Words fail to describe how bad four more years of Donald Trump would be for America and the world, to say nothing of the Democratic Party. In the beginning, I joked about the Mad Max hellscape that awaits us in the Trump era, but it’s gotten much less funny over time.
Why am I telling you this? You know this, right?
I’m telling you this because at some level Democrats still seem to believe that this is a mere political contest, with traditional limits and boundaries. They still think this is an election like any other, where they will turn out the base and scrap over the remaining voters in the center, trying to get back to the Oval Office along the paths laid out through the long, sprawling history of American politics.
But this isn’t just any election; it is an existential moment for America. This is either the last election of the nation we understood and loved, or the first of a long reset where we restore our honor and image after Trump’s term.
Campaigns often claim that the present election will decide what the America we leave our children and grandchildren will look like. This is rarely true; most elections aren’t epochal choices between light and darkness, liberty and servitude, good and evil.
This election? Yeah. It’s the real, apocalyptic deal.
Pick one: our messy, flawed, wonderfully sloppy democratic republic stumbling toward the shining city on the hill, or a kingdom of cruelty and utter corruption led by a family of authoritarian kleptocrats in thrall to foreign powers.
In those terms, you’d do anything to win, right?
Right?
Watching the 2020 Democrats, that answer isn’t clear. Some seem willing to chase their ideological fantasies instead of a decisive victory; others are unable to focus on a single, strategic truth—that this election will be fought in fifteen or so swing states and will be entirely a referendum on Donald Trump.
So what’s it going to be? A real campaign, or a purity contest for the edges of the Democratic Party?
Choose now and choose fast, because the clock on the 2020 election is running. The only thing you can never get back in an election is time. You can raise more money. You can do more ads. You can change your speeches and messages. You can do more calls, interviews, and town meetings until you collapse from campaign exhaustion. But you can’t get back a single week, day, or hour. Time, tide, and the battle of 2020 wait for no one.
All reelection campaigns are a referendum on the incumbent. All of them.
This presidential race is the ultimate referendum on the politics, character, persona, and actions of a man who has proven himself to us in a thousand awful ways. His enablers and ball-washers spend their lives in a state of constant revisionist panic, lunging from “He didn’t say that” to “He didn’t mean that” to googling “How can I enter the witness protection program?”
Trump cannot be shamed. He cannot be embarrassed. He cannot be controlled, and he cannot resist his impulses. Turning this election into a referendum on Trump is a gift for Democrats, not a burden.
Democrats don’t need to sell the progressive base on opposition to Trump. They don’t need to sell the rank and file. They don’t need to sell African Americans. They don’t need to sell most Hispanics. They do need to make the case that Trump is a mentally and morally unwell man, and that he sold a pack of lies to the voters in the fifteen or so swing states that matter in 2020. Democratic base voters gave us a preview in 2018, and they’re ready to rock again in 2020.
The following chapters outline the case to be made against Trump in this referendum. They look at how deeply Trump’s next four years will damage the American system, and the American people. If the stakes are outlined more starkly and more directly, Democrats might—in spite of themselves—understand how vital it is they fight this fight as it is, not as they wish it to be.