The Never Trump Moment Is Over. Does Harris Realize It?

This week, I’ve been having rude flashbacks to one of the dumbest and cringiest campaign decisions in recent memory. In the waning days of the 2021 gubernatorial race in Virginia, the folks at the Never Trump outfit the Lincoln Project inexplicably tried to do a stunt in which five of their members, cosplaying as tiki torch–carrying white supremacists, turned out as fake supporters of Glenn Youngkin at a Charlottesville campaign stop. It fooled nobody, and it went over about as well as dengue fever in a day care. Everyone involved should have been driven out of both the Commonwealth of Virginia and politics in general.

I am not going to attribute Terry McAuliffe’s eventual loss to these idiots. But I am going to let it stand as an example of how the Never Trump Republican set, especially those who plied their trade doing dark arts against Democrats for decades before being forced out of their own party, don’t have the greatest political instincts. It’s kind of axiomatic, really: If they did have good political instincts, there wouldn’t even be “Never Trump Republicans.” But now, instead of celebrating—I don’t know—President Marco Rubio’s Supreme Court and the way it gutted Roe and ended Chevron deference, they’re all looking at each other with hangdog faces, trying so hard to remember that they enthusiastically support Democrats now.

All of which brings us to Kamala Harris, who has recently taken the Never Trump Republican community unto her bosom, in an effort to pull mildly conservative fence-sitters into her camp with some light Dick and Liz Cheney slap and tickle. There is definitely defensible politics in this collaboration—and if you’ve any familiarity with the Democratic Party, you know that this is the traditional time for its great Pivot to the Center. But that pivot happened a while ago. And while I don’t think of this necessarily as a Faustian bargain, I am concerned that Harris might have taken this partnership too far.

Let me start by saying that there are things that don’t worry me about Harris’s embrace of supportive Republicans. Unlike your pissy friend on Twitter—or the progressive leaders who’ve recently fretted about the matter to the press—I’m not concerned about Harris voters getting demoralized or demobilized at the sight of Harris campaigning with Republicans. If you climbed aboard this campaign back in its gung-ho, good vibes days, there’s no logical reason to have jumped off the bandwagon. I’m certainly not mad that Dick Cheney is going to vote for Harris—I’ve been waiting for that gobshite to come around to my way of thinking for years, and he should keep right on shedding his wrong and dumb political ideas in favor of my smart and correct ones. As a general rule, you should never feel insecure about your political convictions if the worst person you know starts to agree with you, and anyone who’d tell you otherwise doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

Similarly, I’m not worried about Harris selling out anything significant on the domestic policy front. She actually looks a little better than Biden (who thought he had a duty to try to work with the GOP) and a lot better than Obama (who, under no real pressure, constantly angled to give away big New Deal entitlement programs to Republicans in return for nothing). I am slightly more worried that the Never Trumpers have had a malign influence on Harris’s foreign policy and immigration messaging, but this is leavened somewhat by the fact that Democrats are really bad on these issues all on their own. (Similarly, to the extent that Harris has worse economic ideas than Biden, I am convinced she comes by them honestly. Most Democrats simply don’t share Biden’s good and correct opinions on these issues!)

The far more pressing problem here is about political tactics, not policy, and especially so in Pennsylvania, where the “Liz Cheney and the Democracy Defense Avengers” pageantry is not resonating. And that might be putting it charitably: According to a fresh survey from the Center for Working-Class Politics, or CWCP, Harris’s “democracy threat” messaging is a huge dud: “the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.”

This is especially concerning because these voters are bucking an overall national trend: Recent polls have found that democracy is creeping back to the front of mind for most voters as a key issue. But if this election comes down to Pennsylvania, as it well might, Democrats may not be targeting the voters who will decide the race with the right rhetoric. As the CWCP’s Dustin Guastella puts it, “All of this suggests that the messaging pivot is a big mistake.”

It is true that the Never Trump Republican set are eager beavers. And their presence in Kamala’s camp helps to reach certain voters and assure them that Harris isn’t a Marxist. And as I noted last week, Harris’s associations with influential Republicans may help conservative election officials withstand the pressure that will inevitably come from Trump to commit election fraud.

But Never Trumpers are, strictly speaking, not Democrats. Nor do they have experience doing Democratic Party organizing or campaigning. And so they likely miss something essential: A lot of the non-MAGA diehards who have gravitated toward Trump over the years have done so because he has convinced them that he intends to shake up the status quo in Washington and take on the old plutocratic, warmongering GOP elite. Harris runs the risk of making Trump seem like a guy who’s going to break the shitty corrupt system that these Americans hate if she’s seen as too inextricably linked to the Cheneys, who may as well have their picture in the dictionary next to “shitty corrupt system.”

At this point, Harris is better off making the kind of arguments that the guys from the Lincoln Project don’t know how to make, and for which the Cheneys aren’t an avatar: Democrats have better policies and politics than the GOP. Democrats will replace Alito and Thomas with liberals who support abortion rights. Democrats will stop Trump from implementing a mass deportation scheme that will blow up the economy. Democrats will preserve Obamacare and Social Security. And the Democrats’ “enemies within” aren’t Haitians or trans people or the line producer at 60 Minutes—they’re corporate special interests and financial sector cheats who’ve been stealing your money. Democrats will run these dirty thieves to ground and crush them into pulp.

I don’t want to ride the Harris campaign too hard here. They ended up with a campaign that was awkwardly bootstrapped to a Biden reelection effort that barely launched, they’ve not shown a whit of complacency since grabbing the reins, and they have to operate in an unforgiving electoral environment where Republicans have a lot of room for error while Democrats have to be perfect. And however belatedly, a messaging shift does appear to be underway. This team has very nearly completed the political equivalent of drawing to an inside straight.

But like it or not, if Harris bottles this race at the end, it’s going to end up serving as a kind of referendum on a centrist style of Democratic politics that simply cannot, in 2024, afford to fail on its own terms. And should it fail, it will take the Never Trump Republicans down with it. So perhaps here in the final act, it’s time for a parting of the ways. The Never Trump set should perhaps do the thing they should have done a better job at when Trump first emerged: tend to their knitting. Let them get their souls to the polls and quietly convince any remaining persuadable voters to disembark the Trump train. And let Harris be what she needs to be: a person who typically champions the kinds of things Never Trump Republicans hate, running against a guy who isn’t really all that different from the politicians they have historically supported.

This article was adapted from Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Last week, on these pages, I went into some detail about big issues that Vice President Kamala Harris needed to incorporate into her closing argument, lest she miss opportunities to draw important attention to—and contrasts with—what a second Trump term would mean for America. Since then, I’ve realized I missed an opportunity of my own. As a rather relentless assault of political news reminded me, beyond his bad policies and ideas, Trump is a uniquely dangerous threat to our democracy. It’s not a matter that should go unmentioned for too long.

Fortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to need urging from me to take up this matter. In her most recent work on the stump, she’s gone to great lengths to raise the salience of the danger that Trump poses. What’s more, she’s making her case in a way that gets media attention and appeals to wide swaths of the electorate—and she’s making her democracy case at a moment when the public seems ready to hear it. The approach she’s taking is some of her best strategic output since her debate.

Trump’s been giving her a lot of material to work with lately. His most recent stump speeches have been nearly undiluted herrenvolk pornography, flamboyant arias against migrants and other “enemies within,” coupled with some of the most despotic ideas he’s ever mused about, including invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to dispose of his political enemies. (His former secretary of defense has urged people to take Trump seriously in this regard.) These recent appearances have been so disturbing that his Monday rally in which he slipped into a fugue and swayed to music for a half an hour seemed to be a nice break from relentless invocations to political violence and oblique threats to political rivals.

Far from letting Trump slide, Harris has been making Trump’s recent rants the centerpiece of her campaign appearances. On Wednesday, Harris appeared at a rally in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with former GOP Representatives Adam Kinzinger and Barbara Comstock and a slew of other Never Trump Republicans, and made a speech about protecting our constitutional values. She wove in recent news—Trump’s aforementioned plans to punish his political enemies; General Mark Milley’s warning that the former president was “fascist to the core”—in an effort to make these stakes clear: “He considers any American who doesn’t support him or bend to his will to be an enemy to our country.… He says that as commander in chief he would use our military to go after them. Honestly, let that sink in: Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged.”

As NPR noted, this turn from Harris is part of a larger effort to “appeal to moderate Republicans and independent voters,” which may cause some consternation to those who’d prefer she center her rhetorical efforts toward left-liberal audiences. But Harris’s overtures to center-right fence-sitters aren’t the bipartisan triangulations of yesteryear. Harris isn’t Biden, making impossible promises to lead GOP electeds back off the QAnon cliff, and she’s certainly not following Barack Obama into the Grand Bargain weeds. 

Harris needs moderate suburbanites to climb on board with her. The Democrats have a rough Senate map, so Harris has to run in a way that might help save Montana Senator Jon Tester’s job. But this outreach is all about democracy as well: Some of the Republicans Harris might reach are conservative election officials who haven’t drunk the Trump Kool-Aid, for whom a little bit of assurance might help them steel themselves against the pressure to commit ballot jankery. At any rate, if the terms of our détente with moderate Republicans is that we all agree a dangerous caudillo shouldn’t be president, these are perhaps the most favorable-to-the-left negotiations in recent memory. At any rate, I’d rather spend the next four years having policy arguments with a too-centrist Kamala Harris than being rooted out as an “enemy of the people.”

Harris doesn’t just save this rhetoric for the Never Trump set, however. This is but a part of a recent push to make these arguments in front of rallygoers of all stripes, often by doing little more than standing out of the way and letting Trump speak for himself. As NPR reported on a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris showed attendees a 30-second mastercut of Trump’s recent public derangements—a montage that “showed Trump repeatedly complaining about ‘the enemy from within’ suggesting they should be jailed—or dealt with violently.”  

By showing rallygoers videos of Trump’s demented ravings, Harris is buying herself more coverage of Trump at his worst. The key difference here is that rather than just sit back and hope that the political press might decide to cover Trump as a dangerous, blathering loon, she’s giving them what they really want: a big ol’ partisan slapfest to cover. 

Stunting on Trump in this fashion meets a media that’s eternally horned up for conflict and controversy where they live, increasing the odds that the wild, authoritarian fantasia Trump’s been spinning on the stump gets more daily coverage. It’s also something of a twofer, because in addition to all the vile racism and violent musings, you’re also wrapping in Trump’s visible infirmities in forming complete sentences and following a conversation. 

It also advantages Harris if Trump takes more questions about the crazy things he says. The fallout from Trump’s invocation of using the law to pursue and punish “enemies within” has been considerably worse for Trump now that Harris is drawing attention to it. In the first place, when Trump’s been pressured to be more specific about who he means by “enemies within,” he’s included well-known Democratic politicians like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, which probably sounds great if you attended a Nazi boat parade for Trump in recent days; less so if you’re a moderate voter with normie tastes. 

It’s also clear that this coverage is annoying Trump as well: At Wednesday’s Fox town hall event (in which Trump was peppered with questions from an audience of what seemed to be Republican organizers cosplaying as undecided voters), Trump was asked about his recent “enemy from within” remarks, and he offered a petulant response. “You know what they are,” he groused about the Democrats complaining about his rhetoric. “They’re a party of sound bites.” The man truly does not like having his own words read back to him. But it’s an easy way to bait him—and as Harris demonstrated during the debate, baiting Trump is a time-tested way to throw him off his game.

The shift Harris is making here is a laudable break with a bad dynamic that Democrats get into with the media. Far too often, Democrats expect the media to take the lead on pointing out that Trump is a psychopath, in order to demonstrate the fourth estate’s commitment to democracy. The media, meanwhile, expects Democrats to take the lead on policing Trump’s lies because, to their mind, it’s the best way to demonstrate their mettle as politicians. It’s arguable that this arrangement consigns all parties to the job for which they’re least well-suited. More to the point, Democrats will probably witness the heat death of the universe before the mass media develops the sort of patriotic impulses that would lead it to save democracy of its own volition. 

It’s better to make good use of the small-minded, shiny object–obsessed political press that we have and feed them the birdseed they want—chaos, controversy, and cheap conflict—than pretend that this industry is going to have some kind of nick-of-time civic awakening. The only way the media will cover Trump as an enemy to democracy is for Harris and her fellow Democrats to make a daily habit of serving up broadsides on the topic. If Democrats have figured this out, it’s a consequential step that could decide the election in their favor.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Our exhausting permanent presidential campaigns eventually lead us to this point: less than one month to go, the home stretch, the closing argument. It’s taken a lot for Democrats to reach this point with a real shot at actually winning the presidency, but it will still be a white-knuckle affair. For Kamala Harris, the polling is good, and rather steady, but not great. Donald Trump, despite having spent the past few weeks defaming innocent Haitian Americans and spreading untold lies about hurricane recovery efforts, is still very close to winning himself.

Is Harris doing enough to beat him at the finish line? I’m not so sure. As The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote this week, Harris is making something of a too-close-for-comfort retread of her first, failed presidential run. Harris has arrived at this point too guarded and overcautious, he argues, with too many edges sanded off and what seems like a different policy walk-back every day. “With Election Day fast approaching,” Alex writes, “there’s a growing sense that she could—and should—be doing more.”

But what “more” should she be doing? My two cents: Harris needs to drill down on specific matters that help define her candidacy, contrast it with the corrupt impunity that a second Trump term will bring, and cast the widest possible net to woo any or all voters who might join her coalition. Specifically, here are three matters critical enough to be part of any closing argument that Harris and her Democratic allies make in these final days:

1. I know that I’m a broken record on this, but Democrats really need to raise the salience of the Supreme Court. Everyone committed to a Harris victory should make it clear that there are two Supreme Court vacancies at stake: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito may not be signaling a desire to retire from the bench, but a Trump win gives them the option to escape, knowing that like-minded replacements will be on their way. And while it might be difficult to find juridical minds more troglodytic than the two most venerable members of the conservative majority, you can definitely find younger bodies into which their ideas might be stuffed.

This is honestly the alpha and omega of anything Democrats might otherwise argue. Right now, with the current majority having gutted Chevron deference, anything that might be considered a “Democratic policy” is subject to the review of a hostile court that’s making up the rules as they go along. It’s possible that Democrats don’t really understand how bad a position they’re in now that Loper Bright is the law of the land. They should listen to the judicial experts in their corner—or get some new ones. Regardless, “Two Supreme Court vacancies are at stake in this election” needs to become a mantra.

2. As I predicted some months ago, 2024 has become a year defined by Republicans largely lying about their unpopular positions on abortion rights. They will, of course, seek to ban nationally as soon as the opportunity presents itself (before moving on to other retrograde policies from Project 2025’s pages). Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have in recent weeks gone all in on the centerpiece of their deception, constantly reiterating that Trump will veto any abortion ban that crosses his desk. While it’s ordinarily sufficient to point out that Trump cannot be trusted and that Harris and her fellow Democrats have more convincingly committed themselves to safeguarding reproductive rights, Harris and her allies must do a better job explaining how Republicans actually plan to bring about a national abortion ban if Trump is elected.

As The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant points out, such a ban is not going to arrive in the form of a bill landing on Trump’s desk; Congress need not be involved at all.

What Trump might do—what his allies want him to do—is enact a ban by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which can’t be vetoed since it’s already on the books. Trump’s misdirection distracts from his consistent anti-abortion record while in office, what the Republican Party platform states, and the very public plans of his former staffers detailed in Project 2025, which Trump also pretends he has nothing to do with. That is part of the Trump-Vance campaign’s plan on abortion: to do whatever they can not to talk about that plan, or at least to confuse the public about what that plan is.

This is a strong issue for Harris, which is all the more reason not to fight this battle on Trump’s terms but to actually level with people about what he intends to do. In their two debate performances, the Harris-Walz ticket failed to make mention of Comstock, despite the fact that Vance actually asked the DOJ to enforce it in a January 2023 letter. This needs to change: Democrats have the truth on their side, and it’s stupid to not use it against an inveterate liar, dissembling on an issue of paramount importance.

3. If abortion is one of the Democratic Party’s best issues, then immigration has to be one of their worst. As I noted a few weeks ago, any hope that we might return to sane comprehensive immigration reform policies has been scotched after the Biden administration entered into a race to the bottom with the GOP’s nativist cranks. The biggest overhang of Trump’s first term is that he managed to set the terms on immigration and yank Democrats to the right. He’s also managed to drag public opinion in his direction. A September 18 Ipsos poll found that there is majority support for some form of mass deportation—a policy Trump plans to deliver.

Democrats haven’t exactly met Trump’s demonization of Haitian Americans with a full-throated defense of these citizens, and it’s not clear that Harris has the stomach for that sort of entanglement. There’s too little daylight between Trump and Harris on immigration, but his plan to exile tens of millions of Americans is the centerpiece of his campaign, so Democrats should attack it with gusto. Fortunately they have another angle to wage war: Correctly depict Trump’s plan as a neutron bomb on the American economy.

As The New Republic contributor Nicholas Slayton reported this week, a recent report from the American Immigration Council found that Trump’s plan would unleash a parade of economic horrors, including estimated GDP losses between 4.2 and 6.8 percent, a $46.8 billion hole in federal coffers, corresponding state and local revenue losses in excess of $29 billion, and “significant labor shocks across multiple key industries, with especially acute impacts on construction, agriculture, and the hospitality sector.” These aftershocks would all create an environment in which “hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born workers could lose their jobs.”

Plus, the total cost to taxpayers just to implement this plan to destroy the U.S. economy would be in the vicinity of $315 billion (a figure the AIC says is “highly conservative”), which would give Democrats the chance to ask Trump the question so often chucked in their direction: “But how will you pay for it?”

It’s not ideal that Harris has been a risk-averse politician—and I personally wish she was more like Biden on economic matters. But these faults are things we can all fight about later down the line. Harris needs to end this election making the arguments necessary to put the Trump epoch behind us. These three areas give Harris broadly appealing arguments to make and clear contrasts to raise, forcing Trump to defend the MAGA extremism that now dictates much of our everyday lives.

Best of all, these aren’t the kind of risky stances from which Harris has heretofore shied away. This is normie bait: good for the broad Democratic coalition, salient to swayable Republican voters, and relevant to habitual nonvoters that both campaigns hope to get off the fence. Winning in November may boil down to a few big contrasts that will define the future—and whether or not Democrats can speak with one voice about why their version of the future is preferable.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

This week, members of both houses of Congress came together, in bipartisan fashion, to accomplish the one thing they’ve been consistently excellent at in recent years: giving one another long vacations away from Washington. This time, lawmakers will adjourn knowing that by their mid-November return, they will resume their duties in a much-changed world: Either former President Donald Trump will have been reelected or former President Donald Trump will be conspiring with Republicans to overturn Vice President Kamala Harris’s election.

The extent to which this all might weigh heavily on the minds of Harris’s congressional allies is not something that I know for certain. That said, it is conspicuous enough that House Democrats spent part of their last week staging a hearing on Project 2025, the elaborate manifesto that purports to be Trump’s second-term agenda, which the former president has, in unconvincing fashion, attempted to disavow. It’s not hard to see why: Democrats successfully pushed Project 2025 into the zeitgeist and poisoned public opinion against it.

All of which might raise the question: Why fight a war you’ve already won? Well, sometimes you just gotta play the hits, I suppose. While Democrats weren’t exactly breaking new ground in their presentation (which paid substantial homage to the multimedia gloss used by the January 6 select committee), TNR’s Grace Segers took note of a new trick that Democrats pulled from their sleeve during the hearing: an effort to “put human faces to what they saw as the most objectionable of Project 2025’s proposals.”

The presentation on Tuesday included testimony from a woman who needed to travel out of her home state of Wisconsin to obtain an abortion, an autoworker from Michigan who spoke about the agenda’s anti-union provisions, and a Virginia woman who relies on Medicare to obtain insulin. It focused specifically on abortion, the economy, and Social Security and Medicare access—topics that are among the most important for American voters.

For a party that I think too often gets caught in the weeds of airy principles and highfalutin paeans to Washington norms, I think this is a welcome shift in tactics. It’s a good sign that Democrats are following an instinct to put flesh and blood on the bones of their case against Trump and to tell real-life stories about the potential mayhem of a future Trump presidency. (TNR contributor Nina Burleigh recently hosted a panel discussion devoted to these insidious plans.) It’s rhetoric that fits Harris’s prosecutorial skills, and it fills in an important blank space: If the next few weeks of this campaign are to be a prosecution of Trump, that case will need plaintiffs—the realer the better.

It’s an auspicious time for such storytelling, as it seems that stories of the real people harmed by the GOP’s designs have recently blossomed across the news cycle. Last week, ProPublica’s Kavitha Surana named two women who lost their lives due to Georgia’s abortion ban. Harris immediately made avenging their deaths part of her campaign. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down,” she told reporters.

Harris has established firm footing on the issue of reproductive rights. Like the attention given to Project 2025, hers is the more popular position, and she’d be well advised to keep finding stories to tell about the dangers of the post-Dobbs world. That said, I’ve argued that the campaign needs to expand its palette to include other patches of what should be favorable terrain, such as Trump’s plan to purge the federal workforce and restore a corrupt spoils system, and the Supreme Court’s attack on liberal governance by gutting Chevron deference in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, without which most of the policies Harris might propose in office won’t survive.

As it happens, reporters have lately endeavored to put some human faces on these complicated matters as well. Over at The Washington Post, author Michael Lewis has been turned loose to curate a series of stories on the men and women of the federal workforce, which Trump wants to transform into an instrument of his revenge and self-enrichment. As TNR’s Tim Noah notes, this is a welcome shift from a paper that’s too often given the civil service short shrift. Meanwhile, over at ProPublica, Eli Sanders draws back the curtain on the people who’ve already been harmed by the Loper Bright decision, confirming the fears of the dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, who warned that the ruling would lead to “large scale disruption.”

This might be the most critical time for Harris and her allies to make use of this considerable fodder and start weaving stories of the people who stand to lose in a second Trump term. Stories that come attached to human faces are more potent and palatable to the media than those attached to intangible arguments about norms and principles: The lives of actual people are more easily transformed into the controversy and conflict that the political press craves. (It’s for this reason that it’s maddening that the Harris campaign hasn’t made a stirring defense of the Haitian community who have so recently borne the brunt of Trump’s attacks, and who live as a febrile example of what his mass deportation plan will be like. This is something that Harris should correct with all due haste.)

I still think that Harris and her fellow Democrats shouldn’t skimp on another rhetorical priority: looking toward the future for which she’ll ostensibly be fighting if elected; this too can be decorated with human faces. And with Congress out, it’s hard to know what platform these important allies will use to mount a case in the media. But it’s nice to see Democrats develop a taste for the kind of storytelling on display at this week’s Project 2025 hearings. There’s magic in having a bit of the old human touch. This election won’t be won with white papers, websites, or wonkery. Victory in November will be claimed by whoever makes the best use of stark moral tones and the real-live stakes faced by real-live people. It will be won by whoever best manifests the joy of helping our neighbors, the satisfaction of crushing their enemies.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

If Donald Trump has a singular policy proposal that he’s planning on implementing upon his return to Washington, it’s probably his bruising and “bloody” mass deportation of tens of millions of people from the United States. Kamala Harris understands that what Trump is proposing is frightening, darkly warning on Wednesday that the plan could herald massive raids and deportation camps. But even as she takes this message to voters, her own position on immigration is, as The New York Times characterizes it, “a balancing act.” It’s important to identify what, precisely, she’s trying to balance, though: on the one hand a desire to appeal to immigration restrictionists and on the other a moral imperative to treat migrants fairly and humanely.

It’s an odd situation for Democrats to be in, considering that draconian immigration policies are Trump’s bread and butter—to say nothing of his habitual demonization of migrants and immigrants. If something in the Democratic response seems to be sputtering, however, that’s probably indicative of a sad reality: One of Trump’s big political successes was his dismantling of the polite Beltway consensus on immigration reform and taking public opinion with him.

If Trump implements his mass deportation scheme, it would be perilous for just about everyone. As the Washington Monthly’s Robert Shapiro reported last May, the proposal would be economically calamitous—damaging to key industries and certain to “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation.” But Shapiro points to something else beyond the economy that seems like it might leave a deeper wound: “MAGA attacks on immigration also draw on common fallacies and reckless misrepresentations. For example, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have deep ties to their communities and the country.”

This is the heart of the matter: a plan to harm both immigrants and the communities that have taken them in. If you’d like to get a feel for what it looks like when Trump is carving up the U.S. population, one need only look to Springfield, Ohio, which has become a microcosmic example of the former president’s larger design. There we’ve seen the Trump-Vance campaign concoct and stoke lies, for the purpose of putting a town on edge and fomenting mass paranoia and the tormenting of the Haitian community, who settled within the city limits on the promise of well-paying jobs and helped revive their town. Trump’s efforts have led to the bullying of these immigrants and chaos throughout the community, with leaders futilely trying to stem the tide of the campaign’s meretricious lies while contending with bomb threats and other violence.

Haitians are the epitome of a vulnerable group, having arrived here after “fleeing a series of disasters, both natural and man-made, many of them exacerbated or caused by the government and industries of the U.S.,” as TNR contributor Jonathan Katz wrote this week. The way the Haitians of Springfield have been depicted by Trump and his MAGA allies is especially grotesque, and might be more than mere campaign trail politicking: Engendering public animus toward immigrants is a soft launch of sorts for Trump’s mass deportation project—which, as Mother Jones’ Isabela Dias reports, is going to target not only undocumented migrants but legal ones too.

The Haitians facing Trump’s slings and arrows could use a champion. So far, however, Harris hasn’t exactly been their fire-spitting defender. In their debate, Harris passed on an opportunity to take Trump to task for his racist attacks on Haitian Americans, offering only a throwaway comment (“Talk about extreme”) before pivoting; a second chance to assail his deportation plan more specifically ended with Harris roasting Trump for the criminal charges he’s racked up since leaving office. More recently, at a National Association of Black Journalists confab, Harris expressed support for the larger Springfield “community” without actually naming the segment of that community who are facing the full force of her opponent’s cruelties.

None of this is likely demonstrative of some personal animus that Harris holds toward Haitians in general—though her omission does recall an incident from the 2020 campaign in which the Haitian American community in Miami was left feeling slighted by a Harris campaign visit. It’s more in keeping with a deep skittishness that has permeated the campaign, most likely through the advisers she’s inherited from Biden. But it’s also a timidity that elite Democrats all seem to share on the issue. I was never very confident that Trump’s ouster was going to catalyze much of a reversal on Trump’s immigration policy. As reporters like TNR contributor Felipe De La Hoz have continually reported during its tenure, the Biden administration has been disappointingly predictable.

As Axios reports, the progressives who want a clean break with Trump’s immigration designs are hoping that Harris’s recent hawkish stance is a temporary measure, born out of (an assumed) necessity of the campaign trail. It’s hard to fathom from where they derive this hope. Democrats haven’t exactly blazed a path away from Trumpism. Harris herself is still taunting the GOP for following Trump’s orders to kill the Biden-favored immigration bill that, had it been enacted, would have left these hopeful progressives bereft.

And as Washington bends in the direction of more draconian immigration policies, the public seems to have become more cemented on Trump’s side of the issue. According to a September 18 Ipsos poll, more respondents “believe former President Donald Trump would do a better job handling immigration than Vice President Kamala Harris, and Americans broadly do not understand what Harris’ role is, related to immigration.” And while “most support giving a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children,” there is also majority support for some form of “mass deportation.”

It’s amazing how things change in such a short amount of time. During the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans took comprehensive immigration reform seriously and tried to find common ground to create a more sensible, secure, and decent way of admitting people into this country. When Mitt Romney pledged to lead a wave of voluntary self-deportation, his proclamation was considered harsh and embarrassing—the fumbling attempts of a dyed-in-the-wool technocrat courting the fringe. Now Trump wants to banish tens of millions of immigrants, including an untold number of legal citizens, and it’s raising surprisingly few hackles.

There is obvious comfort to be taken in the fact that Harris doesn’t share these extreme views and—I think!—doesn’t share Trump’s love of disappearing a huge portion of the populace. But Trump has drastically shifted the Overton window, and Democrats have done almost nothing to arrest it. The aspirations of comprehensive immigration reformers seem all but dead, and the future of humane immigration policies is bleak indeed. We might as well say it, if only because admitting we have a problem is the necessary first step in solving it: Trump won.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

It’s pretty rare for the Columbia Journalism Review and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to be dishing on the same topic. But media critics touched a nerve this week with accusations that the political press suffers from a “coherence bias,” particularly as it relates to Donald Trump: the tendency of reporters and editors to take his verbal diarrhea and transform it, through the magic of elision and omission, into statesmanship. TNR contributor Parker Molloy has an even better word for this practice: “sanewashing.”

That this discussion arose in the days leading up to the presidential debate was to the benefit of those tuning in. It likely primed the pump for some of the real-time fact-checking of those moments when Trump seemed to be completely gacked up on whoop chicken, such as his contention that Democrats support “post-birth abortions” and that immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating pets. But if there’s an agreement to be had on sanewashing, then let it serve as a springboard for a larger and more important conversation: whether the political media’s grasp of policy is truly commensurate with its constant demand for it.

Recent attempts in the mainstream media to understand and explain wonky matters have been embarrassing failures—a dereliction that shares strands of DNA with its tendency to tidy up Trump’s constant barrage of nonsense. A prime example can be found in one of the stories that provoked the sanewashing conversation: the Associated Press’s recap of Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of New York last week, in which he offered up several paragraphs of word salad in lieu of a discussion of child poverty. The straight story of what happened was a naggingly simple one: Trump dodged a question about child poverty in order to pivot to what he wanted to talk about—tariffs—and shoehorn in his preferred talking points. He did this less artfully than many politicians, but it would have been sufficient to simply say he did not bother to answer the question he was asked.

But the AP didn’t opt for the straight story, and instead constructed a world rivaling George R.R. Martin. In the AP’s version of cloud-cuckoo-land, Trump explicated an innovative idea, in which the proceeds from our trade wars would facilitate bountiful childcare benefits … somehow. It’s bad enough that the AP did all this heavy lifting just to make it appear that Trump used complete English-language sentences in a speech. But considerably more effort was expended here to convert several minutes of sundowner gobbledygook into an allegedly earnest policy proposal. To get there, these reporters had to ignore a vast amount of information and experience, including knowledge of the policies that Republicans have actually supported and the informed opinions of actual experts.

The reality is that what will happen in Trump’s second term looks more like this: These tariffs get applied. American consumers pay more money for goods. The money goes into federal coffers. And the GOP passes (and Trump signs) budget packages that include massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, alongside massive cuts to funding for social services.

Could that money have paid for childcare? Sure! It could have gone to baking the world’s largest funnel cake! But in our actual reality, the GOP is adamantly, philosophically opposed to providing government assistance to the people who need relief the most, thus rendering meaningless whatever benefits Trump thinks all of his alleged “big numbers” might provide. This kind of forthright, accurate analysis was available had anyone at the AP understood tariffs at the same level of intellectual heft as the Twitter menswear guy.

This is only the latest example of the vast delta in the political press between acquiring policy information and understanding that information. The signature policy goal of the next Trump administration, to hear reporters tell it, is the facilitation of a massive deportation plan that would evict tens of millions of people from the country. One question that could be asked here (because it’s the first question put to any Democratic policy proposal) would be, “How will you pay for it?” Literally where does the funding to spin up this effort come from? How do you plan to get the United States out of the deep recession that would occur as a result of this population extraction? (If Trump’s answer is, “I’m doing tariffs,” maybe remind him that those proceeds were already earmarked to fix child poverty.)

So it was very weird when—with all these unasked urgent questions—a recent New York Times story portrayed his nigh-on unworkable plan as a linchpin in a proposal to ameliorate the affordable housing crisis: “Harris and Trump both have plans to address America’s affordable housing crisis,” the story originally read. “Hers include tax cuts and a benefit for first-time buyers, and his include deportations and lower interest rates.” (The story was later stealth-edited to massage these sentences out of existence.)

The original contention of the piece was to portray economists as equally skeptical of both candidates’ housing proposals. But here, the entire idea that a mass deportation plan would play a role comes bull-rushing into the discussion without warning and without any explanation of how it would work. Would low-income Americans be literally moved into the domiciles of freshly evicted immigrants? No one knows, and no one can say! (And to be honest, “economists” would probably be even more keen to find out how Trump’s plan to issue massive tax cuts for the wealthy—and the ballooning deficits that would follow—would somehow lead to lower interest rates. The Times just takes it on faith that Trump will somehow magically summon them from the economic wreckage of his grand design.)

That so much falls by the wayside in covering Trump’s policy proposals might be somewhat acceptable if this lackadaisical approach was consistently applied across the board, but this hasn’t been the case. I am sympathetic to journalists, from campaign reporters to The New Republic’s Alex Shephard, who think Kamala Harris ought to put more meat on the bone in terms of policy, but we should be at least as demanding that Trump answer the “How?” and “WTF?” questions that his ideas engender.

What’s very clearly emerged from recent weeks of campaign trail coverage is a rather glaring disparity. On one hand, we have an eminently defensible drive to get Harris to pony up more details of what she wants to do as president, and real scrutiny being paid to how much her policy preferences have shifted in the past five years. On the other hand, we have reporters dutifully filling in Trump’s blanks, excusing his psychopathic edges, and inventing weird cause-and-effect chains that purport to explain how his ideas work. I’m glad that the press is taking Trump both literally and seriously, but no one can look seriously at the literal details of his “proposals” and conclude they make any sense. To pretend otherwise is to write fiction, not journalism.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Just when Donald Trump thought he had put his latest weird controversy behind him, the son of the late Senator John McCain dragged it back into the news. This week, Jimmy McCain, who followed his father into military service, announced that he was all in for Kamala Harris, going so far as to register as a Democrat for the upcoming election. The catalyzing event for McCain was a scandal that made huge news last week: the Trump campaign’s bizarre attempt at a publicity stunt at Arlington National Cemetery on August 26, which ended in an altercation between members of his campaign staff and an official at the cemetery, who attempted to enforce a rule barring cameras in one section of the grounds.

The fracas spurred a weeklong festival of potshots, recriminations, and—as with all things Trump—the specter of political violence, as the official who ran afoul of Trump’s campaign thugs was left fearful of retaliation. It was all too much for McCain fils, who referred to the Trump team’s actions as a “violation.” As true as that may be, the whole hullabaloo is also quintessential Trump—and perhaps the best example of how he will rule in a second term: as a bully, bent on pushing around, publicly maligning, and punishing those who earn their living in public service.

This is no mere supposition on my part. It’s no secret that Trump and his GOP allies plan to radically reconceive the federal workforce into an engine of personal gain and retribution. Indeed, it was a latter-day plan of Trump’s first term that never ended up coming to fruition: In October of 2020, he issued an executive order that would have recategorized a wide swath of the civil service under something called “Schedule F,” giving Trump broad leeway to apply political loyalty tests to executive branch employees and fire those who could not pass them.

Trump was unable to fully implement this design, and President Joe Biden was swift to rescind the order upon taking office. But Trump and his allies—notably the far-right weirdos of the Peter Thiel Extended Universe, which includes vice presidential hopeful J.D. Vance—dream of purging the federal government of anyone who isn’t a true MAGA believer and bringing back a souped-up spoils system that would transform the government into an engine of retribution.

Trump learned during his first term that the federal workforce was often a de facto blockade against his corrupt designs, simply because throughout its ranks are people who follow the rules. And while purging this workforce of its dedicated lifers and replacing them with cronies and trolls won’t make the civil service smarter or more efficient, it will reduce resistance to unlawful orders and create opportunities for corruption. Currently, federal employees are protected if they refuse unlawful orders. Trump wants to change that, so that the massive federal workforce might be transformed into the fist of an authoritarian president.

In particular, attorneys are a big focus of Trump’s plans, because these are the referees who tell government managers and political leaders which potential actions are either illegal or unauthorized. If these civil servants are dispensed with and replaced with flunkies, not only will there be no one left to slow a corrupt administration’s plots and schemes; the American people will lose vital advocates, sworn to uphold the Constitution. These will be replaced by revenge-minded vipers, with loyalty only to Trump, his financial interests, and his lust for revenge.

The potential for mayhem if Trump gets his way with the federal workforce is boundless. As I previously wrote:

Democrats might find their Social Security or veterans’ benefits delayed or denied. They might no longer be able to obtain passports. Emergency disaster aid might flow only to those deemed loyal to the administration. Corporations that refuse to pay tribute might be punished. Transform the civil service from an open hand to a closed fist, and things get very frightening very quickly.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to see how last week’s incident at Arlington National Cemetery might have gone down under a Trump presidency. With Biden in office, rules and norms were respected, and officials at the U.S Army had a free hand to support the woman who tried to stop Trump’s team from filming in a restricted area, saying publicly that “her professionalism was unfairly attacked.” If Trump returns to office, those same officials would be risking their livelihoods for trying to uphold the law against a Trump ally—or be promoted for letting them break the law.

Trump’s plans for the federal bureaucracy have received some mainstream attention, but they’ve not jumped into the public psyche yet, despite—or perhaps because of—the pure comic-book villainy of the scheme. But there’s a lesson for Democrats here: Harris and her allies were successful in popularizing Trump’s association with Project 2025—and his faltering attempts to distance himself from it—through a literal and figurative “billboard-size” campaign. These efforts paid off handsomely.

Can Democrats repeat this success? Trump’s plans to weaponize the government are cut from the same antisocial cloth. Its proponents fit squarely within the “weird” frame that Democrats used throughout the summer. “Schedule F” has a similarly ominous name. And most importantly, these are plans that Trump and his fellow Republicans openly discuss, and which they’ve already tried to implement once. The explosive incident at Arlington Cemetery is a fitting way to illustrate the larger malevolence of Trump’s designs and get people to recognize the same thing that Jimmy McCain saw this week—that it was disqualifying.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

With the party vibes at the Democratic National Convention fading, and attention turning to the ragged ten-week sprint to November, the punditocracy seems ready to declare an end to Kamala Harris’s honeymoon. Where, everyone wants to know, are her policy positions? The notion that she has none has been overstated, but this is indeed the moment where a campaign, after all the convention’s frippery, is expected to put some meat on the bone. And given that Harris has lately retreated from bold positions she once took on a range of issues, she will be “expected to … explain the differences between her 2019 primary campaign agenda and her more limited ambitions as the Democratic nominee in 2024,” as Brian Beutler notes in his Off Message newsletter.

I’m curious about this as well—and since I labor at a journal of ideas, I’d certainly prefer the next phase of the conversation to veer in the direction of policy. But if you want to know the biggest difference between 2019 and now, I would urge you to consider the dark shadow that hangs over everything: the Supreme Court’s conservative majority’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

That ruling, which overturned a doctrine called “Chevron deference,” puts the future of any policy that Harris favors in grave doubt. If you want the Harris campaign to get more detailed on policy, I’m sorry to say that any conversation starts and ends with how they plan to confront a Supreme Court that has torched the separation of powers in the mad game of Calvinball they kicked off during the Trump era.

The gutting of Chevron deference is not something that the smooth-brained masses of the political media adequately understood when it came down. Chevron deference is essentially the doctrine that allows government agencies to respond nimbly to their congressional mandates; hitherto, the judiciary stayed out of the way, allowing executive branch personnel to use their expertise to interpret ambiguous regulations. Imagine, for example, the technological advancements that have occurred since landmark environmental legislation was passed decades ago. The EPA, given free rein to adapt to this changing landscape, can move more fleetly to remediate pollution thanks to Chevron. The Roberts court, instead, imagines a world where they have to return to Congress each time there is an emergency, to get specific guidance.

The best way of describing what the conservative majority did is to say it gave six unelected right-wing politicians who all enjoy a lifetime appointment a line-item veto over anything a Democratic Congress—and by extension Harris—wants to do, unless they can muster the votes to confront each problem they want to solve with an inhuman amount of hyper-specificity. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser has explained, if the executive branch “can’t regulate without getting permission from a Republican judiciary … then conservatives no longer need to worry about Democratic presidents doing much of anything that doesn’t meet the GOP’s approval.”

Judicial malefactors have already cited Loper Bright to challenge President Joe Biden’s policies and pilfer money from the pockets of ordinary people. The way this ruling potentially hamstrings the ability of the federal government to protect ordinary people from a myriad of harms means this is a Supreme Court decision that will come with a running tally of costs to taxpayers—and, most likely, a body count.

The Supreme Court really is the most critical policy issue in this election. The Trump-installed majority is central to what the right plans for a second Trump term. Beyond the fact that the Roberts court’s ruling in Trump v. United States imbues the chief executive with monarchic levels of unaccountability—a dangerous privilege for, frankly, any president to possess—Project 2025, which is best understood as a massive rollback of individual rights, is something that Republicans simply could never contemplate without their super-legislature in black robes.

Here, vaporizing Chevron has an asymmetric impact on the ambitions of the two parties. The GOP, having retreated from any part of the policy realm besides Project 2025’s infernal schemes, the furnishing of tax cuts to plutocrats, and deregulating everything under the sun (also a form of wealth transfer to plutocrats), need not worry about Chevron being in effect anymore.

But what makes Chevron crucial to this campaign is that the sledding for Democrats remains rough even if they prevail in November. Indeed, even if they blow the GOP out of the water electorally, the end of Chevron deference is a fail-safe against Democratic policy, constantly running in the background as long as five of the six conservatives on the Roberts court agree. In this way, Harris and her fellow Democrats are locked out of liberal governance. Since liberal governance will form the cornerstone of anything Harris and Democrats want to do during her time in office, a confrontation with a Supreme Court that’s holding the policymaking apparatus hostage is not a fight they can duck.

All Democrats need to join in this fight, and constantly raise the salience of the Supreme Court and its attendant corruption. It would be a good idea for any policy discussion to note that the Roberts court is the primary antagonist to making things better, easier, safer, and fairer for ordinary Americans; they are despoilers of the land and pilferers of our wealth. Harris should continually remind voters that turning things around will require a Democratic president to be on hand to appoint any replacements that may be needed, and prevent the oldest conservative justices from escaping into retirement, which would allow Trump to replace them with young members of the right’s lunatic lower-court farm system.

Is it time to revisit court-packing? I think the institutionalist case against it completely collapsed by the end of the court’s last term, but I doubt Harris has the stomach to revive the idea over the next several weeks. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court will remain the rock in the road that Democrats must find a way around if they want to improve our lives. Anything you might want an ascendant Democratic administration to do faces the judicial veto of right-wingers who can’t be voted out of office. It’s true that Harris is probably not going to deliver, or even champion, the most ambitious policies that progressives favor. But whether you’re a progressive fan of Medicare for All, or a centrist dedicated to means-tested, watered-down bullshit, you’re all in the same boat, so grab an oar.

Has Donald Trump betrayed the anti-abortion movement? It’s a hard case to make against the president who appointed the Supreme Court justices necessary to gut Roe’s protections once and for all, and who’s gone to some lengths to take a victory lap for doing little more than being the warm body who complied with the Federalist Society’s honey-do list. But this does seem to be the position of Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who spent last weekend working himself into a lather over Trump’s weeks-old commentary on the matter, in which he appeared to disavow his support for a national ban on abortion.

The end product of Pence’s considerable vexation is an op-ed in The New York Times, a halting work of high dudgeon in which the former vice president meanders through eight paragraphs before eventually alighting on his complaints about his former boss. Pence says that Trump’s “recent retreat from the pro-life cause” has left him “disheartened.” “I was deeply disappointed,” he says, when the former president “stated that he considered abortion to be a states-only issue and would not sign a bill prohibiting late-term abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, even if it came to his desk.”

It’s hard to say who this op-ed is for. Pence doesn’t exactly command any kind of political constituency and he’s now well outside Trump’s circle of influence. And for all of Pence’s melodramatic talk of betrayal, he arrived rather late to this particular party, some weeks after Trump made the statement in question. All that said, I feel duty-bound to tell Pence to cheer up: If Trump is reelected, he will absolutely sign a national abortion ban. I’m really not sure why anyone even doubts this. Take it to the bank.

Perhaps we should go back and actually reflect upon what Trump actually said:

My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land, in this case, the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many will have a different number of weeks, or some will have more conservative than others, and that’s what they will be.

If this is why Pence is so mad, the fault perhaps lies in his cognitive abilities, not Trump’s remarks. As Semafor’s Jordan Weissman noted, “If you actually listen to Trump’s statement on abortion, he doesn’t say ‘should’ be left to the states. He says ‘will’ be left to the [states]. It’s just a statement of what the law is. He leaves unsaid what would happen if a ban crosses his desk.”

Indeed, it wasn’t until days later that Trump actually offered any kind of political commitment, telling a reporter on the airport tarmac in Atlanta that he would not sign a national abortion ban into law. Here, I must offer a reminder that this promise isn’t worth much, as Trump is—and I can’t believe I have to explain this to Mike Pence—an inveterate liar. Even the reporting on Trump’s comment is careful to note that this represents a shift from Trump’s prior position on the matter and alludes to the former president’s possible motivation, to “to make one of his greatest political liabilities disappear.”

As I’ve written before, lies and prevarications are what you should expect from Trump and his fellow Republicans this year as they attempt to regain power in a world where the Dobbs decision has rebounded to their political detriment. It’s been well established that conservatives are planning further rollbacks to abortion rights behind the scenes, even as they endeavor to present themselves as more politically palatable to the public—an effort that involves “rebranding” the pro-life movement in an effort to obfuscate its plans.

Here, conservatives haven’t been doing anything different than what they’ve been doing for decades. Pence, in fact, is prevaricating in this very op-ed when he says, “I believe the time has come to adopt a minimum national standard restricting abortion after 15 weeks in order to end late-term abortions nationwide.” I’m not sure he actually believes this! In 2010, Pence told an Indiana anti-abortion group that “abortion should never be legal”—though he offered some concessions on saving the life of the mother. As recently as last May, Pence vowed his support for a national ban on abortion after six weeks. Perhaps Mike Pence should explain to the pro-life movement why he’s become such a squish on the issue before he tries to fillet his former boss.

If Trump is reelected, the last thing you should expect is this kind of wishy-washiness. As Susan Rinkunas recently reported for Jezebel, leaders on the right are “increasingly discussing the prospect” of using the Comstock Act to “ban abortion nationwide if he wins a second term.” The still-on-the-books law from 1875, which the Christian Right has been hoping to revive, is one of the linchpins of Project 2025, the de facto second-term playbook that the Heritage Foundation has created on Trump’s behalf—which states that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.”

As Rinkunas documents, the level of prevarication around the right’s out-in-the-open plan to use Comstock as a reproductive rights bulldozer is sky-high—and ably summed up by an anonymously quoted attorney who explained to The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey that Comstock is “obviously a political loser, so just keep your mouth shut. Say you oppose a federal [legislative] ban, and see if that works’ to get elected.” It’s not hard to see this in the subtext of Trump’s own remarks when he talks about the GOP’s “obligation to the salvation of our Nation…TO WIN ELECTIONS.” As Rinkunas notes, Trump is eyeing his own salvation from potential criminal convictions as well.

But why tell the press that you plan to lie to the press about your abortion position? Here we should consider the world-historical awfulness of American political reporting—and how badly they biffed the story when Trump made his abortion remarks. As The Present Age’s Parker Malloy reported, “NBC News, The New York Times, CNN, Axios, CBS News, NPR, ABC News, The Washington Post, The Hill, Forbes, Politico, Financial Times, the Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal … all botched their reporting of Trump’s statement on abortion policy by inaccurately stating in headlines that he believes abortion rights should be left up to individual states to figure out.”

The media’s track record, to put it mildly, is shit! Sometimes it’s hard to know whether the political press doesn’t realize when they’re getting squid ink sprayed in their faces or if they simply look forward to being abused in that fashion.

It’s honestly hard to discern whether Pence’s op-ed isn’t meant to be more of this same dissembling. Only his near-total irrelevance to the conservative movement exculpates his involvement in their effort to paint Trump and his fellow Republicans as more moderate than they really are. Regardless, Mike Pence should calm down: He’s going to get everything he could possibly want out of a second Trump presidency—except for maybe an apology for that time Trump sent a mob to murder him. Given Pence’s voracious appetite for self-abnegation, though, maybe he doesn’t mind.

Next week marks the last week of oral arguments in this Supreme Court term, leaving little more than a sprint through the remaining decisions left unsettled. As of this writing, some heady matters remain unresolved. The ruling on the abortion pill has yet to be decided; there is a consequential gun rights case on the docket; and as always, the fate of the administrative state hangs in the balance. For many ordinary people, it will be another white-knuckle stretch, as they hope for narrow rulings that might limit the potentially life-altering—and precedent-shattering—damage.

For Democrats, the 6–3 split on the high court is a generational problem. At least, that’s how it’s often framed. In a recent post, my colleague Matt Ford stated the matter pretty starkly: “By some estimates, liberals may not have a chance to appoint a majority of Supreme Court justices until the 2050s. If Barrett stays on the court until she is the same age as Ginsburg, she will serve until at least 2059.” To think about this dilemma in these terms is to resign oneself to the idea that the solution won’t be arriving for several decades. But a lot can happen between now and 2059, and perhaps even sooner, because of another immutable law that holds that “shit happens.”

With that in mind, has anyone noticed that something seems to be up with Justice Clarence Thomas lately?

This past Monday, it was reported that Thomas was absent from the court and not participating remotely in the oral arguments of the day, with Chief Justice John Roberts assuring everyone that Thomas would get the full range of “briefs and transcripts” after the fact, ensuring that he’d be able to participate in the cases. Thomas doesn’t miss many days of work, and unlike a previous instance two years ago in which he missed a number of sessions during a hospital stay, no reason for his most recent absence was offered.

Into this blank space in the story, allow me to remind everyone that Thomas, 75, is the oldest of the justices, the longest-serving member of the court, and while I don’t doubt that Harlan Crow’s Garden of Dictators may be the venue for eldritch incantations of all varieties, there is no reason to believe that Thomas is immortal. In other words, he is still subject to the vagaries of the Universal Law of Shit Happening. (Fun fact: Samuel Alito is only a year younger than Thomas.)

It’s really no one’s fault that the comings and goings of sitting Supreme Court justices can be such a macabre business. Given the opportunity to amend the Founders’ work, I imagine that ending the whole “lifetime appointments for wizened, unaccountable elders in robes with the final say over American life” arrangement would be near the top of the list of improvements. But Democrats are probably too physiologically incapable of stating the potential stakes of the upcoming election to their voters in terms as stark as “Clarence Thomas might not be long for the bench; send Biden back to stem the tide of far-right jurisprudence.”

It’s not as if taking the high road hasn’t led anywhere: As The New Republic contributor Simon Lazarus has pointed out several times, a combination of consistent pressure and high-minded critique from liberals has, over the course of the past few terms, seemed to play a role in the justices taking a more tempered approach to their rulings. This strategy may yet bear more fruit this term, and forestall the kinds of extreme rulings that the conservative bloc’s two elder statesmen might hope to wrangle.

Still it’s weird to watch how some on the left are raising the salience of the justices’ mortality: by urging Democrats to bring Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s career to a premature end, the better to install a younger jurist now while Biden is still president. In that aforementioned article, Ford took a dim view of this way of thinking and suggested instead that Democrats might be better off simply winning elections. Regardless, this is a debate worth moving on from. It’s silly for Democrats to be divided in an election year over anything, let alone Sotomayor’s career, and anyway, no one’s run this plan to pull a late-in-the-day switcheroo past Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, whose permission is still required for such stunts.

Nevertheless, there is definitely a ruthlessness gap between the parties in this regard. Republicans have had enormous success in dispensing with the polite traditions that govern the high court’s promotions and relegations. That the GOP went to elaborate lengths to prevent Obama from appointing Merrick Garland to the bench was, during that ongoing folderol, evidence of how far they were willing to go to consolidate power. But it is also a reminder that there was once a time when the makeup of the Supreme Court wasn’t in their favor and they were staring down the tunnel of the same kind of generational problem that Democrats now face.

But the right has benefited from the happenstances of the Shit Happens Law, as well. The misfortuned timing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death created the opportunity for the 6–3 split and provided the catalyst for the Democrats’ recent agita over Sotomayor. Still, the lessons of the recent past—combined with all this recent talk of court-vacancy gamesmanship—illuminates a simple idea that Democrats should perhaps find the courage to speak aloud, regardless of the grisly implications: Elections matter, because you never know when the chance to appoint a new justice might arise. There is a clear mission at hand: Don’t let any of the court’s elder conservatives have the opportunity to make their escape through the safe harbor of a Trump presidency.