Election Countdown, One More Day and a Wake-Up: Now It's Up to Us.
One thing we don't know, many things we do know. And some
models for a better stage of American history that could be ahead.
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On the first day of this
year, I started this “Election Countdown”
series. It followed a 152-item series called the “Trump Time Capsules” that I wrote during the 2016
campaign.
The headline on that
first item this year was, “Three hundred and nine days that will change the
world.” The rationale was this:
The years after 2024 will depend on what happens to us in these upcoming
days, and on what we do in response.
Recording what it is like for us to live through this period—when so much
of the nation’s future depends on each of us, but when none of us can know the
outcome—is the aspirational theme for this upcoming series. A journal of the plague year, when we can’t yet assess the
disease’s final toll. Periodic markers and measures of what people learned and
said, of how they responded, of who did what in a time of maximum trial.
I have in mind a range of standing features on how institutions and
individuals are meeting this moment’s challenge. Naturally this will include
the press, which is the institution I know best and the one that, in theory,
can still make real-time corrections…
Let us hope, as I
put it seven years ago [in writing a “Trump Time
Capsule” series about the 2016 race], that people will look back on these
300-plus days with chastened wonder, and with cautionary guidance about our
steps ahead.
Now we have just a day
and a half until Election Day. Tens of millions of Americans have already cast
their votes. If you’re one of those who wait, as Deb and I usually do, for the
ritual of casting your vote in person, be sure to be there on Tuesday!
Here is a very quick
survey of where we stand now. I’ll start with the main thing we don’t know. And
then move to the important things we certainly know, and then to a surprising
model for the future.
The one thing we don’t
know:
What is going to happen
two days from now, and between then and next January 20, and beyond.
It’s possible that right
now votes could be “breaking” in a way that turns a very close race into a
decisive result. Extreme example: the Carter-Reagan race in 1980 was considered
too close to call until the very last days. When the votes were counted, they
broke strongly in Reagan’s favor. He carried 44 states. No one is imagining
that this time. But polls can be wrong.
It’s also possible that
this year things will remain as close as the polls say, or become as contested
as Bush-Gore in 2000. In any case, two days from now we pass a huge watershed.
The things we do know.
1) That Donald Trump is
already declaring victory, and will do so more stridently on November 5. The
press needs to be prepared.
As I wrote recently about the powerful new
movie The Apprentice, among the lessons young
Donald Trump absorbed from his mentor, Roy Cohn, was: always claim victory, no matter the score. Never admit defeat, especially when you’ve lost.
Trump has been using
that approach nonstop since 2020, with his “stop the steal” mantra now embraced
by most of the GOP. For months he has been priming his base to believe that he
is “way ahead” in all 2024 polls, so any result except a Trump victory must be
a fraud.
Trump is sure to switch
from saying “I will win” to “I have won” less than 48 hours from now. On
Tuesday as the first exit polls come in, Trump himself will say that they look
“better than anyone expected,” so a big win is ahead. The Fox team will back him
up. As the first real counts come in after 8pm from Pennsylvania, they will
favor Trump, because of the usual GOP-skew of same-day-vote results. Trump will use them to
announce he was won the crucial state and thus the election.
We saw this drill in 2020.
It is likely to be worse this time. Partly that is because Trump has
conditioned his entire party to expect fraud. Partly it is because the Fox News
team that made a brave, correct, anti-Trump call of Arizona results four years
ago has been fired for that transgression.
From top to bottom Fox is now on board.
Word is that the
Harris-Walz campaign team is fully prepared to rebut these false claims on
Election Day, through social media and “normal” media as well.
Democratic lawyers are
geared to fight the inevitable courtroom battles that will follow. They won
virtually all the “stop the steal” lawsuits after
2020.
But what about the
media? The TV and radio networks?
The AP? The big newspapers? They know what is coming from Trump and his team. Are they prepared to do
more than simply “both-sides” claims about the results —that is, “balancing”
the real numbers from state officials, versus Trump’s victory claims?
In two days we’ll see.
2) That Donald Trump is
in the middle of an active, accelerating cognitive collapse, with enormous
potential effects on our future.
I have no medical
training. But years ago when I saw Lawrence Taylor, of the NY Giants, snap the leg of Joe Theismann, QB of
the then-Redskins, in a televised game, like all other viewers I knew instantly
that something terrible had occurred.
That is how nearly anyone
must feel watching Donald Trump on the stump these days. It’s not so much the
ramble and the repetition and the shriveling vocabulary. It’s the dis-inhibition: Talking about Liz
Cheney in front of a firing squad three days ago. Making obscene gestures with
a microphone two days ago. Saying today that he wouldn’t mind if a gunman hit the press
corps. There is no bottom.
If you have ever seen an
elderly, demented person start erupting in out-of-character curses or
profanities, you have seen “disinhibition.” I’ve seen it. It’s horrible and
tragic. Now we see it every time we turn on the TV.
Three further points on
“disinhibition” that seem relevant:
·
A gripping
inside-reporting new piece from Tim Alberta, in
the Atlantic, this weekend, about how
rapidly Trump’s disorders have worsened. The story opens with Trump’s staff
struggling to keep him from publicly calling Joe Biden a “retard.” (That staff
members are leaking these things is of course an enormous tell in itself.)
Trump managed to keep that slur bottled up, but each day he lets more of them
out.
·
A Substack post from Gary Marcus, who is trained in psychology,
on the increasing before-our-eyes signs of disorder. Here is a Xitter-scale sample, of his much more detailed
Substack presentation:
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·
The video of what preceded Trump’s instantly
notorious stunt with the microphone in Milwaukee two days ago. The final minute
of the video at this link is what made the
headlines (Trump lewdly caressing the mic). The preceding three minutes of the
video are in a different way just as disturbing. Trump leads off a speech with
a minutes-long, wholly inappropriate, spiteful rant about the “stupid people”
on his staff who have messed up his sound systems. It is like nothing else I’ve
ever seen from a major public figure—and we see it again and again.
Will any of this “matter”
for the vote? Who knows. But it will matter tremendously if Trump should gain
power. It means that voting for Trump means either voting for the chaos he
embodies himself—or sooner or later empowering JD Vance, and all that Vance brings with him.
Democrats obviously hope
that Trump’s vulgarity and excesses might matter to voters. To women in general, to Puerto Rican voters in
particular (most particularly in Pennsylvania), to Cheney-style Republicans,
perhaps to others. The leaks and internal backbiting that Tim Alberta managed
to collect suggest that some Republicans now think they Trump’s conduct has mattered, and that they
can help themselves by deflecting the blame. Sinking ships, rats, and so on.
It’s notable that we’re
hearing practically nothing similar from the usually squabbling Dems. This is
one of many reasons you would rather be in Harris’s position now than Trump’s.
And that’s not even counting her brief but very effective brief appearance last
night on SNL.
3) That however this
turns out, we will have to talk later about…
(the media).
I’ve promised to go easy
on this theme for a while. So for now, just one headline from the NYT this weekend:
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This is an analysis of a race in which one of
the candidates calls the other a “stupid” “low-IQ” DEI candidate
who “used to be Indian” and then “decided” to turn Black. A race in which one
candidate says that outsiders, named as coming from Africa and Latin America,
are “animals” who “poison the blood” of the country, and are eating our cats
and dogs, and need to be rounded up. That Detroit and Philadelphia are
hellholes. A race in which his supporters talk about the “Great Replacement
Theory” and publicly tell “watermelon” jokes and worse.
Journalists supposedly
work to provide a “first rough draft of history.” I doubt that second or third
drafts of history will say that the 2024 contest was when “identity politics”
went away. Not even the first drafts should.