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August 30, 2024
Trumpism Will Outlast Trump
We will have to overcome the MAGA project’s attacks on the electoral system even after the November election.
A Trump-themed flag is flown by supporters across the street from Trump Tower as former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a press conference after being found guilty over hush-money charges on May 31, 2024.
(Photo by Angela Weiss / AFP)
The announcement on Tuesday by special prosecutor Jack Smith that his office intends to revive the election interference and hoarding-of-secret-documents cases against Donald Trump is a reminder—if any is needed—of just how destructive Trump can be when he abuses political power for personal gain.
But perhaps what’s worse is how the former president draws people into his criminal orbit, turning them into faithful followers no matter how legally dubious the task at hand. At Mar-a-Lago, he allegedly convinced a series of low-level assistants to share his criminality in moving boxes of documents around in an apparent effort to avoid handing them over to federal authorities. In the election interference case, he convinced dozens of lawyers, political aides, and others to engage in a national pressure campaign to get state legislators and elections officials to challenge the vote counts in states that he had lost.
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Almost certainly, neither of these trials will begin before the election—yet the granular level of detail of malfeasance and abuse of power contained in these indictments ought to give pause to any independents still seriously thinking about handing the keys of power back to a man with Trump’s felonious qualities.
Recently, the MAGA-captured Georgia state election board has shown just how far Trump-acolytes might be willing to go were he to lose yet another presidential election in November. Its far-right majority has been on a summer tear, setting in place rules that basically give any local county the right to endlessly delay vote certification on almost any pretext. Members of the supposedly nonpartisan board have attended Trump rallies where they have been personally feted by the candidate himself, to the raucous cheers of attendees. Trump has called these election officials “pit bulls” who are “fighting for victory.”
This is all in keeping with Trump’s endless drumbeat of warnings to his followers that the 2024 election will also be stolen from him, as he has baselessly, and continually, claimed for nearly four years now regarding the 2020 contest. After months in which Trump was steadily rising in polls, the polls have shifted in Harris’s favor, and Trump has now fallen marginally behind Harris. And as his odds of winning the White House have declined, the intensity of his attacks on the electoral system have grown.
Trump allies are already hard at work suing several states, alleging that they are not adequately purging voter rolls of inactive or dead voters. Trump himself has repeatedly refused to say unequivocally that if he loses he will accept the results of the November elections.
This behavior is, of course, deeply corrosive to the culture of democracy. It encourages voters to think of those who vote differently from them as enemies engaged in vast, shadowy conspiracies to deprive the MAGA-leader of his God-given right to ultimate power. And it legitimizes any and every shenanigan aimed at boosting the electoral position of Donald J. Trump.
It also deepens fissures at the most local of levels, turning everyone from small-town mayors to county supervisors into foot soldiers in the larger MAGA project.
Over the past decade, as Trump’s personality cult has picked up steam, communities such as California’s Shasta County have swung far to the right, with board of supervisors’ meetings coming to resemble mini-MAGA rallies, complete with screaming audiences and playing-to-the-galleries political hucksters.
Out on September 3, my new book, Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America, details what happened in Shasta County, and also in Clallam County, Washington, to the north, as local political figures sought to use MAGA language and tactics to gain control over their political terrain. In each instance, lynch mobs confronted public health officials; online trolls threatened death and destruction against their political opponents; basic governmental functions were subjugated to far-right ideological campaigns; and moderate, pragmatic, political figures were exiled by the MAGA base.
In Clallam County, a good-governance league eventually organized to successfully defeat MAGA candidates over the course of two election cycles; but in Shasta County, which had always hewed further to the right, the braking mechanisms failed to kick in, and over the course of a few years the county became a poster child for the chaos triggered by the hard right’s burn-it-all-down brigades. School boards were taken over by Christian nationalists; the public health officer was fired; numerous other county officials also lost their jobs; the county leaders attempted to make Shasta a “Second Amendment Sanctuary County”; election-deniers were invited in to give long presentations before the board explaining how and why the 2020 elections were stolen; and local militias ended up as political kingmakers.
This is, unfortunately, the trajectory that too many communities are following. The long tail of Trumpism is thrashing as wildly today as it was eight years ago, in some ways even more so.
The Republican Party wants to paint all of this as being somehow normal. It’s not. There’s nothing remotely normal about heading into the homestretch of a presidential campaign with a candidate facing multiple federal felony indictments, stirring up local election boards to preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections, and prepping his followers to rise up in insurrection once more should he lose in November. Down that route lies nothing but chaos and the tearing apart of community fabric.
Can we count on you?
In the coming election, the fate of our democracy and fundamental civil rights are on the ballot. The conservative architects of Project 2025 are scheming to institutionalize Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision across all levels of government if he should win.
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Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is The Nation‘s Western Correspondent. He is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar, and most recently Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America.
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Oh, doctor!