We Are The Only Check On Trump
It is our duty as Americans is to again say no to fascism, to the remaking of American life by the worst among us.
There was a widespread belief both among the pundit class and the electorate that no one – not even a psychotic, aggressively ignorant game show host – could do lasting damage to American democracy.
Congress, the judiciary, the press, faithful opposition, good people in federal agencies: These would serve as the almighty guardrails that would prevent Trump, or any future right-wing wannabe tyrant, from bringing authoritarianism to the United States. Carry on with your life and trust the guardrails. Watch the game, pay the bills, buy your groceries, plan your vacation, go work out or take a walk or bowl with your neighbors. Live your life free of worry that an anti-democracy candidate had taken the wheel. Everything, the thinking went, would be OK.
Those adorable little pretenses fell away, not all at once, but piece by piece, until Americans understood that no one was willing to do what it took to enforce the guardrails of representative democracy, to make the guardrails mean something. The judiciary, long ago captured by far-right activists cosplaying as high-minded jurists, either stepped aside or actively promoted and assisted the Trump administration in unraveling key elements of democracy. Democratic lawmakers, in their tragic marriage to decorum and tradition, largely refused to play hardball with the fascist president.
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And the press – which briefly embraced its role as the last and final check on this tyrant’s thirst for totalitarianism – acquiesced slowly but surely. Like everyone and everything in the United States, the media came to fear Trump and his promise or reprisal. Major media’s total abdication looked like this in the final months of the 2024 election cycle: Inventing a New Trump that might be palatable to the average voter, refusing to take seriously his most insane and dangerous ramblings, and the billionaire owner of one of the nation’s foremost newspapers killing the paper’s endorsement of Trump’s opponent for fear of legal and financial revenge should he sweep back into power.
That leaves us. The American voter is the last and only check on the greatest threat to the nation in our history. No one and nothing else will do the job. We are left to once again reject Trump, the way we did in 2020 (and 2018 and 2022, elections for which pollsters appear unaware). American voters treated the 2020 election as an all-out civic emergency and unseated the tyrant. Despite being clearly ineligible to run for president, the tyrant is once again at the precipice of power and we will – a coalition of pro-democracy normies – reject him again, this time for good.
It’s equal parts empowering and terrifying that we are all that’s left, that we – normal folks living normal lives, desperate not to be enveloped by a political maelstrom every waking minute of every day – are the only people who stand between the tyrant and a presidency that promises to never end, but to continue in his image, perhaps for generations.
My embarrassingly naive belief that the guardrails would hold continued even after Trump lost the 2020 election and sent his goons to overthrow the government. I thought for months and months – years, even – that the System – whatever that means to you – would flush out the disease of Trumpism by prosecuting him and his allies and making an example of them as enemies of the United States. I thought the System would cleanse itself. For various reasons, and despite Jack Smith's best efforts, the System instead protected Trump and ensured his disease would remain in our political bloodstream. John Roberts made this happen, naturally. The System cannot cure itself, it turns out. We must cleanse it.
I don’t particularly like being in this position. I would have preferred someone in government or in the courts had figured out this shit a while ago. There is no use in denying it though – our duty as Americans is to again say no to fascism, to the remaking of American life by the worst among us, people who delight in pouring their pain onto the populace. They want us, like them, to follow the worms and embrace the darkness and nihilism that define their movement.
Everything we are seeing says this darkness will be thrown on its ass on Election Day. Even the most ardent pro-Trump polling bros – men working for mainstream outlets who have caved to the tyrant and his Wizard of Oz-like illusions – are starting to see what Bad Faith Times readers have seen all along: An electorate that has no appetite for the terror and fury of another term or two or three for the tyrant that hates this country to its core.
You and I are the only check on tyranny. Maybe we always have been.
Bad Faith Percolating
My bad faith senses – which I paid good money to have installed – have been tingling in recent days as folks on the right increasingly talk about “the peaceful transfer of power” without an iota of irony.
The fake tough guys in charge of Project 2025 have said for a while now that a second Trump presidency would be a bloodless revolution if “the left” allows it to be. In other words, don’t oppose us and you can live. It’s chilling and altogether in line with the language of 20th century fascist movements that had no time for pretenses. Get out of the road if you want to grow old, they told their opponents.
I hadn’t thought much about that in recent months until I turned on CNN Monday morning and saw Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas and somehow a 2024 Republican presidential candidate, saying he had signed an open letter encouraging Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to commit to the peaceful transfer of power. This kind of both sidesism would be funny if it weren’t so fucking disingenuous. The CNN anchor pressed Hutchinson to say which of the two major party candidates would reject a transfer of power, and after hedging for while and pretending he was unaware of the January 6 insurrection, Hutchinson begrudgingly named Trump as the most likely candidate to do a coup.
The American right talking about the peaceful transfer of power makes me deeply uncomfortable. As Republican officials in Texas and Florida tell the Justice Department that they cannot monitor their states’ (corrupt) elections, and as Republican-led states get green lights from Republican judges to purge potential Democratic voters from the voting rolls in the lead up to Election Day, and as the Supreme Court plays ball with Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s bad-faith argument that the state is full of noncitizens casting votes, I can’t help but think of a total ratfucking of this election if it is in fact a close one.
We know the Supreme Court's right wing members consume right-wing media all day every day. Probably Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and the rest don’t really believe there is a huge contingent of illegal votes being cast in the 2024 election, but that hasn’t stopped them from advancing far-right interests in the past. Their Dobbs ruling was based entirely on bad-faith legal arguments, as was the Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and its decision to give Donald Trump kinglike powers. The Court’s conservatives did not believe what they said they believed. But those realities, carefully created through bad-faith legal arguments, were necessary to achieve their preferred outcome.
Abortion had to be dangerous to ban it. Racism had to be over if they were to destroy the Civil Rights Act. Money had to equate to speech if they were to eliminate all campaign finance laws. Trump had to have had the nation’s best interest at heart if he was to be granted immunity from all American laws. You and I know how this works. They do too. And whether you like it or not, these bad-faith legal tactics have worked beautifully for the fascist cause.
Please don’t mistake this for permission to unleash your inner-doomer; this is no time to fall for the doomerism the right wing wants you to embrace. There is no denying, however, that the groundwork is being set for challenges to election results based on the totally fictitious claim that millions and millions of undocumented people are casting votes for Kamala Harris in swing states. It’s my hope that the Harris campaign and the Biden administration and voting rights groups are ready and, importantly, willing to snuff out these bad-faith tactics before they transform into reality.
Polling Bros Discover Abortion Rights
Of course it took a woman to humbly tell an anxious nation that abortion rights would be a main driver – perhaps the main driver – of 2024 voter turnout.
After months and months of Nate Silver and Nate Cohn and Red Wave Dave Wasserman refusing to so much as acknowledge the end of abortion rights as an issue in the 2024 election, Ann Selzer – one of the country’s most respected pollsters in a grift-adjacent industry full of dudes – last weekend released polling data showing the end or Roe might actually be on the minds of American women. Imagine that.
Selzer found Harris up a few points in Iowa, a state that had been on no one’s radar largely because pollsters have tweaked their models in terror of underestimating the fascist vote.
Iowa’s monstrous abortion ban, implemented this summer by the state’s Republican majorities, seemed to have caught the attention of Iowans who enjoy a little bodily autonomy. The findings that independents in Iowa, who had leaned hard toward Trump in the summer, were now leaning Harris were not all the stunning, Selzer said.
“Our consensus from the reporters who work this beat is that the abortion ban went into effect this past summer,” Selzer said. “I think it has gotten people interested in voting.”
"It is clear that senior women are an advantage for Harris in our poll. It's a big, big spread."
Women who have seen constitutional abortion rights come and go are making a stand. Older women included in the Selzer poll backed Harris by a 2-ot-1 margin. Independent women chose Harris over Trump 57 percent to 29 percent, a big swing from two months ago, when independent women gave Harris a five-point lead. Meanwhile, many so-called independent polls have shown the women’s vote frozen in 2020 or even leaning toward Trump two years after his hand-picked Supreme Court justices ended abortion access for most of the country.
But wait, it gets worse for the Big Boy. Selzer's polling found Trump’s lead with men has shrunk from 27 points in September to 14 points today. It seems some men value the lives of women.
That abortion matters quite a bit should go without saying. But it has not, as Bad Faith Times readers know all too terribly well by now. Pollsters have operated under the fear of angering the Big Boy and his followers for this entire cycle. These male pollsters have been laser focused on Trump’s appeal to young, fascist men who are generously described as “disaffected.” Would these poor boys be left with no choice but to vote for fascism because they can’t get a date? Would they support the guy calling for the end of democracy because some ladies are making a little more money than they are? Would these young men tear themselves away from the most depraved pornography you’ve ever seen and crawl out of their mothers’ basements to cast a ballot for Trump on Election Day? These are the questions pollsters are asking. Everything, apparently, hinges on the whims of blackpilled, porn-brained young guys who have the sads because an easy life wasn't gifted to them like mommy had promised.
Men in the polling industry, meanwhile, have paid no attention to women voters in the wake of the most significant political event of the past half century: The repeal of Roe. It’s as shameful as it is inexplicable. In a casual Google search last night, I found article after article on 2023 special elections that (strongly) hinted at the impact of the Court’s Dobbs ruling. It was always there in plain sight: People, primarily women, are fucking pissed about losing a basic human right, and they’re going to vote like it.
I said the other day on BlueSky that the Dobbs ruling endangers every single pregnancy in the United States. That’s wrong though. The end of constitutional abortion rights endangers every single American capable of getting pregnant. We read every few days now about another woman who very much wanted to be pregnant dying because doctors refused to help her for fear of going to prison (doctors are not immune to conceding to fascism). The end of Roe is a national emergency, and it took a woman pollster to make that clear.
Kamala Harris is going to win the election, largely on the strength of women who refuse to let JD Vance be their de facto OBGYN. That the country’s high-profile pollsters – all men – either could not or would not see this should call into question the existence of the mostly useless Polling Industrial Complex.
So get out there and vote Tuesday. You are the only check on Trump.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social
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