Over the weekend, Democrats celebrated their biennial tradition of hand-wringing and panic about the election a year hence. Every cycle about this time, polls showing that their voters are unhappy with their candidates and wish they had someone better are floated by all the major polling outfits and everyone starts hyperventilating. It seems like only yesterday that the polling showed Democrats being swept away by a "red tsunami" in the midterms and it was inevitable that they would lose both chambers of Congress for the foreseeable future. Oops!
One of the more extreme examples of this came back in 2011 when President Barack Obama was running for re-election. With a 61% disapproval rating on the economy and 73% saying the country was heading in the wrong direction in some polls, there was growing talk of running a primary opponent or replacing Joe Biden as vice president on the ticket. Data maven Nate Silver wrote an epic analysis for the New York Times on November 3, 2011, almost exactly 12 years ago, that was headlined, "Is Obama Toast? Handicapping the 2012 Election." His conclusion? Probably. At best, Silver concluded, Obama only had a 50-50 chance of winning.
We all know what happened. Obama went on to win 332 electoral votes to Romney's 206, and 51.1% to 47.2% in the popular vote. In today's politics that's what a landslide looks like.
The point of rehashing this ancient history is just to remind everyone that polling is not invincible by a long shot. A lot can happen in the next year. More importantly, when it comes down to voting, people have to actually make a choice. And next year they are going to choose between a man they consider to be too old to be president and a man (just three years younger) who is also under 91 felony indictments for attempting to impede the peaceful transfer of power and stealing classified documents. He has also been held liable for sexual assault and massive business fraud in New York Civil courts just in the past year. He could easily be a convicted felon by the time voters go to the polls next year.
This is, of course, on top of the terrible performance he gave during his four years as president, a performance which was rewarded with a decisive loss by seven million votes, 51.3% to 46.8%. As it was the most litigated presidential election in history because Donald Trump is the greatest sore loser the world has ever known, the only people who doubt the result are members of the cult who believe whatever their Dear Leader tells them.
But perhaps Americans are in a forgiving mood and figure it's best to let bygones be bygones and welcome Trump back to the White House because he can't possibly be any worse than the president who has brought the country out of the mess created by the pandemic with one of the strongest jobs booms in half a century, passed massive bipartisan legislation under the most difficult circumstances and is handling foreign policy challenges few have had to confront since the cold war. (And yes, he is old. He just doesn't trowel on piles of bronze make-up and dye his hair neon yellow to hide it as Trump does. )
So if voter think it can't get worse, they need to think again.
As I wrote last week, there are dozens of MAGA Republicans working on the agenda for the next term getting ready to implement what amounts to an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. They aren't trying to hide it. In fact, they are explicitly running on it as a platform. I mentioned the reinstatement of Schedule F, Agenda 47, Project 2025 and their plans to install MAGA legal advisers throughout the administration to ensure that there are no Federalist Society RINOs like former Attorney General Bill Barr or White House counsel Don McGahn, who didn't robotically snap to and fulfill all of the president's wishes without question.
But that's really window dressing. Sure they want to "deconstruct the administrative state," as former adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon has been pushing for years. A patronage system makes it so much easier to profit on the backs of the taxpayers and deliver goodies to their wealthy benefactors. But it's important to remember that Donald Trump doesn't understand or care about any of that. It's all about him. And right now he has only one real agenda: revenge.
As Democrats throughout the land spent the weekend in agonized tribulation over the polls that say some Biden voters want to vote for Trump, the Washington Post published a big story about what Trump and his henchmen have planned for their next term should this come about:
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
Needless to say, he wants to prosecute Joe Biden and his family and has explicitly framed it as payback. (Last month in New Hampshire, he said, “This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent. And that means I can do that, too.” ) But it's not just Democrats he plans to go after. Repblicans like former White House chief of staff Gen. John Kelly, his former attorney Ty Cobb (who appears frequently on CNN) and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, as well as members of the FBI and Justice Department, are all on the list.
This is part of "Project 2025," which the Post reporters describe as a "partnership of right wing think tanks" rather than just the Heritage Foundation which has previously been reported as leading the planned purge of civil service personnel. According to documents acquired by the Post, they are drafting executive orders to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement. The main purpose of this would be to quell demonstrations and protests. Jeffrey Clark, Trump's co-defendant in the Fulton Country Georgia felony trial and an unnamed co-conspirator in the Federal Jan. 6 case, is spearheading this initiative.
Anyone who enables Donald Trump to become president again is essentially enabling a military crackdown on peaceful protest. I'm sure the insurrectionists of Jan. 6 (who Trump now calls "hostages") will be free to assemble wherever they want. But those who disagree with Trump about the economy, abortion, Israel and Ukraine or any other issue about which his positions are magnitudes more odious than Joe Biden's will have to learn to keep their mouths shut. We won't be having anything other than MAGA demonstrations in the future.
Unless the country has completely lost its moorings on a level that can only be explained by LSD in the water supply, the fact that people are saying Donald Trump would be a better president is nothing more than a political primal scream. Yes, Americans are upset about the economy and the world feels unstable but I don't believe that it's so bad that a majority will put an actual criminal, vengeful, would-be dictator back in the White House. Call me an optimist. We can't be that far gone.
