This is an election about elections.
One of the two leading candidates in the race, Donald Trump, has not only demonstrated a long-running skepticism of rule of law; he is also the only president in American history to attempt to remain in office after losing an election. This election is a test: Can the American public resoundingly reject a man who has not merely been a chaotic extremist but has also attacked the American system of republican government itself?
Less than four years ago, this question would have seemed preposterous—not because Trump’s antidemocratic impulses were any secret, but because they seemed to have ended his career. Trump summoned supporters to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress was set to certify the election’s results. Then he instigated an assault on the Capitol, during which insurrectionists waged hand-to-hand combat against law-enforcement officers and sacked the seat of American democracy. They hunted for Speaker Nancy Pelosi and talked of hanging Vice President Mike Pence. Trump sat by for hours, watching the chaos on television and refusing to intervene.
As the nation learned in the days and weeks after, the violence was only the climax of a long-running effort to steal the election. Even though Trump’s advisers understood that he had lost the election, he attempted a paperwork coup, pressuring state election officials to “find” votes and conjuring fake slates of electors to submit to Congress.
By January 7, it seemed like it was all over for Trump. Even Senator Mitch McConnell, one of the canniest operators in American politics, thought so. “I feel exhilarated by the fact that this fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” he told a reporter. Polls backed that up: Americans were intensely repulsed by the riot, and they blamed Trump. He was banished from social-media platforms and, it appeared, public life.
I warned on January 7 that the horror of the previous day would be whitewashed, but I had no idea how successful the effort would be. The road to impunity began with McConnell and his House counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, who had also fiercely criticized Trump. McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago to make amends. McConnell, hoping that voters would do the work of banishing Trump without him having to take any personal risks, flinched from an impeachment conviction that could have barred Trump from running. For other Republicans, espousing election denial became a litmus test.
President Joe Biden’s new attorney general, Merrick Garland, was determined not to appear too political, and the Justice Department was painfully slow to bring charges against Trump in connection with his election subversion; to this day, he has not been tried, and if he wins the election, he probably never will be.
Trump exploited all of these failures to plot his comeback. Richard Nixon was forced to resign for offenses that paled in comparison with Trump’s. Even so, as Elizabeth Drew wrote in The Atlantic, Nixon devised a secret yearslong plan to restore himself to semi-respectability. Trump, by contrast, has shown no remorse, has not gone away, and stands a good chance of becoming president once again. He’s done so while embracing January 6. What he once insisted was a false flag by leftist agitators he now celebrates as patriotic and justified.
So now the matter is before voters, every other safeguard having failed. Trump has abandoned none of his election denial. He has refused to acknowledge that Biden is the rightful president, despite Biden having won a resounding victory. Trump has discredited Americans’ faith in their own democracy, with consequences that will last for generations. He’s spent the past few weeks seeding doubt about another American election, even though he might win it.
Democracy is a tough idea to get one’s arms around. It’s abstract, and until recently, it felt so deeply embedded in life in this country that, despite its failures, it could be treated as a given. When voters decide whom to support, they understandably sometimes focus on the more urgent questions directly in front of them—matters such as their standard of living, their rights, and their social structures. But the essence of the American system is not which path we take on these issues, but the procedures by which we decide. That fundamental idea is being put to the test today.