Opinion: Democracy and reality are on the ballot

As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sprint toward the finish of the shortened 2024 presidential race, it is time to ask: What issue should be foremost in U.S. voters’ minds when they cast their ballots?

It’s not the cost of living, immigration, abortion or foreign wars, though all are critically important. Overshadowing them is this election’s meta-issue — the insistent question that just won’t go away: Can Americans entrust their democratic institutions and traditions to a vengeful Trump and a Republican Party he has remade in his image?

Trump is acutely aware of the danger in that question. He accuses Harris and “radical leftists” of posing the real threat to U.S. democracy.

With trademark disregard for honesty, civility and intellectual coherence , Trump piles on the insults, calling the vice president a socialist-communist-fascist dumbbell who’s “mentally impaired” to boot.

It’s ugly and nonsensical, but, hey, it’s Trump; in his carnival barker playbook, making sense is for losers.

Harris is a normie Democratic politician who has risen the ranks, paid her dues and now offers her family history as proof that the American dream is alive and well. Trump is a ranting provocateur and convicted felon who breaks any rule that gets in his way, then calls attempts to hold him accountable proof that America is a failed nation.

In this sense, Harris and the Democrats are the conservatives in this year’s election, while Trump and MAGA-supporting Republicans are the radicals willing to rip up the Constitution to “save America.”

Their grip on reality is as tenuous as their respect for the rules that make our democracy work. Trump’s hallucinatory vision of an economically ruined America besieged by rampaging criminals and pet-eating immigrants seems to grow more hysterical with every campaign rally.

He’s running on sheer fantasy — his “landslide” re-election in 2020, prevented only by a supposedly rigged system. A gobsmacking two-thirds of Republicans say they believe him about this. One notable and awkward exception is his own running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who couldn’t bring himself to affirm his boss’s lie during his nationally televised debate with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).

By Trump’s lights, denying reality shows “strength.” According to last week’s revelations from Special Council Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6 coup attempt, top advisers repeatedly warned Trump that there was no evidence of election fraud.

“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” he reportedly told his daughter . “You still have to fight like hell.”

As Trump cynically subverts Americans’ confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and the impartiality of our legal system, House Republicans have found another way to discredit our democracy.

Since taking control of the House after the 2022 midterms, they’ve proved utterly incapable of governing — either themselves or the country. Now weakly led by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), the House has been paralyzed by the performative antics of Trump-supporting extremists in the Freedom Caucus. The result has been the least productive since the Depression .

For example, House Republicans can’t even fulfill their most basic Constitutional duty — passing budgets and appropriations bills to fund the government. Instead, they keep bringing the nation to the brink of financial default.

Unable to hold his fractious caucus together, Johnson must rely on Democratic voters to pass essential bills, even as he falsely accuses them of “weaponizing” government against Trump.

Among its many lowlights over the past two years, an almost evenly split GOP House held up U.S. aid to Ukraine for six months, during which Kyiv’s plans for a new offensive fizzled and the initiative passed to Russian invaders.

Last February, House Republicans killed a border security bill they had demanded as the price of their support for Ukraine aid. Painstakingly crafted by Senate Republicans and Democrats, it contained $20 billion for border police, asylum courts and detention facilities.

But Trump and the caucus are more interested in spreading public alarm about immigration than reducing it. At their command, Johnson duly scuttled the Senate bill.

The Freedom Caucus has made the GOP House dysfunctional, but there are lucrative rewards for such political nihilism: Appearances on Fox and other Trump propaganda organs, money from right-wing megadonors and Trump’s coveted endorsement in GOP primary contests.

While spurning lawmaking, caucus agitators busy themselves with hyper-partisan hearings in which witnesses are viciously berated and feature censure resolutions, payback impeachments and committee investigations triggered by outlandish conspiracy theories.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) wasted 15 months on a shambolic impeachment inquiry into the “Biden crime family” that turned up no high crimes or misdemeanors.

Disappointed House Republicans awarded themselves a booby prize — impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for no other reason than doing his job. The Senate refused to dignify this partisan charade with a trial.

Not content with disabling the House, far-right Republicans are exporting the Freedom Caucus model to the states.

“Many of the 11 legislatures with state-based Freedom Caucuses have seen their Republican majorities splinter and descend into bitter conflict with the application of the Congress-honed tactics,” reports Politico Magazine.

A Republican Party convulsed by extremism and rabid partisanship, a nominee incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction – these are bigger problems for our country than overpriced eggs and high rents.

Over the next four weeks, Harris and the Democrats should keep reminding voters that the health and safety of America’s long-running experiment in popular self-government is in their hands.

Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

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