The 2024 Election Will Be Far Worse Than You Realize

This election will result in either autocracy or mass violence. It's time to prepare.

With Ron DeSantis stunningly dropping out of the presidential race despite coming in second in Iowa — why did he stay in if he was just going to drop out upon coming in second, anyway? — and endorsing the man who has spent the last year bullying and humiliating him, our La Femme Nikkita’s path to victory seems to be foreclosed. It is not totally out of the realm of possibility that contrarian New Hampshire will behave like it did in the 2008 primary and vote primarily to keep the competition going, but it’s impossible not to conclude that things look grim. We are now slouching toward a Trump-Biden rematch, despite a supermajority of the country’s horror at the prospect.

It’s high time to stop pretending that this rematch will in the final analysis be a political contest like any other. With Trump’s reascendence, the die has been cast: a constitutional crisis is now inevitable. I am terrified, because it seems that few others — besides Robert Kagan — are able to cut through the fog and haze of incredulity and perceive what’s really coming. It does not take an oracle to guess.

Scene: It's June 2024.

Donald Trump's criminal trials are well underway, and yet another confrontation has taken place between Trump and a judge. As is well-known by now, Trump has hijacked his trials and is using them to stage unprecedented performances of fascistic political theater. Jaws drop as Trump harangues the judge, the prosecution, President Joe Biden, and the criminal justice system itself, indifferent to whether what he says is true. He spouts accusations ten times faster than they can be verified. Everything he says is calculated to appeal not to the judge or jury, but to his political base, which he is preparing for Armageddon in November in the event of another loss. He seethes with rage and contempt toward the court and our legal system. The judge knows, of course, that Trump is trying to get thrown in jail so he can play the martyr for his cultic apologists, and therefore will decline to treat him the way he would any other defendant. Trump will have calculated, correctly, that he is already above the law in some ways: the center of gravity of power in such cases, we and he will see, lies not with the judge or jury, but with public opinion.

Now it's October 2024.

Trump, having skipped the debates with his illegitimate opponent — the fake president who stole our democracy through the rigged 2020 election — is giving a speech.

"This is it, folks. This is the apocalypse. This is Armageddon. This is the final battle. They're on the verge of stealing your president, your sacred right to choose your leader, through the worst abuses of the legal system we've ever seen in this country — at the hands of this president, who is killing our democracy and taking away your right to vote yet again, and we can't let it happen.”

By now, it is clear to everyone that Trump has appropriated the call to save democracy and has turned it against Biden. Many who once said they would not vote for Trump if he were convicted no longer think his guilty verdicts — they happened; no one escapes ninety-one felony indictments — are legitimate.

“If this incompetent criminal is allowed to illegally and unconscionably steal the White House again, I believe we will see patriots like those who fought our crooked system on January 6th rising up in every city to say: we can't let them steal our country. I don't want it to happen, folks. I'm just predicting it. It’s like day following night. Because this is the reality of what's happened to our poor country at the hands of this crooked criminal president who is trying to end our democracy by stealing your vote and destroying your favorite president at all costs, even if it means the end of the USA. I hope it doesn't happen. I don't think it will, because I think we are going to win. When we win, it will be a glorious day for America and the Constitution and the rule of law and our great democracy. So we can't let Biden win. We don't want those things to happen. They don't have to happen, and they won't, because we'll win."

Got that? If you're scared, there's an easy way to avoid all this: just let Trump win.

The 2024 election will therefore be conducted under the specter of mass violence.

This race will be the grand finale of Trump's life as a criminal con man clown, treating the world like clay in his hands. From the 1980s onward he has done everything in his capacity to master the Machiavellian dark arts of media manipulation, political demagoguery, and lawfare. With not only his second term but his very freedom at stake, there should be no doubt that Trump will set the country on fire if he thinks there is even a remote chance that doing so will allow him to reascend to power and/or escape prison. He and his sycophantic vice presidential nominee — probably Tucker Carlson, Kristi Noem, Tim Scott, or Elise Stefanik — hand-picked to be a propagandist-in-chief in the mainstream media, will spend the whole year sledgehammering the message to his apologists that the criminal justice system is illegitimate, the electoral process is illegitimate, the idea that we even have the rule of law is illegitimate, Joe Biden's presidency is illegitimate, and the press coverage slamming him for all of this is illegitimate. No source of information, in fact, can truly be trusted, and no figure or institution is reliable, except Trump hinself. And tens of millions will believe it.

Trump has never admitted to losing a competition. Ted Cruz won the 2016 Iowa caucuses by cheating. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by a margin equivalent to however many illegal immigrants must have voted. The Emmys were rigged against The Apprentice. A CNBC online poll failed to show him as the winner of the 'top businessman' title, so he threatened to sue. And of course, he actually won the 2020 election in a landslide.

Can there be any doubt that he will not accept the results of the election if he loses?

He might not lose, of course. A combination of carpet-bombed propaganda over the last decade, laziness, complacency, numbness, exhaustion, cynicism, fatalism, paralysis, incredulity, and false hope could result in an outright Trump victory. If this happens, it should be obvious to all, we are in for a grave constitutional crisis. But our constitutional crisis is already here. There is no possible favorable result to a Trump-Biden rematch. It will either end in autocracy or mass violence. It is a fait accompli.

Our natural bias is to believe the future will basically be like the past. We have a hard time imagining that unprecedented events may come to pass, that the improbable is going to take place from time to time, that the ordinary rules may not apply this time. The terrifying reality is that we are in uncharted waters. January 6th was Trump's Beer Hall Putsch, an amateurish warm-up to the main event, the ultimate spectacle to come.

Now is the time for true patriots to get ready for political warfare in defense of our constitutional republic and the rule of law. This tyrannical menace is once again terrorizing our suffering country, driven by a maniacal desire to recreate the entire world in his deranged image and become the full-time obsession of every human being on Earth. It's a state of emergency, and we need all hands on deck. We cannot place ourselves on the road to becoming Rome, ruled by psychotic, histrionic, megalomaniacal clowns who attach five hundred medals to their uniforms and declare themselves the supreme holy cosmic emperor of all time and space. The next year will be a demoralizing slog, and it will be perilously challenging to remain happy warriors. We face an opponent unrestrained by common manners, the sting of conscience, the guardrails of ordinary process and procedure, and the felt need to simply get one's facts straight. His apologists are so driven by motivated reasoning, us-versus-them thinking, phantom threats around every corner, and the power of personality cult that there seems to be a hermetically-sealed, self-referential, Ouroboros-style inability to even consider unwanted information and conflicting facts and ideas. Even the most obvious unwanted realities can be safely dismissed as merely giving aid and comfort to CNN or the Deep State and therefore false or irrelevant. It is categorically impossible to change the minds of people like this by November.

But one side is really going to have to win and another side is really going to have to lose. We must make it clear to the so-called 'exhausted majority' what the stakes are. We must arouse the apathetic to this once-in-a-lifetime threat to our way of life. And we must break the chokehold Trump retains on his apologists, through political defeat followed by incarceration, where he will not be able to perform the Trump Show for the rest of the cosmos to observe. Every possible avenue to keep him from power must be exhausted, from the 14th Amendment to attempting to prop up Nikki Haley in tomorrow's primary in New Hampshire. It's time to throw the kitchen sink at this monstrosity. The stakes could not be higher.

This is our greatest crisis since the Civil War, a time our descendants will ask us about, wondering what we did to fight for our way of life when it was on the line. Many of us have always promised ourselves that if the advent of a fascist regime was at hand, we not only wouldn't be the ones to fall for it, but would be the ones to fight to the last breath to stop it. We must rally for our great republic. If our citizens have no virtue, no care for our inheritance, nothing they will fight for, then no Constitution or law can save us. It's time to step up and prove that we deserve to keep the republic that has been bequeathed to us.