If, after all the votes are counted, Donald Trump is declared the winner of next Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election, his supporters will correctly be able to say that American democracy has given their candidate the right to impose his agenda on the country. And then President Trump will set about destroying that very same democracy.
It would be within his elected mandate to do so, having effectively campaigned on a platform of turning the United States into an authoritarian state under his rule. Do the people who intend to vote for him understand that?
It appears they don’t, or if they do, they don’t care, or they care about other things more. The polls somehow have Mr. Trump in a dead heat with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. It is agonizing to watch.
Did those voters not hear Mr. Trump promise that Nov. 5 will be “liberation day in America,” and that he will be their agent of “retribution” against the “threat from within” – the “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs” who “steal elections” and will “do anything possible ... to destroy America”?
Did they not hear him describe the U.S. as an “occupied country” at war with immigrants he slanders as dog-eating “vermin” that are “poisoning the blood of the country”?
Were they listening when he said he would use the military against American citizens whose protests he deems unacceptable?
Does nothing register when he calls his Democrat opponents “human scum” and “garbage” over and over? Have they forgotten his previous attempts to use the Department of Justice against his political enemies? Are they ignoring his stated intention to do so again, given the chance?
Mr. Trump’s positions are the hallmarks of a would-be authoritarian leader. If Republican voters simply write them off as bluster, they are taking a huge risk. So, too, are those who hear what he says but believe his inner circle will restrain him, or that Congress and the courts will rein him in.
But while that was mostly true in his first term in office, it isn’t any more. Dozens of Mr. Trump’s previous cabinet members, generals and staff members have said he is unfit for office; more than one has described him as a fascist. This time, Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who will gleefully mete out his retribution and implement his agenda.
The Senate and the House of Representatives could meanwhile be controlled by equally servile Republicans after the election. And the Supreme Court this summer ruled that a president has immunity for his official acts, including otherwise criminal actions.
Those same Republican voters might tell themselves that they will not be the target of Mr. Trump’s wrath, but that is not a wise bet to make.
They might also be hoping that they will be better off economically under a Trump administration. But Mr. Trump’s threat to impose 20-per-cent tariffs on everything the U.S. imports will make many goods more expensive (not to mention spark trade wars and harm long-time trading partners, Canada included).
It may seem absurd that voters are on the verge of giving the felonious Mr. Trump another term, but there is a good reason for it: he has spent a decade conditioning his supporters to doubt the integrity of elections, to believe the media are fake news, to distrust the courts and other government institutions that are critical to democracy, and to view political opponents as enemies.
If there is a warning for Canada in this, it is the reminder that democracy’s existence is not some immutable law of the universe. Democracy is, rather, a story we tell ourselves. Its success relies on people saying to themselves and to each other that our elected legislators have our interests at heart, that our political opponents deserve our respect, that the courts are fair, that the media are balanced and honest, that bureaucracies are competent, that elections are safe from interference, that democracy’s incremental nature is preferable to revolution and upheaval, that the rule of law is paramount, and that we do not want to be ruled by a single, unaccountable, all-powerful person.
When people living in a democracy start to doubt any one of those things, it creates cracks in the foundation that can bring down the entire edifice from the inside. Even the oldest democracies, ours included, are susceptible to this structural flaw.