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Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally Oct. 27 at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Peter W. Stevenson /The Washington Post via Getty Images
Donald Trump's violent legacy
Oct 31, 2024
Monti is a professor of sociology at Saint Louis University.
Donald Trump presents himself as the greatest defender of American democracy since Abraham Lincoln. His monumental conceit might be dismissed out of hand, except for this: There is some merit to his boast. Surely not in the edifying way he intends but still deserving more serious attention than many Americans would be inclined to give it.
At the heart of the violent legacies left by Lincoln and Trump is the problem of order: imagining the kind of people Americans should become and harnessing the energy of a restive population whose own views on that question could not be ignored.
Lincoln’s presidency brought longstanding and increasingly volatile disagreements on both matters to a head. He could not avoid a Civil War that for a time broke the Union he had sworn to keep intact. In the end, however, the violent resolution to their disagreements tested but ultimately reaffirmed the resilience of our most crucial governing customs and institutions.
As president, Trump and his supporters had a much less inclusive idea about the kind of people they wanted Americans to become. They worked tirelessly to celebrate divisiveness and promote disunity. In the end, however, the short-lived insurrection and attempted coup d’etat he fomented in 2021 only succeeded in reaffirming the legitimacy of the same political customs and institutions that Lincoln gave his life to protect.
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The question raised by such a counterintuitive outcome is important, especially considering the political discord and threats of renewed civil unrest and violence some Americans fear is on its way and others hope to use to their advantage.
How could civil unrest and mass violence undertaken with such radically different views about the kind of people Americans should become end up reaffirming rather than undermining the same conventional political values, customs and norms?
My answer to this question is different — a lot different — from the ones being advanced by all the people talking about Trump’s ongoing challenges to election integrity. At the heart of my answer is an unheralded fact about the kinds of public trouble Americans have customarily made on the streets of our towns and cities. It isn’t as unhinged or consequential as we have been taught to believe.
It turns out that Americans are very good at making crowds and using unrest and violence to express their discontent over the ways their leaders behave. We are unpracticed and really bad at making coup d’etats and staging insurrections that topple governments.
There’s something else to bear in mind when we think about the damage that might be done in a second insurrection or an attempted coup d’etat. In the last half-century, Americans have shown themselves to be more reluctant to lay down their own lives or to take someone else’s life in the name of all the causes we take up.
As much as Americans might love or hate Trump, they are not inclined to kill each other to make their feelings clear. The kind of civil unrest Americans practice these days is a great deal less deadly and generally just more civil than it used to be.
It is important to keep this in mind as we try to figure out how likely and bad a second Capitol insurrection would be.
To be sure, the politically inspired unrest and violence of 2020 and 2021 were unprecedented and scary. Given the short time Trump’s first insurrection lasted and how spectacularly his attempted coup d’etat failed, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that neither he nor his supporters in 2021 were as committed to turning our political customs and government institutions as upside down as they made out. They were ready for a street brawl, not a full-fledged political insurrection and coup d’etat.
Skipping ahead to the current election season, Trump has already seen that a second call to arms is unlikely to be as successful as the ones he made in 2020 and 2021. Despite his public pleas, for example, Trump’s supporters didn’t surround the courthouse where his financial misdeeds were being scrutinized this year, and his 2024 rallies aren’t as full as they were four years ago. People also are leaving them well before Trump stops speaking or dancing.
Any attempt to overthrow the government a second time would be likely to end even before it began. Trump didn’t have the support of military leaders to back up his assault on the Capitol in 2021. He would face much stiffer and immediate resistance from civil and military leaders if he tried to pull off a second one in 2025.
This won’t stop Trump from trying again, of course. I believe there will be a second reckoning of some kind in 2025.
Serious scholars and political commentators have warned us this reckoning was coming. They weren’t surprised by Trump’s open embrace of authoritarian values and reactionary policies in the Project 2025 manifesto. The same goes for his courting of violence.
The people warning us about the Trump reboot and its impact on our politics have drawn parallels between his behavior and that exhibited by authoritarian leaders in other countries. They argue further that America came perilously close to going down that road in 2021.
Their concerns are warranted and the evidence backing them up is sobering.
My reading of history, however, suggests that their arguments are more sobering than the evidence is compelling. The reason why has nothing to do with the seriousness of the threat or that law enforcement agencies won’t be prepared this time to repel a violent challenge to the integrity of our elections and the peaceful transfer of power to a new national government.
My prediction of a second failed insurrection, if one happens at all, is that =Trump doesn’t know much about the history of social and political unrest in this country or thinks he can defy the lessons it teaches us. Either way, he won’t be any happier with the results this time than he was in 2021.
The prospect of his failure is written all over our history of social and political unrest.
People and organizations involved in violent encounters with groups they don’t like, leaders they hold in contempt, and public practices they find offensive end their attacks quickly and achieve few, if any, of the goals they set for themselves and the accommodations they demanded.
Even the most dramatic and upsetting social unrest and public violence we see these days reveals something historians have long understood.
People are far less invested in turning the world upside down than in nudging their way into the conversation about the direction they want their communities and governments to move.
This isn’t the violent legacy Donald Trump would have preferred to leave the rest of us to build on. But it’s the best one he could have left us.
Americans, it seems, can live with a lot of social and political upheaval because the people acting out had far more modest goals in mind than their intemperate rhetoric and actions suggested. We would be well advised to keep this in mind as we come to the closing moments of the 2024 election.
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Workers walk through the Rocky Broad River in Chimney Rock, N.C., near a home destoryed by Hurricane Helene.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Project 2025 would have 'catastrophic' impact on hurricane warnings
Oct 30, 2024
Raj Ghanekar is a student at Northwestern University and a reporter for the school’s Medill News Service.
Residents in the southeastern United States are still recovering from devastating damage brought on by back-to-back hurricanes. As federal, state and local officials continue working to deliver aid, experts say the country would be less prepared for future hurricanes if proposals included the conservative plan known as Project 2025 were to be put in place.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration houses the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, which are vital to predicting these cyclones. But the 920-page proposal published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, argues NOAA “should be dismantled” and includes steps to undermine its authority and position leading the country’s planning for severe weather events, such as providing official emergency warnings.
“It would be potentially catastrophic if you had more than one authority agency … giving you opposite instructions on what to do or opposite warnings," said Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT.
Former President Donald Trump has denied any connection to the plan and his team is preparing a blacklist of people to keep out of a potential second Trump term, including some with ties to Project 2025, according to Politico. But at least 140 people who worked in the first Trump administration have contributed to it, according to a CNN review. Project 2025 Associate Director Spencer Chretien pitched it as a comprehensive overhaul of the executive branch in a 2023 commentary, “laying the groundwork for a White House more friendly to the right.”
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In its current state, NOAA plays a critical role in collecting massive amounts of data, conducting its own forecasting models and making all of that information available to the public for free. It also possesses exclusive authority to issue official extreme weather warnings.
Emanuel said keeping that power with NOAA is necessary for ensuring emergency management before the storm is less rambunctious. Uniformity in warnings keeps people safe by ensuring the public does not get contradictory information.
But Project 2025 argues that NOAA’s bureaucracy is far too hefty and the government must “break up NOAA.” The document points to NOAA and its sub-organizations getting over half of the Department of Commerce budget.
“These form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry,” the document says. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
On the other hand, experts say NOAA’s budget and multifaceted organization are a huge aid to its work to develop accurate weather predictions, especially in the case of hurricanes. NOAA has several branches including the National Ocean Service and NOAA’s research wing that integrate all their research to produce more accurate hurricane and climate modeling.
According to its fiscal 2024 proposed budget, NOAA spends money on satellites, weather centers and more, all for the purpose of ensuring it has a well-rounded data collection method. This allows the federal government to predict storm paths up to five days out, according to NOAA’s website.
Project 2025’s pledge to separate and disconnect those branches and their functions would hinder the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center from doing their own jobs well, according to Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The weather that we see on any one day, it's not just a result of factors that day,” Cleetus said. “You have these long-term trends, multi-decadal factors, climate factors, all of these factors that come together to express in the form of any particular day's weather.”
Project 2025 advocates for the NWS to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which experts say could put a price on NOAA’s service to the general public.
A Project 2025 spokesperson said the proposal “does not call for the elimination of NOAA or the NWS,” adding that the use of “commercial products to provide a better result for taxpayers at a lower cost is nothing new.”
But doing so would take away a critical public good, according to Jeff Masters, a former meteorologist and current staff writer for Yale Climate Connections who started a private company of his own in 1995. He said that when a bill entered Congress in 2005 to restrict the NWS forecasting from being publicly shared, he declined to support it.
“That would have benefitted my company because now, [we] make more profit because we don't have that competition,” he said. “But we quickly saw that that was a societal loss, and we did the right thing by opposing it.”
Masters said charging for forecast information would disproportionately harm low-income populations as well, with localities or state governments with less money forced to spend money on cheaper, lower-quality options, and in turn, potentially not getting necessary weather information to save lives when a storm is on the way.
Cleetus has a similar view. She warns that commercialization could particularly harm those who cannot afford to pay for them.
“When you have data that people depend on for emergency purposes … and if that data is put behind a paywall, it will just become less accessible to people who need it, and that can have life threatening consequences,” Cleetus said.
The section on NOAA was part of the chapter dedicated to the Department of Commerce. It was authored by Thomas Gilman, who served as chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration of the Commerce Department during part of Trump’s term. Gilman currently serves as a director of the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal organization.
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Elections and Halloween can combine to create a scary atmosphere.
Noam Galai/Getty Images
Halloween, fear and democracy: Finding empathy amid the scary season
Oct 30, 2024
Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund. Becvar is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and executive director of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Halloween, a holiday celebrated around the globe, traces its roots back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The event marked the end of the Celtic year and symbolized a time when the boundaries between the living and the dead blurred, allowing spirits to roam among the living.
While Halloween is often associated with fear, darkness and death, it also represents an opportunity to confront our fears in a communal way. We dress up, share stories of ghosts and let ourselves feel scared for fun. Ironically, this holiday centered on facing fears falls less than a week before the elections, a time when many are most politically afraid. This Election Day, a majority of Americans are feeling fear about the outcome of the presidential election, which falls five days after Halloween, with some fearing what happens if Kamala Harris gets elected and some fearing what might happen if Donald Trump wins.
As the candidates sprint to the finish line, they are both playing on this fear.
As Arash Javanbakht, an associate professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University, noted in The Fulcrum in August,
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“Instead of excitement about the upcoming election, many of my patients and friends – regardless of political affiliation – report they’re terrified at the thought of the ‘other side’ winning. Democrats tell me they fear Donald Trump will end our democracy; Republicans are afraid Kamala Harris will turn the United States into a socialist society without family values.”
The fears may differ, but the undercurrent of anxiety is remarkably similar.
However, Halloween offers a timely reminder of how we might handle this political dread. It is an opportunity to reframe our fears through costumes, parties and community activities; and to transform those fears into something more constructive. What if, this Halloween, we took a similar approach to our political anxieties? Imagine if, instead of succumbing to anger, dread or even hatred arising from our political disagreements, we transformed that negative energy into empathy and curiosity.
The image of children trick-or-treating is so common that it almost seems transactional, but underneath the joy of receiving a treat from a stranger is a simple act of communities coming together to share in the simple pleasure of giving and receiving, no matter who is under the costume. This exchange, unburdened by judgment or assumptions, is a small but powerful example of how different members of a community can come together to share in a common idea, if only temporarily.
What if we, too, allowed ourselves to adopt this open-hearted spirit, especially when it comes to politics? Rather than seeing those with opposing viewpoints as enemies, what if we approached them with the same curiosity and openness that children bring to each new house on Halloween night? After all, just as no one knows what candy lies behind a neighbor’s door until they knock, we cannot fully understand another person’s perspective until we are willing to engage with it.
Elvis Presley’s song “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” captures this spirit perfectly. Before he sang those famous words in Las Vegas in 1970, he introduced the song with a message:
“There was a guy who said you never stood in that man's shoes or saw things through his eyes or stood and watched with helpless hands while the heart inside you dies. So help your brother along the way, no matter where he starts for the same God that made you, made him too, these men with broken hearts. I'd like to sing a song along the same lines.”
On this Halloween, as we navigate haunted houses and neighborhood streets, we might also take a moment to consider the fears that haunt our political landscape. What if we tried, even briefly, to imagine life from the perspective of those who see the world differently? Could we find a way to turn our collective anxieties into opportunities for connection, rather than letting them deepen our divisions?
Elvis’s song might provide the soundtrack for this effort, reminding us that while fear and division can be powerful, so too can understanding and compassion. This Halloween, let’s try on a new costume — one that sees beyond fear and strives for a deeper understanding of our neighbors. It might just be the treat that our democracy needs.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
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CNN and other media outlets need to explain the process, not just predict the winner on election night.
YouTube
This election night, the media can better explain how results work
Oct 30, 2024
Johnson is the executive director of the Election Reformers Network. Penniman is the founder and CEO of Issue One and author of “Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy and What We Can Do About It.”
Watching election night on cable or network news is a great national tradition. Memorable moments arise as the networks announce their projections in key states. Anchors and commentators demonstrate extraordinary understanding of the unique politics of hundreds of cities and counties across the country. As the results of the most consequential election on the planet unfold, there’s a powerful sense of shared witness.
But our polarized politics has revealed a serious flaw in election night coverage. As disinformation abounds, it is increasingly important for voters to know how the actual, legally certain election results are determined. And right now, voters are not seeing enough of that information on their screens on election night.
Projections by CNN, Fox and other outlets serve an important function. They give voters a statistically based prediction of who the actual winner will likely be once states complete their careful processes in the weeks after Election Day. But these projections have no official status, and news anchors typically don’t do enough to make that clear. News programs also need to include segments that explain how the actual results are verified and certified.
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Four years after November 2020, we still have a dangerous level of disagreement and uncertainty across America about the critical fact of who won that presidential election. By far the main reason for this uncertainty is the unwillingness of Donald Trump to accept his defeat, a defeat confirmed by multiple audits and recounts and by the outcome of more than 60 court challenges across the swing states.
But we should acknowledge that uncertainty arises in part because America has a very complicated presidential election system that can be hard for citizens to really understand. Different rules in every state create differences in how Americans vote and how and when vote counts are verified and certified. Court cases play a critical role in the legal certainty of results but are hard for voters to learn about and understand. And the election happens in two phases — the vote of the people and then the vote of the electors the people have selected — and that combination creates confusion.
There is a risk that network projections on election night can add more uncertainty. Something called a “projection” inherently implies uncertainty, since it could possibly be reversed. And projections suggest subjectivity, since different news outlets reach different conclusions about whether a state is ready or still too close to call.
We cannot let who won the presidency be a subjective question, a matter of opinion — it must be understood as a matter of fact and law. For that to happen, we need to help Americans see and understand the legal processes that do in fact render a certain answer to the big question of who won.
These are the reasons we have cosigned, with a broad, bipartisan array of organizations, an open letter to election reporters and election news anchors. The letter is an initiative of the Election Reformers Network developed with bipartisan support from The Carter Center, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Issue One and other organizations.
The letter asks that news organization use some version of the following phrasing every time a state result is projected:
- "This is just a projection. The actual results will be final when every vote is counted, officials verify and certify the outcome, and any challenges are resolved in court.”
The letter also urges reporters to reassure voters that accuracy matters more than speed, by using a phrase such as:
- “Counting the votes takes time, and election results are not final until officials verify and certify the results. We expect [STATE] to certify its official results by [DATE]."
Lastly, the letter encourages election night programs to include brief segments that explain the upcoming post-election verification and certification phases in the key swing states. Such segments could also provide brief explanations of the reason behind the timing of release of results so that delays do not cause creating concerns. Pennsylvania law, for example, does not allow election officials to pre-process absentee ballots before Election Day, as other states do, and for this reason results may be delayed there and networks likely will not be able to project a winner in Pennsylvania on election night.
There is of course a serious risk that the 2024 election could result in the same division in public opinion that plagued 2020, with one side refusing to accept the legally validated outcome. But even if that happens, how reporters and news networks talk about the real results process could have a significant impact on reducing susceptibility to ungrounded claims.
Americans learn a lot about our country on election night, as anchors zoom in on the political details of pivotal swing counties across the states. This year it’s time for Americans to also learn a lot about America’s election process on election night.
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