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FULL TEXT: The election in 29 days is going to be a historic wipeout.
That is my prediction.
Donald Trump will be repudiated. MAGA will be crushed, and I believe it will never again function as a viable national political coalition. It will endure as a poisonous minority movement, committed to extremism and fascism, sustained by grievance, and organized around the worship of one man.
But electoral defeat will not make it harmless. Its shrinking reach may intensify its fanaticism. A movement that regards its leader as the embodiment of the nation cannot easily accept that the nation has rejected him. It must invent a betrayal. It must identify enemies. It must explain why the people are no longer entitled to decide.
Donald Trump is 80 years old. He has spent a lifetime treating refusal as an injury and accountability as persecution. I expect his response to a defeat to be madness: an escalating fury directed at reality itself.
He will deny the results. He will allege conspiracies. He will tell his followers that their country has been stolen because the country has voted against his movement. I expect his allies to translate that accusation into a coordinated effort to obstruct the verdict.
On September 30, 2020, I warned on MSNBC that Trump would ask his supporters “to act seditiously” and “to retain the loser of an American election in power:”
I predicted the political violence that would culminate on January 6. I saw the progression: defeat recast as theft, propaganda mobilizing grievance, a leader demanding that his followers deny the sovereign will of the American people. The warning was explicit. The catastrophe followed. We have no excuse for failing to recognize the pattern now.
But a midterm defeat will leave him in the presidency. It will threaten his control of Congress, expose him to scrutiny, and place obstacles before his exercise of power. Those restraints are what he will fight to prevent.
The danger is the use of state power to maintain political power without consent: intimidation of officials, retaliation against opponents, pressure on institutions, and attempts to make lawful election results meaningless.
In my reading, the bargain Trump offers the country is destruction if his movement loses — and dictatorship if it prevails. His own flirtation with being a dictator, qualified as applying only on his first day, should have remained central to every examination of his intentions. Instead, the news cycle moved on.
This is the failure that runs through the American media’s coverage of Donald Trump. His words are reported, and then discarded. His threats become yesterday’s content. His promises vanish beneath the next performance.
Each episode begins as though the last never happened.
An endless reality show, with no accumulated record and no sustained accounting. The president is granted a fresh narrative every morning, while the public is deprived of the connections necessary to understand what is happening.
The pattern is the story. Isolation conceals its significance.
Too much corporate journalism has become frightened of that significance. Fear of retaliation. Fear of losing access. Fear of corporate displeasure. Fear of being accused of bias for describing conduct that would have disqualified another American politician from respectable company.
The result is a vocabulary of evasion. Threats become provocations. Cruelty becomes messaging. Authoritarian ambitions become an unconventional governing style. The discussion turns to whether a performance will help him politically, while the substance of the performance slips away.
This is how a public becomes accustomed to danger without ever being adequately informed about it.
The same evasion infects coverage of his public behavior. When he appears to doze, the question deserves examination. When he erupts in rage or loses the thread of an argument, the footage deserves scrutiny. A president’s capacity to discharge his responsibilities is a public concern.
Show the evidence. Examine it consistently. Stop disguising instability as tactical brilliance.
The press cannot hold one president to a standard of relentless scrutiny, and grant another immunity because his behavior has become exhausting.
Every generation of Americans that warned about the essential role of a free press in protecting liberty understood something we are watching unfold: citizens cannot defend their rights when the exercise of power is hidden from them.
I regard the retreat from that duty as cowardice and a corruption of journalism’s public purpose. Individual reporters continue to do courageous work. Their persistence makes the failures of the institutions above them more conspicuous, not less.
For years, omissions defined much of the negligence. The question never asked. The statement never revisited. The threat buried beneath campaign gossip. The contradiction allowed to stand because explaining it would interrupt the spectacle.
Now those omissions co-exist with a propaganda culture that glorifies the leader, portrays opponents as enemies of the nation, and treats dissent as treachery. When government power carries that message, I regard it as fascist propaganda. The language prepares its audience to accept punishment as patriotism.
A frightened press leaves the public exposed to this manipulation. The propagandists supply a coherent story of enemies and betrayal, while too much conventional coverage supplies disconnected episodes, stripped of memory.
Here is what I expect us to see.
On election night, the repudiation will be unmistakable. Within a day, a score of MAGA candidates will refuse to concede. Within a week, Trump’s lie will have found its footing. Results that seemed certain will be presented as uncertain, despite no evidence sufficient to overturn them.
Within two weeks, Trump will be on offense. The conversation will shift from the scale of his defeat to his demands. His accusations will dictate the questions. His allies will demand investigations, delays and exceptions. The country will be asked to prove, repeatedly, what its voters have already decided.
By December 1, I expect corporate media to be filled with stories asking whether the new Congress should be seated, or can be seated. The obstruction will supply the controversy. The controversy will supply the coverage. The coverage will confer legitimacy on the obstruction.
The liars will arrive on the Sunday shows. They will filibuster a fantasy into apparent reality, exploiting every interruption, every timid follow-up, and every invitation to return. Their purpose will be to exhaust the distinction between an allegation and evidence.
Truth and falsehood will receive the same lighting, the same introductions, and the same respectful opportunity to make their case. Viewers will be invited to choose between them as though a certified vote count and an invented conspiracy were competing preferences.
By mid-December, I fear huge swaths of America will no longer know who won.
Then what?
That confusion will become the justification for extraordinary action. A manufactured crisis will be offered as grounds for withholding recognition, obstructing the new Congress and protecting presidential power from the restraints voters demanded.
This is the sequence I am warning about. The election produces a verdict. The lie attacks certainty. The media amplifies the dispute. The resulting confusion becomes an argument for denying the verdict its consequences.
The press must confront that sequence while it unfolds. Every allegation requires evidence. Every obstruction requires an explanation of who benefits. Every threat against an official requires scrutiny. Repetition cannot turn a falsehood into a fact, and a presidential demand cannot erase a lawful result.
Citizens must vote. Officials must count, certify and enforce the results. Institutions must withstand intimidation.
A victory that cannot take effect leaves the people dispossessed of their own decision.
The press must find its courage. The verdict must take effect.
Dangerous hours and days lie ahead.
That is my prediction.
Donald Trump will be repudiated. MAGA will be crushed, and I believe it will never again function as a viable national political coalition. It will endure as a poisonous minority movement, committed to extremism and fascism, sustained by grievance, and organized around the worship of one man.
But electoral defeat will not make it harmless. Its shrinking reach may intensify its fanaticism. A movement that regards its leader as the embodiment of the nation cannot easily accept that the nation has rejected him. It must invent a betrayal. It must identify enemies. It must explain why the people are no longer entitled to decide.
Donald Trump is 80 years old. He has spent a lifetime treating refusal as an injury and accountability as persecution. I expect his response to a defeat to be madness: an escalating fury directed at reality itself.
He will deny the results. He will allege conspiracies. He will tell his followers that their country has been stolen because the country has voted against his movement. I expect his allies to translate that accusation into a coordinated effort to obstruct the verdict.
On September 30, 2020, I warned on MSNBC that Trump would ask his supporters “to act seditiously” and “to retain the loser of an American election in power:”
I predicted the political violence that would culminate on January 6. I saw the progression: defeat recast as theft, propaganda mobilizing grievance, a leader demanding that his followers deny the sovereign will of the American people. The warning was explicit. The catastrophe followed. We have no excuse for failing to recognize the pattern now.
But a midterm defeat will leave him in the presidency. It will threaten his control of Congress, expose him to scrutiny, and place obstacles before his exercise of power. Those restraints are what he will fight to prevent.
The danger is the use of state power to maintain political power without consent: intimidation of officials, retaliation against opponents, pressure on institutions, and attempts to make lawful election results meaningless.
In my reading, the bargain Trump offers the country is destruction if his movement loses — and dictatorship if it prevails. His own flirtation with being a dictator, qualified as applying only on his first day, should have remained central to every examination of his intentions. Instead, the news cycle moved on.
This is the failure that runs through the American media’s coverage of Donald Trump. His words are reported, and then discarded. His threats become yesterday’s content. His promises vanish beneath the next performance.
Each episode begins as though the last never happened.
An endless reality show, with no accumulated record and no sustained accounting. The president is granted a fresh narrative every morning, while the public is deprived of the connections necessary to understand what is happening.
The pattern is the story. Isolation conceals its significance.
Too much corporate journalism has become frightened of that significance. Fear of retaliation. Fear of losing access. Fear of corporate displeasure. Fear of being accused of bias for describing conduct that would have disqualified another American politician from respectable company.
The result is a vocabulary of evasion. Threats become provocations. Cruelty becomes messaging. Authoritarian ambitions become an unconventional governing style. The discussion turns to whether a performance will help him politically, while the substance of the performance slips away.
This is how a public becomes accustomed to danger without ever being adequately informed about it.
The same evasion infects coverage of his public behavior. When he appears to doze, the question deserves examination. When he erupts in rage or loses the thread of an argument, the footage deserves scrutiny. A president’s capacity to discharge his responsibilities is a public concern.
Show the evidence. Examine it consistently. Stop disguising instability as tactical brilliance.
The press cannot hold one president to a standard of relentless scrutiny, and grant another immunity because his behavior has become exhausting.
Every generation of Americans that warned about the essential role of a free press in protecting liberty understood something we are watching unfold: citizens cannot defend their rights when the exercise of power is hidden from them.
I regard the retreat from that duty as cowardice and a corruption of journalism’s public purpose. Individual reporters continue to do courageous work. Their persistence makes the failures of the institutions above them more conspicuous, not less.
For years, omissions defined much of the negligence. The question never asked. The statement never revisited. The threat buried beneath campaign gossip. The contradiction allowed to stand because explaining it would interrupt the spectacle.
Now those omissions co-exist with a propaganda culture that glorifies the leader, portrays opponents as enemies of the nation, and treats dissent as treachery. When government power carries that message, I regard it as fascist propaganda. The language prepares its audience to accept punishment as patriotism.
A frightened press leaves the public exposed to this manipulation. The propagandists supply a coherent story of enemies and betrayal, while too much conventional coverage supplies disconnected episodes, stripped of memory.
Here is what I expect us to see.
On election night, the repudiation will be unmistakable. Within a day, a score of MAGA candidates will refuse to concede. Within a week, Trump’s lie will have found its footing. Results that seemed certain will be presented as uncertain, despite no evidence sufficient to overturn them.
Within two weeks, Trump will be on offense. The conversation will shift from the scale of his defeat to his demands. His accusations will dictate the questions. His allies will demand investigations, delays and exceptions. The country will be asked to prove, repeatedly, what its voters have already decided.
By December 1, I expect corporate media to be filled with stories asking whether the new Congress should be seated, or can be seated. The obstruction will supply the controversy. The controversy will supply the coverage. The coverage will confer legitimacy on the obstruction.
The liars will arrive on the Sunday shows. They will filibuster a fantasy into apparent reality, exploiting every interruption, every timid follow-up, and every invitation to return. Their purpose will be to exhaust the distinction between an allegation and evidence.
Truth and falsehood will receive the same lighting, the same introductions, and the same respectful opportunity to make their case. Viewers will be invited to choose between them as though a certified vote count and an invented conspiracy were competing preferences.
By mid-December, I fear huge swaths of America will no longer know who won.
Then what?
That confusion will become the justification for extraordinary action. A manufactured crisis will be offered as grounds for withholding recognition, obstructing the new Congress and protecting presidential power from the restraints voters demanded.
This is the sequence I am warning about. The election produces a verdict. The lie attacks certainty. The media amplifies the dispute. The resulting confusion becomes an argument for denying the verdict its consequences.
The press must confront that sequence while it unfolds. Every allegation requires evidence. Every obstruction requires an explanation of who benefits. Every threat against an official requires scrutiny. Repetition cannot turn a falsehood into a fact, and a presidential demand cannot erase a lawful result.
Citizens must vote. Officials must count, certify and enforce the results. Institutions must withstand intimidation.
A victory that cannot take effect leaves the people dispossessed of their own decision.
The press must find its courage. The verdict must take effect.
Dangerous hours and days lie ahead.
