This is the next of our series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020.
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There is no sense beseeching everyone to get over it, because they won’t. The reasons we despair that Donald Trump is actively pursuing the Presidency go way beyond the sickening, real but far from inevitable possibility that he could win. Why we are heartsick is worse than that. We can’t believe that any significant number of people could buy into Trump’s unique brand of malevolence, lying and authoritarianism.
Rather than Trump’s level of support merely surfacing an undercurrent that might have always been there, it makes us think that it is now a different country than it was. We have a lot to regret in our nation’s past, but it seemed like elected officials shared the ideas and some of the dreams of democracy. Pledges of outright retribution or deportation of American citizens. were uncommon. The more obvious forms of lying and assaults of American institutions were discouraged, and sometimes even disqualifying.
So, we miss that a lot and we miss it every day. At the worst, we think it might be gone forever. On the most depressing days of our intended activism, the existence of Donald Trump and MAGA disempowers us completely. When we defeated Trump in 2020, our movement was filled with energy and purpose. Even now that he is a felon, too many of us are now feeling 2024 as a year of dread.
Luckily, this is a treatable condition. If you haven’t re-engaged, do it now. Our path to winning is clear, if we follow it. Once we get there, the huge bonus will be that this will be the last gasp of this level of Trumpism, mercifully. Meanspirited-ness and the assault on democracy will live on, fueled by social media, but our daily dose will diminish This is because:
- Trump will not be running a fourth time after being defeated in November.
- No Trump wannabe who follows him will have his or her pre-candidacy name recognition or his or her own television network. This has been essential to Trump’s level of political viability. There will be a host of claimants to Trump’s legacy, making the higher levels of support for a single MAGA politician impossible to muster.
- As these claimants emerge, none will have the capacity to execute another. Trump has taken revenge against elected officials in his own party to an all-new level. He has expanded the range of punishable offenses beyond that of any of our country’s other elected officials, ever. By now they have learned that he can and will destroy their future election prospects. There are lots of Republican leaders who don’t believe that Trump’s felony convictions were rigged by Joe Biden. They just don’t plan on saying so. They let him back in after the insurrection because they were scared not to, and for good reason. His vengeance within his own party is not hypothetical.
- The legal problems will not go away. Trump will be sentenced for the 34 felonies. He will pay huge penalties in the two civil cases that have been resolved, and that will be the beginning, not the end. The Supreme Court will not invent total presidential immunity, much as Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would like. Ultimately, the piper will be paid for election fraud.
The requirement is that we put aside the grievous soul-wrenching recognition that the voter disqualification of Trump (which could have happened countless times in the past years) never happened at all. For the less than five months we have, we must replace it with a new relentlessness. Here we can take advantage of what is going our way.
First, the 2%+ gain we get from Trump being convicted is just the start of it. We will get at least that with the real possibility of more related to the mid-July sentencing, his subsequent appeals and other legal problems. It isn’t just this switch of regular voters we are working for. Biden already leads among voters who cast ballots. It’s among infrequent voters that Biden trails. Now come predictions that the convictions will cause Trump-leaning infrequent voters to not vote at all or vote for Robert Kennedy. A post-conviction poll by Fox News has Biden only four points behind in Florida, which had not been thought of as a swing state.
Second, whether they provide an immediate opportunity for the federal district court in DC to continue with Jack Smith’s election fraud charges, the Supreme Court will decide in June that Donald Trump does not have legal immunity for his private (not official) acts.
Third, the battle over reproductive freedom will still be raging in November and will get us votes in every state. Splendidly, choice initiatives are on the ballot in swing states Arizona and Nevada, as well as several other states, including Florida and Colorado.
Fourth, the conditions of the June 27 debate favor Biden’s approach. There will be no live audience and the moderator will have full control over candidate microphones.
So, the plan is waiting to be grabbed. Before we lose ourselves in what Trump having a core of support means about America, let’s return to our 2020 focus on winning the winnable. We can do these three things today:
| 1) Boost Sarah Longwell | |
| There is not a better Republican anti-Trump leader than Sarah Longwell. She is the organizing force behind Defending Democracy Together. More recently, she has led Republicans for the Rule of Law in an advertising campaign in swing states attacking Trump’s claim of total legal immunity. Whatever your lifelong or immediate political persuasion, you can donate to the ad campaign or sign their petition. | |
2) Get Some Donation Guidance | |
 | A recent missive identified two organizations that are especially intent on sorting out where political donations will have the biggest impact. These are Focus for Democracy and the Movement Voter Project. Now comes OATH which meticulously sorts out which congressional candidates most need your help. |
3) Get Into the Field | |
| Across the country, activists are agonizing over whether to hit the road in the early fall, traveling to swing states to help build upon narrow margins. For those who have the yen and not the assignment, there is no better group of field organizers than Common Power. They are Seattle based but fully accessible online. They are training volunteers and deploying them to ten states. | |
As we do the essential work of political activism in the nearly five months until the election, we aim for less consternation and more tirelessness. As we know from our efforts in 2020, that will do the job.
David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington
