On Politics: A closing argument for an abnormal election
A closing argument for an abnormal election
The latest, with 7 days to go
Tonight, Vice President Kamala Harris will stand on the Ellipse, a lawn by the White House that dates back to the 19th century, to urge Americans to consider the country's more recent past. The Ellipse is a setting intended to draw the public's gaze back to Jan. 6, 2021, when former President Donald Trump used that site to urge his supporters to march to the Capitol, before they started a deadly riot he now calls a "day of love." It's also a place that underscores how plainly, thoroughly and grimly abnormal this election has become. A candidate who tried to overturn the last election is not usually in striking distance of winning the next one, with the future of a criminal prosecution hanging in the balance. An opposing candidate's closing argument speech is not usually held at the birthplace of an insurrection. And American voters do not usually find themselves needing to form an opinion on whether the next president should use executive power to imprison enemies or even to deploy the military against them. We have had a lot of elections. We have had a lot of close elections. But we really haven't done this before. Never before have voters been warned so clearly and persistently that a certain candidate would govern like a "fascist" or a "dictator," as some of Trump's former aides have in recent days. Never before has that same candidate spent the last weeks of his presidential campaign escalating threats toward his enemies anyway. And it is not usually the case that, in the closing days of a campaign, a candidate finds himself denying accounts that he praised Hitler. "You'd have to go back to the Civil War era to find an election as consequential as this one, in which our freedom as Americans and the idea of America itself is on the line," said Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel under Barack Obama who leads the advocacy group Protect Democracy.
The sense of anomaly goes far beyond the Ellipse, coursing through a divided and deadlocked country facing big new questions about what presidential power is actually for. It is not normal for the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a Republican, to be coy about a "little secret" the former president said they shared, raising Democratic fears about Republicans' post-election plans before Johnson said it was a get-out-the-vote operation. It is not normal for ballot boxes to be set on fire, as they were in a narrowly divided congressional district in Portland, Ore., yesterday. And it is not normal that, with a Trump rally planned in Allentown, Pa., the local schools saw fit to close "out of an abundance of caution." This is a presidential campaign that has been aberrant since its very beginning. Over a summer of upheaval, two attempts on Trump's life underscored a national threat of political violence. Democrats took the unusual step of switching their nominee from President Biden to Harris, his running mate. Trump and his Republican allies say fears about his anti-democratic rhetoric — as well as accusations that he is a fascist — are wildly overblown, a tactic intended to scare voters, which they insist will not work. "The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that anyone who isn't voting for her is a Nazi," Trump said yesterday at a rally in Georgia, although she has never made such a remark. He called himself the "opposite of a Nazi." Trump and his campaign are still reckoning with the fallout of his own closing argument — a long-anticipated Sunday evening rally at Madison Square Garden, where his remarks were eclipsed by the racist and misogynistic words of his warm-up acts. A joke about Puerto Rico being an "island of garbage" has angered Puerto Rican voters — including those in critical swing states — and evoked Trump's dismissive attitude toward the U.S. territory during his presidency. "That wasn't a joke — that was a dog whistle," said Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris's running mate, on a sports podcast. "Well, not even a dog whistle. It was a scream."
On Tuesday, at a news conference where he took no questions from reporters, Trump took the unusual step of bringing up the comparisons between his Madison Square Garden rally and a pro-Nazi rally that took place there in 1939 so that he could dismiss them. "How terrible to say, right? Because, you know, they've used Madison Square Garden many times. Many people have used it, but nobody's ever had a crowd like that," Trump said, before describing the rally a bit like the way he sometimes talks about Jan. 6. "That was love in the room, and it was love for our country," he said. "It was really love." Harris's allies have said that Trump's promises of retribution and his casual attitude toward basic democratic tenets have heightened the stakes of the election. At her speech tonight, her advisers said, she will try to reach voters who are worn out by it all, and tell them that a Harris presidency would do more to improve their lives. "Donald Trump intends to use the United States military against American citizens who simply disagree with him. People he calls 'the enemy from within,'" she will say, according to excerpts from the remarks circulated by her campaign aides. "This is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better." There are some ways that the not-normal of it all could help Harris. She is trying to assemble an unusual coalition of Democrats and Republicans to defeat Trump. This has led to unconventional endorsements — including from one conservative newspaper columnist in Nebraska, David Mastio, who said he was voting for Harris, "the most awful, socialism-friendly, fake Democratic presidential candidate of my lifetime," because Trump had "brought violence into our political system in the most dangerous way since the Civil War." There is much that has democracy experts spooked. An election has never played out amid so much disinformation, so much distrust in the nation's election system, or with so much potential to touch off a democratic crisis. Nor has it played out with a candidate who told his supporters to "fight like hell" before they attempted an insurrection at the Capitol — and repeated those words just a week before the next election. "We're going to fight like hell for the next seven days," Trump said on Tuesday at his Florida club.
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