Can Harris Stop Blue-Collar Workers from Defecting to Donald Trump?

 

 

By EYAL PRESS

The New Yorker

 

 In June 2016, Scott Sauritch, the president of United Steelworkers Local 2227, a branch based in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, drove for half an hour to a union hall in Pittsburgh, where Hillary Clinton was holding a campaign rally. Sauritch was hoping that Clinton, whom the U.S.W. had just endorsed, would talk about jobs and the steel industry. Instead, she focussed on the character flaws of Donald Trump, calling him “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified.” As Sauritch listened, he grew frustrated: what did she plan to do for workers? Afterward, he told me, Clinton shook hands with supporters. Sauritch stood there in his union shirt, but Clinton didn’t extend her hand to him. “Hey, Hillary,” he called out, prompting her to turn around. “I’m the union president—we really need your help.”

He rememers her saying, curtly, “Oh, I will help,” then leaving.

That November, Sauritch voted for Clinton. But this fall he’s backing Donald Trump, in part because he believes that Democrats don’t actually care about the working class—a group defined, by pollsters, as people without college degrees. If Sauritch were still running Local 2227, he might have felt pressure to keep his decision private, since the U.S.W., like most unions, is supporting Kamala Harris. But he left his post in 2022 and is now free to speak his mind. Most of the rank-and-file workers Sauritch knows share his view, he told me, regardless of what union leaders say publicly. “I don’t care what you see on TV,” he said. “The grunts in the lunchroom love Trump.”

Not long ago, America’s steel mills and factories were full of loyal Democrats. These union members understood that, in the struggle between labor and capital, Republicans sided with management. One of the workers who shared this outlook was Sauritch’s father, Herman, a retired steelworker and the person who introduced me to Scott. When Herman was young, he told me, employees knew “there wasn’t a Republican in the goddam world that ever tried to help the working guy out.” Herman, an eighty-three-year-old who wears a ring inscribed with the U.S.W. logo on his right hand, still believes this. He raised his children—five sons and a daughter—in a household that he thought would instill the same perspective in them. To his dismay, three of his sons support Trump. “I don’t know where I screwed up,” he said, with a sigh.

The shifting political allegiances of blue-collar voters have made it increasingly difficult for Democrats to compete in, much less carry, parts of the country they once dominated. In 1984, Walter Mondale won ten counties in western Pennsylvania, home to the state’s once thriving steel industry. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost all but one, contributing to her defeat in Pennsylvania and, consequently, in the election. Some of the union members who had long turned out for Democrats had either moved away, after their factories shut down, or become MAGA Republicans. And a new generation of blue-collar voters was emerging, one that was less likely to belong to unions and to vote Democrat.

The counties where this transformation occurred are heavily populated by working-class whites, who were especially receptive to Trump’s xenophobic nationalism. But some polling suggests that the decline in support for the Democratic Party hasn’t been confined to the white working class. In 2012, Barack Obama carried the nonwhite working class by sixty-seven points—a margin that helped him win the over-all working-class vote. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed Trump by eighteen points among working-class respondents, in part because the size of her advantage among nonwhite voters without college degrees—twenty-four points—was roughly a third of Obama’s in 2012. Although Black and Latino voters back Harris over Trump by large margins, the Times/Siena poll showed Harris with substantially less support from both white and nonwhite working-class voters than Joe Biden had in 2020.

The large crowds at Harris’s rallies, along with the donations that have poured into her campaign, have drawn comparisons to Obama’s electrifying race for the White House in 2008. The broad enthusiasm her candidacy has aroused is reflected in the proliferation of Zoom fund-raisers with names like South Asian Women for Harris and White Dudes for Harris. But Harris’s support rests disproportionately with affluent, college-educated voters. It’s possible that courting such Americans—including Republicans in the suburbs who dislike Trump and support abortion rights—will enable her to win. But, even if this strategy succeeds, it will raise questions about the Democratic Party’s identity and priorities. For much of the past century, its leaders have prided themselves on championing less advantaged people. If such Americans continue drifting away from the Democrats, it will be hard to dismiss the perception that the Party speaks mainly for coastal élites and upscale professionals. This is particularly dangerous in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, where this year’s election may well be decided—and where nearly two-thirds of voters don’t have college degrees.

One mistake of Hillary Clinton’s that Harris will surely not repeat is taking the support of working-class voters for granted. According to Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest federation of unions, Clinton didn’t visit a single union hall in Michigan or Wisconsin after she became the nominee, in 2016. While she dismissed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” Trump held rallies across the Rust Belt, promising to bring back jobs and deliver “a victory for the wage-earner.” Trump’s speeches were littered with bigoted remarks about Mexicans and Muslims. But, as a group of sociologists noted in a paper published in The British Journal of Sociology, he also exalted factory workers who had been stripped of their jobs, and of their dignity, by structural forces beyond their control, especially free-trade agreements backed by Democrats. (Of course, Republicans had supported the same agreements.) Trump’s message resonated with voters like Steve, a retired firefighter I spoke with while visiting Berks County, in southeastern Pennsylvania. He was dressed in a T-shirt adorned with the American flag, and told me that he’d voted twice for Bill Clinton. “Grandpop was a Democrat, Dad was a Democrat,” he explained. “They had a pro-union stance, and that was that. I learned it from them.” Then he watched the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton signed, ripple through the Rust Belt, causing nearby factories to slash jobs. “Those places laid off hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people,” he said. I met Steve, who left the Democratic Party, outside a Trump field office, where he’d come to volunteer.

Once Trump was in office, he abandoned his vow to help America’s forgotten workers. Instead, he cut taxes on the wealthy. Trump appointed Peter Robb, a former management attorney, as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a series of anti-worker rulings, including one that restricted the ability of union organizers to communicate with employees. By contrast, many scholars regard Biden’s Administration as the most pro-labor since F.D.R.’s. In Biden’s first year, the N.L.R.B. ordered employers to reinstate more workers who had been illegally fired for protected activity, such as participation in a union, than it had during Trump’s entire Presidency, and the agency has defended workers involved in organizing drives at companies like Amazon and Starbucks. In 2023, Biden walked a picket line in Michigan with striking members of the United Auto Workers, a gesture of solidarity no other sitting President has performed. (Harris walked a U.A.W. picket line in Nevada in 2019.) Biden also oversaw a boom in domestic manufacturing and construction, which was spurred by legislation—such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—that required workers’ salaries for government-funded building projects to reflect “prevailing wages,” thus encouraging the hiring of union labor.

Had Biden run again, he undoubtedly would have campaigned on this record, hoping that it would pay dividends with voters in union households, which he won in 2020 by seventeen points—more than double Hillary Clinton’s margin. Since Harris became the Democratic Presidential nominee, she has also tried to emphasize her labor credentials. Among her first campaign stops this summer was a union hall in Wayne, Michigan, one of the three locations where the 2023 U.A.W. strike began. She went there with Tim Walz, whose selection as her running mate drew praise from labor leaders familiar with his record as the governor of Minnesota, which includes signing a law granting workers paid family and medical leave. Seven union leaders spoke on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, among them the U.A.W.’s president, Shawn Fain, who wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt and told the crowd, “Kamala Harris is one of us.”

It’s not clear, though, whether most workers share this view. A few weeks after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, I met Aaron Joseph—an organizer with District Council 57 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, which has members in thirty-two counties in western and central Pennsylvania—at a coffee shop in Carnegie, a working-class suburb west of Pittsburgh. On social media, Biden’s decision to step aside was greeted with relief and exuberance. Joseph told me that the painters, glaziers, and drywall finishers in his shop reacted differently. “We’ve been hitting a three-to-four-year boom because of the Administration’s policies,” he said. “When Biden stepped down, it was like losing a friend.” The union has plenty of Trump supporters, Joseph told me, but Biden’s vocal backing of organized labor, and the fact that he was from Scranton and seemed at ease among blue-collar workers, had bolstered his appeal. Harris lacked these advantages. “She’s from California—that generally does not play well in western Pennsylvania,” Joseph said. “For our membership, there’s a sense of unfamiliarity.”

Celinda Lake, a pollster who has conducted extensive surveys of working-class Americans, said that unfamiliarity with Harris could end up helping her campaign, enabling her to distance herself from the less popular aspects of Biden’s Presidency, such as the high inflation he presided over. “The Trump campaign didn’t anticipate that people are ready to take a fresh look at her,” Lake said. Harris’s experience as an attorney general who took on price gougers—a record she has highlighted at campaign rallies—could also appeal to blue-collar voters. “People think of A.G.s as people’s lawyers,” Lake said. “It’s a particularly great office for women, because you can demonstrate toughness without being too tough. They’re dragon slayers—they’re the ones protecting the cubs.”

Lake believes that Harris will fare slightly better than Biden would have among working-class women and worse among working-class men. “I think there will be a big gender gap,” she said. This was borne out in the encounters I had one day in Allentown, where I attended a press conference announcing that the Economic Development Administration, an agency in the Department of Commerce, had awarded the city a twenty-million-dollar grant to help its distressed neighborhoods. Numerous officials turned out to celebrate the news, among them the Democratic congresswoman Susan Wild, who is running for reëlection in a swing district. “We are going to build an economy that works for everyone,” Wild declared at the event, which was held inside a warehouse that is being converted into a prefab-wall-panel factory by union laborers. Afterward, I talked to some construction workers at the site. One of them said that he was a Democrat but wasn’t supporting Harris because of her failure to protect the border—the subject of a deluge of Trump attack ads in Pennsylvania. Another worker, a tall man with a bushy gray beard, said, “I like Trump.” Later, I went to a diner to meet Anne Radakovits, a member of Council 13 of AFSCME, which represents more than sixty-five thousand public-service workers in Pennsylvania. Radakovits was excited about Harris’s candidacy, but wasn’t surprised that some of the guys I’d spoken to at the construction site were less enthusiastic. “We’ve never had a female President,” she said. “God forbid a woman be in a leadership position, because we scare people.”

Gender and race may be among the reasons that blue-collar white men will not vote for Harris, but there are also many working-class communities where being a woman of color in a contest against an older white man—a candidate notorious for his vulgar attacks on immigrants and Black people—could be an advantage. In early August, I visited Reading, Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city. Two-thirds of its ninety-five thousand residents are Latino, the fastest-growing demographic group in the state. I went there to meet Nancy Jimenez, a field coördinator for Make the Road Pennsylvania, an immigrant-rights group, at its local headquarters. Since 2016, she told me, the organization had registered more than fifteen thousand new Latino voters in Pennsylvania. A group of canvassers, in powder-blue T-shirts, told me that their mission was nonpartisan. Yet several acknowledged that their jobs had become easier since Harris had replaced Biden on the ticket, which generated a surge of interest in voting. One woman said that numerous people who were registered as Republicans had asked if she could help them switch parties.

A dozen other canvassers came in. They had been knocking on doors to survey immigrant residents about the issues that mattered to them. Given Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations if elected, it stands to reason that one of these issues was Trump himself. A middle-aged woman who had been canvassing told me that the vast majority of Latinos in Reading disliked Trump because he denigrated immigrants. But several other canvassers indicated that, contrary to what liberals might assume, many immigrant voters they’d spoken to, especially those who had entered the U.S. legally, had conservative views on border security. Moreover, immigration was not these voters’ top concern—the economy was, both because the cost of living kept rising and because local jobs often paid little more than the minimum wage, which in Pennsylvania is $7.25 an hour.

Indeed, a national survey conducted earlier this year by the Valiente Action Fund found that Latino voters ranked “economic issues/inflation” as the nation’s most important problem by a wide margin. The survey was sent to me by Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, an organization of restaurant and service workers who are fighting to raise pay in their professions. The restaurant industry is one of the largest employers of Latinos and Black people in the U.S. This year, both Trump and Harris have proposed eliminating taxes on these workers’ tips. Trump’s embrace of this idea was ironic, Jayaraman said, since one of the first things the Department of Labor tried to do under his Presidency was propose a rule that would have made tips the property of restaurant owners rather than workers—a gift to the powerful National Restaurant Association lobby (and presumably to Trump himself, whose Mar-a-Lago employees would have been subject to the change). Jayaraman, who successfully led a campaign against the proposal, said, “Everything Trump did was anti-restaurant workers.”

Removing taxes on tips would make little difference to most restaurant workers, Jayaraman explained, because two-thirds of them don’t earn enough money to pay income taxes anyway. A more meaningful step would be to end the sub-minimum wages that restaurants in most states are permitted to pay—in Pennsylvania, $2.83 an hour. Harris, in fact, has endorsed this change, a move that Jayaraman praises her for. But she still worries that both parties focus disproportionately on high retail prices instead of on low wages. A few years ago, she told me, she realized how important the latter issue was to voters while doing outreach in Ohio. “We found that, if you walk up to someone and say, ‘Hey, will you sign my petition to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour?,’ they’ll stop. If you then say, ‘Hey, you can’t sign unless you are registered to vote,’ everyone does it. That’s what makes them register.” Too many service workers weren’t hearing any campaign talk about raising their wages, she told me, which she feared might lead some of them to sit out the election.

The canvassers at Make the Road Pennsylvania told me that many people they met expressed doubt that voting could improve their lives. One canvasser said that she was frequently told, of politicians, “They just want my vote, and then they forget about us.” Manuel Guzman, a state representative whose district includes neighborhoods in Reading lined with modest row houses and populated mainly by Latino immigrants, told me that he was familiar with this kind of voter skepticism. Guzman, who is half Dominican and half Puerto Rican, was confident that Democrats would carry Reading in November. But he was worried that the margin of victory would be disappointing, given the disconnect between what preoccupied Democrats in Washington, D.C., and what he was hearing from his constituents—many of whom needed multiple jobs to escape poverty, which afflicts a third of Reading residents. “We’ve become so focussed as a national party on saving democracy,” he said. “I’m gonna be honest with you—I’ve not heard one person in the city of Reading talk to me about democracy! What they’re telling me is ‘Manny, why is gas so high?’ ‘Why is my rent so high?’ No one is speaking enough to these issues.”

Guzman and I met outside a restaurant in Reading called Café de Colombia. Across the street was a red brick office building with a sign in the window: “LATINO AMERICANS FOR TRUMP.” It was a field office that the Trump campaign had opened in June. A parked motorcycle was draped with a banner that read “TRUMP 2024: MAKE VOTERS COUNT AGAIN.” Inside, a life-size cutout of Trump had been placed by the entrance, next to an American flag tacked onto a yellow wall. I wandered down a hallway and saw roughly a dozen people waiting for a meeting to start. None appeared to be Latino. When I mentioned this to Guzman, he wasn’t surprised. But he also cautioned against dismissing Trump’s appeal to local Latinos. One draw was Trump’s projection of strength, which, Guzman suspected, might win over some macho types. Another was that voters in Reading “have seen a lack of investment from the Democratic Party for a very long time.”

A few weeks after Harris entered the race, a poll of people in seven swing states found that she was leading Trump among Latino voters by nineteen points—a dramatic shift from a similar survey in May, which had shown Biden with a mere five-point advantage. But Harris’s margin among Latinos was still slightly weaker than Biden’s in 2020. Guzman, who served as the Latino-vote director in Pennsylvania for the Biden campaign that year, thought that Harris could make up the difference, but only if she did more outreach in the weeks to come. “She was a relatively unknown person to the Latino community,” he said

Shortly after Labor Day, I attended a packed Harris-Walz rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. It took place at an outdoor arena along the waterfront. As the crowd filtered in, volunteers handed out water bottles and signs that said “KAMALA” on one side and “COACH!” on the other. Walz, a former high-school teacher and assistant football coach, was the featured speaker. According to the campaign, he was “barnstorming” across the battleground state, with additional appearances in Lancaster and Pittsburgh.

Walz took the stage to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” dressed in khakis, a sports coat, and an open-collared white shirt. Soon after shouting, “Thank you, Erie!,” he blasted Trump as a plutocrat who had given his “rich friends” a tax cut, and praised Harris for standing up to the moneyed forces that screwed people over in communities like Erie. “She’s the one who took on the fraudsters,” Walz proclaimed. “She stood up to the corporate interest.” As President, Harris would fight for the middle class, he vowed, for “nurses, teachers, and farmers who do an honest day’s work”—the kind of people he grew up with in rural Nebraska. “Those are the folks who need to get a tax cut.” Swiping again at Trump, he said, “If you’re a billionaire, you don’t give a damn about Social Security or Medicare. If you’re my mom—who has to pay her heat bill and her food with it—it matters a lot.” Walz paid homage to the unions whose workers “built America,” telling the crowd that, when “more people were in them, the middle class was better off.” But he offered no specifics about raising the minimum wage.

Some progressive analysts have argued that, in an age of rising inequality, embracing a more populist economic agenda is the only way that Democrats can hope to win back the working class. A few weeks before the rally in Erie, Harris introduced a set of policies that suggested she agreed with this view. The measures included an expanded child tax credit of up to six thousand dollars, and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar subsidy for first-time home buyers—pillars of the “opportunity economy” that Harris promises to create. In swing counties like Erie, the Harris campaign appears to have delegated the task of promoting this agenda to Walz, who is accustomed to addressing voters in the heartland. “I come from farm country,” he said at the Erie rally. “Our farmers aren’t getting rich right now—they’re getting three dollars and ninety cents for corn” per bushel. The big money was being made by middlemen and grocery-store owners. “And those folks need to stop price-gouging us!” Todd Clary, a steelworker standing near the stage, was impressed. He said, of Walz, “He really connects well with the working class, because he’s lived it. Being a schoolteacher, a coach, coming from farmland, he understands the struggle at the grocery store, at the gas pump.” Clary attended the event with a group of fellow-workers, all of whom reacted positively to Walz, he said.

But some believe that Walz’s presence on the ticket won’t change much if Democrats don’t move to the center on social and cultural issues. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, in their recent book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” argue that the Party has grown increasingly beholden to an array of advocacy groups—the A.C.L.U., Black Lives Matter—whose positions on everything from defunding the police to transgender rights reflect the values of urban professionals but alienate the working class. When I spoke to Teixeira, he noted that Harris’s advantage among college-educated voters is more than forty points higher than it is with working-class voters. Her campaign, he felt, was targeting the “NPR vote.”

During the Presidential debate on September 10th, Harris tried to undercut the notion that she’s overly woke by noting that she and Walz are both gun owners. She also spoke forcefully about social issues in which Democrats have the more popular position, such as reproductive freedom. Ballot measures seeking to safeguard abortion rights have prevailed by significant margins in the past two years, including in red states such as Kansas and Ohio; moderate gun-control measures are also broadly popular. (In a recent NBC News survey, fifty-seven per cent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint, created in part by former Trump Administration officials, that proposes increased “surveillance” of abortion patients and providers and a crackdown on the mailing of abortion pills.) At the Erie rally, Walz didn’t mention police reform or gender-affirming care for trans teen-agers, even though he supports both. But he did talk about the shooting that had just taken place in Winder, Georgia, where a teen-ager had killed two students and two teachers with a semi-automatic rifle. Walz told the crowd that he was a hunter and a former “N.R.A. guy,” but that his feelings began to change in 2012, after he met with parents of children murdered in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut. His son, Gus, had just entered his senior year of high school, he added. “It’s bittersweet for me because”—he paused—“those killed at Sandy Hook would have been entering their senior year, too.” It was the most sombre, and affecting, moment in his speech.

Rosenthal, the former A.F.L.-C.I.O. official, argues that the problem facing Democrats has less to do with where they stand on social issues than with many working-class voters’ perception that the Party is so obsessed with the culture wars that it has stopped paying attention to their economic hardships. Rosenthal showed me a draft report, “The State of Working-Class Voters,” that draws on focus groups and polling data to argue that the strongest way to counter this distrust is by “leading with economic issues,” such as jobs and health care. “These voters believe Democrats care about everyone else but them,” the report, a joint project of In Union—a pro-labor organization led by Rosenthal—and the progressive advocacy group American Family Voices, states. “They need to hear loudly and clearly that our candidates and our party are working to improve their lives economically.”

Because many working-class voters have become cynical about politics, simply airing TV ads about economic policy is unlikely to move them, Rosenthal told me. They tend to be more trusting of messages from organized labor. In Union has been sending newsletters to more than a million working-class households in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (The group receives support from various unions.) A recent edition profiled J. D. Vance, highlighting the Ohio senator’s opposition to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would increase penalties for companies that violate employees’ right to participate in union activity, and noting Vance’s close ties to the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel.

Numerous liberal analysts have argued that working-class Americans who support Republicans are voting against their own interests. In “Rust Belt Union Blues,” a book published last year, Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, and Lainey Newman, a former student of hers, reject this view. They argue that political preferences are shaped less by policy than “by how people see themselves within their communities and their perceptions of who is (and who is not) on their side.” Drawing on field work conducted in western Pennsylvania, they trace the rightward shift among working-class voters to the decline of unions—in particular, to the fraying of social bonds that organized labor once nurtured, not only in mills and factories but in fraternal organizations, sports teams, and union halls. Workers interacting in these settings developed a shared identity as “good union men” and as devoted Democrats—the party that they assumed was their defender.

As union density declined, these gathering places disappeared, Skocpol and Newman note. Like most Americans, working-class people grew more isolated. When they get together today, it’s often in very different social and political environments, such as conservative megachurches or at places like the Fairhope Rod & Gun Club, which is an hour south of Pittsburgh. I went there recently with Herman Sauritch, the retired steelworker whose son is voting for Trump. We sat at a horseshoe-shaped bar as people talked about another shooting that had been in the news. Everyone agreed that the incident shouldn’t be blamed on the proliferation of firearms. “A gun is just a tool,” an older man drinking a beer said. “Guns don’t kill people—people kill people,” a waitress mused.

Sauritch also took me to Monessen, a town on the Monongahela River where, at the age of nineteen, he’d landed his first job, at a wire mill. He betrayed no nostalgia for the position, telling me that the conditions at the mill, which had long since closed, had been so dangerous that workers often lost fingers. But he spoke wistfully about the Chateau Lounge, a bar where he and his co-workers used to go after shifts. Other workers had favored the Italia Unita Club, across the river in Charleroi, where Sauritch grew up and still lives. He told me that the lawns and houses in his neighborhood used to be well maintained; now many were so overgrown with weeds and vines that they looked abandoned. The downtown shopping area, which Sauritch said used to be so thronged with workers that you could barely find a place to stand on the sidewalks, was filled with vacant lots and empty storefronts. In recent years, a growing community of Haitian immigrants had settled in Charleroi. Trump recently declared that Haitians had “inundated” many Pennsylvania communities, and that Charleroi had been left “virtually bankrupt.” It was not as cartoonishly racist a charge as Trump and Vance’s repeated assertions that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating people’s pets, but officials in Charleroi strongly denounced the claim. “Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community,” Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, the president of the Charleroi Borough Council, said in a statement.

Sauritch took us a few miles outside Charleroi and stopped his car in front of an abandoned concrete pile the size of a football field. It was the metal-pipe plant where he’d worked until the nineteen-eighties, when it, too, shut down. To visit such ruins is to understand why discrete economic proposals—such as promising to protect health-care benefits—can strike the residents of western Pennsylvania as inadequate. “I don’t think benefits are unimportant, but it’s too individualistic,” Skocpol told me. “People look around at their communities and they see wastelands.”

While driving with Sauritch, I saw dozens of Trump signs on lawns. I didn’t see a single Harris sign. At the gun club, Sauritch said that he often overheard members bashing Biden and praising Trump. Despite being outnumbered, he sometimes tried to argue that Trump’s policies favored billionaires, not workers. He rarely convinced anyone. “They never let facts interfere with their point of view,” he joked.

Some liberals believe that arguments about economic self-interest don’t sway Trump’s working-class supporters because they are motivated primarily by racial grievance. This is undoubtedly true of some, and racial prejudice can be hard to disentangle from economic concerns. In a recent Times article, a working-class voter from Wilkes-Barre told a reporter that she was not racist, but went on to say that opportunity should be “for everybody,” not just “Blacks and people of color,” whom she alleged were being handed money while white Americans were “being let down.” Trump has deftly exploited such sentiments. But, in “Rust Belt Union Blues,” Skocpol and Newman point out that white working-class voters have long had prejudiced attitudes about race—a fact that, until recently, didn’t stop them from supporting Democrats. Newman, who grew up in Pittsburgh and conducted dozens of interviews with current and retired union members in western Pennsylvania, including Herman Sauritch, told me that she had noticed a pronounced change in whom workers saw as their enemies. For older union members, “ ‘us’ was the workers and ‘them’ was business, which Republicans were lumped into,” she said. For their younger counterparts, “ ‘them’ was largely based on perceptions of a cultural élite.”

This new conception has taken hold, in no small part, because conservative media outlets, from Fox News to talk radio, have relentlessly propagated it. But Democrats also bear some responsibility for the shift. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., noted that, in the nineteen-seventies, Democrats began telling a story about economic progress that made almost no mention of the conflict between workers and capitalists. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and on through to Barack Obama, the new narrative was “a variation of the Republican story that prosperity comes from unencumbered businesses,” Podhorzer said. This faith in markets would have startled pioneering labor leaders like Walter Reuther. The Democrats’ business-friendly turn occurred, ironically enough, just as inequality was widening to levels not seen since the Gilded Age—a problem that deepened as Democrats embraced free-trade agreements. They also supported the deregulation of Wall Street, which helped cause the 2008 financial crash. After the meltdown, the Obama Administration bailed out banks that had engaged in fraud but did little for the homeowners they had victimized, who could hardly have been faulted for wondering whose side the government was on.

Biden’s tenure, in particular his large public investments and support for striking workers, has marked a break from this approach. But, as the political philosopher Michael Sandel has noted, Biden’s Presidency has been oddly “themeless”—bereft of a captivating explanation of why these policies are necessary to create a more just society. The theme Harris has emphasized in her campaign—expanding opportunity to revive the middle class—implicitly acknowledges how deeply entrenched inequality has become but seems directed as much at business owners as it is at workers. Tellingly, the speech Walz delivered in Erie contained more details about the fifty-thousand-dollar tax deduction that Harris wants to offer to new small businesses than about her plans for increasing the pay of low-income workers. On her Web site, Harris devotes a mere sentence to the latter issue, promising that she will “fight to raise the minimum wage” without indicating by how much.

Another thing Newman noticed in interviews with younger workers was their anger at union leaders who reflexively supported the Democratic Party without getting anything in return. I heard this sentiment from Scott Sauritch, Herman’s son, who praised Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, for speaking at the Republican National Convention rather than rushing to “kiss Kamala’s ass.” (On September 18th, the Teamsters declined to endorse a candidate in the election, after internal polls showed that nearly sixty per cent of its members backed Trump. But local Teamsters unions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada immediately endorsed Harris.) The language that Sauritch used to describe Harris—whom he referred to at one point as an “evil bitch”—made me wonder how much his aversion to her had to do with her gender as opposed to her policies. Yet I could see why he felt that union leaders were too beholden to the Democrats. In 2018, two years after he’d attended the Hillary Clinton campaign rally, he was invited to a press conference at the White House announcing new tariffs on steel imports. The day before the event, he told me, the U.S.W. had instructed him not to wear his union shirt, in order to prevent Trump from using the footage in a commercial. Sauritch feels that the request would never have been made if the same policy, which he saw as helping workers like him, had been introduced by a Democrat. He wore the shirt anyway. (A U.S.W. representative told me that Sauritch had been advised that wearing union gear was optional.) During the press conference, at Trump’s invitation, Sauritch told the story of how his father lost his job at the metal-pipe plant when Japanese imports were battering the steel industry. Even more than the tariffs themselves, what had lingered with Sauritch from the event was the feeling of being recognized, unlike at Clinton’s rally. “He showed respect,” Sauritch said, of Trump.

To prevail in Pennsylvania, Harris doesn’t have to win the western counties. She just has to “lose them less badly,” as Skocpol put it. Harris also needs to drive up support and turnout in regions of the state where many working-class residents have felt contempt from Trump—because of their skin color or their status as immigrants.

Among the Pennsylvanians in this group are the cleaners, security officers, and food-service workers who gathered one morning at the headquarters of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, in Philadelphia. They’d come to canvass for Harris on a sweltering day in August, in a city where the working class looks nothing like the all-white crowd I’d seen at Herman Sauritch’s gun club. Local 32BJ has close to two hundred thousand members, about half of whom were born in a foreign country. In Philadelphia, most of the union’s members are Black. Twelve of the nineteen members who turned up to canvass on the day I visited were Black women. One of them, Barbara Cherry, told me that she’d been sitting in the front row at the rally in Philadelphia where Harris had announced Walz as her running mate. “It was magnificent,” she said. When Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she recalled, the shift in enthusiasm in Philadelphia was seismic. Now, when she knocked on doors to encourage turnout, people were telling her, “Of course I’m coming out—the whole house is coming out.”

Sam Williamson, the Pennsylvania director of Local 32BJ, said that, since Harris became the nominee, the union had witnessed a “surge in members coming in to volunteer and phone-bank.” In informal surveys, he said, support for Harris was running at roughly eighty per cent, both among members and among local working-class voters whom its canvassers were contacting. “This spring, we weren’t seeing those kinds of numbers with Biden,” he said. But Harris’s support among such voters isn’t as strong as some of her backers may assume. Her twenty-four-point lead among nonwhite working-class voters in the Times/Siena poll is more than twenty points lower than Biden’s was four years ago.

For all the excitement that Cherry and the other canvassers sensed, plenty of working-class Philadelphians had reservations about Harris. Her background as a prosecutor raised some eyebrows, especially among Black men. Audra Traynham, a cleaner who was sitting next to Cherry, blamed a lack of information about Biden’s strong labor record, such as his appointment of staunch workers’-rights advocates to run the N.L.R.B. When I asked Traynham if Philadelphians knew how hostile to workers the N.L.R.B. had been under Trump, she shook her head. But people did remember the stimulus checks bearing Trump’s name that they had received during the pandemic. Cherry said that she’d recently spoken to three young Black men who, citing those checks, told her they were leaning toward Trump. Working people needed to brush up on their labor history, Traynham said, but she understood why they hadn’t done so: “Right now, capitalism has people working so hard—two, three jobs trying to survive—that they can’t even lift up their heads to get the information.”

In Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, she described the community in the East Bay where she grew up as “a beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers.” Traynham, who is fifty-seven, told me that she was raised in a similar neighborhood, on a block in West Philly where families could survive on just one job. The neighborhood had hardly been rich, but it had been stable, she said. When Harris talked about building a strong middle class as a “defining goal” of her Presidency, Traynham could connect this vision to concrete memories from her childhood. But she could see why many of her current neighbors might find the notion difficult to visualize. “I’m gonna be honest with you,” she said. “We don’t have a middle class anymore here. What we have is the working poor.” Then she gathered her things and rose from the table. “Gotta go knock on doors,” she said. ♦

Eleição nos EUA opõe ruptura radical de Trump a estabilidade frágil de Kamala

 

'Flags I', obra do artista pop americano Jasper Johns

 

 Disputa na próxima terça pode levar ordem internacional a cenário de fragmentação e incerteza 

 Carlos Gustavo Poggio 

 [RESUMO] Eleição presidencial nos Estados Unidos, na próxima terça (5/11), talvez seja as mais decisiva e impactante da história do país. Caso vitorioso, Donald Trump voltaria ao poder com o Partido Republicano totalmente submisso às suas vontades e uma Suprema Corte mais favorável, o que lhe daria carta branca para implementar agenda mais extremada que abalaria a ordem global. A democrata Kamala Harris, por sua vez, representa uma esquerda que, emparedada pela polarização, oferece uma continuidade frágil do sistema, sem força para renovação.

No célebre romance gótico, Victor Frankenstein, um jovem cientista ambicioso, decide desafiar as leis da natureza. Ele reúne pedaços de corpos e, em um experimento ousado, dá vida a uma criatura que, em vez de glória, lhe traz horror.

Incapaz de encarar sua criação, Frankenstein a abandona, deixando-a à própria sorte. Rejeitada e amargurada, a criatura se torna vingativa, voltando-se contra o próprio criador e destruindo tudo o que ele ama. Sem controle ou direção, o monstro representa o pesadelo de uma ambição que, uma vez solta, não pode mais ser contida.

Donald Trump parece o monstro do romance de Mary Shelley, reanimado com pedaços de ideologias que pareciam mortas na realidade americana, como o protecionismo, o nacionalismo e o autoritarismo.

Em 2016, ele foi levado ao centro do Partido Republicano para revitalizar uma base desiludida e recuperar um eleitorado que se sentia esquecido. Todavia, como na história de Shelley, essa criatura logo se mostrou difícil de controlar.

No início, muitos republicanos olharam com horror para a sua retórica agressiva e para o desprezo que ele demonstrava pelas normas do partido. Ainda assim, acreditavam que poderiam moderá-lo e que figuras tradicionais do partido —como o líder no Senado, Mitch McConnell— seriam capazes de mantê-lo dentro dos limites institucionais.

Durante o governo Trump, os avanços mais evidentes aconteciam nos temas em que havia convergência de sua agenda com a de McConnell, como na questão de cortes de impostos. Em outras questões, no entanto, como as relações comerciais com a China e o enfraquecimento da Otan, o Congresso e indivíduos em sua própria administração atuaram como freios, contendo o alcance de suas políticas.

O vice-presidente Mike Pence tornou-se uma ilustração clara desses freios: no último ato de seu governo, Pence cumpriu a Constituição e certificou a vitória de Joe Biden, desafiando os desejos de Trump e reforçando a autoridade das instituições americanas. Esse episódio emblemático destacou como, mesmo no auge de seu poder, Trump ainda era limitado pelas normas e lideranças tradicionais.

Com o tempo, os criadores de Trump foram sendo afastados, derrotados ou silenciados, enquanto ele consolidava seu poder. Hoje, a criatura está solta —o velho Partido Republicano, morto e enterrado, deu lugar a uma entidade nova, moldada à imagem de Trump, sem amarras ou controle.

McConnell e outros líderes republicanos tradicionais foram marginalizados, aposentados ou ajustaram suas carreiras para apoiar Trump incondicionalmente, como é o caso do senador Lindsey Graham. Trump tornou-se não apenas o líder do partido, mas o próprio partido, e, com isso, ganhou carta branca para conduzir uma agenda mais extrema e menos institucionalmente moderada.

Enquanto os republicanos passavam por essa transformação, o Partido Democrata seguiu uma trajetória mais conservadora, e Kamala Harris, sua candidata à Vice-Presidência em 2020, foi escolhida mais por conveniência política, para atender a demandas identitárias e aplacar a ala mais progressista da sigla, do que por uma base de apoio própria.

Agora, Kamala teve de reposicionar algumas de suas políticas para se alinhar ao centro, revelando uma postura cautelosa. Sem a experiência consolidada de um líder transformador, ela, caso eleita, provavelmente delegará boa parte das decisões de política externa a especialistas do establishment Democrata.

Kamala representa uma esquerda que, diante da polarização e do avanço da direita populista, se vê forçada a proteger a ordem existente, mais do que impulsionar mudanças profundas. Essa curiosa dinâmica, uma direita revolucionária e uma esquerda conservadora, coloca os EUA em um cenário de incerteza global.

Se Trump for eleito, seu estilo insurgente e sua rejeição aos compromissos internacionais tradicionais abalarão ainda mais a ordem global, criando um vácuo de liderança que potências rivais, como China e Rússia, estarão prontas para ocupar.

Em contraste, Kamala oferece uma continuidade frágil, uma tentativa de manter o sistema internacional sob uma lógica que já mostra sinais de desgaste. Em vez de reformas robustas, a abordagem dela tende a preservar o que ainda resta das alianças e dos acordos multilaterais, mas sem a força transformadora necessária para renovar a liderança americana.

Em um eventual segundo mandato, Trump encontraria um cenário bem mais favorável que no seu primeiro. Com o Partido Republicano quase inteiramente nas mãos de seus apoiadores leais, sem a presença das vozes moderadoras que poderiam frear suas ações, o Congresso já não representa uma barreira significativa.

A Suprema Corte, que tradicionalmente servia como um contrapeso ao Poder Executivo, agora reforça sua autoridade, como ficou claro na decisão que declarou Trump imune a ações legais por medidas tomadas durante sua Presidência, consolidando ainda mais sua proteção contra as consequências de suas próprias ações. O republicano se tornaria uma figura ainda mais volátil, com menos compromissos para com seu próprio partido e mais propenso a governar conforme seus impulsos.

A escolha do senador J.D. Vance como seu candidato a vice em 2024 foi a primeira pista. Em 2016, ter Mike Pence como seu companheiro de chapa representava uma estratégia calculada: aproximar-se do eleitorado evangélico, um dos pilares do Partido Republicano, que via Trump com desconfiança.

Pence, um conservador firme e respeitado, oferecia uma garantia de que a administração de Trump teria um vínculo com a base do partido e com a ideologia republicana clássica. Desta vez, o critério determinante para a escolha do vice foi claro: lealdade incondicional a Trump. Vance, mais do que qualquer outro, representa uma nova elite republicana que emergiu para servi-lo, não ao partido.

Essa mudança revela uma lição aprendida por Trump ao longo de seus quatro anos na Casa Branca: ele agora valoriza a obediência absoluta sobre qualquer qualidade ideológica ou credibilidade eleitoral.

Com um partido moldado à sua imagem e lideranças que priorizam a lealdade acima de tudo, Trump se vê liberado de praticamente qualquer contenção interna. Esse cenário, de um presidente que opera sem freios institucionais e com um vice leal apenas à sua figura, configura uma nova dinâmica de poder com impactos que transcendem as fronteiras dos Estados Unidos.

As consequências para a ordem internacional são profundas, pois a política externa americana, sob um eventual novo governo Trump, tenderia a ser ditada por interesses imediatos e isolacionistas, abandonando compromissos históricos e deixando aliados à própria sorte. Essa mudança não só ameaça a estabilidade das alianças tradicionais, como também abre espaço para o avanço de potências rivais.

Trump, ao longo de sua carreira política, nunca escondeu seu desdém pela Otan e por alianças multilaterais em geral. Seu isolacionismo em 2024 representa um enfraquecimento ativo da aliança militar que, desde 1949, tem sido um pilar da segurança transatlântica.

Uma reeleição de Trump certamente levaria países europeus a questionar a confiança na proteção americana, acelerando um processo de militarização independente na Europa. Na prática, a Otan deixaria de ser a aliança coesa que tem sido, transformando-se em um bloco de países com agendas menos sincronizadas e mais suscetíveis à influência de poderes externos, como Rússia e China.

Este contraste define o cenário de 2024: enquanto Trump encarna uma direita que rompe com a tradição e busca uma mudança radical, Kamala simboliza uma esquerda que tenta preservar o sistema.

No entanto, mesmo que ela saia vitoriosa, a sombra de Trump e a força das ideias que ele representa continuarão presentes. O republicano se tornou um exemplo para outros países sobre a volatilidade da política americana e a permanência de ideais nacionalistas e protecionistas, que demonstraram ter ressonância profunda. Para aliados e rivais, a ascensão do trumpismo como forca política evidencia que os Estados Unidos podem não ser mais o pilar de estabilidade que historicamente pretendiam ser.

O monstro que o Partido Republicano ajudou a criar ameaça agora não só o sistema político americano, mas também a estrutura da ordem internacional. A vitória de Kamala pode oferecer uma estabilidade temporária, mas sua influência é limitada e insuficiente para conter a desestabilização gerada por um afastamento contínuo dos EUA do papel tradicional de liderança global.

O mundo aprendeu que os EUA podem virar as costas a décadas de alianças e compromissos em uma única eleição. No final, o legado do trumpismo talvez não seja apenas o de uma ruptura temporária, mas o de uma nova realidade em que o imprevisível se tornou a norma.

O trumpismo provou que as fundações da política americana são menos sólidas do que muitos imaginavam —e essa incerteza é o novo alicerce sobre o qual as relações internacionais terão de se reequilibrar.

FOLHA 

The Protection Racket

 

 

By FINTAN O’TOOLE

The New York Review of Books

 

In October 2020, on the morning after Kamala Harris had debated then vice-president Mike Pence, Donald Trump would not say her name. Calling in to Fox Business from the White House, he referred to her as “this monster that was onstage with Mike Pence.” The choice of this term was not accidental—he repeated it for emphasis.

Even by Trump’s standards of vituperation, there is something strangely excessive about this verbal assault on a woman who posed little direct threat to his reelection. Typically, his insults are literal takedowns. The target is belittled (Mini Mike Bloomberg, Little Marco Rubio, Little Rocket Man Kim Jong-un) or rendered weak and infantile (Low Energy Jeb Bush, Low IQ Maxine Waters, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer). Even Trump’s opponent in that election, Joe Biden, was diminished to Sleepy Joe—Sleepy, of course, is also one of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs.

Choosing to (as Shakespeare might have it) “be-monster” Harris meant going against this grain. Instead of cutting Harris down, he was talking her up, inflating her into a Medusa, a Scylla, a Grendel. And in the current campaign, he has returned to this magnification of her malevolence, making Harris a sourer of American lives. Trump increasingly conjoins the monster Harris with the monster alien immigrants who are, in the dark hallucination he wants to engender, streaming across the southern border to invade American homes and murder and rape their occupants. On September 29, at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, he told his followers that Harris “should be impeached and prosecuted for her actions. And these killers are stone-cold monsters and have so little heart. They have no heart.”

In a Truth Social post on September 27, based on a wild distortion of figures that in fact refer to a forty-year period (including Trump’s own years in office), he wrote that “Comrade Kamala Harris…allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country…. And people are dying every day because of her. SHE HAS GOT BLOOD ON HER HANDS!” For many of Trump’s biblically inclined followers, this surely evokes the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation: “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.”

Trump identifies Harris completely with her rampaging army of killers. In his telling she is them, their actions are hers, and together they create a monstrosity beyond his audience’s collective imagination: “These are rough, vicious, rougher than anything you can imagine.” Trump casts Harris in a horror movie that no moviemaker could ever put on screen: “If you wanted to do a movie, there’s no actor in Hollywood that could play the role. There’s nobody that could do it…. But it’s all because Kamala let these people in.” It seems unlikely that Trump has read Immanuel Kant, but here he is enacting Kant’s idea of the sublime as a mix of pleasure and displeasure “arising from the inadequacy of imagination.” He is both thrilling and terrifying his followers.

Trump fires at Harris the familiar missiles of sexist abuse: nasty, dumb, lying, crazy, “mentally disabled.” But there is something more visceral in his conjuring of a female fiend. It is dredged from the depths of a specifically political strain of misogyny: the horror of the woman ruler. It harks back to the sixteenth-century Scottish Presbyterian preacher John Knox and his The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women (1558), in which “regiment” means “rule” or “government”:

It is more than a monster in nature that a Woman shall reign and have empire above Man…. The Empire of a Woman is a thing repugnant to justice, and the destruction of every commonwealth where it is received.

In Women and Power (2017), the classicist Mary Beard reminds us that male Greek writers depicted females who assume authority as perverters of the natural order:

For the most part, they are portrayed as abusers rather than users of power. They take it illegitimately, in a way that leads to chaos, to the fracture of the state, to death and destruction. They are monstrous hybrids, who are not, in the Greek sense, women at all. And the unflinching logic of their stories is that they must be disempowered and put back in their place.

 

It is notable that Trump did not resort to this mythic level of misogyny in his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He painted her as weak, crooked, and deceitful—all golden oldies of antiwoman rhetoric. But he did not seek to construe her as the embodiment of a hellish vision of lethal femininity. Why does Harris, first as a vice-presidential and then as a presidential candidate, summon from the depths of Trump’s psyche these terrifying tropes? It is partly that Trump has become ever more disinhibited as he has grown older and ever more inclined to turn up the dial on outrage and provocation. Partly too that his overall vision has become even more apocalyptic—the Whore of Babylon, if she is not stopped, heralds the end of the world, and Trump warns that if Harris is elected America is “finished.”

But there is another, less obvious factor: public attitudes about the effects of gender on life in America have undergone remarkably rapid changes in the Trump era. In 2017, the year Trump took office (and also the year of the Me Too cascade of revelations about rape and sexual harassment), just 35 percent of survey respondents agreed that “men have it easier in the US today.” Now 47 percent endorse the same proposition. Especially striking is that this alteration in perception is bipartisan. The rise in the recognition of male privilege is extremely pronounced among Democrats: from 49 to 68 percent. But it is proportionally even greater among Republicans—it doubled from 16 to 32 percent. It seems that significant numbers of Trump voters came to see America as more of a man’s world while their own man was dominating US politics.

Yet the paradox is that this greater acknowledgment that women live at a disadvantage to men has been matched by another, equally dramatic shift. In 2020, 51 percent of Americans said the word “feminist” described their views either “very well” or “somewhat well.” Today just 35 percent say the same. Among Republican men, the figure is just 10 percent. What has happened, then, is an increase in acceptance of the reality that there is structural discrimination against half the population, combined with a shying away from the ideology that seeks to do something about it. It is in such contradictory states of mind that dark myths have most appeal.

Why has self-identification with feminism shrunk so significantly in such a short time? Almost certainly because of the way Trump has managed to polarize everything—including the notion that women have a right to equality and to control their own bodies. He has done this, oddly enough, by making an implicit acceptance of at least some sexual violence by men against women into a wedge issue. This is not an effect he intended. Rather it has arisen from the revelation in 2016 of the tape in which Trump boasted that he could “grab [women] by the pussy” and from the verdict of a Manhattan jury in 2023 that Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll in 1995 or 1996. That judgment amounted to a finding that Trump is a rapist: as Lewis A. Kaplan, the judge in the civil trial, explained, “The jury’s finding of sexual abuse…necessarily implies that it found that Mr. Trump forcibly penetrated her vagina.”

This is a different kind of unimaginable—not a twisted fantasy but a physical reality too raw and visceral for many Americans to want to hold in their heads. In one case by his own admission and in the other by the verdict of a jury of his peers, Trump has given Americans images of himself forcibly grabbing and penetrating women’s genitalia. There could be no starker expression of male power, of the violent possession and domination of the female body. But in order to continue to follow Trump and to vote for him, it is necessary to do at least one of two things. The first is to deny the truth, even when at least part of it comes from Trump’s own mouth: slightly more than half (52 percent) of Trump voters say they do not believe he committed sexual assault. The second is to embrace cognitive dissonance: 5 percent say they believe he is a sex offender (but intend to vote for him anyway), while 42 percent say they are “not sure.”

To close up that fissure, the figure of the sex-predator president must be obliterated by the figure of the monstrous woman. There has to be a female violence (BLOOD ON HER HANDS!) even more terrifying than mere male sexual aggression. It is not enough for Trump the rapist to be opposed by a woman who is devious and weak and stupid. He must be up against what Barbara Creed called, in the title of her groundbreaking 1993 book on horror movies, “the monstrous-feminine”: “what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.” Hillary Clinton was bad (and Trump did call her “the devil”)—but Harris is evil. She must be not merely disdained but dreaded and reviled beyond the limits of the imagination. “No person,” as Trump put it on Truth Social on October 11, “who has inflicted the violence and terror that Kamala Harris has inflicted on this community can EVER be allowed to become POTUS!”

This is the most extreme example of Trump’s uncanny ability to turn the world upside down. Trump the rapist becomes the defender of women against the sexual violence unleashed by the monstrous-feminine: “You will be protected,” he told women in Pennsylvania on September 23, “and I will be your protector.” Trump has, from the beginning of his presidential campaign in June 2015, characterized Mexican migrants as sexual predators: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” But as the current campaign reaches its climax, he has made this claim more personal and intimate. He now routinely names a girl and two women murdered in the course of sexual assaults by undocumented immigrants: Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, and Rachel Morin. These vilely abused bodies are not peripheral to Trump’s campaign; they have become MAGA icons, quasi-religious female martyrs.

Democrats must understand that however grotesque this strategy may be, it is highly effective. It is a reminder of Trump’s boldness—instead of avoiding a subject (sexual predation) on which he ought to be vulnerable, he has absorbed it into his personal brand, not only as the savior of America but now specifically as the deliverer of women and girls. It gives women who might think twice about voting for a known rapist a way out: Harris, the mass rapist by proxy, is even worse. And it simultaneously endorses male self-pity. His rhetoric makes it possible to believe that “men have it easier” not because of the persistence of patriarchy but because all American women and girls are in imminent danger of being raped and murdered by dark-skinned strangers licensed by Harris. The violence perpetrated on American-born women by their own male compatriots is projected outward onto the evil woman who stands between Trump and his rightful place in power.

This message resonates with a deeper sense of male victimhood. As Trump transforms himself from predator to protector, his most ardent followers are men who transform the real privilege of their gender into the belief that it is they who suffer from a system rigged against masculinity. As the moral philosopher Kate Manne puts it in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), the structures of patriarchy

are often quite invisible to the people whose privileged social positions they serve to uphold and buttress. So dismantling them may feel not only like a comedown, but also an injustice, to the privileged. They will tend to feel flattened, rather than merely leveled, in the process.

Large majorities of male Trump voters agree with the propositions that “many women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist” (74 percent); “employers should not make special efforts to hire and promote qualified women” (70 percent); “when a man and woman get divorced, the court system will always treat the woman better” (77 percent); and “when women demand equality these days, they are actually seeking special favors” (62 percent). In a divided culture, all games are zero-sum—if women are gaining, men must be losing.

It has been more than a decade since the sociologist Michael Kimmel published his study Angry White Men, based on extensive interviews. As he puts it in the preface to the 2017 edition:

White men’s anger comes from the potent fusion of two sentiments—entitlement and a sense of victimization. The righteous indignation, the anti-Washington populism, is fueled by what I came to call “aggrieved entitlement”—that sense that those benefits to which you believed yourself entitled have been snatched away from you by unseen forces larger and more powerful.

Trump inflates Harris into the embodiment of these larger and more powerful forces—and “unseen” seems especially apt in the way it connects her to unfilmable and unimaginable horror. It helps, of course, that she is Black. Kimmel recalled appearing on a television talk show opposite three “angry white males” who felt they had been the victims of workplace discrimination:

The title of this particular show, no doubt to entice a potentially large audience, was “A Black Woman Stole My Job.” In my comments, I asked the men to consider just one word in the title of the show: the word my. What made them think the job was theirs? Why wasn’t the episode called “A Black Woman Got the Job” or “A Black Woman Got a Job”? Because these guys felt that those jobs were “theirs,” that they were entitled to them, and that when some “other” person—black, female—got the job, that person was really taking “their” job.

The election, then, is hypergendered. But you wouldn’t necessarily know this from the way Harris has conducted herself in its latter stages. One of the reasons her momentum has stalled is that the campaign seems uncertain about whether it should take part in this lurid psychodrama or ignore it in the hope that most Americans will find it just too weird.

An instance of this indecision was Barack Obama’s address to “the brothers” in Pittsburgh on October 10. He admonished Black men who are not supporting Harris: “Part of it makes me think…that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.” He specifically acknowledged that masculinity itself is at issue in the election, wondering whether some Black men are attracted to Trump’s bullying “because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down?” Yet Obama then went on not to discuss the madness of a rapist posing as the protector of women but to appeal to racial solidarity: Black men should support Harris because Black women “have been getting our backs this entire time.” The point, however, is that Black men who support Trump (like other men of any racial minority) do not do so as members of a racial group. They do it as men. Obama placed gender in the forefront of the argument but then could not quite keep it there.

As for Harris herself, her instinct is not to play the woman card—a phrase Hillary Clinton embraced in the 2016 race. (When Trump claimed “the only thing she has got going is the woman’s card,” Clinton’s campaign produced a pink card printed with the phrase “Deal me in.”) At the Democratic convention in Chicago in August, the difference between Clinton’s rhetoric and Harris’s was striking. Clinton wanted to define Harris as her successor in the fight for political equality, just as she herself was heir to the women she name-checked: Shirley Chisholm and Geraldine Ferraro. She framed her own loss to Trump in 2016 not as a defeat but as a stage on the way to ultimate victory: “Nearly 66 million Americans voted for a future where there are no ceilings on our dreams. And afterwards, we refused to give up on America.” She presented a narrative in which “every generation [of women] has carried the torch forward.”

But Harris did not accept Clinton’s proffered torch. Conspicuously absent from her acceptance speech was any explicit appeal to the obvious truth that it is long since time the US elected a female president. This refusal was color-coded. In 2016 Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination clad in white—the color sported by the early-twentieth-century American suffragists. On the night of Harris’s nomination, the delegate floor was dazzlingly white, as women wore the same color to make the same point. But when Harris appeared, she was in sober navy blue. “Listen,” she told CNN in August. “I am running because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.” The combination of these two categories means, of course, that the glass ceiling Clinton sought to shatter is reinforced with an extra layer of prejudice.

Some of this reluctance is surely based on raw political calculation. Clinton’s explicit presentation of herself as a groundbreaking female candidate did not help her beat Trump. In the 2016 general election, as John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck write in their 2018 book Identity Crisis, “Women did not rally to Clinton’s candidacy, but men shifted to Trump—especially men with more sexist attitudes.” Clinton did beat Trump among women voters by twelve percentage points, but Obama had won women voters by thirteen and eleven points in 2008 and 2012. And she lost white men by an astonishing thirty-one points—a wider margin than any candidate since Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. There were more men who voted against Clinton because she was a woman than women who voted for her on the same grounds. It is easy to see why, looking at those figures, Harris decided to play down her femininity. She feared that being too upfront about the historic prospect of a woman in the Oval Office would antagonize men without galvanizing women.

She has another, more personal reason for her hesitancy. Harris had to emerge as a public figure from an extremely gendered role—that of consort to the charismatic California politician Willie Brown. The two dated in the mid-1990s, before he became mayor of San Francisco, and that relationship has long been exploited by right-wing commentators. Brown explains in his autobiography, Basic Brown (2008), exactly what that position demanded:

Naturally, it’s not easy being the date of Willie Brown either! It’s hard to find a companion who can handle dating Willie Brown, because that often means being ignored. When I walk into a party or public dinner or other social gathering, instantly all the attention is focused on me. Everybody wants to BS with me. My poor date may not know anybody else in the room.

Harris knows, in ways that no male politician ever could, that a woman in public life has to navigate between this kind of invisibility and its opposite: extreme scrutiny of her appearance. In 2013 no less a figure than Obama himself, speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser in San Francisco, remarked of Harris: “You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough…. She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general in the country. It’s true! C’mon.” While Obama also had a habit of introducing a male officeholder as a “good-looking guy,” the obvious difference is that with Harris being beautiful becomes as much an accusation as a compliment. Her looks have long been both politicized and sexualized through the implication that she has succeeded only by being physically alluring to powerful men, that her function in the various offices she has held has been purely decorative. As J.D. Vance demanded of her at a rally in Michigan, “What has she done other than collect a check from her political offices?”

In August Trump went further and suggested that Harris traded sexual favors for political advancement, reposting on Truth Social photographs of her and Hillary Clinton that were captioned: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” His constant references to her as “really DUMB” have this same sexual overtone—if she has risen so far with so little intelligence, there can be only one explanation. It is not accidental that for Trump supporters, the image of the Whore of Babylon is made literal. Among the ghost prompts still offered by Amazon’s search bar are “Joe and the Hoe gotta go flag,” “Joe and the Hoe gotta go yard sign,” and “Joe and Hoe gotta go hat.” Since Biden’s decision to step aside, the T-shirts and trucker hats sold on websites now leave him out of it: “Say No to the Hoe.” It is easy to understand why Harris prefers to stay as far away as possible from this vileness.

An unfortunate side effect of her unwillingness to be more explicit about the importance of gender in the election, however, is that she ends up trying to compete on macho terms. She plays the Pistol-Packin’ Mama, talking about owning a Glock, firing it at a range, and being ready to use it in earnest: “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” And this gun talk is magnified in her repeated evocation of the American military’s lethality: “As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world”—a formulation she used in both her acceptance speech and her debate with Trump. There is something too transparently performative about this posturing. It undercuts Harris’s messaging on gun violence in the US (surely an electoral asset) and patently evades all serious moral and political questions about the use and abuse of American military power.

Yet she has other instincts—and her own version of mythological female power. In 2003, in her first television interview as a candidate for district attorney in San Francisco, Harris, according to her biographer Dan Morain,

spoke of her admiration for the Hindu goddess Kali, a mythological warrior who protects innocents by slaying evil. In a classic depiction, Kali holds the decapitated head of a demon, has a necklace of severed heads, and wears a skirt of bloody arms.

She seems capable of having fun with the very myth of the killer woman that Trump seeks to use against her.

Harris has spoken eloquently of how she decided to become a prosecutor because her best friend in high school confided that her stepfather was being sexually abusive. At the beginning of her presidential campaign, Harris did indeed present herself as a ferocious protector of women and children: “As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, California, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them,” she said in her acceptance speech. In her first speech after Biden announced his decision not to run, she explicitly targeted Trump the rapist, saying that she had gone after “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.” She added, simply, that “Donald Trump was found liable by a jury for committing sexual abuse.”

These words carry the electrical charge of brutal clarity. It is a truth that should not be normalized. His former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway has remarked accurately that “I think people have very thick shock absorbers when it comes to Donald Trump.” A critical part of Harris’s job is to disable those shock absorbers, to make enough wavering voters feel the full force of the reality that predation is his way of life. She can’t do that while giving him free rein to run what must surely be the most wildly misogynistic campaign ever staged in a democracy. Kali has to find a way to behead the real monster.

In 2008, when the allegedly un-American views of his pastor were being used by the right to stir racial animosities, Obama confronted the attack head-on by making a thoughtful, reflective, but combative and unyielding speech about race in America. Harris has a great deal to say on that subject—but also on the real experience of being a woman in the US. The Trump campaign has sought to disembody her, both by turning her into a she-devil and, with slightly more subtlety, by suggesting that she is childless and therefore, as Republican Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders puts it, “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” Here Trump’s way of talking her up as an unnatural and existential threat is combined with the accusation that this Black woman is being uppity. Harris is, in this telling, a creature unconnected to real family life. But she shows in her demeanor that she is in fact comfortable in her own body and in her own skin. She needs to express that defiant comfort more directly in her words, to say once and for all why keeping women humble is not an acceptable agenda.

—October 24, 2024

 

Four More Years of Unchecked Misogyny

 

SOPHIE GILBERT

 Strange as this might be to say of the only American president found legally liable for sexual abuse, the only leader of the free world accused of dangling a TV gig in front of a porn performer seemingly as an enticement for sex, the only commander in chief to publicly denigrate the sexual attractiveness of both Heidi Klum (“no longer a 10”) and Angelina Jolie (“not a great beauty”), I don’t believe Donald Trump hates women. Not by default, anyway. “When it comes to the women who are not only dutifully but lovingly catering to his desires,” the philosopher Kate Manne wrote in her 2017 book, Down Girl, “what’s to hate?”

The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function. The more than 25 women who have accused Trump of sexual assault or misconduct (which he has denied), and the countless more who have endured public vitriol and threats to their life after being targeted by him, have all been punished either for challenging him or for denying him what he fundamentally believed was his due.

At the micro level, Trump’s misogyny can be almost comical, in an absurdist sort of way, like the time in 1994 when he fretted over whether his new infant daughter would inherit her mother’s breasts, or when he tweeted to Cher in 2012, “I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.” On a larger scale, the legislative and cultural shifts he fostered during his four years in the White House are so drastic that they’re hard to fully parse. Until 2022, women and pregnant people had the constitutional right to an abortion; now, thanks to Trump’s remade Supreme Court, abortion is unavailable or effectively banned in about a third of states. The MAGA Republican Party is ever more of a boy’s club: All 14 representatives who announced bids to become House speaker after the ouster of Kevin McCarthy were men; the victor, Mike Johnson, has blamed Roe v. Wade in the past for depriving the country of “able-bodied workers” to prop up the American economy. Online and off, old-fashioned sexists and trollish provocateurs alike have been emboldened by Trump’s ability to say grotesque things without consequences.

Trump’s glee in smacking down women has filtered into every aspect of our culture. If, as the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote, “ideology is not acquired by thought but by breathing the haunted air,” then Trump has helped radicalize swaths of a generation essentially through poisonous fumes. He didn’t create the manosphere, the fetid corner of the internet devoted to sending women back to the Stone Age. But he elevated some of its most noxious voices into the mainstream, and vindicated their worst prejudices. “I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1–10 scale in the same way that we do,” wrote the former self-described pickup artist Roosh V on his website shortly after the election.

By now, misogyny has bled into virtually every part of the internet. TikTok clips featuring Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker who has said that women should bear some personal responsibility for their sexual assaults and frequently derides women as “hoes,” have been viewed billions of times. (Tate has denied the charges against him.) In 2021, before Elon Musk bought Twitter and oversaw a spike in misogynistic and abusive content—not to mention reinstating the accounts of both Trump and Tate—the Tesla entrepreneur and men’s-rights icon tweeted that he was going to inaugurate a new college called the Texas Institute of Technology & Science (TITS). Boys on social media are being inundated with messaging that the only qualities worth prizing in women are sexual desirability and submission—a worldview that aligns perfectly with Trump’s. Misogyny, as my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in Slate in 2016, is the one ideology Trump has never changed, his one unwavering credo. Seeking to dominate others with his supposed sexual prowess and loudly professing disgust at women he doesn’t desire has been his modus operandi for decades. Any woman who challenges him is “a big, fat pig,” “a dog,” a “horseface.”

What would four more years of Trump mean for women? It’s hard to conclude that Trump was moderated by the presence of his daughter in the West Wing, exactly—or, for that matter, by any of the advisers who thought they could temper his worst instincts before they ended up fleeing in droves. But what’s most chilling about a possible second Trump presidency is that he would certainly now be unchecked. The advisers who remain are the ones who bolster his darker impulses. It was Trump’s adviser Jason Miller, Axios’s Mike Allen reported, who psyched him up between segments of his 2023 CNN town hall as he became more and more aggressive toward the moderator, Kaitlan Collins. “Are you ready? Can I talk? Do you mind?” Trump jeered at her. Anyone who’s ever witnessed an abusive relationship could instantly recognize the tone.

ATLANTIC

Trump Isn’t Merely Unhinged

 

by David A. Graham

With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.

The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want to let him occupy their headspace; or perhaps because he got kicked off Twitter (now X) and they had no interest in joining Truth Social. Or maybe it’s because the more sinister material gets mixed up with his strange elocutions (“We’re gonna have a great country—it’s gonna be called the United States of America”), contrarian hot takes (“You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart”), and gibberish (“All of these indictments that you see—I was never indicted. Practically never heard the word. It wasn’t a word that registered”).


Whatever the case may be, Trump has continued to make plainly dangerous and stunning remarks. Notwithstanding his rival Governor Ron DeSantis’s recent claim that Trump has “lost the zip on his fastball,” the former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.

They are the sorts of ideas that would have been shocking to hear from any mainstream politician just a decade ago. And yet, today, Trump—arguably the single most influential figure in the United States—says these things, and they hardly register. Consider the following examples, all from just the past few months:

1. Promised to destroy the federal government as we know it.

Trump has been promising in speeches to “demolish the deep state.” What he means by that is to end the federal government as it exists today, eliminating the civil-service jobs that have been in place since the late 19th century. This is clear because former Trump aides who are designing the effort, part of a sort of shadow government housed at conservative think tanks, are open about what they have in mind, as my colleague Russell Berman reports: a federal workforce that can be fired by the president at will and must follow his personal whims. That would be a major departure from the current system, where employees are permanent professionals who work for administrations of both parties and are meant to focus on effective implementation, rather than political hacks chosen for their loyalty.

2. Argued that a presidential candidate should be immune from prosecution.

While attempting to dodge the 91 criminal indictments against him, Trump argued in a July 10 court filing that he shouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of a federal trial, because running for president “requires a tremendous amount of time and energy.” This goes directly against the idea that no U.S. citizen is above the law.

3. Insulted and attempted to intimidate judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and others.

Trump hasn’t just made arguments in court related to the criminal and civil cases against him; he has also produced a steady stream of invective directed at anyone involved in the cases, to the point of seeking to intimidate witnesses, court staff, and even prosecutors’ family members. Subjects of his threats include the federal judge Tanya Chutkan; New York Justice Arthur Engoron; Engoron’s law clerk (for which Trump was slapped with a gag order); New York Attorney General Letitia James, including his inscrutable and maybe racist nickname for her; Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff and a possible witness; Special Counsel Jack Smith; and even Smith’s wife, a documentary filmmaker. Smith’s team successfully convinced Chutkan that some of these infractions could threaten the likelihood of a fair trial, and she ordered Trump to stop, though she permitted him to attack her and President Joe Biden, among others, and to call his prosecution political. Trump appealed the order but lost, then promptly attacked another potential witness, former Attorney General Bill Barr. (An appeals court has now paused the order once more.)

4. Continued to claim that the election was stolen.

Trump continues to insist, despite presenting no real evidence and losing every relevant court case, that he actually won the 2020 election. “I don’t consider us to have much of a democracy right now,” he said on Meet the Press on September 17. Perversely, Trump now has some incentive to keep lying about the election rather than acknowledge that he lost: Part of Smith’s case is premised on the idea that Trump knew he had been defeated. A functioning democracy depends on the consent of the losers; throughout U.S. history, losers of elections have sometimes grumbled fiercely and other times taken losses gracefully, but none has ever tried to stay in office and then continued to claim he was the rightful winner in the manner Trump has.

5. Excused the January 6 riot.

On Meet the Press and elsewhere, Trump has continued to excuse the riot on January 6, 2021, and to argue that people charged in the riots are political prisoners. He told the Meet the Press moderator, Kristen Welker, that he might pardon people convicted of federal crimes for their involvement in the assault on the seat of U.S. government: “Well, I’m going to look at them, and I certainly might if I think it’s appropriate. No, it’s a very, very sad thing. And it’s—they’re dividing the country so badly, and it’s very dangerous.” He has since referred to these people as “hostages,” a description that makes sense only if you find the very idea of policing the insurrection illegitimate.

6. Entertained pardoning himself.

Trump also continues to flirt with the idea of granting himself a pardon, typically saying he doesn’t see any need for it but refusing to rule it out. Most mainstream scholars say a self-pardon is probably not constitutional and certainly not something the framers intended.

7. Menaced American Jews for not voting for him.

During Rosh Hashanah, on September 17, Trump shared a meme that read, “Just a reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices going forward!” As my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote, Trump has often made such offensive remarks about the loyalties—perceived or desired—of American Jews, but this was “particularly ugly in the way it deliberately singled out a specific constituency during that constituency’s holiest season.”

8. Suggested executing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.

Apparently outraged by the Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of General Mark Milley, whom Trump appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump on September 22 accused Milley of treason and suggested that he deserved the death penalty. “This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!” Trump wrote. Trump’s loose and sloppy treason accusations have always undermined the Constitution, and many past comments like this have precipitated threats and even attacks from Trump supporters.

9. Accused NBC of treason and threatened to pull it off the air.

Trump has never had any interest in upholding the First Amendment, but his remarks on September 24 were unusually sharp. Trump wrote that NBC News, and especially MSNBC, “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason.’ Why should NBC, or any other of the corrupt & dishonest media companies, be entitled to use the very valuable Airwaves of the USA, FREE? They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” This sort of demonization of the press is dangerous per se—as demonstrated by attacks on journalists—as are Trump’s casual accusations of treason, but this one carries a clear threat to try to use the power of the federal government to punish a news organization for reporting he doesn’t like. This contradicts even the most limited, basic understanding of the importance of a free press, as protected by the First Amendment. (Set aside the dissonance of saying this shortly after granting an in-depth interview to NBC News!)

10. Promised to lock up political opponents.

During a September 28 interview, Trump said he would imprison his political adversaries if he is reelected. Glenn Beck asked Trump, “You said in 2016, you know, ‘Lock her up.’ And then when you became president, you said, ‘We don’t do that in America.’ That’s just not the right thing to do. That’s what they’re doing. Do you regret not locking her up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?” Trump replied, “Uh, the answer is you have no choice because they’re doing it to us.” Because Trump believes, or claims to believe, that he is being prosecuted for purely political reasons, he’s vowing to go after his political opponents for the crime of being his political opponents—a violation of both free-speech and due-process protections.

11. Recommended extrajudicial executions.

At a rally two days later, on September 30, Trump once again advocated going around the criminal-justice system to administer vigilante punishment. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he told the California Republican Party, adding: “Shot!” (The Associated Press, either too nonchalantly or with dry understatement, described it this way: “Trump animates California Republicans with calls to shoot people who rob stores.”) This, too, violates the basic concept of due process for accused criminals.

12. Called for a judge overseeing his case to be prosecuted.

Among Trump’s many fulminations against Justice Engoron, Trump told reporters on October 2 not only that the judge should be removed from the bench, but that he should face prosecution—for no apparent crime other than being assigned to Trump’s case and ruling against Trump. “This is a judge that should be disbarred,” he said. “This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he’s doing. He’s interfering with an election.”

13. Told voters not to bother voting.

During an October 23 rally in New Hampshire, Trump told attendees, “You don’t have to vote, don’t worry about voting. The voting, we got plenty of votes, you gotta watch.” As is sometimes the case with Trump, it’s hard to tell whether this is intended as a joke; or a statement that if all votes were counted, he would win; or as some sort of intimation of stealing the election himself. In any case, discouraging civic participation contradicts the basic principle of a government by, for, and of the people.

14. Celebrated the antidemocratic strongman Viktor Orbán.

At the same rally, Trump talked about his love for one of the most repressive leaders in Europe: “There’s a man, Viktor Orbán, did anyone ever hear of him? He’s probably, like, one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world. He’s the leader of Turkey,” Trump said, adding that he had a “front” on Russia. In fact, Orbán is the leader of Hungary (Trump later corrected himself), and neither country shares a border with Russia. More to the point, Orbán—who proudly describes himself as “illiberal”—is an authoritarian who has become a darling of the Trumpist right, as my colleague Anne Applebaum has explained.

15. Promised to indict Joe Biden.

The biggest headlines out of Trump’s October 29 rally in Sioux City, Iowa, came from his confusing the city with Sioux Falls, South Dakota—the sort of slipup that undermines his attacks on Biden as senile. But the more substantively disturbing thing Trump said at the rally was that his own indictments would give him permission to politically prosecute his predecessor. “They brought our country to a new level, and, but that allows—think of this—that allows us to do it to Biden, when he gets out,” Trump said. “And that would be very easy.”

In a Univision interview that aired November 9, he added: “They have done something that allows the next party—I mean, if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business, they’d be out of the election.” This goes beyond Trump’s suggestion of going after his opponents in a general way. Few things could be more directly counter to the idea of a democratic republic, and more redolent of a failed state, than a pretextual prosecution of one’s predecessor.

Article originally published atThe Atlantic