Playing Russian Roulette with Democracy

Why this might be our last election in the United States

I intended to write my final post on Neo-fascism, but events have overtaken me. Given that this upcoming Tuesday is the final day of voting here in the United States, I wanted to explain simply and in plain English why I'm so freaked out about what is happening and what I think it means for the future.

I think most people assume a second Trump administration would be pretty similar to all previous Republican administrations. That it wouldn’t be all that different from Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, or Mitt Romney or John McCain had they assumed office. Or that it won't be that much different than the pre-pandemic Trump administration.

Furthermore, I think people assume that if the Trump administration turns out to be an unmitigated disaster (which I think it will be, and I'll explain why in a bit), then we can simply vote them out of office again in four years and replace them with a different administration. Right?

Well, maybe that's true. If both of those assumptions are valid—and I very much hope they are—then it may not be such a big deal after all. We’ll see.

But, for reasons I'm going to articulate below, I don't hold that view. They might be right. I might be wrong. But I think it is playing Russian Roulette with American democracy.

The analogy is a perfect one (and ironic, given the name). You can certainly play Russian roulette with no harm. You spin the barrel, point the gun and..click...nothing happens. But if you're wrong, the consequences are the most dire and severe consequences imaginable. If you're wrong or unlucky, you won't get a second chance.

I would prefer not to load a bullet into that chamber.

Let's start here: There is abundant and overwhelming evidence that the MAGA movement is intending to cripple and undermine the election system by which we peacefully transfer power here in the United States. At every level of government, from the national to the precinct level, MAGA operatives are attacking and undermining faith in the US electoral process and in democracy itself. This can be indirectly, by spreading lies, misinformation and agitprop on social media, or directly by infiltrating the government intending to forestall or subvert the election process.

Already, ballot boxes have been set on fire in several states. There have been reports of voter intimidation. False stories of voter fraud are flooding social media, including from Trump himself, who is spreading false claims about illegals voting and other nonexistent problems. Trump has already said that he will not accept the results of any election that does not declare him the victor, claiming that such an outcome, by definition, constitutes “fraud.” His supporters, who inhabit an alternate reality, have made it clear that they inent to engage in violent acts and domestic terrorism if he does not win.

The Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) has done some of the best reporting on this topic, unlike the feckless, useless, and incompetent American media. This is part two of a four-part series called America's Last Election which does a very good job of explaining in basic terms exactly how Trump attempted to subvert the last presidential election and stage a coup to stay in office in 2021, and how the MAGA movement is currently working at every level of government to undermine elections this year and make sure the democratic will of the people will not be carried out. I strongly recommend watching the whole series its entirety, and not just this part:

The model here is dictatorships like Venezuela. Despite the opposition party winning sixty percent of the vote, President Maduro is still in office, protected by friendly media and courts. That is what we are facing here in the United States. So the idea that we will be able to simply vote MAGA out of office in four years is, in my view, hopelessly naïve. What happens when they have four years and the entire apparatus of the Federal government at their disposal to carry out these plans to rig elections as described above and prevent themselves from ever being removed from office democratically? What happens if they simply ban opposition parties or prevent them from running as in Russia and the other illiberal states that MAGA sees as role models? What is the “little secret” that Trump obliquely referred to when talking about Mike Johnson?

This attack on American democracy and undermining faith in our election system is straight out of the dictator’s playbook. And it is not a “both sides” issue—it is one party, one movement, doing this. It a dagger poised at the heart of American democracy. As Josef Stalin said, “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

That alone should be disqualifying. That fact that someone who attempted a coup to overthrow the American government is walking free—not to mention able to run again for president—or that millions of people are willing to vote for him, is simply astonishing to the rest of the world who live outside the right-wing media bubble. It looks like the United States has completely lost its mind, which it has.

So that's point number one. Point two is that we have abundant evidence that the previous Trump administration attempted to do all sorts of batshit crazy things in their first term in office but were consistently hindered and reined in by sane people who were able to prevent his most bizarre, often illegal, orders from being carried out. They did so at great personal cost to themselves, sometimes even lying to the president or telling him his orders were being carried out when they weren’t.

All of these incidents have been extensively documented in a series of books that could practically fill its own library. I have to admit, had I known we would be here today, I would have spent more time reading these books and documenting what was in them. As it stands, I had to resort to the Wikipedia page on books about the Trump administration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Books_about_the_Trump_administration

One of the earliest books was written by Michael Wolff entitled The Fire and the Fury, which, among other things...

...highlights descriptions of Trump's behavior, chaotic interactions among senior White House staff, and derogatory comments about the Trump family by former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

Trump is depicted as being held in low regard by his White House staff, leading Wolff to claim that “100% of the people around him” believe Trump is unfit for office...Wolff said Trump himself was characterized by “wide-ranging ignorance.” For example, Sam Nunberg, a campaign advisor, reportedly tried to explain the United States Constitution to Trump but could not get past the Fourth Amendment...

This was followed by a book by two Washington Post reporters, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, entitled A Very Stable Genius. That book...

...highlights a July 2017 meeting at the Pentagon at which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, among other senior advisors and generals, attempted to brief the president on the current state and projection of military power, with Trump responding negatively to their approach and reportedly calling them “losers”, “dopes”, and “babies”, then abruptly leaving the meeting, prompting Tillerson to reportedly refer to him as a “fucking moron”.

In another episode, Trump reportedly tried to undo the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, saying it's “just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas.” When Tillerson told him it would need action by Congress, Trump reportedly instructed an aide to draft an executive action to repeal the law.

The authors document a pattern in which Trump fired any and all advisors who tried to educate him or restrain his impulses – the so-called “grownups in the room” – replacing them with advisors who “think their mission is to tell him, ‘Yes.’” The book suggests that this consistent pattern of reliance on personal loyalty, combined with a disregard for consequences, has placed Trump in opposition to conventional democratic power structures in Washington, D.C., with apparently chaotic results...

The book also highlights apparent gaps in the president's geopolitical knowledge, relating a story about a meeting with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi in which the American president reportedly claimed, incorrectly, that India and China do not share a border. Another account describes him visiting Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial while apparently having no understanding of what actually happened there...

The venerable journalist Bob Woodward, of All The President's Men fame, has written several accounts of the Trump's time in office. The first of them, entitled Fear: Trump in the White House, corroborates many of the above accounts (my emphasis):

According to the book, aides took papers off his desk to prevent him from signing them. White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly referred to Trump as an “idiot” and “unhinged”, while Secretary of Defense James Mattis said Trump has the understanding of “a fifth or sixth grader,” and John M. Dowd, formerly Trump's personal lawyer, called him “a fucking liar” telling Trump he would wear an “orange jump suit” if he agreed to testify to Robert Mueller in the Special Counsel investigation...

CNN's editor-at-large Chris Cillizza described Fear telling a similar story compared to mainstream media reporting and other 2018 books – journalist Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury and former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman's Unhinged – that the Trump administration has a “chaotic, dysfunctional, ill-prepared White House” led by Trump, “a man hopelessly out of his depth in the job, but entirely incapable of understanding how desperately out of depth he actually is…”

One notable incident reportedly occurred after the Khan Shaykhun chemical attack in April, 2017. According to Woodward, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis ignored an order from Trump to assassinate Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, with Trump reportedly saying “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.” Trump said in 2018 the idea “was never even contemplated” and that the book was a lie, but in 2020 reversed himself and said that he had been in favor but Mattis had opposed the idea.

Wolff, Leonnig, Rucker and Woodward have all penned multiple books about the Trump White House, as has Jonathan Karl, ABC News chief Washington correspondent, which all paint a similar picture. Former staffers have also written books that Trump himself has sued to prevent being published (unsuccessfully), including from former aides Omarosa Manigault-Newman, Michael Cohen and John Bolton. Among the revelations from Bolton's book are:

In one of the more jarring passages of the [The Room Where it Happened], Bolton claims the president voiced his support for concentration camps to Chinese President Xi Jinping during the 2019 G-20 world leaders summit. “XI explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps” for the Uighurs, Bolton writes. “According to our interpreters, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which he thought was exactly the right thing to do.”...Bolton also alleges that Mr. Trump pushed Xi in trade negotiations to agree to purchase American agricultural products in order to boost Mr. Trump's political standing with U.S. farmers and help him win reelection.

Given Trump's stated goal to construct concentration camps in the US large enough to hold up to four percent of the American population, that is a chilling revelation indeed. Bolton also wrote that Trump seemed unaware that Britain is a nuclear power, and invited Kim Jong-Un to the DMZ with a Tweet without telling any of his senior advisors. The book by Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen describes,

...Trump's capacity to lie and tell half truths, to exaggerate, to willingly mislead, and to manipulate his followers and the press. Trump is portrayed as a heartless man who looks for the help of conservative Christian leaders while later viciously criticizing them, and who claims he supports the common man yet fails to pay money he owes to small and large businesses. He is described as a charlatan who will do anything to push his agenda and meet his personal and financial goals, while putting his family, staff, and the country second to his own agenda.

All of these books uniformly tell the same story. All of them depict Trump as basically a mad king, dangerously unfit for office, and his administration as being in constant chaos. They depict him as being constantly—almost daily—reined in by his more competent senior advisors and staff who were able to thwart his most unhinged and erratic behavior during his first administration.

All of those competent staff and advisors are gone now, replaced by a rogue’s gallery of charlatans, cranks, grifters, con-artists, yes-men, and kleptocrats like Steven Miller, Rudy Giuliani, RFK Jr. and Elon Musk, and other assorted mixed nuts. Do we really want to turn the US Federal Government—with all of its unfathomable power—over to them?

Not only that, but those former presidential advisors have been almost uniformly shouting from the rooftops telling us to not let such an incompetent, unhinged moron back into the world's most important and powerful office. Many of them fear retribution should Trump be reelected to a second term in a situation more reminiscent of Third World dictatorships than the world's leading democracy. Even Republicans like Mitch McConnell privately call Trump, “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist.”

More recently, some of the revelations by former advisors have taken on a sharper edge and a more urgent tone as the election nears. Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Milley, was a key source for Woodward’s 2021 book Peril. Milley told Woodward, “I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he's a total fascist,” adding, “He is now the most dangerous person to this country.” According to Axios, Milley appeared to call Trump a “wannabe dictator” in his retirement speech and said he was “deeply convinced” that Trump remained a danger to the U.S. after losing the 2020 presidential election. Milley also told Woodward that he has installed cameras, bullet-proof windows and blast curtains at his house due to threats from unhinged Trump supporters, and that he feared retribution if Trump were to return to office. Trump has repeatedly said that he intends to use the office of the presidency for retribution against his critics, including recalling former generals so that they can be court martialed in show trials for defying him.

Shortly after those statements were made public, General John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff from 2017 to 2019, said that Trump fit “into the general definition of fascist” in his opinion, and that Trump wanted generals like Hitler had—unquestioningly loyal and willing to carry out any order, no matter how insane or extreme. These are extraordinary claims by high-raking former members of the military who interacted with Trump first-hand, and who will not be present in a second Trump administration.

“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” Kelly said. “So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

Kelly continued: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

This is unprecedented in American history. No other administration has had such a large number of people—or any people for that matter—from its first term warning us of the dangers of the administration they formerly served returning to office. Why aren’t we listening?

To underscore the fascist point, Trump has called for media critical of him to be shut down. He has repeatedly said that he plans to use the institutions of the US government to go after his enemies. He wants to turn the FBI and domestic police and intelligence agencies into organs for carrying out his personal retribution. He has called Americans who do not support him him “an enemy within,” and claimed that they are the greatest threat to the country. His relentless campaign of incitement rains down violent intimidation and death threats on anyone who dares oppose him. This is not what the Founding Fathers imagined.

So the claim that a second Trump administration will be similar to the first appears unfounded to me. A mad king with the world's biggest army and a nuclear arsenal at his command seems almost too terrible to contemplate. One who clearly admires Adolf Hitler and takes his cue from autocrats and dictators around the world even more so. Yet that’s what we are facing. And again, to drive this point home, what if we cannot remove this administration from office by voting?

So that's point number two.

Third, lets' talk about his policies. Via Kevin Drum, here is a rundown of what Trump has stated he wants to accomplish if he were to return to office:

• Enact 20% tariffs on all imports.

• Cut $2 trillion from the federal budget.

• Let RFK Jr. “go wild” on health, food, and medicine.

• Mass deportation of illegal immigrants.

• Big tax cuts for corporations and the rich.

• Abandon Ukraine. Maybe Taiwan too.

• Use the military to fight “the enemy within.”

• Build a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

• Fire thousands of nonpartisan civil servants so he can replace them with MAGA drones.

• Repeal any and all efforts at combating climate change, which is a hoax.

• Implement "concepts of a plan" to repeal Obamacare, including its provision that protects people with preexisting conditions.

• Take unspecified revenge against Meta and Google.

• Blow up the federal deficit.

Presumably, the people voting for Trump either:

• Support those policies.

• Are unaware of those policies.

• Believe that those policies will not actually be implemented.

The last two are odd. Why would you be unaware of the policies of the candidate you support? Why else would you vote for them? And why would you vote for a candidate specifically in the hope that they will not implement the very policies they are proposing? I hear this all the time—that he's not really going to do all of these things. Really? Why not? And why is your support for a candidate predicated upon him NOT doing the very things he’s promised to do over and over again in his speeches?

At the same time they don't think he's going to do any of those things, people simultaneously believe that he will somehow:

• Restore prices to their 2019 levels. And that is what we are talking about here—inflation is already back down to its prepandemic level.

• End the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.

• Supercharge economic growth and create millions of new jobs.

• Stop all illegal immigration.

• End crime.

• Fix health care.

He offers no plan to accomplish any of these things, only vague “concepts of a plan.” So why do people believe him when he says he’s going to do these things and not the others? All my life people have had cynical views of politicians and their pie-in-the-sky promises. They assumed they were being lied to all the time. So why is Trump the first politician in all of history whose over-the-top promises they actually believe, despite him having a consistent track record of lying and fraud and never carrying out a single promise in his entire life? It seems like a rather odd time to suddenly become credulous of politicians and their promises.

Let's talk about some of those policies:

First of all, tax cuts, tariffs, and mass deportations (we'll come back to those) are all highly inflationary. As much shit as I give economists, and it's well-deserved, they are correct about these effects. Yet people are supposedly voting for Trump because of inflation. Make that make sense.

Do they think Trump can somehow return prices to their 2019 levels? By that logic, we could return Obama to office and pay 2016 prices. Or even the geriatric Jimmy Carter and pay 1980 prices. Do people believe the president determines prices in a free market economy by fiat? In fact, rampant corporate consolidation was a major driver of rising prices during and after the pandemic, and this will become more pronounced as deregulation is pursued and corporations are given free rein. The Biden adminstration was the first to go after monopolies in a long time. No more.

Second, tarrifs are inflationary by design. They are a tool in the economic toolkit, and sometimes useful when you want to protect domestic industries. But the key is: there have to be domestic insdustries which can fill that void. Typically, tarrifs are used to protect important domestic industries that you want to develop such as high-tech or green tech, or ones that are important for national security like steel or microchips. They are also useful to developing economies. However, if there are no domestic industries that are able fill the void, then all you are doing is raising prices for consumers.

But a blanket tariff policy is absolutely ridiculous. Trump has vowed to enact 60 percent tariffs on goods imported from China (where most consumer goods are made) and 10 percent on everything else. Apparently, there are some people out there who are dumb enough to think tariffs are paid by foreign governments. You cannot tax foreign governments—that would be a free lunch. China will not pay our taxes, Americans will. They also appear to be unaware that tariffs are paid by domestic businesses which sell imported goods, and those costs are usually passed on to consumers. If there's already a cost of living crisis, this will exacerbate it to an extreme degree. It will also lead to trade wars, hurting American businesses.

There seems to be this idea that if you enact tariffs, jobs will magically come back like Shoeless Joe in a sort of reenactment of Field of Dreams, and the Rust Belt will magically spring to life again with factories like the desert blooming after a rainstorm. But that's not how it works.

There are ways to revitalize domestic manufacturing, but they usually involve direct government investment, which the Biden administration has pursued with the largely successful (and poorly named) Inflation Reduction Act. As I've said before, what made manufacturing jobs pay well wasn't that they were manufacturing jobs, but that the were unionized—something Republicans remain staunchly opposed to. Also, manufacturing has been automated to such a degree that it's no longer a major source of employment, even in China. High wages tend to do that under capitalism.

Based on the results of the previous tariffs, there was no net job growth while consumer costs increased, so not exactly a roaring success. And if you think some tariffs are necessary, well, so does the Biden administration which kept in place the Trump tariffs that made sense.

However, if there is a truly terrifying policy, it’s the replacement of the entire American civil service with loyalists and cronies as outlined in Project 2025. This will effectively destroy American governance, reducing the United States to little more than a third-rate banana republic where fealty to the regime is the only litmus test for service rather than qualifications or competence. This is the this sort of thing which causes economic failure and hyperinflation, not “government money printing” as we've seen in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela. I'm a single-issue voter on this issue alone. It would be economic Armageddon. I, for one, would prefer to continue to be able to afford food, pay my bills, and have a roof over my head.

But that’s not the only economic insanity. The specter of the worlds richest person imposing brutal and severe cuts on the most vulnerable people in American society is an image so grotesque I can't even wrap my mind around it. Musk has promised to cut an insane two trillion dollars from the government budget, which, as Keven Drum pointed out, would literally zero out the entire Federal discretionary budget. The government would effectively be bankrupt. Presumably this would not include the billions of dollars in contracts the government currently funnels to Musk and the other billionaires backing Trump. The American state would be carved up like a turkey and served up on a plate to various oligarchs.

Aside from being a moron and a sociopath, Elon Musk clearly has no idea of how money or the economy works. He seems to believe in the most radical Austrian economic theories—that government can only steal from the private sector, that government spending is “waste,” that cutting back spending causes the economy to grow, and so on. Even legitimate conservative economists would not take any of this seriously. Putting this “genius” in charge of anything would be giving a flamethrower to a toddler and setting him loose in a fireworks factory.

What Elon should have learned in his alleged physics degree is that reality pushes back. No amount of ideology will repeal the laws if economics, just like you can't will away gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. The scary part is, I’m not convinced that even mass unemployment or a massive drop in GDP will have any affect politically. The American public has been convinced that the American economy—which The Economist (not exactly a left wing rag) has called “the envy of the world”—is the worst economy on earth. Over half of people believe we are in a recession, even though we are not.

Could we not imagine a scenario of 25% unemployment, mass homelessness, a plummeting stock market, delayed projects, falling investment, reduced trade, and business closures being portrayed as a “thriving” economy, and people believing it? In this pervasive atmosphere of unreality, it doesn’t seem so far fetched. Fox and social media appear to have already convinced people that day is night, so can they not gaslight us into believing that night is day? At this point, I'm not even sure anymore. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Finally, let's talk about immigration and concentration camps.

News flash: removing ten million workers—the size of North Carolina—from the workforce will not fix the economy. I've seen estimates that as high as 1 in 3 immigrants work in construction. Probably even more work in agriculture and food service. Removing these workers will make prices go up, way, way up. And domestic American workers will not fill the void. With unemployment at around 4 percent, pretty much everyone who wants a job already has one. Americans are already losing their shit over rising costs for fast food, produce, and housing, and all of those are guaranteed to skyrocket.

I work in the construction industry. I know that people are desperate to hire and jobs are going begging. Projects are already being delayed because there aren’t enough workers. In my view, this is ultimately because of demographics. The immigration situation certainly does not justify the hyperbolic and over-the-top rhetoric we’ve been hearing. It is manufactured outrage. And by the way, if you think the Biden administration has ignored the immigration issue, I urge you to watch this:

Then lets talk about the costs. We do not have the resources at present to arrest, let alone detain, ten to twelve million people. Not even close. To put that into perspective, the current incarcerated population in the US—the world's largest—is 1.9 million people. And the cost is staggering. The American Immigration Council put the price tag at an astonishing 315 billion dollars using the most conservative estimate possible, not even counting the effects on the wider economy. The cost of arresting just one million people would be over 89 billion dollars a year, and that does not include detainment or repatriation. This is the equivalent of wartime spending, which would also cause inflation to soar. And this in a country that supposedly can't afford universal health care or child care or free university education. Imagine if we spent that money on making people’s lives better instead of hate and punishing people. What happened to the economic populism of Trump’s 2016 campaign?

I fear that whipping up fear over mass immigration into a fever pitch is mostly a pretext to install a vast new domestic police force—a Gestapo (or Gazpacho) loyal only to Trump himself. Given the severe lack of manpower to do any of these things, I wonder if right-wing militias will be deputized and folded into the official government apparatus in order to carry out these draconian policies—Trump’s very own Schutzstaffel. If militias become an arm of the government, there is a good chance they will eventually turn into roving death squads, which are a feature of authoritarian regimes¹. The ominous European phrase “papers please” will become a part of daily life for everyone, not just illegal immigrants. Sounds extreme? Consider that these sorts of people have already festooned their vehicles, homes and other belongings with skulls, apparently not even contemplating if they are the baddies.

My other fear is that these immigrants are not really going to be deported at all. What happens when the countries they originally came from are not willing to accept millions of people dumped on their shores, with all of the costs involved, and there's every reason to believe that they will not. In that case, there are only three possible options: 1.) They will be detained indefinitely at enormous cost to American taxpayers, 2.) They will be released back into society—an outcome that would make Trump look weak, 3.) They will be executed.

Is this the real reason for dehumanizing immigrants? For calling them rapists and murders—the “worst of the worst?” For referring to them as vermin? For claiming they eat cats and dogs and are riddled with disease? For describing the US border as an “open wound?” For calling them “not human” and “animals?” For using the exact same word-for-word terms and rhetoric the Third Reich used to describe the Jews and other minorities like “poisoning the blood?” The Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper has claimed that the Holocaust was an accident, an unfortunate result of poor planning on the part of the German High Command. They didn't want to exterminate those people, you see, they just had no choice. In reality, Cooper claims, it was an act of mercy.

Cooper was prominently featured recently on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Are they preparing us—or at least Trump's hardcore supporters—for the inevitability of what they are already planning to do? Why else would they make such outrageous claims over and over again when they are basically impossible to carry out? Surely they know it will fail? What if it was never intended to succeed? And what if a lot of the people who will end up in those camps are “the enemy within?” And thanks to the Supreme Court, any actions Trump takes in an “official” capacity, inducing those above, will be considered “legal” by definition.

I suspect this was the plan all along. Those immigrants were never intended to go home. Nor will they be the only people in those camps. The solution will be final.

Here’s an even scarier thought: consider happens when these madcap and insane schemes crash and break apart on shoals of reality, as they surely will. What happens then?

• What happens when we don't have the resources to detain, deport or incarcerate a million people let alone ten or twenty million?

• What happens when the 200 % tariffs on imported goods from China and tax cuts cause the rate of inflation to spike, not decrease?

• What happens when cutting billions of dollars from the federal budget by a deranged Elon Musk causes the domestic economy to crash? In fact, Musk has openly stated that he plans to intentionally crash the economy. Are people just going to sit by and watch the wealthiest billionaire in the country destroy American economy the economy “for it’s own good?”

• What happens when even the most basic functions of government that people depend on can no longer be carried out because all the competent employees have been fired and replaced with partisan cronies and the civil service is gutted?

• What happens if there is another pandemic, possibly even worse, and there are no government health services anymore because RFK Jr. has gutted institutions like the CDC and replaced experts with quacks? What happens when communicable diseases start killing babies again as they did in Samoa?

• What happens when natural disasters continue to strike because of climate change and FEMA is busy rounding up immigrants instead?

• What happens when Trump withdraws from NATO and Ukraine falls? Or if Russia pushes further into eastern Europe and attacks a NATO country? Or China invades Taiwan? Which side will we even be on?

• What happens when they try to enact a national abortion ban, as they are almost certain to do, or any of the other ultraconservative wish list items in Project 2025 that they are denying they’re planning to do right now in order to get elected?

Are people going to be willing to accept “let them eat culture war” when their jobs go away, or the government can no longer provide basic services, or the stock market crashes, or prices spike, or militias roam the streets of their town sweeping up anyone who looks remotely foreign in dragnets outside of the rule of law or the justice system? When the camps swell with “errors” and civil liberties are suspended?

Are Trump and his cronies going to accept the pushback he's inevitably going to receive when these policies end in disaster, as they surely will? Is he going to accept protests in the streets? Or is he going to call out the military as he repeatedly vowed to do during his first term and declare martial law? Remember all the people who stopped him from doing those terrible things before? They are all gone. The people who surround him now are rabid authoritarians and MAGA loyalists. Will Trump and company respect the rule of law? Or is that when the killing starts? And if it really does get that bad, will Trump (or Vance) accept the results of an election that throws them out of office? Will we even be able to do so anymore? To quote Trump directly: “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be very easily handled, if necessary, by the national guard, or if really necessary by the military.”

Because that's what we're facing here. A lot of people may lose their lives. Maybe you. Maybe me. Maybe someone you love. Because that's how these things go. Politics is not a game. Putting incompetent people in charge of the government is no joke. People look at Trump’s buffoonery, his incoherent, rambling speeches and nonsensical answers to basic questions, his powdered orange visage and wispy cotton-candy hair, and see him as some sort of clown. And he is a clown. But this is no laughing matter. His very absurdity serves as a smokescreen to hide the deadly seriousness of what’s happening to our country right before our very eyes.

While we still may not be adequately dealing with civilizational-scale problems, I would prefer not live under a permanent crisis for the next four years. Maybe my fears are unfounded and a potential second Trump term will be just another “boring” Republican presidency. Maybe Harris will prevail. But that’s taking a big risk. Right now the gun is cocked and loaded and pointed at our temple. We've spun the cylinder. If the chamber is empty, we will be safe. But if we're wrong, and my worst fears are true, this Tuesday we might pull the trigger and send a bullet into the brain of American democracy, killing it dead, possibly forever.

“On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.”

― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

1. We even know what they are going to wear.