Donald Trump's illegal election interference must be stopped!

Trump Is Sabotaging the Midterms. The Supreme Court Must Stop Him.

To the Supreme Court:  "Where are you❓"

Donald Trump has a long record of threatening rather than protecting the integrity of American elections. 

At his worst, he sought to overturn the 2020, results. 

Trump attempted to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger into reinvestigating the state's 2020, election results, despite being repeatedly told that there was no electoral error. Trump's repeated efforts to convince Raffensperger to find some basis to overturn the election results were perceived as pleading and threatening. At one point on the call, Trump told Raffensperger, "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state."

During the Raffensperger call, Trump falsely suggested that he could have committed a criminal offense by refusing to overturn the state's election results.

Now he is menacing the midterms, with an executive order that would throw voting by mail into chaos if it went into effect.

It is up to the Supreme Court to prevent that. Nearly one in three voters now votes by mail. 

Trump’s order has already sown doubt about whether Americans can continue to trust the Postal Service to deliver their ballots and prompted bipartisan alarm from states and local election officials. The sooner the court puts Trump’s ill-advised directive to rest, the better.

Trump’s order is illegal. He does not have the authority to set the rules for election administration. The Constitution gives that role to the states, with Congress providing oversight. “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations,” Article I states.

As a bipartisan task force said in 2021 in response to a relatively minor executive order from President Joe Biden, “Presidents don’t have much of a role in how elections are run — and that’s a good thing.” Nevertheless, Trump ordered the Postal Service in March to decide which voters would receive mail-in ballots, a decision that states have always made for themselves.

His order is also a recipe for bureaucratic chaos. It would force states to send lists of eligible voters to the Postal Service, with each voter’s information attached to a unique bar code. Even minor discrepancies between the information on the list and the information on a ballot envelope could lead to somebody not being able to vote.

Tracking ballots via bar codes can have benefits when election officials have sufficient time and funds to set up a system. It allows voters to see how their ballots are moving through the mail. But, Trump’s rushed order is pretending to solve a problem that does not exist. He claims it will prevent voter fraud, which is vanishingly rare in the United States.

Rather than making elections more secure, the order would inject turmoil. Many jurisdictions would need far more time than they have to comply with the new rules for a November vote. And while the Postal Service has had a stellar record of delivering ballots quickly, it has no experience or expertise in making decisions about the appropriateness of sending ballots to millions of people. It has already been struggling this year with timely ballot delivery.

A Postal Service employee’s whistle-blower report became public this month, warning that the new system could reject an entire batch of ballots, numbering in the thousands, if even one bar code did not scan properly. Anybody who has used a self-service counter at a supermarket understands how common bar code problems are. The whistle-blower raised “grave concerns” that the change could cause major disruptions.

The order could lead some voters who request mail-in ballots not to receive them, while also slowing the election process. “There is a low but nonzero chance that in a state with a nail-biter congressional election, someone will discover 50,000 ballots at the post office on the Wednesday after the election,” said Charles Stewart III, the director of the M.I.T. Election Data and Science Lab. The risks are biggest in states where most voters now vote by mail, including California, Colorado and much of the rest of the West. The numbers are also significant in Maine, Michigan and Ohio, where Senate races are tight, as well as Pennsylvania and other states with close House races.

During the decade that Trump has been at the center of American politics and spread lies about supposed voter fraud, he has repeatedly failed in his efforts to corrupt voting. Voter turnout in the past two presidential elections was higher than in any other in at least 40 years, and his illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 result failed. This executive order, however, has the potential to alter the midterm elections unlike anything else he has done.

Whether Trump's illegal order will help his party win in November is not clear. Rural districts, which tilt Republican, are more likely to lack the equipment needed to comply with the Postal Service’s rule. But urban districts, which lean Democratic, could also struggle, given their size, and there is reason to think the Trump administration may target them unfairly, given its record. It is uniquely unsuited to be trusted with fairly overseeing elections. In any case, the partisan implications of Mr. Trump’s order should not matter. It is wrong because it could prevent many Americans of any political affiliation who are eligible to vote from doing so.

It already has caused some Americans to begin wondering whether they should shift from mail voting — which has been convenient and reliable — to in-person voting. Some may end up not casting any ballot as a result. Others who would prefer to vote by mail may go to the polls on Election Day, contributing to long lines, which can also reduce turnout. The president’s executive order is a direct threat to this year’s elections.

Lower courts have twice blocked the order in response to lawsuits by voting rights groups and more than 20 states. Last month, the Supreme Court lifted that ruling on procedural grounds, saying that the litigation was premature because the Postal Service had not issued a rule to carry out the order. The service finalized the rule late last month, and the case is now awaiting the justices’ decision.

They should act quickly — within days. This Supreme Court has stood up to Trump’s election interference before, refusing to hear his allies’ appeals to overturn the 2020 election. But the six Republican-appointed justices have in other cases been naïve about his pattern of illegal, anti-democratic behavior. They have too often imagined that they were dealing with a president who would follow their rulings in good faith. This case presents a classic example. By refusing to rule so far, the Supreme Court has allowed confusion about the midterms to spread.

Nothing is more important to democracy than free and fair elections. Our country has built a system in which Americans can have confidence. Trump is trying to wreck it. The Supreme Court must protect it.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are responsible for high health care insurance costs harming middle class Americans

Health care costs skyrocket, courtesy of cruel Trump Republicans By Oliver Willis https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/1/2/2361065/-Health-care-costs-skyrocket-courtesy-of-cruel-Republicans

Millions of Americans had their health care costs significantly increase as of Januaray 1st—a direct result of the “One Big (Fake❗) Beautiful Bill” 😡💢passed by Trump Republicans and signed into law by Donald Trump.

On the first day of the year, subsidies for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which were protected under the administration of former President Joe Biden, were allowed to expire. 

This means millions of people currently receiving government help with their health insurance costs will no longer have that assistance.

#SenatorSusanCollinsAlert ❗ Check my substacks link here

An analysis of the situation in September by the nonpartisan health policy group KFF estimated that, on average, the loss of subsidies will increase health care bills by 114%. 

Sadly, the new higher costs will affect more than 24 million people who buy insurance on Obamacare exchanges.

Republicans refused to include language retaining the subsidies in their “One Big (Fake❗) Beautiful Bill.” Following the bill’s passage, Republicans also rejected efforts by congressional Democrats to bring back the subsidies. In November 2025, the Senate Republicans blocked a bill backed by Democrats to restore the subsidies.

The party’s position is far out of touch with most Americans. A November poll from KFF found that 74% of respondents favored extending subsidies, including 76% of independent voters—and even 50% of Republicans.
“Make no mistake, the blame behind the skyrocketing health💲 care costs millions are facing today is squarely at the feet of House Republicans, and the American people know it,” Washington Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told Politico.

Democrats intend to campaign during this year’s midterm elections on the key issue. 

Republicans lost multiple elections last year in races where Democratic candidates highlighted the issue of affordability, including the gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, along with the mayoral election in New York City. 

Nevertheless, during the same time, Trump has falsely argued that affordability is merely a “hoax” offered up by Democrats.

But, in addition to increased health care 💲costs, tariffs imposed by Trump have increased the price of goods for millions of people—most notably for grocery staples.

Republicans spent years using cost-of-living grievances to attack Biden, only to take steps and support measures that have increased costs ever since they took power. Now, Republicans face the very high likelihood of payback from voters in this fall’s 2026, elections.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans promised administrative transparency, but guess what? They lied!

Echo opinion letters published in the Baltimore Sun:

(Question- Does the  Baltimore Sun check the authenticity from the people who write letters like the individual named "Gail Householder"❓

In her (the) November 1st letter, a person named Gail Householder speculates that if either President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden had torn down the East Wing of the White House to build a massive ballroom, the “lamestream media” would be falling over themselves to praise the destruction and construction (“Criticism of White House renovation is hypocritical“).  - Maine Writer: IMO it is Gail with the fake name "Householder" who is the hypocrite because whoever he or she is created a premise that just did not exist.

Frankly, we will never know if that’s true, because neither of those presidents chose to do that, probably because they respected the history of the White House and didn’t have the emotional need to build a gilded overwrought monument to themselves (my speculation).

I also found her assertion that “liberals” want “total power, authority and obedience” rather curious, as that is exactly what Donald Trump wants and is doing. But, I guess if it’s your authoritarian who is implementing voting restrictions, indicting political opponents and illegally arresting people based on their looks and denying them legal representation, then total power, authority and obedience seems very, very acceptable.  From— Douglas Kaplan, in Baltimore

No Kings Rallies - Speak up using your Freedom of Speech rights - before we lose this right to "The Great Captitulation"

I love America. That's why I'm participating in the 'No Kings' protest | Letter to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

To clear up the false rumors, I love America, and I am participating, unpaid, in the October 18 "No Kings" protest. I realize it's hard for Trump supporters to understand; I never understood their outrage at former President Joe Biden.

This era may eventually be known as "The Great Capitulation." Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court are abdicating their responsibilities and allowing the executive branch to create a de facto monarchy.

Most of us want the checks and balances of the three branches of government. Presidents are not allowed to fire judges because they don't like them. It's not appropriate for a president to threaten my congressman with a primary opponent, just because he voted against him once.

Sure, we could do better on immigration and crime. At the same time, armed ICE agents are not the answer. Sending National Guard troops to cities that FOTUS (Felon of the United States) does not like is not the answer. Weaponizing the military against our own people is the clear path to dictatorship.

Even if you voted for him, you know this is not right. Speak up, while you still can. 

From in Denny Krause, Wyoming

Donald Trump and maga Republicans support the evil retribution campaign against anyone Trump does not like: That's a lot of people!

Trump’s Vendetta Campaign Targets Mr. John Bolton

Echo editorial opinion published in The Wall Street Journal

This FBI raid makes clearer that second-term success for the President includes retribution.

Trump promised voters during his campaign for a second term that he had bigger things on his mind than retribution against opponents. But it is increasingly clear that vengeance is a large part, maybe the largest part, of how he will define success in his second term.

Trump's revenge campaign took an ominous turn Friday as FBI agents raided the home and office of Trump’s first-term national security adviser John Bolton. They brought two broad warrants to search the “premises.” Agents showed up unannounced at his Bethesda, Md., home at 7 a.m. They confiscated his wife Gretchen’s phone because it was visible and not on her person. Mr. Bolton had already left for his office, which is where FBI agents greeted him.

Trump Gets His Revenge on John Bolton. Who’s Next?

An echo editorial published in The New York Times 

Less than 12 hours after President Trump’s inauguration in January, he revoked the security detail protecting John Bolton, his former national security adviser turned critic, despite credible threats from Iran. Since then, Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Mr. Bolton on social media, including by calling him one of the “stupid people” making it harder to end the Ukraine war. The president has also continued his yearslong accusations that Mr. Bolton leaked classified information, without offering any evidence.

None of Trump’s pressure tactics stopped Mr. Bolton from pointing out the president’s many foreign policy failures. On Thursday evening, Mr. Bolton was back on CNN, saying that President Vladimir Putin of Russia had managed to “roll” Trump at their recent (failed❗) Alaska summit, and criticizing the administration for being unable to explain the outcome of the summit or the future of peace talks.

On Friday morning, Augut 22, 2025, the intimidation ratcheted up several notches. 

At dawn, the F.B.I. conducted a search of Mr. Bolton’s house in Bethesda, Md., and his office in Washington. Agents carried out boxes of papers and put them into vehicles with flashing blue lights in front of the amassed cameras. The Times reported that officials were investigating whether Mr. Bolton had improperly leaked national security information to the news media and other parties to damage the Trump administration. Mr. Bolton, notably, has not held government office in six years.

It is too early to know what the F.B.I. will claim to find in all of those boxes but not too early to surmise that the search for incriminating documents was not the real goal of Friday’s search. 

Even if it turns up documents that should not be there, the administration has damaged any presumption of good faith by flinging weightless accusations of criminality at those who challenge it. That approach was evident in the snide social media posts that accompanied the search. “NO ONE is above the law,” wrote Kash Patel, the bureau’s director. “@FBI agents on mission.” Mr. Patel’s deputy Dan Bongino jumped to an accusation of guilt with his response: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.” And Attorney General Pam (aka "Nurse Ratchet "of DOJ) Bondi declared: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.”

The search is a new chapter in Trump’s campaign of retribution against his critics. The White House and its loyalists in the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are sending a clear message: Keep quiet, or we will use the extraordinary power of federal law enforcement to threaten your job or your liberty and put you under a lasting cloud of suspicion. And they are using the fearsome punitive authority of the government to conduct this campaign.

Trump has accused former President Barack Obama of “treason,” claiming his predecessor was behind the effort to reveal how Russia helped Trump’s 2016, campaign. “He’s guilty,” Trump said of Mr. Obama in July, acting as both judge and jury. 

Almost immediately the Justice Department created a task force to investigate the allegation. Jack Smith, the former special counsel who brought two federal indictments against Trump, is now under a federal investigation after Senator Tom Cotton, (aka "Cotton Balls Cotton") Republican of Arkansas, accused him of violating the Hatch Act.

The White House is also using accusations of mortgage fraud against three people for whom Mr. Trump holds special grievances. The F.B.I. has begun a criminal investigation into whether Letitia James, the attorney general of New York and a Democrat, lied on mortgage documents. Ms. James, who denied the charge, won a fraud judgment against Trump in a state court last year. (This week a New York appellate court tossed out the half-billion-dollar fine against him as excessive but upheld the judgment.) The Justice Department has even issued a subpoena to Ms. James for records related to her lawsuit against Mr. Trump, an extraordinary intrusion into a state legal matter that directly affects Ms. Bondi’s boss.

The second target is Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and an outspoken adversary of Mr. Trump, whom the president has accused of similar deception on a mortgage application; a federal investigation is underway. The third is Lisa Cook, a member of the board of the Federal Reserve (appointed by President Joe Biden), whom Trump threatened to fire on Friday, claiming the grounds of mortgage deception*. The allegations initially came from Bill Pulte, Trump’s appointee as the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who has not explained how Ms. Cook’s federal mortgage application came to his attention. The move fits with Trump’s intention to take control of the central bank, despite its independence from the executive.

It is possible none of these investigations will result in a criminal charge. Still, they can do great harm to their targets. The cost of mounting a defense can be ruinous, and in some cases the reputational damage can be impossible to fix.

Whatever the outcome, they instill fear in anyone who might consider challenging the president, and they erode trust in the justice system.

Trump seems convinced that he is doing nothing to his rivals that was not done to him in earlier prosecutions and lawsuits. 

That is untrue (IOW, another lie❗🤥). There is little comparison between the substantial evidence amassed in his cases — in particular, that he tried to break the nation’s election laws in 2020, and refused to return classified White House documents — and the frequent lack of evidence lobbed at his adversaries.

We do not pretend to know how any of these cases will turn out. 

Nevertheless, it is clear that Trump and his appointees are perverting the justice system to serve their political interests and intimidate their critics. Given this pattern, Mr. John Bolton and the rest of Trump’s targets deserve every benefit of the doubt. Despite the justice system’s many imperfections, Americans long had reason to trust that federal officials would not target people for investigations without evidence. Under the Trump administration, that assumption is disappearing. The president has given all Americans reason to believe that justice is now applied selectively and unfairly.

*Donald Trump has a history of being accused of mortgage fraud❗

New York v. Trump is a civil investigation and lawsuit by the office of the New York Attorney General alleging that individuals and business entities within the Trump Organization engaged in financial fraud by presenting vastly disparate property values to potential lenders and tax officials, in violation of New York Executive Law § 63(12). The defendants were Donald Trump, five other individuals including three of his children, and ten business entities including some that owned property in New York, Florida, and Chicago.

Donald Trump's outrageous pre-transition decisions are already dangerous: There is nothing "peaceful" in his rhetoric

Donald Trump's sequel will be a bigger failure than his first trial run!

Maine Writer: Thanks to the Houston Chronicle for peeling back the veneer on the fake Trump participation in a smooth administrative transition.  Frankly, Trump was prepared for another January 6th insurrection if Vice-President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz had been elected.  All of which is to say, Donald Trump gets zero credit for supporting a smooth transition. Nevertheless, while the Biden administration delivers toward the peaceful transition, Donald Trump has exposed his incompeence in a series of chaotic decisions about cabinet nominees, creating explosive policies about mass exportations, tariffs, and making outrageous claims about how the United States can create Canada as a 51st state, purchase the Island of Greenland from Denmark and reclaim the Panama Canal.  Preposterous! Echo opinion published at this site here:

Jackie Calmes opinion: It’s great that the transfer of power following the November 2024, election is proceeding peacefully, as it always has except at the onset of the Civil War, and, yes, in 2021. 

Yet, you can thank President Joe Biden, Vice President Harris and their fellow Democratic good losers for that, not Trump. 

No one can credibly doubt that, had he lost again, he’d be raising another ruckus. Or worse, that there’d be violence. Trump suggested as much, telling Time in April, “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.”

States and the federal government prepared for mayhem that never came. Gabriel Sterling, the top Georgia election officer who four years ago publicly and presciently warned Trump that “someone’s going to get killed” because of his provocations, and who endured death threats himself, said of the electors' meeting this week, “To be honest, I forgot about it.”

As Trump declared in last month’s victory speech, “It’s time to unite.”

But as Biden said afterward in congratulating him: “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

Biden — who still hasn’t received acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020, victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Indeed. And that’s why, in this week of the uneventful electoral college vote, (Did you miss it❓ On Tuesday, the electoral college made official what we’ve known for six weeks: Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris for the presidency) - Americans should take the occasion to note the damage that Trump has wrought to the citizenry’s faith in elections by his years of demagogically disparaging them — instead of joining him and his MAGA minions in memory-holing their falsehoods about election fraud.

Trump has gone silent about “rigged” elections since he won in November. And yet, up to the final hours of voting, he was crying foul. “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia. Law Enforcement coming!!!” he posted on election day.

City and state officials, including Seth Bluestein, a Republican member of Philadelphia’s board of elections, reposted Trump’s lie to insist there was “absolutely no truth” to it. For that, Bluestein suffered antisemitic attacks and threats online. Countless election workers have known the feeling. Thanks, Trump.

Days earlier, Trump claimed, “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” He spread a false conspiracy theory of vote stealing in one county, adding, “We caught them cold.” No, he hadn’t; there were no vote thieves to catch.

After Trump won Pennsylvania — surprise! — he clammed up about Democrats' alleged heists there and in all six other battleground states that he carried, including four states governed by Democrats. I guess as vote riggers go, Democrats are just inept?

Even before the election, Trump stifled his talk that early and mail voting are rife with fraud, but only after advisors, apoplectic that Republican candidates were being shortchanged, appealed to his “yuge” ego: “Sir, your people are so excited to vote for you that they want to as soon as they can,” one said during an April meeting at Mar-a-Lago. “You gotta tell them it’s OK.”

Trump has not, however, changed his tune about the 2020, election. The president-elect continues to lie that he won it, so routinely that reporters let it go unchecked ❗😧 What’s worse, looking ahead, is that Trump reportedly is making fealty to his election lies a job requirement for appointees to high-level administration posts.

So it is that he’s tapped former Florida Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi to be U.S. attorney general. She was part of “the first wave of the Big Lie,” as former Trump White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin put it to the House Jan. 6 investigation committee. Bondi rushed to Pennsylvania after the 2020 election to spread disinformation about dead voters and ballot dumps. She was with lead election denier Rudy Giuliani for Team Trump’s ludicrous news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in a Philadelphia industrial park. And she was fulminating on Fox News: “We are not going anywhere until they declare Trump won Pennsylvania.”

In 2022, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6, committee that Bondi contacted her before she testified to press Hutchinson to remain loyal to Trump, according to the Washington Post. (Yet, it’s former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, that House Republicans now want prosecuted for witness tampering for her talks with Hutchinson.) This year, Bondi echoed Trump’s falsehoods about noncitizens voting from her platform as a leader of a pro-Trump policy institute. And she promised retribution for Trump’s indictments: “The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted.”

No doubt Bondi as the next attorney general would carry out Trump’s calls for the Justice Department to investigate the 2020 election, to prosecute Biden and to get House Jan. 6 committee members behind bars.

“Is she going to continue … pushing out the Big Lie?” California’s new Democratic senator and January 6 committee veteran Adam Schiff recently asked on MSNBC.

That was a rhetorical question, of course.

Jackie Calmes is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.

Dec 20, 2024

Jackie Calmes:  Trump’s acknowledgment of Biden’s 2020 victory, let alone congratulations, and who, thanks to Trump, is considered illegitimate by seven of 10 Republicans — expressed hope that “we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system. … It can be trusted, win or lose.”

Vice-President Kamala Harris is endorsed for President by The New Yorker magazine!

The Vice-President has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Donald Trump.

Echo opinion published in The New Yorker by The Editors:

At the 1940, Republican National Convention, in Philadelphia, an uneasy affair marked by bomb scares, a British espionage scandal, and the imminence of global conflict, ten names were placed in nomination. On the sixth ballot, a corporate executive from Indiana named Wendell Willkie finally emerged as the challenger to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was running for a third term. 

Desperate to find a way to compete with F.D.R., a political colossus who had lately engineered the New Deal and ended the Great Depression, Willkie challenged him to a series of radio debates.

This was something new in American life. F.D.R. hardly feared the medium—he’d been delivering his homey yet substance-rich fireside chats to the nation since 1933—but he nonetheless dodged Willkie’s invitation, citing scheduling conflicts. In November, he crushed Willkie, and by the end of 1941, he was engaged in the struggle against fascism.

#VoteHarrisWalz The 2024, election also comes at a moment of national crisis. 

This time, however, the threat to the country’s future—to its rule of law and its democratic institutions, its security and its character—resides not in a foreign capital but at a twenty-acre Xanadu on the Florida coast. For nine years, Donald Trump has represented an ongoing assault on the stability, the nerves, and the nature of the United States. As President, he amplified some of the ugliest currents in our political culture: nativism, racism, misogyny, indifference to the disadvantaged, amoral isolationism. 

Trump's narcissism and casual cruelty, his contempt for the truth, have contaminated public life. As Commander-in-Chief, he ridiculed the valor of fallen soldiers, he threatened to unravel the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and he emboldened autocrats everywhere, including Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and Viktor Orbán. 

When Trump lost to Joe Biden, in 2020, he tried every means possible to deny the will of the electorate and helped incite a violent insurrection on Capitol Hill.

In contrast, the Democratic Party’s nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris, has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to build on the successes of the Biden Administration and to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Trump. 

Few, if any, of our readers will be surprised that we (The New Yorker) endorse Harris in this election—but many would have been surprised, earlier this year, that he choice would end up being between Trump and the Vice-President. The change in the Democratic candidate is the result, of course, of a debate of the sort that F.D.R. sidestepped.

During the past half century, these quadrennial confrontations have become a centerpiece of election season—a chance to glimpse the choice in real time, side by side. 

Aficionados may know the highlights of debates past: Ronald Reagan, at the age of seventy-three, joking nimbly that he would not “exploit” the “youth and inexperience” of his fifty-six-year-old opponent, Walter Mondale; George H. W. Bush glancing at his watch after Bill Clinton answered a question from the audience; Mitt Romney assuring the country that, far from being a sexist, he had, in fact, “whole binders full of women” he had consulted for his gubernatorial cabinet.

Yet no debates have been as unusual or as consequential as the two we have just witnessed. The first—on June 27th, in Atlanta, between Trump and President Biden—proved to be an unmasking. 

On a human level, Biden’s nationally televised disintegration was a poignant spectacle. Viewed more coldly, it was a gift. Had it taken place, say, after the Conventions, it might have been too late to force a reassessment.

It was hardly a secret that Biden has aged, growing markedly less robust, particularly in the past eighteen months or so. If he got through an interview or a (rare) press conference without incident, staff and supporters exhaled and treated it as a victory. 

But, rather than open the gate to a younger generation of Democratic candidates, Biden, his advisers, and the Party leadership stood in the way. They made it plain that a challenger would inevitably be defeated. 

Meanwhile, through spin and deft scheduling, the White House staff protected the President and hoped for the best. Tens of millions of voters, fearing another Trump Presidency, had little choice but to close their eyes and think of America.

But staying the course was, as the polls were suggesting, probably a
doomed strategy. In an attempt to invigorate the campaign, Biden and his team took the risk of challenging Trump to an early debate. Perhaps a forceful, coherent performance would diminish the doubts about the President’s capacity to govern well into his mid-eighties. It was not to be. 

In fact, the debate, broadcast on CNN, was a humbling. Biden’s resting expression of slack confusion was almost as unnerving as his faltering efforts to make a clear and vivid case for his reëlection.

When Jake Tapper asked him about the national debt, he delivered a wobbly reply that concluded, “Look, if—we finally beat Medicare.” After President Joe Biden gave a similarly jumbled response to a question about immigration, Trump said only, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.” By Trumpian (aka Trumpziism ❗) standards, this was a kindness. It was also the end of the Biden candidacy.

For the next twenty-four days, the President travelled a hard road from denial to acceptance. All of us face the assault of time, but few must reckon with mortality before the eyes of the world. Biden loves the job and thought he was uniquely positioned to defeat Trump once more. But finally, after absorbing discouragement from Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, the Obamas, and others, Biden, in an act of grace, issued a letter concluding that it was “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.” In a separate message, he gave his endorsement to Kamala Harris.

The second Presidential debate, at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, was an unmasking of another kind. For some time, observers have asked whether Trump, who is now seventy-eight, has himself suffered from some form of decline. On a given day, it is hard to determine if a particular insult, lie, or rant represents his usual malevolence or something else. 

Not long before the debate, Trump took to speculating whether it would be preferable, in the event of finding oneself on a sinking boat, to die by shark attack or by electrocution from the boat’s battery. (“I’ll take electrocution every single time,” he assured a grateful nation.) 

Mean spirited as usually, there is nothing he will not say. 

When a group of Proud Boys were convicted of conspiracy last year, he warned that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department were just getting started: “get smart america, they are coming after you!!!”

Trump has defied multiple legal gag orders, attacking judges and jurors, and has even blamed the latest attempt on his life, a deeply alarming event, not on the would-be assailant or the easy availability of assault weapons but on the Democratic ticket👿💢❗

For Harris, the debate presented an opportunity to expose Trump at his worst. All she had to do was to prick his vanity. 

Trump’s rallies were boring, she suggested. Military leaders thought he was a “disgrace.” Foreign leaders ate his lunch, considered him weak, laughed at him. With growing rage, Trump began howling from a familiar hymnal. America is a “failing nation.” Migrants are pouring in from “prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” Indelibly, Trump picked up on a racist, J. D. Vance-endorsed conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants in Ohio and gave it his full voice:

In Springfield, (Ohio) they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.

Trump went on in this vein of fact-free bluster, bringing discomfort even to some fellow-Republicans. He had been calling Harris “dumb as a rock” and “unable to speak properly without a teleprompter” or even “put two sentences together,” while mocking her looks, her family, her racial identity, her personal life. He refused to pronounce her name correctly. Harris decided to flick all that lint from her shoulder. She left it to the moderators to correct Trump’s facts and the electorate to behold his lunacy. It was a performance that had the potential to lay bare Trump’s character for those voters who might not have been paying much attention. 

After the (failed❗) debate, Trump, of course, declared a “BIG WIN,” but he then issued a loser’s proclamation: “there will be no third debate.” Some days later, he had more to say about that night, particularly about an endorsement that came his opponent’s way minutes after the debate’s conclusion. 

On his social-media platform, he wrote, “i hate taylor swift!”

In the fall of 2016, the editors of The New Yorker published an enthusiastic endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

On November 8th, barring some astonishment, the people of the United States will, after two hundred and forty years, send a woman to the White House. The election of Hillary Clinton is an event that we will welcome for its immense historical importance, and greet with indescribable relief. It will be especially gratifying to have a woman as commander-in-chief after such a sickeningly sexist and racist campaign, one that exposed so starkly how far our society has to go.

The lack of sufficient caution remains, well, an astonishment. We all learned a painful lesson. Trump has never won the national popular vote, and the elections of 2018 and 2020 were setbacks for the Republicans; in 2022, the anticipated “red wave” failed to materialize. And yet in rural towns, in struggling deindustrialized cities, in the South and the Midwest, his popularity is broad and deep. His strength among Black and Latino men has grown. 

Worse, Trump has the ardent backing of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, right-wing legal activists like Leonard Leo, and no small number of Wall Street executives whose highest priorities are to prevent regulation and changes to their tax status. Coming out of the Democratic National Convention, and then the September 10th debate, Harris made extraordinary inroads with the electorate; she’s got the “vibes,” as this year’s cliché has it. But the race remains very close. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump outperformed the polls. No responsible assessment of the contest has the luxury of focussing only on the imperatives for a Harris Administration and gliding past the ramifications of another Trump Administration.

There’s every reason to think that Trump II would be far worse than Trump I. Twice impeached, found liable for sexual abuse, convicted of thirty-four felony counts, and facing many more state and federal charges, Trump would return to the White House in a spirit of vengeance. He would immediately set about betraying his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution and wage battle against the independence of the Department of Justice in order to preserve, protect, and defend himself. 

Trump made it clear that he would also use the powers at his disposal to punish his opponents. And this time there would be no advisers who would rein him in.

Trump is a menacing presence in American life, and most of his former associates know it. Of his forty-two former Cabinet secretaries, only half have endorsed him. More than two hundred staffers for four previous Republican Presidents and Presidential candidates have endorsed the Democratic ticket. High-ranking officials who once surrounded Trump—including former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Defense Secretaries Jim Mattis and Mark Esper, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chief of staff John Kelly, the former national-security advisers John Bolton and H. R. McMaster, and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—regard him as unfit, a threat to national security.

Trump’s campaign has centered on immigration. His first-term abominations included family separation, the Muslim ban, and the decimation of the refugee and asylum system. 

Now Trump and his (evil👾👽) advisors like Stephen Miller want to carry out mass deportations reminiscent of the Eisenhower Administration’s “Operation Wetback,” promising the creation of vast internment camps for undocumented immigrants. Such efforts would require the participation of the Department of Defense and the National Guard. These goals are not only unrealistic; they’re undemocratic.

There are more than eleven million undocumented immigrants living in the United States; at least sixty per cent of them have lived here for more than a decade. Under Trump, federal agents would target anyone they could, without clear guidelines or priorities. This policy would tear apart families, unleash fear in immigrant communities, and lead to racial profiling and discrimination.

A second Trump Administration also augurs economic disaster. His promised tax cuts would hollow out the government’s finances, especially if he manages to enact the escalating measures that he has promised while campaigning, such as making Social Security benefits tax-free. Then, there’s his plan to impose tariffs of up to twenty percent on imports, plus much higher duties on anything made in China. According to credible economic models, this would bring a resurgence of inflation, raising the cost of living for those least able to afford it.

Trump’s effect on the judiciary would be no less alarming. In his first term, he appointed three Supreme Court Justices, who played an essential role in eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion. Twenty-two states have since either restricted the procedure or banned it outright, and states in the latter category (including Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi) ave somhe of the country’s highest rates of maternal and infant mortality.

Nor is this the only respect in which Trump’s judicial appointments have imperilled public health and safety. The judges he named to the federal bench have continued his campaign of regulatory sabotage. A series of recent Supreme Court rulings have invited polluting industries to challenge pretty much any rule, old or new, that they don’t like.

Despite such rulings—and despite a recklessly expansive opinion about Presidential immunity—Trump has sometimes complained that the Court remains insufficiently compliant. Three Justices are currently in their seventies; if Trump gets another round of picks, he is likely to make personal loyalty a deciding factor. 

Notwithstanding a constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” he has indicated that, once in office, he would dismiss federal criminal cases pending against him, and, with the help of a suitably pliable Attorney General, he would almost certainly fire the special counsel Jack Smith. “I have the absolute right to pardon myself,” Trump has said. A subservient Justice Department and judiciary could readily be enlisted in his vendettas: Trump—who has insinuated that Mark Milley should have been executed for disloyalty—has also said that he might well prosecute political opponents, including Joe Biden.

Trump’s record on the environment is the worst of any President in modern history. His Administration rolled back nearly a hundred regulations aimed at protecting the nation’s air, water, and wildlife. 

It dismantled Obama-era efforts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s Department of the Interior rushed to lease public lands for oil and gas drilling, and his Department of Energy worked methodically to weaken efficiency standards. A 2020 analysis by the Rhodium Group
estimated that the Trump Administration’s actions would result in the release of an extra 1.8 billion tons of CO2 by 2035, a planetarily disastrous outcome. And Trump has continued to scoff at climate science. Talking to Elon Musk, in August, he asserted that one impact of sea-level rise would be the creation of “more oceanfront property.”

Discussion about foreign policy in this election season has been, as always, limited at best. Trump’s pronouncements are either flip (“I don’t give a shit about nato”) or dismaying in both their specifics and their evasions. With respect to the horrific events of the past year in the Middle East—the Hamas attack on October 7th, in which twelve hundred people were killed and more than two hundred taken hostage, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, which has left more than forty thousand Palestinians dead and countless people displaced—Trump’s response is that it “would have never happened” if he had been in office. When he was in the White House, he presided over the signing of the Abraham Accords, which promised a new era in relations between Israel and more of its Arab neighbors but paid almost no attention to the rights and the future of the Palestinian people.

In the (one and only 😧) recent debate, Trump was asked simply if he wanted Ukraine to prevail against its invader, Putin’s Russia. Trump, who appears to prefer aggressive Russian authoritarianism to Ukraine’s evolving democracy, could not bring himself to answer in the affirmative and convey support for Ukraine’s struggle to preserve its sovereignty and independence. Indeed, Trump radiates contempt for Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who failed to deliver on Trump’s thuggish demand, in 2019, that, in exchange for weapons shipments already earmarked for Kyiv, he investigate the Biden family. Putin, who has shredded nascent democratic institutions and procedures in his own country to create a system based solely on his authority, is more Trump’s style.

Trump is no more assuring when it comes to China policy. Xi Jinping, whom Trump has recently praised as a “brilliant guy” who “runs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist,” believes that the world is undergoing a realignment—“changes unseen in a century.” Once again, Trump seems uninterested. 

In fact, Trump suggested that he might even leave Taiwan to fend for itself in the event of a Chinese attack. The island should “pay us for defense,” he said. Trump warns of another world war, and yet here, too, his policies seem designed to encourage aggression and destabilize the international order.

In every arena, there is little question that a Harris Presidency promises far greater sanity and far greater humanity. 

As recently as three months ago, the Washington cognoscenti cast aspersions on her political skills. These quickly evaporated as Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, the shrewd and appealing governor of Minnesota, have rapidly proved to be effective campaigners. Their swift transformation of the Democratic Party’s prospects for November has been astonishing. Harris deserves enormous credit for stepping fearlessly into the role that fate has dealt her. In the face of a malign opponent, she has behaved with poise, conviction, and intelligence. Of course, her ability to carry out her policy ambitions would improve immeasurably with the election of Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. But, whatever the circumstances, her positions on the critical issues are rational, undergirded by a basic sense of decency, and often compelling.

Where Trump promises mass deportations, she has expressed support both for boosting border enforcement and for opening avenues that would lead to legal immigration. The refugee program, which is both a moral imperative and a pragmatic tool of U.S. foreign policy, has grown substantially during the Biden-Harris Administration. The government has also tempered interior enforcement, allowing the large undocumented population, particularly those with families and deep ties to local communities, to live without constant fear of arrest and deportation.

The Biden-Harris record on asylum at the border is mixed, partly because the policy solutions are far more complex. 

Harris said that she would support a bipartisan Senate bill that drastically curtails asylum, and, in the current climate, support for that bill is politically expedient. But there is good reason to believe that, if elected, Harris could be pushed to combine increasing vigilance at the border with more policies that would provide relief to those in desperate need. She has been clear that she would protect undocumented families and find ways to bring a sense of compassion to the immigration system. Congress, to be sure, has been a barrier to any meaningful efforts at immigration reform; conservative courts, together with Republican state attorneys general, would try to limit what Harris could do by executive order. But the alternative is unimaginably bad.

On the subject of economics, Harris’s proposals have sometimes lacked detail, but they thoughtfully address concerns of working-class and middle-class Americans, with a particular focus on the cost of housing. President Biden, for his part, has made a concerted effort to reëstablish the Democratic Party’s bond with blue-collar voters. He has been unusually pro-union and pro-manufacturing. There’s a reason that, after the disastrous first debate, some of the most diehard Biden loyalists were on the Party’s left. The inflation that rose earlier in his term—and that his political adversaries have used to define his economic record—has now abated, while Biden can be credited with passing programs that directed federal spending toward badly needed infrastructure projects and green-energy projects. The U.S. is currently leading its peers in the rate of economic growth.

Owing to Senate opposition, Biden struggled to follow through on his ambition to bolster the “care economy,” through paid family leave, child tax credits, and other measures. 

Although Harris has pulled back from Biden’s positions in certain areas—she favors, for example, a more modest corporate tax increase—these family-relief programs are the part of Biden’s agenda that she is most enthusiastic about. She will push hard for them, alongside her initiatives aimed at easing the housing crisis.

For the Harris campaign, the most emotionally galvanizing issue has been abortion. This will be the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Close to ninety million women have registered to vote this November, and historical data show that women have favored Democrats over Republicans in every general election since 1992. As Vice-President, Harris has emerged as a leading voice on abortion, framing it powerfully as a matter of bodily autonomy and a right to health care. 

Vice-President Harris called for concrete policy changes, such as reinstating federal protections for abortion, and has never shied away from making forceful statements on the issue. In March, Harris toured a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota, becoming the first Vice-President to make a public appearance at an abortion provider.

Leaders in the field of women’s health have praised her directness and see it as a welcome change from Biden’s wavering stance. (In this year’s State of the Union address, he failed to say the word “abortion” once, even though it was included in his prepared remarks.) As a senator, she sponsored bills designed to improve maternal health and guarantee access to contraception. 

In 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, she memorably asked him, “Can you think of any laws that give government the power to make decisions about the male body?”

She also sought to limit a state’s ability to ban abortion unilaterally. “If there are those who dare to take the freedom to make such a fundamental decision for an individual, which is about one’s own body,” Harris said of abortion rights at a campaign fund-raiser in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, “what other freedoms could be on the table for the taking?”

Vice-President Harris has a reasonably strong environmental record, even, if in recent months, she has chosen to give it only modest attention. As California’s attorney general, she pursued several high-profile cases against polluters, including one against Conoco Phillips for endangering water supplies. 

In 2016, she sued the Obama Administration over a plan to allow offshore fracking in the Santa Barbara Channel. (A federal judge sided with Harris, and an injunction remains in place.) In the Senate, she promoted electric school buses and was an early co-sponsor of a resolution calling for a Green New Deal. Running for President in 2019, Harris, who has called climate change an “existential threat,” said that she would ban fracking for oil and gas. She has since reversed that position, but, as Vice-President, she cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of new spending and tax breaks for clean-energy projects.

On foriegn policy, Harris, who has spent many hours in national-security briefings, speaks the language of liberal internationalism, echoing Biden’s policies, from Ukraine to the Middle East. 

But Harris is of a different generation than Biden. We can reasonably hope that, as she maintains his commitment to traditional allies and alliances, she will also employ American leverage when those allies are acting heedlessly. With respect to Gaza, she has voiced support for two states for two peoples; she has reasserted Israel’s right to security while at the same time evoking the “heartbreaking” suffering of the Palestinian people, and calling for an immediate end to the war, with a resolution that would enable Palestinians to “realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.” 

Vice-President will also need to act decisively in the United States’ interest when dealing with someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, who has frequently given American Presidents the back of his hand while benefitting immensely from American support.

With regard to China, Vice-President Harris is likely to extend President Biden’s posture of watchful, skeptical competitiveness.

A former prosecutor, she often views foreign policy through the lens of international law, and she has rebuked China for expanding its territorial footprint. In 2022, shortly after her first meeting with Xi, when some leaders might have attempted to send reassuring signals, Harris did the opposite: during a visit to the Philippines, she vowed America’s support “in the face of intimidation and coercion in the South China Sea.”

Four years ago, in our endorsement of Joe Biden, we said that, while he was leading in the polls, we hoped he would displace Trump “by a margin that prevents prolonged dispute or the kind of civil unrest that Trump appears to relish.” 

In retrospect, we now know what happened: the margins, in four decisive states, were extremely narrow, and Trump refused to concede. Instead, he levelled wild accusations and filed dozens of lawsuits. When those failed, he called on his MAGA believers to march on the Capitol. This time around, the Trumpzi campaign and various right-wing groups have already deployed deny-the-vote efforts around the country, particularly in swing states like Georgia,Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. There is every likelihood that, if Trump loses, the drama could go on for weeks or months after Election Day. He has made no secret of the fact that he is willing to use every lever, deploy every dirty trick, political and rhetorical, to bring the country to the brink once more.

And so the choice is stark. The United States simply cannot endure another four years of Donald Trump. He is an agent of chaos, an enemy of liberal democracy, and a threat to America’s moral standing in the world. Kamala Harris—who has shown herself to be sensible, humane, and liberal-minded—is our choice for the Presidency. At the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, a few weeks ago, the American people were able to see both the stakes of this election and the vast differences between the candidates. The right choice—the necessary choice—is beyond debate. 

Published in the print edition of the October 7, 2024, issue, with the headline “Harris for President.”