You’re Allowed to Call Trump a Threat to Democracy
You’re Allowed to Call Trump a Threat to Democracy
Political violence is an intolerable threat to our nation. It isn’t the only one.
Would-be assassins and migrant pogroms grab the headlines, but the most electorally important event of the week may be the much more boring one coming tomorrow: The Federal Reserve is set to cut interest rates for the first time in two years. Happy Tuesday.
JD Vance Wrings His Hands
—Andrew Egger
Again an attempt on Donald Trump’s life is foiled, thank God and the Secret Service. And again the question arises: Isn’t the other side’s rhetoric getting a little too extreme?
JD Vance sure thinks so. “Look, we can disagree with one another. We can debate one another,” Trump’s running mate fretted at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition event yesterday. “But we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he is elected it’s going to be the end of American democracy.”
Everybody okay out there? None of you ruptured your diaphragm laughing? No eye rolls so severe they got stuck up there? Great, just checking.
Obviously, no one objects to the idea that political chatter could be chiller. But Vance’s pivot to hand-wringing about extreme rhetoric is truly shameless coming from the current GOP ticket. Under Vance’s furrowed-brow rules of engagement, calling a political opponent a fascist threat to democracy is way over the line. But calling an opponent a communist threat to democracy, as Trump says daily of Kamala Harris? Less of an issue, apparently.
Vance’s attempt at rhetoric-policing is particularly ridiculous this time around—and not just because Trump accused Harris of being a fascist less than two weeks ago. In the wake of the first attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans at least tried for a few moments to pivot to a less incendiary tone themselves—until Trump got bored and started ad-libbing from the GOP convention stage. This time, they’re doing both things at once: crying foul on their opponents’ rhetoric while continuing shamelessly to hit below the belt.
“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” Trump said during a Fox News interview yesterday. “They are the ones that are destroying the country—both from the inside and out . . . It is called the enemy from within. They are the real threat.”
At about that same time, his campaign sent out a fundraising email saying Joe Biden “truly hates our country” and was allowing “an invasion” that is “terrorizing U.S. citizens.”
The standard Vance is embracing here—incendiary rhetoric is fair game right up to the point when it provokes an attempt at violence, at which point it becomes retroactively inappropriate—is obviously ridiculous. (And even if it weren’t, this standard still wouldn’t give Trump the moral high ground here: I’m old enough to remember his jeering response to the attack on Paul Pelosi.)
But let’s back up a minute. “Team Trump’s rhetoric has been far worse” is an easy case to make, but it shouldn’t be enough to satisfy us. One of the ways Trump coarsens our politics is by seducing his opponents into thinking that, so long as they clear the incredibly low bar of “less horrible than Trump and his ilk,” they maintain the moral high ground. So we would do well to ask ourselves: As political violence crops up more often, are we doing as much as we could to lower the temperature?
But lowering the temperature doesn’t mean ignoring the truth. We needn’t lose sleep over calling Trump a “threat to democracy,” for instance: In 2020, he unquestionably showed himself to be one, trying by both fraud and force to reinstall himself as president contrary to the laws of the country and the voted will of the people. He continues to deny the outcome of that election and is open about not accepting the outcome of the coming one.
But it’s more crucial than ever for us to acknowledge that two things to be true at once: First, that Trump is a dangerous and real threat to democracy; and second, that political violence is also a threat to democracy. The latter is a danger that must be abhorred from all sides. But you can condemn the wannabe assassins while also noting that Trump’s open embrace of violence is a big part of what makes him so dangerous.
President Vance
—William Kristol
Does JD Vance matter?
Donald Trump said he doesn’t. When Trump appeared before the National Association of Black Journalists at the end of July, he was asked about Vance. He proceed to give a little lecture in political history: “Historically, the Vice President, in terms of the election, does not have any impact. I mean, virtually no impact. . . . It’s all about the presidential pick. Virtually never has it mattered. . . . But historically, the choice of a vice president makes no difference.”
There’s some truth to what Trump said. My former boss, Dan Quayle, suffered from a pretty miserable introduction to the American public as the vice presidential nominee in 1988. Yet the Bush-Quayle ticket won the election by eight points. Vice President Quayle did fine in 1992, more than holding his own in his debate with Sen. Al Gore, and yet the Bush-Quayle administration was defeated handily in its reelection bid.
So on the one hand, vice presidential nominees don’t seem to have a direct effect on the outcome of the election. But it’s also the case that vice presidential picks can make a more subtle difference. Voters don’t vote for or against the ticket because of the vice presidential nominee. But the vice presidential choice can affect the perception of the presidential nominee. In that indirect way, the VP pick matters.
In 1992, Quayle did fine in his matchup against Gore. But Bill Clinton’s selection of Gore nonetheless helped Clinton. It both reinforced a message of generational change, and reassured voters that the Democratic party had moved to the center (Gore was one of ten Democratic senators who voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq in January 1991).
In 2008, what turned out to be Sarah Palin’s unpreparedness for a vice presidential race may have ended up hurting John McCain.
In 2016, the selection of Mike Pence helped reassure both Republican donors and evangelical voters that it was alright to stick with Trump, despite everything—and, near the end, despite the Access Hollywood tape.
This brings us back to Vance.
Trump picked Vance a week before Joe Biden stepped aside, at the height of Trump’s overconfidence about victory this year. To the degree there was an electoral rationale, Trump’s team seems to have hoped the selection would strengthen Trump even more among white working-class men, who had drifted away from Trump ever so slightly in 2020.
But the selection of Vance was also, in a sense, a governing pick. Trump thought Vance would help ensure his plans for a full-on radical and authoritarian presidency in 2025 weren’t derailed by excessively law-abiding, norms-following, institutions-respecting, old-fashioned Republicans. So Vance was in an odd way—in Trump’s way—a governing selection. He was a Project 2025 pick more than a Campaign 2024 pick.
Vance’s prominence in the campaign does indicate how central he could be to a second Trump administration. Trump already intended an America First and Project 2025 administration, more radical in its policies and in its governance than his first. Vance as vice president makes that prospect far more real and certain.
So it’s fair to take Vance seriously. It’s also fair to note that Vance, a senator for all of a year and a half, is unqualified for the presidency in terms of experience. It’s also fair to note that he’s also the most radical, the most extreme vice presidential nominee in modern times.
And it’s not just that as Trump ages, and becomes even less interested in policy, a Vice President Vance would become increasingly important. There’s also the possibility, always present even if the president isn’t eighty years old, that a vice president will become president. It would be irresponsible not to take seriously the prospect of a President Vance.
Everything we’ve seen about that prospect should make us shudder. So Trump may not want us to attend too much to Vance. But, distasteful as it is, attention must be paid.
Quick Hits
HARRIS RESPONDS: In yesterday’s newsletter, we mentioned ProPublica’s report about the death of Amber Thurman, a young Georgia woman who died from complications of abortion in 2022 when doctors balked at treating her in the wake of Georgia’s then-new six-week abortion ban. This morning, Kamala Harris released a statement in response: “This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school. This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down. In more than 20 states, Trump Abortion Bans are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care.”
TOO ON THE NOSE? The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida held a press conference yesterday laying out the charges against Ryan Routh, the man accused of making an assassination attempt on President Donald Trump’s life—the second such attempt this summer. The attorney who outlined the charges was Markenzy LaPointe. LaPointe’s biography is remarkable. He served for six years in the United States Marine Corps Reserve and did a tour in Iraq during the Gulf War. Before that, he grew up in Miami, where he drove a cab and helped his mother operate a restaurant in Key Biscayne. But he wasn’t born in Miami. He was born in Port-au-Prince. He became a U.S. citizen in 1995, and became the first ever Haitian-born American to serve as U.S. Attorney when he was confirmed by the Senate (after having been nominated by Biden) in 2022.
HIS OWN KIND OF NUT: As more information has come out about Routh, one of the most bizarre discoveries has been how many times he’s cropped up before. A manic advocate for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia, Routh spent a lot of time in recent years trying to find allies in high places—at one point trying to catch Elon Musk’s attention on Twitter to help him acquire a rocket to fire at “Putin’s Black sea mansion bunker.” He’d also met with congressional offices—both Republican and Democrat—and spoken to national media on a number of occasions: This retrospective from a New York Times reporter is well worth a read.
Cheap Shots
Time for a quick House GOP vibe check:
I think Vance is a very scary candidate for any political office. He really has no qualifications and has an authoritarian temperament He lacks a moral core.
“Pet eating Vance” is way more scary than Trump.