Biden Should Call Trump a “Sick F**k” in Public. Real America Agrees.

We learned this week, via Jonathan Lemire and some Politico colleagues, that Joe Biden uses salty language about Donald Trump in private. He’s a “sick fuck” and a “fucking asshole.” During his Valley Forge speech commemorating the January 6 insurrection, the president almost let it slip in public: “At his rally, he jokes about an intruder, whipped up by the Big Trump Lie, taking a hammer to Paul Pelosi’s skull. And he thinks that’s funny. He laughed about it. What a sick …”

The White House declined to comment for the record, but this was obviously put out there by administration sources just to test the reaction. Well, here’s mine: Biden should just go ahead and say it publicly. Not all the time of course. But once or twice. It won’t hurt. Most likely it will help. Might help a lot, in fact.

This is so for two basic reasons that people in politics sometimes forget about inside their pressure bubbles. The first is that it’s genuine. If it’s what he thinks, then he ought to just own it. People hear politicians calibrate their words every day (well, except Trump, but even he does it sometimes, notably with respect to a federal abortion ban). To hear someone just let it rip is refreshing.

Reason two? A hell of a lot of people agree. The ones who don’t are loud and enraged, and they command not one but three propaganda television networks (Fox, One America, Newsmax). But I’m betting that your average American—middle class, not very political, guided by conventional morals and values, not angry at either Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce—thinks Donald Trump is a sick fuck.

The success of such a play would depend on the evidence Biden would introduce to reinforce the label. It can’t be political. He led an insurrection? No. That’s partisan. He separated children from their parents and kept them in cold barracks with Mylar blankets? That’s plenty bad, but it’s still just politics.

The best evidence is above politics. Like Trump’s habit of insulting soldiers. Biden hit the right note in the Valley Forge speech: “[Trump] referred to those heroes, and I quote, as ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’ He actually said that. How dare he say that. How dare he talk about my son and all like that. Look, I call them patriots and heroes. The only loser I see is Donald Trump.” (Biden believes son Beau’s brain cancer, the cause of his death, stemmed from his exposure to burn pits in Iraq during his service.)

The Paul Pelosi story is a pretty good piece of evidence too. Yes, the name Pelosi will set off the inevitable bells on both sides. But I doubt many swing voters think it’s OK to joke about taking a hammer to an 82-year-old man’s head. We might throw in what Trump said about John McCain back in 2015 (“I like heroes who weren’t captured”).

Trump, as we know, leads Biden narrowly in most polls (and in some state polls, not so narrowly). At the same time, large majorities agree that Trump is a lawless and reckless and just bad human being.

Here are some poll results from last summer, which are in line with a ton of other polls. Popularity—unfavorable, 60 to 38 percent. Does Trump think he’s above the law? Yes, 63 to 37. Do you support or oppose Trump’s indictments? Yes, 53 to 39. Do you think Trump has committed a crime? Yes, 62 to 32. And the most germane one here, is Trump fit for office? No, 58 to 42.

Why, you might ask, is a man with those numbers leading in polls? First of all, because Joe Biden is 80. If Biden were 75, he’d be six, seven points ahead, no question about it. And second, because those average swing voters have forgotten everything they didn’t like about Trump, while they see every day the things they don’t like about Biden—his age, and his inflation (although things are improving considerably on that front).

This campaign—and not panicking about January’s head-to-head polls—is going to be an exercise in reminding those voters of the things they hated about Trump. In some ways, Trump will do that work himself. He’s already doing it, defaming a woman he raped, misbehaving in courtrooms, getting convicted of more crimes (we hope), ranting against the legal system, the one venue where his bullshit doesn’t fly. By late October, a lot of people will have observed his campaign-season antics and be asking themselves whether they really want this moral baboon in their faces for another four years. (It occurs to me that’s an insult to baboons.)

But a lot of the work will have to be done by Biden and the Democrats. Trump’s lie to the American people about the seriousness of the coronavirus. His serial bragging about getting rid of Roe v. Wade. His love of Vladimir Putin. His increasing dementia, far worse than Biden’s. And his basic sociopathy and inhumanity. If driving home that last point home means Biden should use a rather unpresidential noun here and there, well, fuck it.

The political conventional wisdom is hard to define sometimes. Usually it’s one of those things that’s just there, like your body temperature. You feel it but don’t notice it. And then, bam, you feel hot, you get the chills, and that’s the moment you know you’re getting sick. Something has shifted, and suddenly you notice this thing you rarely think about.

That’s how this week felt with regard to the conventional wisdom. A week ago, Donald Trump was the clear favorite to win in November, and of course he may yet—the polls are close and will remain so. But also, a week ago, Trump had a lot of wind in his sails coming off his smashing Iowa win, and Joe Biden was a doddering old man with a mixed-at-best economic record.

There was no huge sea change this week. But there’s also no question that those scripts started to flip, in two important ways.

First and most important, Trump is now the one doddering his way toward dementia. He has been for a while, but the Nikki-Nancy moment, and Nikki Haley’s subsequent attack on Trump, finally forced the media to make Trump’s mental state into a running narrative. The column I wrote Monday about this did monster traffic, which I note not to boast but by way of observing that the readership means that a lot of people were obviously thinking the same thing.

On Morning Joe, cable’s most influential show in setting the conventional wisdom, they’ve been just merciless about Trump’s addled brain. The Biden campaign put together a very funny ad mocking Trump. And over the rest of the week, Le Grand Orange (apologies, Rusty!) did not disappoint. There was that nutso social media binge against E. Jean Carroll—37 posts in two hours, Wednesday night. Then there was his ridiculous testimony at the Carroll defamation trial, where he was on the stand for three minutes and managed to defy the judge’s instructions twice. Then there was his absurd whining Thursday as he left the courtroom, repeating three times, “This is not America.” No, asshole, this is actually the best version of America. A courtroom is the one place where your lies and slander don’t fly.

Trump’s brain is turning into Jell-O before our eyes. No, not just Jell-O, but one of those ’60s Jell-O molds your mother (or grandmother) made, with cottage cheese and fruit and chunks of canned tuna and olives and a few mystery ingredients for good measure. And it’s not like there’s any chance he’s going to be pulling himself together. The pressure is building, and fast. This month, two judges, Lewis Kaplan in the Carroll case and Arthur Engoron in the fraud case, will announce the size of the damage awards they want Trump and his businesses to pay in those cases. Carroll seeks $10 million. New York Attorney General Letitia James seeks $370 million in the fraud case.

Neither judge seems especially seduced by Trump’s alleged charisma. So let’s say Kaplan socks him with $15 million and Engoron with, oh, $450 million. Hardly implausible. Both are supposed to happen within a matter of days.

Then there’s the campaign trail. Trump is going to win the GOP nomination, sure, but Haley has stepped up her attacks—apparently realizing that now that it’s a two-person race, the only chance she stands is to finally go after her opponent, especially now that he’s calling her “Birdbrain” and mocking her fashion choices. “I know that’s what he does when he is threatened, and he should feel threatened, without a doubt,” she told a South Carolina crowd.

Trump will dispatch Haley in the February 24 primary in that state—and then, possibly, he’ll turn right around and face Jack Smith’s prosecutors in a Washington courtroom the next week. The trial date is March 4, although that’s up in the air, pending the resolution of a pretrial motion. So Trump’s going to be winning primaries—that is, inside the hall of mirrors that is the Republican Party faithful—while out in the real world he’s going to be losing in court, and losing what’s left of his mind. Now that Trump’s mental condition is fair game, he’s just going to deteriorate even more—a self-reinforcing downward spiral into the quicksand of his cankered soul.

The second change, even more important albeit less fun to talk about, has to do with the reality—and the perceptions—of the economy. I won’t throw a bunch of numbers at you, but: gas prices down, Dow setting a new record above 38,000, and a great (not good—great) GDP report this week. More important still were those recent numbers showing that consumer confidence is up more over the last two months than during any two-month period since 1991. Think about that. Thirty-three years. In 1991, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were being potty-trained (though not together!), and Patrick Mahomes wasn’t born.

All this is why Punchbowl News, a reliable reflector of conventional wisdom, led its Friday morning newsletter with “Dems get ready to run on the economy.” Think they would have done that even a week ago?

And by the way, what is Trump’s reaction to this? To say he wants the economy to crash. He wants Americans to lose jobs and health care and houses and small businesses. If that’s not fodder for a 30-second ad, or about a dozen of them, Democratic operatives are more asleep than usual.

This is even more important than Trump’s personal meltdown because most people still vote on the economy. They form their views and reach their conclusions three to six months out from the election, which is the next few months. If these two new narratives—Trump is demented, and the economy is strong—settle into conventional wisdom, the way we talk about this election may be very different indeed by Memorial Day.

You have no doubt seen the incredibly depressing news about the incredibly depressing purchase of The Baltimore Sun by the incredibly depressing David Smith, chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, the right-wing media empire best known for gobbling up local television news operations and forcing local anchors to spout toxic Big Brother gibberish like this.

The Sun was once a great newspaper. I remember reading, once upon a time, that it had sprung more foreign correspondents into action across the planet than any American newspaper save The New York Times and The Washington Post. It had eight foreign bureaus at one point, all of which were shuttered by the Tribune Company by 2006. But the Sun’s real triumphs came in covering its gritty, organic city. And even well after its glory days, it still won Pulitzers—as recently as 2020, for taking down corrupt Mayor Catherine Pugh, who served a stretch in prison thanks to the paper.

Smith wasted no time in showing his cards during his first meeting with the staff Wednesday. He was asked about a comment he made to New York magazine back in 2018, when he said, “Print media is so left wing as to be meaningless dribble.” (“Dribble”? Let’s hope he won’t be on the copy desk.) Did he feel that way about the Sun specifically? “In many ways, yes,” Smith said, adding that he wants the paper to emulate the local Fox affiliate, which is owned … by Sinclair.

But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more. There’s the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, after he got rich from his Unification Church, sprouted media properties, most notably The Washington Times, still owned by the church’s News World Communications (once upon a quaint old time, it was shocking that the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital was started by a cult). And Philip Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group started the tabloid newspaper The Washington Examiner in 2005. These days, the list includes Elon Musk with X/Twitter, Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance with Rumble (a right-wing YouTube alternative), Ye with his attempted purchase of the now-defunct Parler, and, of course, Donald Trump, with Truth Social. They all understand what Viktor Orbán told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022: “Have your own media.” Shows like Tucker Carlson’s old Fox show, the Hungarian strongman said, “should be broadcast day and night.”

I’ve been watching this develop for decades. The right-wing media was a thing long ago, but it was still easily drowned out by the mainstream media. If the mainstream media was a beach ball, the right-wing media was a table tennis ball.

Today? The mainstream media, with cuts like those endured by the Sun, is maybe a volleyball, and the right-wing media is a basketball—a little bigger. And it’s on its way to beach-ball-hood. The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year.

And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing.

I’ve been in the trenches of this fight for many years. Back in the George W. Bush era, the late Rob Stein, a Democratic insider and good friend of mine, mapped for the first time the conservative infrastructure in a PowerPoint presentation that became such a hot ticket in Washington liberal circles that The New York Times Magazine did a story about it. He showed, from looking over conservative groups’ 990s (because they were mostly all nonprofits), how much was spent on policy development, how much on field operations, how much on youth training, and how much on media. I don’t remember the numbers, but the media figure was high.

Much of this spending was coordinated. Murdoch’s empire didn’t count, because his properties were for-profit, as was The Washington Times. But a lot of the nonprofit spending was directed by a handful of anointed movement leaders, and they made certain that a big chunk of money was spent on media.

I used to try to argue, whenever I was lucky enough to get the ear of one of our side’s rich people for five minutes, that we needed to build an avowedly liberal media infrastructure. I was told that they just weren’t that interested. They had other priorities. They were concerned with the issues. They weren’t prepared to lose all that money, and for what?

For what? Ask Viktor Orbán. He knows. Ask Rupert. Why has he held onto the New York Post? News Corp., the parent company, makes a profit. But the Post loses kajillions. Nobody knows how much, but here’s an estimate from 12 years ago that put the paper’s losses at $60 to $120 million a year.

So why does he keep it? Because it’s worth every penny. It gives him power. The Post’s editors know how to use its front page and its news pages to shape discourse. Where did last fall’s New York crime scare come from, the one that had Westchesterites convinced they dare not set foot in the city, and which elected all those Republican members of Congress? From the Post, that’s where.

I used to be told sometimes, “Yes, but we have The New York Times, The Washington Post …” Really? No, not really. Sure, they endorse Democrats mostly. And sure, much of their social and cultural coverage proceeds from liberal assumptions. They, and almost all of the mainstream media, will not write a story today suggesting, for example, that undocumented immigrants across America should be rounded up en masse and deported. This has been a hard-won reality forged by many activists and intellectuals over many years, and it is a good thing.

But it isn’t capital-P Politics. On capital-P Politics, The New York Times and The Washington Post often let liberals down. I was having these arguments, as I said, back when Dubya was president, and he and his vassals were ginning up their phony case for invading Iraq. Which newspaper published the infamous “aluminum tubes” story charging that Saddam Hussein was seeking material that could only be used in nuclear centrifuges? The Times, on its front page on a crucial Sunday in the fall of 2002, as Bush officials spent the day fanning out onto the political chat shows touting the article.

It was false. Eventually, the Times itself debunked the story—but in 2004, well after the war had started. And as for the Post, that liberal paper’s editorial page was one of the most important promoters of the Iraq invasion in all of American media. (Speaking of the unreliability of liberal media outlets at that time, it would be evasive of me not to mention The New Republic’s own fervent support of the war, but that wasn’t me; I was helming The American Prospect at the time, and we opposed it.)

I used to say to people: What we need is a full-throated liberal tabloid in Washington—a Washington version of the New York Post that would use its front pages and its news columns to promote embarrassing stories and scandals about Bush administration officials, evangelical grifters, and other prominent right-wingers. It would be agenda-setting. It would have some juicy gossip columns and a great sports section because a tabloid newspaper has to. And most of all, it would have done the vital work of connecting liberal values to a proletarian tabloid sensibility.

Everyone I mentioned this to laughed in my face, and maybe you are too. But Phil Anschutz didn’t laugh. He started a conservative tabloid right around the same time I was saying our side should start a liberal one. And what’s happened? I suppose he’s lost money, although I don’t really know. But The Washington Examiner is a respected property (it gave up on print in 2013, but that was fine; by then it was an established presence). I see its people on cable news, and it has produced some legit stars like Tim Alberta. It has influence, I assume its reporters have Hill press credentials, and I don’t see anybody laughing at it.

How different would today’s discourse be if someone had funded such a paper? I don’t want to overstate things, but it would be different, no question. Four years of tabloid “woods” (covers) smartly and riotously mocking Trump while he was president would absolutely have changed the way he was perceived and described by the rest of the media.

And now let’s return our thoughts to Sinclair. How different would things be out there in America if, 15 or 20 years ago, some rich liberal or consortium of liberals had had the wisdom to make a massive investment in local news? There were efforts along these lines, and sometimes they came to something. But they were small. What if, instead of right-wing Sinclair, some liberal company backed by a group of billionaires had bought up local TV stations or radio stations or newspapers all across the country?

Again, we can’t know, but we know this much: Support for Democrats has shriveled in rural America to near nonexistence, such that it is now next to impossible to imagine Democrats being elected to public office at nearly any level in about two-thirds of the country. It’s a tragedy. And it happened for one main reason: Right-wing media took over in these places and convinced people who live in them that liberals are all God-hating superwoke snowflakes who are nevertheless also capable of destroying civilization, and our side didn’t fight it. At all. If someone had formed a liberal Sinclair 20 years ago to gain reach into rural and small-town America, that story would be very different today.

There has in recent years been an impressive growth of nonprofit media outlets, led nationally by ProPublica and laying down roots everywhere, from the aforementioned Baltimore, where the Baltimore Banner has sometimes been scooping the Sun, to my home state of West Virginia, where Pulitzer Prize–winner Ken Ward’s Mountain State Spotlight is doing terrific reporting. These outlets are welcome indeed. They do sharp and necessary reporting. But they’re nonprofits, which, under IRS rules, cannot be partisan. They have to be apolitical.

What we used to call “the progressive infrastructure” has grown in the two decades since Stein was showing his PowerPoint around town. Donors got together at Stein’s behest to create the Democracy Alliance. It helped seed the Center for American Progress, designed as liberalism’s answer to the Heritage Foundation. It helped grow groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. On the media front, it funded Media Matters for America, the broad left’s leading media watchdog outfit.

But there is one job liberal benefactors have refused to take on (with a few exceptions, starting with the owner of this very magazine). The cost has been enormous. And by the way—this story isn’t over. By a long shot. I’m certain David Smith wants to buy more struggling newspapers and turn them into MAGA sheets. And there are surely mini-Sinclairs in formation. Prager University’s right-wing misinformation videos are gaining a foothold in some public schools. Right-wing outlets have zero interest in sharing the “media space” with the mainstream media. They want to crush it.

And I fear that they probably will. There’s a story in the Times today about three moguls who bought prominent media properties, most notably Bezos with the Post, and the many millions they are losing. That’s sad. But what did they expect? You don’t buy a newspaper expecting to make money. You buy a newspaper because you want influence. You are passionate, as Murdoch is, about pushing the country in a certain direction. You either learn to live with the losses or you find a way to cover them. To those who say it’s impossible, I point out that somehow, the rich men of the right have figured this out. And so Bezos, who has no discernible public passion, will probably tire of it all and sell someday—and maybe to David Smith, whose public passion is very discernible indeed. If you can’t imagine the Post as a right-wing rag, you’d better start smelling the coffee that’s been brewing for 20 years.

What will the result be 20 years from now? Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what Murdoch, Anschutz, Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.

Sometime this month, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron will decide how much Donald Trump should pay in penalties in the fraud case brought by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Engoron has already ruled that Trump did commit fraud, so now it’s just a matter of the money. Engoron has been decidedly unimpressed by Trump’s lawyers’ arguments throughout the proceeding, so it seems reasonable to think Engoron will come close to, match, or maybe even exceed James’s request of $370 million.

According to Lisa Rubin of MSNBC, speaking on Morning Joe Friday morning, the very theatricality of Trump and his attorneys’ denials can be a factor in the judge’s determination—that is, if Engoron determines that Trump and his lawyers’ lies are egregiously flamboyant and obvious, that can help dictate the penalty amount. Rubin predicted that the amount would be “in the hundreds of millions” of dollars and that perhaps Engoron would drop the nuclear penalty on Trump and his family—barring them from doing business in New York again.

Meanwhile, as Engoron is deliberating, another trial is about to begin. The E. Jean Carroll defamation trial will open next Tuesday, the day after the Iowa caucuses. Last year, a jury found that Trump had lied about not sexually abusing Carroll years ago, and awarded her $5 million. Trump appealed. Last summer, the judge in the case clarified, amid intense media debate and speculation, that Trump did in fact “rape” Carroll.

Meanwhile, on the political front, Trump will win Monday’s Iowa caucuses. The following Tuesday, January 23, New Hampshirites will go to the polls. One poll that got a ton of attention showed Nikki Haley within seven points of Trump. She has some momentum, but in the polling averages, Trump still has a double-digit lead. And he’ll be coming off a massive win in Iowa. So let’s say for the moment that Trump wins New Hampshire handily too.

The media narrative with respect to the Trump lawsuits will be what it has been, except on steroids: Trump’s legal woes only help him. That’s true with respect to Republican voters. But there are a lot of reasons to think that that piece of conventional wisdom will be dead wrong when it comes to other voters.

First of all, New Hampshire may well prove this point. Independents can vote in New Hampshire primaries and have a history of being cranky and unpredictable. Now let’s assume that Trump doesn’t win the Granite State handily—he wins it narrowly or maybe even loses. If that happens, Haley will be succeeding on the strength of those independent voters. And that will constitute a big and important switch that’s worth paying attention to.

In 2016, independents made up 42 percent of the electorate in the state’s GOP primary, and Trump cleaned up among them: He got 36 percent of the independent vote, while his closest competitor, John Kasich, got 18 percent.

If Trump loses independents in New Hampshire to Haley—even if he still wins overall—that will be a big sign that the Trump show isn’t playing well beyond the MAGA base. We’d have to wait until the results to see what these voters say about why they didn’t vote for Trump. But it’s hardly a stretch to think that Trump’s legal problems have to be part of the story.

The media aren’t paying attention to this at all. Case in point: Last week, there was a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll that got a lot of attention. In its write-up, the Post highlighted the fact that three years after January 6, Republicans were if anything more loyal to Trump, not less. The rest of the media largely followed that lead, so the story of that poll became yet another “Trump can get away with anything” story.

But other results from the poll that got a lot less attention told a different story. The survey asked people if the Justice Department, in charging Trump for insurrection, was holding him accountable as it would anyone else or was targeting him unfairly. A comfortable majority, 57 percent, said he was being treated fairly. That’s the exact percentage of independents who said the same, compared to 90 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of Republicans.

In other words: The Republican base, as is so often the case in these kinds of polls, is a total outlier that distorts the overall results. What does this tell us? I think it’s clear. As the primary “drama” winds down, and as the courtroom drama heats up—and both of these are likely to happen in early March—we’ll see the trials start to take more of a toll on Trump. If the Jack Smith insurrection trial proceeds as originally planned on March 4 (that’s now in abeyance pending resolution of a Trump appeal), Trump’s remaining and mathematically meaningless primary wins are going to get a lot less attention than what’s going on in that Washington courtroom.

Don’t buy the narrative that none of this hurts Trump. It will. He’s not being persecuted. He’s a scumbag who did lie about his property values, who did rape Carroll, who did lead an insurrection, who did take classified documents (he doesn’t dispute this—he just says he was allowed to do anything he pleased), and God knows what else. Republicans may not care. But I think real Americans do.

President Biden will give what they’re billing as the first speech of his reelection campaign today, and in it, he will attack Donald Trump by name as a historic threat to democracy. An aide told The Washington Post that Biden “is going to be very straightforward on what happened, the truth of what happened, and the role that Trump played in that.”

The speech will arrive, as we approach the third anniversary of the insurrection, in about as bleak a context as we could imagine. Trump leads Biden in most head-to-head polls, albeit just by a point or two. And Republicans are apparently rallying to Trump. A Post poll released earlier this week had some gob-smacking findings showing that Republicans are far less concerned about January 6 than they were right after it happened, and they weren’t very bothered then.

We’re in a surreal hall of mirrors. Trump keeps suffering legal defeat after legal defeat. He’s being tossed off state ballots. His lawyer all but admits he led an insurrection. A new House report details nearly $8 million he made from foreign governments while serving as president. And for now, none of it matters.

This campaign will be about a lot of things, as all campaigns are. But the main question will come down to this and this alone: Will a majority or plurality of Americans use their vote—that is, employ the peaceful means of democracy’s most essential right—to put a violent fascist back in charge of this country?

That the answer isn’t a clear “no” is terrifying. But here’s the thing. Some would argue that the fact that the answer isn’t a clear “no” means that Biden and Democrats shouldn’t emphasize the issue because it’s not a clear winner. I say the opposite is the case. Emphasize the issue and make it a winner. If polls today show that not enough people care about democracy, don’t just follow the polls. Change the polls. Make them care.

Republicans understand this dynamic and have for years. The classic recent example is the Iraq War. After the 9/11 attacks, no one outside a handful of neoconservatives thought they justified waging war on Iraq. But over the course of 2002, the Bush White House changed public opinion. They did it largely through lies, but they did it. By the time the United States invaded Iraq, majorities supported it.

Trump has changed polls too. Pre-Trump Republicans believed a lot of bad things, and I’m certainly not sugar-coating that GOP—which, after all, laid down and gave itself over to Trump. But they did still believe in the general integrity of the American electoral system. No one was urging Mitt Romney to dispute the 2012 election results. Romney conceded on election night (or very early Wednesday morning, technically), and everyone moved on. But by 2016, Trump was saying that he would respect the results “if I win.” And that was all it took. The polls, at least among Republicans, changed and changed dramatically.

Democrats historically don’t do this. When the polls are on their side—as when, for example, George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security in 2005—they’re as swashbuckling as Blackbeard. (That was one case where the GOP/right-wing media onslaught failed conspicuously to change the polls.) But when the polls aren’t on their side, they’re about as swashbuckling as Caspar Milquetoast.

If they want to make this democracy argument—and I think they’re right to do so—and if they want to win it—and they must—this habit has to change. They need to be mapping out a plan now that stage by stage will lay out an argument to voters (swing voters especially) that by Election Day will have them terrified at the prospect of Trump getting back into the White House. This can, and must, start with January 6. But then, by late spring say, and especially by the fall, the argument should be almost entirely about the future. Attack ad after attack ad simply need to take Trump’s own words, and the words of his people in leaks to media outlets, about how they’re going to impose authoritarianism in his second term. I would anticipate too that, by the fall, Trump will have said as much many times on the hustings, handing the Democrats fresh and irrefutable fodder.

Obviously there are other things the Democrats need to do. They are positioned to win millions of votes on the question of abortion rights. They have to press an economic argument the best they can, and as I wrote Monday, if some economic predictions are right, that could be less of a challenge than it seems like it will be today.

But there is a deep moral and ethical question at the center of this election unlike any other of my lifetime. Will Americans use the tools of democracy to hand their country to a democracy destroyer? They won’t if Democrats refuse to accept the “people don’t care about democracy” argument and make them care.