Is a Second Donald Trump Presidency Inevitable?

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

My feelings about the 2024 Presidential election were summed up by Joy-Ann Reid, MS-NBC host and biographer of the late civil-rights martyr Medgar Evers and his widow Myrlie, when she appeared to promote her book on the February 6 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWnUgSvwVXo). She described her feelings about the 2020 Presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump as “confident” that Biden would win and a state of normality would return to America’s body politic. This year, she said, she’s “terrified” of a Trump victory and return to the White House.

So am I. Just as Trump eked out a victory in the Electoral College in 2016 and launched his tumultuous four years as President, he appears poised to carry the day in 2024 as well. In 2016 Trump had the good fortune to be running against Hillary Clinton, one of the most reviled figures in American political history and the target of a decades-long political smear campaign. In 2024 Trump is running against Joe Biden, whom the Republican propaganda machine has been able to depict as a doddering old man barely capable of tying his shoes in the morning, much less delivering a speech or leading the country.

Democratic strategists watch helplessly as Trump himself and his minions in politics and the Right-wing media project an image of Trump (who is only three years younger than Biden, remember?) as a man of youth and vigor, an energetic crusader for “Making America Great Again.” Though Biden has a record of accomplishment to draw on, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and an economy that is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic faster and stronger than any other in the world, he gets almost no public credit for any of it.

Two major opinion polls released in early February 2024 showed just how much of an uphill battle Biden faces if he wants to be re-elected. One was from NBC News (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-trump-economy-presidential-race-rcna136834) and one was from National Public Radio (https://www.npr.org/2024/02/07/1229500337/poll-2024-election-biden-trump-immigration-democracy). According to Mark Murray of NBC News, “Biden trails GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump on major policy and personal comparisons, including by more than 20 points on which candidate would better handle the economy. And Biden’s deficit versus Trump on handling immigration and the border is greater than 30 points.”

In a recently released Monmouth University poll (https://www.newsweek.com/americans-poll-donald-trump-border-wall-1873707), 53 percent of American respondents now favor Trump’s proposal to build a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border, and 46 percent oppose it. During Trump’s actual Presidency, 56 percent of respondents opposed the border wall and only 42 percent supported it. It’s an indication of how much Americans’ attitude towards immigration in general and the U.S.-Mexico border in particular have shifted in a hard-line direction. According to the NPR poll, 41 percent of respondents want increased border security and only 28 percent would prioritize creating a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the so-called “Dreamers,” people brought to the U.S. as children by their undocumented immigrant parents.

NBC News’s poll, as reported by Mark Murray in the above-cited article, has still more troubling news for Biden and the Democrats. “Trump has the edge on securing the border and controlling immigration (35 points over Biden), on having the necessary mental and physical health to be president (+23), on dealing with crime and violence (+21), on being competent and effective (+16), and on improving America’s standing in the world (+11),” Murray wrote. And, despite Biden’s attempts to make protecting American democracy a major theme of his campaign – while Trump is promising to be “a dictator on day one” of his second term – the two men are essentially tied on the issue of protecting democracy, with 43% of voters picking Biden and 41% preferring Trump.

Biden’s overall job approval rating remains low – 38 percent in the NBC poll and 40 percent in NPR’s – while Trump’s is 49 percent, ironically higher than he ever got while he was President. Just 29 percent of respondents in the NPR poll gave Biden positive marks for handling immigration and border issues, which explains why Republicans in both houses of Congress tanked a border security deal that would have given the President sweeping new powers to enforce immigration laws. And they were quite honest about why they were doing this. As Congressmember Troy Nehls (R-Texas) said, “I'm not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden's approval rating. … Why would I?”

Biden’s Coalition Is Disintegrating

Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by narrow margins in six key “battleground states” – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia – that, in America’s cockamamie way of electing its national leader, play an outsized role in determining the next President. Trump is currently leading in all six, as well as winning the nationwide popular vote – something he didn’t do either in 2016 or 2020. Starting in the 1968 election and continuing through Ronald Reagan’s wins in 1980 and 1984, the Republicans were able to capture most of the white working-class vote (particularly its men) by emphasizing racial and cultural issues, and now they’re making inroads over groups the Democrats have historically counted on as well.

According to a February 27 report by Mark Murray on the NBC News site (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/union-households-favor-biden-closer-margin-2020-poll-finds-rcna140569#:~:text=The%20combined%20NBC%20News%20polling,approve%2C%2059%25%20disapprove), in 2020 Biden carried 56 percent of voters from households headed by a member of a labor union, to 40 percent for Trump. This year, polls show Biden still leading Trump among union households, but by a much narrower margin: 50 percent for Biden to 41 percent for Trump. In the same polls, Trump leads among all voters, 47 to 43 percent in NPR’s poll and 47 to 42 percent in NBC’s.

Astonishingly, Trump is also making inroads against Biden among people of color. Democrats have for decades counted on heavily winning communities of color, especially African-Americans and Latinos, to make up for having long since lost much of the white male vote to Republicans. But Trump’s share of the African-American vote actually increased from 8 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2020. And according to an NBC News dispatch from November 21, 2023 (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/meetthepressblog/eyes-2024-black-voters-sour-biden-rcna126124), “Biden’s net-approval rating among Black voters has dropped nearly 20 points over the course of this year, from plus-46 points throughout the year to plus-27 points this month. The latest survey finds 61% of Black voters approve of Biden, versus 34% who say they disapprove of the president.”

Even more amazingly, Latino voters have so strongly soured on Biden that Trump actually leads among them in polls, according to USA Today and the British newspaper The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/01/trump-biden-latino-voters-poll). According to a poll by USA Today and Suffolk University, Trump led Biden 39 to 35 percent among Latinos in a survey taken at the end of 2023. A similar poll from CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/19/trump-wipes-out-bidens-lead-with-latino-voters-in-2024-cnbc-survey-.html) showed that between October and December 2023, Latino voters swung from a five-point lead for Biden to a seven-point lead for Trump.

Part of the reason may be economic. I remember a warning I got from a Mexican-American friend of mine who told me in 2016 that a lot of Latino U.S. citizens were going to vote for Trump because they were worried that undocumented immigrants were taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to them. Part of it also may be due to a long-term strategy by Republican activists who seek to win over voters of color, especially Latinos and African-Americans, with the same racist, sexist and homophobic cultural appeals they used successfully to pull the white working class away from the Democrats in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Whatever the strategy is, it seems at this stage to be working in the Republicans’ favor.

Biden is also hemorrhaging support among voters under 34, a key demographic in his 2020 election victory. In 2020, Biden carried young voters by 24 points; today, according to the USA Today/Suffolk University poll, Trump leads among young voters by four points. And he’s also losing support among Arab-American voters, at least partly due to his overall backing of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza. In the Michigan Presidential primary on February 27, 2024, more than 100,000 Democratic voters marked their ballots as “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, responding to an insurgent campaign by Palestinian-American activists to call on Biden to support a permanent cease-fire in the Israel-Gaza war.

In a dispatch from the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68427304), Sarah Smith reported that Michigan “is home to America's largest Arab-American population, most of whom are deeply upset by the devastation they see in Gaza. President Biden can't afford to ignore their demands that he call for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza – rather than the temporary one that the White House has been pushing for. He did not mention the war or the protest vote in his statement following his victory, but his campaign team will have surely heard the message loud and clear.” Biden has publicly, though mildly, warned Netanyahu that some of his actions – including targeting the Nasser hospital in Gaza and threatening a ground invasion of Rafah, the southern Gaza city to which the Israeli government earlier urged Gazans to move to on the promise that they’d be safe – are “over the top,” but that hasn’t been enough to discourage Arab-Americans from opposing Biden for his efforts to win Congressional funding for Israel’s war machine.

Leyla Elabed, one of the organizers of the “uncommitted” protest vote, angrily disagreed with Sarah Smith’s comment that her campaign might only help Trump. “If Biden doesn't act now, and listen to the 80 percent of Democrats and the 66 percent of Americans that want a permanent cease-fire right now, it is going to be Biden, his administration and the Democratic Party that are going to be accountable for handing the White House to Trump in November,” Elabed told Smith.

Smith also reported that some of the young people she interviewed had other concerns about Biden besides his tacit support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza. “Each of these students said they wished Mr. Biden had stood aside and allowed another candidate to get the Democratic nomination this year,” Smith said. “They think that at 81, he is too old to understand the concerns of their generation, and that he hasn't been aggressive enough on climate change or on forgiving student loan debt.” Biden has actually done quite a lot to reduce student loan debt – as much as he could given his defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court and the reluctance of Congress to act on the issue – but it’s not enough for students who are facing crippling long-term student loan debts their entire lives.

Smith also reported on “the concerns I tend to hear from undecided voters who are considering backing Donald Trump. Those moderate voters – whom I've met in the wine bars of Atlanta, the sandwich shops of Philadelphia and the rural outposts of Iowa – often help decide who wins the White House. They've told me they felt much better off when Donald Trump was in office. And they're not convinced yet by the Biden administration's attempts to persuade Americans the economy is improving.”

It’s occurred to me that at least part of that might be due to nostalgia for the pre-COVID era; the economy may have looked better because COVID-19 hadn’t hit yet. It’s also possible that a lot of American voters have overall memories of the first Trump Presidency that are a lot more rose-colored than they thought at the time; that could be why Trump’s approval ratings are higher now than they were at any time during his term. Some pundits have coined the term “vibeonomics” to deal with the frustrating fact, if you’re a Democrat supporting Biden, that though the economic statistics right now look good (especially low unemployment and a slowly but steadily declining rate of inflation), people aren’t giving Biden credit for the parts of the economy that are working and are blaming him for the parts that aren’t, including stubbornly high grocery prices.

Biden won the Presidency in the first place by putting together a broad coalition of voters, and now he’s alienating many of the groups that were crucial to his victory. In the 1920’s Will Rogers famously joked, “I belong to no organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Recently MS-NBC hosts and guests have suggested that actually applies to modern-day Republicans, especially given the open civil war between various factions of the Michigan Republican Party over who is entitled to lead it. But as we move closer to November 5, 2024 (the nominal election day, though given the multiplicity of vote-by-mail and absentee-voting options that’s more of a deadline than an actual date), it’s the Republicans that (with only a handful of exceptions) are solidly behind Trump while the Democrats are fragmenting.

Indeed, the 2024 Presidential election is looking more and more like a repeat of 1980. The Republicans are going in with an impressive degree of unity around a controversial but highly charismatic apostle of the Right, while the Democrats are splitting and some of them are flirting either with not voting at all or voting for an alternative-party or independent candidate – which under America’s system of winner-take-all elections amounts to the same thing. Either Donald Trump or Joe Biden will be the U.S. President from 2025 to 2029 – and unless you vote for Joe Biden, you’ll be helping Donald Trump win. It’s that simple.

The Modern Antaeus: Trump’s Superpower

During Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign I posted an article at https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2016/08/trump-modern-antaeus.html comparing Trump to Antaeus, the giant in Greek mythology. Antaeus was the son of the sea god Poseidon and the earth goddess Gaia, and he could not be defeated in ordinary combat because every time an enemy knocked him down, Gaia would replenish his strength and he would get up again and vanquish his foe. Antaeus was finally killed by the hero Herakles – though you probably know him by his Roman name, Hercules – who used one arm to stab Antaeus to death while his other arm held the giant up and kept him from reconnecting with his earth mother and regaining his strength.

In that article, and in a further blog post called “mmm … peach … mint” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2019/12/mmm-peach-mint.html) published on the eve of President Trump’s first impeachment (for attempting to extort derogatory information on then-candidate Biden and his son Hunter from Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky), I detailed the multiple ways Trump had screwed up and escaped accountability in a way denied to lesser mortals. As I wrote in 2019, “He did it in 1991, when the banks who had loaned him money to build casinos in Atlantic City were about to foreclose on him and force him into bankruptcy — until they realized that the casinos would be worth more with Trump’s name on them than without it. So they cut a deal by which he could keep his name on the casinos and collect a royalty from [them], but without having anything to do with running them. The deal energized Trump’s businesses; realizing he could make money merely by leasing his name without the bother of actually building or owning anything, he did many more such deals and raked in huge amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing.

“Trump snatched victory from the jaws of defeat again in 2016, when the release of his conversation with Billy Bush on the set of Access Hollywood — with Trump’s proud boast that he could have his way with any woman he wanted because ‘when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything’ — one month before the election caused panic within the Republican Party. Veteran GOP professionals and strategists panicked, thinking there was no way the American people would elect a President who had openly and proudly boasted of committing rape on national TV. There was even talk of taking Trump off the ticket and putting up his running mate, Mike Pence, for President. Instead, Trump stayed on the ticket and ultimately won the presidency in the Electoral College despite getting three million fewer votes than his principal opponent.”

And Trump’s extraordinary streak of good fortune has continued even after he lost the 2020 election. So far he’s been able to escape responsibility for his attempt to overthrow his electoral defeat through force and violence by summoning a mob of his supporters to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 and exhorting them to storm the Capitol because, as he said, “[Y]ou’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong.” (https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial.) Initially Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy objected and called out Trump for the violence that ensued that day, but they quickly returned to slavish devotion to him. Today McCarthy is out of electoral politics and McConnell has announced he’s stepping down from his leadership post after November.

Trump’s conduct before, during and after his Presidency has led to four separate jurisdictions – the feds in Washington, D.C. and Florida and state prosecutors in New York and Georgia – filing indictments against him on 91 felony counts. But, again, what would be a career-ender for any other politician actually boosted Trump. He was able to convince the party faithful that the indictments against him were part of a political hit job from Joe Biden and his administration to savage him and render him unelectable. They gave him the leverage to destroy every other Republican who wanted to run against him for the 2024 nomination and add them to the many heads on his trophy wall of Republicans who tried to defy him, including former Senators and Congressmembers like Mitt Romney, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Either they fell victim to Trump-endorsed primary challengers, or they realized that would happen so they retired.

Democrats and vaguely Left-of-center media pundits have taken a false sense of optimism from polls that allegedly show up to 35 percent of people who voted against Trump in Republican primaries won’t vote for him in November if he’s the nominee. They also believe the polls that show many Republicans and Trump-leaning independents won’t vote for Trump if he’s actually convicted of a crime before the November election. But Trump and his attorneys have worked industriously to make sure that none of his cases come to trial before the election. Of the four, only one has a currently scheduled trial date early enough to finish before the election – and it’s the least significant of them: the New York state case alleging “falsification of business records” to conceal his hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t go public in 2016 with her allegations of a one-night stand with Trump.

Don’t believe a word of those polls. Most Republicans live in a so-called “media bubble” in which the only news they get is from Right-wing propaganda sources like AM talk radio, Fox News and the various Web sites (Newsmax, One America News and the like) which built up audiences disgusted with Fox for accurately reporting the 2020 election results in Arizona. They’ve heard the line about the “Biden crime family” bringing “socialism” to America so often there’s no way they won’t vote for Trump, even if they come to see him as the lesser of two evils. It’s true that this works in the other direction as well – a lot of Democrats currently unhappy with Biden for many reasons, including his support of Israel’s genocide against Gaza, will probably come around and vote for him anyway – but I suspect that more Democratic voters will defect from Biden than Republicans will from Trump.

As for the other three cases against Trump, they’re all in ruins right now. Special prosecutor Jack Smith – who in an unconscionable delay wasn’t even appointed until two years after January 6, 2021, mainly because neither President Biden nor his attorney general, Merrick Garland, really wanted to prosecute Trump unless they absolutely had to – has had to put the big case against Trump for inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection on hold pending resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court of Trump’s claim of absolute Presidential immunity from prosecution for any crimes he may have committed in office. Smith’s case in Florida accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents after he left the White House has been slow-walked by a blatantly pro-Trump judge, Aileen Cannon.

And the case against him in Georgia – potentially the most dangerous one because it’s a state case and therefore he can’t just order it dismissed the way he can with the federal cases if and when he becomes President again – has been sandbagged by exposure of the affair between Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. Willis and Wade both declared that their sexual relationship didn’t start until 2021, after Willis hired Wade to work on the case, but at least two witnesses have come forward and testified it began as early as 2019. Since both Willis and Wade made their statements in legal filings under penalty of perjury, if it turns out they were lying about the affair, not only will Willis be removed from the Trump prosecution but she could find herself in prison for perjury.

So the likelihood that Donald Trump will be tried and convicted on a major charge before the 2024 election is virtually nil. And the odds of that happening became even smaller on February 27, when the U.S. Supreme Court announced that they would hear Trump’s appeal on the doctrine of absolute Presidential immunity. What’s more, instead of fast-tracking the case the way they did with the Colorado Supreme Court decision ruling Trump off that state’s primary ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment for having incited the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the Court didn’t set oral argument until late April and will likely not issue a final decision until late June, when their current term ends. Even if the Court doesn’t rule in favor of Trump’s claim of absolute immunity, that still probably won’t allow for the trial to finish before the election.

What’s more, Trump has openly declared that it’s heads he wins, tails Biden loses. Either the Supreme Court says Presidents have lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution, in which case the charges against Trump in all jurisdictions magically go away; or it doesn’t, in which case Trump will undoubtedly order his attorney general to prosecute Biden for anything they can cook up against him. Trump already tried that in October 2020, when he ordered then-Attorney General Bill Barr to indict Biden, former President Barack Obama and former Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Barr tried to explain to Trump that he wouldn’t just willy-nilly indict people absent probable cause to believe they’d committed a crime, but his refusal to cook up cases against Trump’s political rivals at Trump’s behest led to a falling-out that only worsened after the 2020 election, when Barr announced that he’d investigated Trump’s claim of “massive election fraud” and bluntly said they were “bullshit.”

If Trump wins the 2024 election – as seems more certain day after day – we may see the spectacle of Biden looking around the world for a country willing to give him asylum and risk alienating President Trump to do so!

And Now for the (Maybe) Good News

As dire as the above reports make prospects for Biden and the Democrats look, there are a couple of confounding factors that might just allow Biden to squeak through to a narrow re-election. One is the ways people have actually been voting – not answering pollsters’ questions, but casting real ballots – in the last three years. Voters re-elected a popular Democratic governor in Kentucky and flipped both houses of the legislature in Virginia. In every single state that has voted on access to abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court’s despicable reversal of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the pro-choice position has won.

And the so-called “red tsunami” that a lot of people (including me) predicted for the 2022 midterms turned out to be more of a red ripple. The Republicans gained a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives instead of the 40-, 50- or 60-seat sweep they were banking on (though, ironically, that just strengthened the hand of the radical Right wing of the party), but the Democrats actually gained a seat in the U.S. Senate. More recently, special elections in 2023 and 2024 have pretty much gone the Democrats’ way, including Democrat Tom Suozzi’s victory in the February 2024 election in Long Island and Queens to replace disgraced and expelled Republican Congressmember George Santos (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/migrant-crisis-fear-mongering-wasnt-enough-to-hold-george-santoss-old-seat).

The other thing that just might save the Democrats in 2024 is that, however strong the hand the Republicans are holding, they may well be overplaying it. The immigration bill is a good case in point. Joe Biden was willing to go along with a highly punitive border bill in exchange for what he really wanted from Congress – more military aid for Ukraine in its existential war with Russia – and he signed on to a proposal that did nothing to improve immigrants’ rights. It didn’t contain a pathway to citizenship, or even long-term legal status, for the “Dreamers.” Instead, it made it considerably harder for people allegedly fleeing persecution in their home countries to seek asylum, and it dramatically expanded funding for Border Patrol agents at a time when the Border Patrol was already the largest police force in the U.S.

Had the Republicans taken the deal Biden was offering, they could have almost certainly sunk Biden’s already slim re-election chances then and there. A lot of progressive Latinos and others would have hated the bill and excoriated Biden for pushing it through. Instead, at the behest of Führer Donald Trump, they trashed their own bill as “open-border legislation” (which it decidedly wasn’t) and refused to schedule it for a vote. One way Tom Suozzi was able to finesse the immigration issue to win the Long Island/Queens special election was to say that if he’d been in Congress when that bill came to the floor for a vote, he’d have supported it. He was thus able not only to neutralize the typical Republican propaganda denouncing him as “Open-Border Suozzi” but condemn the Republicans as hypocrites for killing a bill that gave them 90 percent of what they’d said they wanted on immigration policy.

Another issue on which the Republicans have overextended themselves is reproductive rights in general and abortion in particular. The Alabama Supreme Court added to the Republicans’ woes on this topic by issuing a ruling declaring frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) to be “children” under the law and thereby protected by the state’s Wrongful Death Act. This led to a horrified reaction from some Republicans, including Trump, who rushed to assure voters that he wouldn’t allow a ban on IVF to become law.

After all, IVF is an elaborate technology used mostly by affluent white couples to have children when they can’t conceive or bring a pregnancy to term on their own, and rich white people are among the Republicans’ core constituencies. But when Democratic Senators tried to pass a bill to protect IVF, Republicans pulled together to keep the Senate from voting on it. States with strong anti-abortion laws like Georgia and Florida have had to contend with anti-choice activists filing their own lawsuits against IVF and citing the Alabama decision as precedent.

What’s worse, the Alabama Supreme Court not only made a decision that effectively bans IVF, they based their opinion largely on theological grounds. As Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, “[E]ven before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing His glory.” This just adds to the fear that a second Trump Presidency will bring an attempt to impose so-called “Christian nationalism” – a belief that American law should be based on a strict interpretation of the Bible as read by anti-choice, anti-Queer, anti-science ultra-Right-wing “Christians” – on the U.S.

It’s the very unpopularity of their overall politics, not only on women’s reproductive rights but on social acceptance of Queer people and steps to avoid or minimize human-caused climate change, that have led many Republicans not only to embrace Trump but to deny democracy and call for a dictatorial takeover of the U.S. One chilling set of interviews on YouTube of people attending a Trump rally showed just how strong the authoritarian mind-set is among Trump supporters. A middle-aged man in the audience summed it up when he was asked if he would prefer dictator Trump to small-d democrat Biden, and he said yes because “America needs a spanking.”

Those are chilling words for me because I’m well aware that I’m one of the Americans these people believe deserve to be spanked (or worse). I’m an openly Gay man married to another man. I’m a socialist. I’m also one-quarter Jewish, and I take a perverse sort of pride in the fact that any one of those three things would have made me a target of the Nazi Holocaust. Donald Trump’s likely return to the White House puts me squarely in the cross-hairs of his supporters – I meant that metaphorically, but from the moment I put those words down I realized that some of Trump’s nuttier supporters could take them literally as well.

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, it will likely be the last free and fair election the United States of America ever has. If Trump wins, the U.S. will be remodeled into a hard, mean dictatorship the way countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Narendra Modi’s India and others already have been. There will be huge concentration camps for immigrants and mass deportations of millions, thereby decimating the U.S. economy. And there will be an end to even the most feeble attempts to deal with human-caused climate change.

Trump and his supporters will run roughshod over the judicial system, the media and any other agency in the country that could get in his way or offer any criticism of him. Trump will take complete control of the Department of Justice and use it as an instrument of personal revenge against any of the myriad “enemies” he feels have slighted him. Under Trump, the U.S.’s 250-year experiment in being a self-governing republic will come to a thudding end, and the so-called “immigration crisis” will also come to an end because people around the world will see the U.S. as a cesspool they want no part of, not a haven for civil rights and economic freedom. That is the kind of country Donald Trump is offering his supporters, and that is the kind his return to the Presidency will give him the chance to create.