fate
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12.01.2024
Two years shy of its 250th birthday, America is about to face one of the most fateful decisions in its history. Presidential candidates quadrennially serve up the platitude that voters confront the most consequential choice of their lifetimes. But in 2024 it’s no drill. This truly is an epochal election. Defcon1 for democracy. A harbinger, feasibly, of an American form of dictatorship.
Illustration by Jim PavlidisCredit:
Certainly, this election is markedly different than the previous two contests involving Donald Trump. In 2016, he was an unknown quantity, and for all his bluster and braggadocio, there was a sense that assuming the powers of the presidency would have a humbling effect. “I believe that every man whoever occupied it, within his inner self, was humble enough to realise that no living mortal has ever possessed all the required qualifications,” President Lyndon Johnson once observed. Trump, however, experienced the opposite of imposter syndrome. In his first television interview after taking office in 2017, he immediately compared himself to Abraham........
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