The interminably long presidential campaign of former President Donald Trump is finally winding its way down to its conclusion. Win or lose, this is almost certainly the last time he will appear on our ballots. Not even this Republican Party could be self-destructive enough to nominate him a fourth time at age 82 in 2028 if he loses this year. And it certainly seems like the last impression of himself as a campaigner that he wants to leave is of the same ugly, conspiracy-driven divisiveness that he has brought destructively into our politics from the minute he came down the escalator in 2015. And we will all be much better off if his brand of lizard-brain politics is finally rejected on Tuesday.
Over the past few weeks, Trump and his allies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars airing a series of vile attack ads against trans Americans, a vulnerable gender minority that the GOP has cynically used as a political punching bag for years. As a direct result of this persecution coming from the very top of the Republican Party, suicide attempts and depression among trans teens are skyrocketing and will surely increase further if Trump wins this way. No one in the MAGA movement seems to care that they are driving hundreds of thousands of already marginalized human beings, including several very close friends of mine, to the brink of despair with their rhetoric and policies.
It should go without saying that Trump and his allies are running ads non-stop in swing states with selectively edited quotes, doctored video, fabricated claims and apocalyptic rhetoric while offering virtually nothing of substance that is positive to voters. The insane rhetoric of his ads is mirrored at his rallies, where he makes completely bonkers claims like the idea that because of the Biden-Harris administration, “Three hundred and twenty-five thousand children are missing dead, sex slaves, or slaves.” There’s no point in trying to hunt down the source of this lunacy because he doesn’t care and neither does anyone in the crowd. They love it. They want more of it. Fact-checking only hurts their feelings and makes them angrier.
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Even by his already demeaning standards, Trump’s rallies and events have also taken a dark turn this fall. Forget former Fox primetime host Tucker Carlson calling Vice President Kamala Harris “a Somoan Malaysian low IQ California prosecutor” at Trump’s now infamous Madison Square Garden rally last week that included a “comedian” referring to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” and riffed about how Latinos like to “come inside.” Trump himself has constantly assailed Harris as “low IQ,” (remember: every accusation is a confession) and refers to her as “a sh*t vice president” among many other things. He slams her, quite ironically, as incapable of “putting two sentences together.” His billionaire patron, Elon Musk, just had his SuperPAC put out an ad that says “we can’t afford to have a “C-word” in the White House” before—nudge-nudge—saying that they mean “communist.” Get it?
Trump has reposted lewd attacks on Harris on Truth Social and the other night he told a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that he would serve as a protector of women and then added, “I will do it whether the women like it or not,” a crude callback to his own history of sexual misconduct and a dog whistle to men who will interpret a Trump victory as payback for the #MeToo movement. The guy seems determined to make the gender gap in American politics as wide as possible.
Rarely, if ever, at Trump’s events does the candidate or any of the other speakers offer an olive branch to Democrats or people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. While he offers a vision of a booming economy and a new epoch of greatness, he always contrasts it with a cartoonish rendering of what America is today that should be unrecognizable to anyone who isn’t steeped in right-wing propaganda. While Harris goes to great lengths to avoid offending the sensibilities of Trump supporters, Trump relishes the opportunity to slam Democrats as “radical Marxists” and “the enemy within.” Not just President Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, mind you, but all of us.
Why would he do this in a close election that may come down to persuading a relatively tiny group of undecided voters? Well, for one thing, he’s blinkered and arrogant and he and his movement have bizarrely convinced themselves that they are running away with this thing. But what else does he have? The stock market, a metric Trump returned to over and over during the relentless boasting of his presidency, has been reaching one all-time high after another. Retirement and savings accounts are bursting (seriously, you should go check yours before you vote for the tariffs guy and his insipid billionaire minion promising to crash the economy). Unemployment and violent crime are near generational lows. America has plenty of pressing problems, and I’m on record lamenting our inability to address them, but we are “a garbage can for the world” only in the sense that every once in a while, thanks to the flawed democracy that Trump wants to dismantle, we get to take out the bin liner and have a fresh start.
Trump can’t both acknowledge these realities and simultaneously campaign against them, so he lies. He runs the most divisive presidential campaign since… his last one. He fulminates against an America in perpetual crisis and decline that exists only in his own fevered imagination and those of his supporters. He refuses to say he will accept defeat, sows discord with fresh election conspiracies every day and exploits the tragic suffering of hurricane victims with lies and conspiracies that damage the fabric of what remains of our shared information universe beyond repair.
He actually summed all of this up at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last year, as it became clear that he would be a dominant force in the Republican primary: “I am your retribution.”
We can’t say that we weren’t warned.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It’s Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.