Do We Really Have to Exaggerate How Bad Trump Is?

(Doug Mills/The New York Times, edited by me)

The latest Trump micro-scandal* centers, as usual, on a stupid thing he said. Addressing “beautiful Christians” during a speech in Florida, he said: “[G]et out and vote! Just this time – you won’t have to do it any more… in four years, you don't have to vote again.” The reaction was swift and predictable: everyone from random posters on X-formerly-Twitter to the Harris campaign agreed this was a “vow to end democracy.” The actual context, in my reading, makes that far from clear (and in fact unlikely). The bit in question came as Trump was talking about the importance of winning the election to “save America,” and Trump concluded: “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote [in four years].” 

So, really, this was another typical bit of Trump bullshit: “I’ll fix everything so good you won’t even have to worry about voting again, just get out and do it this once!” A ridiculous thing to promise, obviously, but not exactly a declaration that he’ll be installing himself as president-for-life. It’s easy to grant this while admitting Trump and the movement behind him are bad for democracy and that Trump himself has no fondness for the rules and norms of the democratic process. But if you say what I just said, you’re liable to be scolded for whitewashing Trump’s comments, trying to twist them into something less alarming than they are. This is not up for debate. Trump said he would end democracy, because he is a dangerous fascist who will destroy the constitution. You are obligated to be Terrified.

So my question is, simply, why do we have to keep doing this? A few months ago it was the “bloodbath” comment — in context, plainly about what would supposedly happen to the economy if Biden was reelected but predictably framed instead as a threat of actual violence. Before that it was how he said he’d be a dictator on day one (an obviously trollish, typically incoherent remark about how he’d “only” be a dictator for the first day so we could drill and build the wall, or something). The narrative has completely calcified at this point: Trump has promised he will rule as a tyrant and abolish elections if he wins. If we fuck this up, it’s all over. Our Democracy Is At Stake. 

The thing is, Trump was president for four years and didn’t transform America into the Fourth Reich. The typical response to that reality is that this time is different. How? I’m not sure if it’s just been memory-holed at this point, but he actually made many extravagant, often disturbing, promises during the 2016 campaign and didn’t follow through while in office. He said he would build a 1,000-mile border wall and make Mexico pay for it. He said he would deport every single undocumented immigrant. He said he would shut down mosques. He said he would put in place libel laws that would let him retaliate against negative press coverage. He said he would bring back the country’s manufacturing sector. He said he would lock up Hillary Clinton. None of that happened. So why the histrionics about everything he says now? Why the need to take his words out of context so they sound scarier than they actually are?

The most coherent response I’ve seen to this is that this time, Trump will be surrounded by people loyal to him, so there won’t be any check on his authoritarian ambitions. But overthrowing American democracy and installing fascism would also require a certain degree of competence and organizational skill. So far the one person Trump has picked for his prospective second administration is J.D. Vance, who… doesn’t exactly strike me a modern-day Heinrich Himmler. Given how Trump’s campaign is currently floundering, it also seems obvious they didn’t plan for Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee despite the fact it was the most obvious contingency they could have anticipated. Not exactly a high degree of competence! Trump is a dumb, lazy narcissist, and the people most loyal to him tend to be somewhat less than brilliant tacticians.

If you’re a convinced Democratic partisan and you’re still reading at this point, you’re likely seething at the way I’m soft-pedaling how bad Trump is. But the thing is, I think Trump is plenty bad! There are a lot of good reasons not to want him to return to power! Maybe instead of arguing that this time Trump would institute actual fascism and it will be So Much Worse than his first presidency, we could talk more about the things he actually did during that presidency. This would include:

• Signing an expensive tax law that gave a massive handout to the wealthy
• Pulling out of the Paris climate accords and rolling back a litany of environmental protections 
• Appointing three of the Supreme Court justices responsible for killing Roe v. Wade
• Starting a trade war with China that hurt the economy and failed to stop offshoring 
• Deregulating the banking industry 
• Instituting a cruel and punitive family separation policy at the border

All of these things are bad! They are also generally not popular, which might explain in part why Trump had a consistently sub-par approval rating throughout his presidency. A second Trump presidency could certainly be worse, but even if it’s more of the same, that’s bad enough. So why exaggerate and engage in wild speculation when you could just point to the undeniable realities here?

It would be one thing if the fevered anti-Trump rhetoric scared people away from voting for him (still not a good thing, given that dishonesty is generally wrong, but at least a pragmatic one). But I don’t think it has that effect. Right or wrong, I think the average normie American can’t imagine things changing all that much from one president to another. So warning that Trump is going to transform the country into Nazi America rings false. And, worse, if they notice that Trump’s statements are getting taken out of context, it sort of undermines all the criticism of Trump for his habitual lying (“look, everybody does it!”).

The same, by the way, goes for the much-discussed Project 2025. I haven’t read the project’s 920-page policy document, but I’m guessing you and most people talking about it haven’t either. From what I can gather it’s basically a super-conservative wishlist: ultra-Reaganite economic policies, reactionary social policies, and a reorganization of the executive branch to make it easier for a Republican president to carry out his agenda. That all sucks! But what it doesn’t amount to is a plan to make The Handmaid’s Tale a reality, or a modern-day Mein Kampf. Nor do we have to pretend that Trump is actually going to carry out every part of a plan he’s explicitly distanced himself from, and that includes (among other things) criminalizing porn.

So, whence cometh the need to exaggerate how bad this all is when the facts are bad enough? I don’t think it speaks to either sincere confusion or cynical dishonesty on the part of most people doing it. What I think it really speaks to is how much we’re all craving a sense of greater purpose. It’s hard to look at the state of the world and have much optimism about the future. So, if there’s not much good to hope for, we might as well exaggerate the scale of the bad that we’re fighting against. Blowing this election up into a world-historic battle against the forces of evil is certainly more psychologically satisfying than admitting it’s a choice between two strains of the same depressing ideology — one that flatly refuses to envision a world beyond profits, and big corporations, and American empire, and competition with China, and arbitrary inequalities enforced by violence. 

To that extent, it’s understandable to build Trump and the Republicans up into a movement that threatens to bring Christian Fascism to America, rather than just more of the same depressing shit we’ve all had enough of. But as someone whose own ideology is diametrically opposed to the GOP’s, it’s still become completely exhausting — largely because it often serves as an excuse to try and browbeat the left into voting for whoever has a D next to their name this time. But more important than its being tiresome, it’s not productive, and it’s not healthy. When one side has lost all touch with reality, it doesn’t help anything for the other to follow suit.

*In the time since I started writing this post, the micro-scandal in question has already been arguably succeeded by one over Trump saying Kamala Harris “became” a Black person. As noted, he says a lot of stupid shit!