He Will Try

Does a second term for Donald Trump represent an existential threat to American democracy?

Even for those fortunate Americans outside of the Trump cult of personality, some are skeptical. Some of that skepticism, perhaps, comes from focusing on the outcome of the January 6 insurrection rather than on the full sweep of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results for two months before it was stopped in Congress that night. And some of the skepticism, for well-meaning individuals like Shadi Hamid, is a diehard faith in American institutions, a faith they feel was vindicated by Trump’s failure to end democracy then. 

Of course, the legal community was nearly united in its assumption that Trump's immunity claim had no basis in law at all, and the Supreme Court surprised them. Who knows how they will surprise us when Trump inevitably challenges the result of the election on some equally invented grounds. It is odd to still have an unyielding faith in the face of such an enormous uncertainty.

But more than trying to convince you of how Trump might go about it, what I really want to say to those of you who are still open to the idea that the threat is greater than you suppose, to people liberal or conservative, Democrat, Independent, or Republican, is this:

He will try.

Many of you wouldn't deny this, and even take it for granted. I am asking you not to take it for granted, to take seriously what it means to say that one party's candidate will not try to cripple our system of free and fair elections, and one party's candidate is guaranteed to. How high do his odds of success have to be before you treat this as a genuine emergency? Is a 20 percent chance of losing our democracy too low? Is 30?

Of course Trump is not just a threat to democracy. He’s a threat in many other ways. Most dramatically, the number of people he has promised to deport if elected keeps going up, but has not gone below 15 million. Perhaps you think he will fail. After all, he promised to deport 8 million people in 2016 and did not succeed. Why should we take it seriously this time?

He will try.

In both cases, past performance is not a guarantee of future outcomes. He tried then, and if given the opportunity, he will try again. Moreover, if he wins we may find in hindsight that defeating him in 2020 only to reelect him in 2024 was the worst possible sequence of events. The efforts of 2017–2021 were haphazard, poorly thought out and disorganized, but there was a significant degree of learning on the part of those few stable figures in Trump’s inner circle such as Stephen Miller. And a four-year break allowed time to process what was learned and formulate a less haphazard approach; most famously, though not at all exclusively, seen in Project 2025.

But even setting all that aside, even assuming that his odds of success in 2025 will be no higher than they were in 2017, any reasoning person must concede: he will try.

A mass expulsion on the scale of 15–20 million people would be, bar none, the largest in the history of the world. Even if Trump’s people only manage to hit a quarter of their goal, the result will be human suffering and death on an enormous scale. The path to hitting deportations of that level would necessarily involve significant weakening of the very safeguards that Hamid and others were banking on protecting our system of free and fair elections.

He will try. And even a partial failure would be a humanitarian catastrophe, and break many of our already battered institutions.

Is it worth it? For what?

Do not promote false equivalences. Do not pretend there is some symmetry of risk here.

And do turn out to vote the entire Democratic ticket, no matter what state you live in.

He will try, so you had better.

Featured Image is DC Capitol Storming, by TapTheForwardAssist